silvio

There is no question that ChatGPT and equivalents are not sentient. Of course they aren’t.

The unfortunate realization is that often, each of us fails to embrace our sentience and think critically; instead we keep repeating the stories we were told, acting indistinguishably from any of these large language models.

There’s a need for a reverse Turing test: prove to yourself that you’re actually not acting as a large language model.

On the topic of a city divided in two, I highly recommend the novel ‘The City & The City’ by China Mieville. It’s an excelllent detective thriller that reminds you that the strongest and tallest walls are always in our minds.

Hey there! This article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696369 got me excited about the current state of generative art using neural networks, so I created this toy using some of those techniques. The site shows you generated movie posters for famous movies, and gives you a chance to guess what they are before revealing the answer. Even though the mechanic is very simple, I found it quite entertaining, and most of the generated posters are detailed and interesting. I hope you enjoy it!

They just switched cameras, and this one doesn't show parts of the craft, so my comment above won't make much sense, but the curvature I see with this camera is similar to the one I saw with the other camera which shows parts of the craft.

If the camera had a fisheye lens, it would distort the parts of the craft that are in its field of view, but those appear without fisheye distortion.

Unless I'm missing something else, the curvature you see is likely due to the spherical nature of planets.

Tesla | Palo Alto, CA | Full Time - Onsite

We're hiring Engineers with solid Computer Architecture fundamentals, who are comfortable working at the lowest levels of Linux or other embedded operating systems, as well as happily venturing into userland and application code. Our day to day include working with C, C++, Linux, DSPs, gstreamer, BlueZ, ARM SoCs, LTE modems, security, bash, yocto, and more.

If you're interested in making a dent in the world, and the above sounds like you, reach out to me at sbrugada (at) teslamotors.com.

At Tesla we have lots of embedded software opportunities, ranging from code that runs in very tiny microcontrollers to beefy ARM host processors. If you, or anyone else in this thread, are interested, contact me on email. My inbox at Tesla is sbrugada.

This will work really well. Some leaves use this same mechanism to 'self-clean', which means that now we will have the ability to add the 'lotus effect' to man-made objects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHcd_4ftsNY

New York as a Microchip layout was the main theme of the intro of 'Hackers'. Check out around 0:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c4KG_8iTZM

Because Europe didn't know about America until 1492.

With more research along these lines, we may have a day when a programming job interview will consist on interacting with some codebase for 10 minutes, and the model will spit out our normalized scores on syntax comprehension, algorithmic thinking, library familiarity, etc.

Space is for all practical purposes a vacuum, thus the only cooling effect would be by radiation, given that the body wouldn't be in contact with anything around it, as opposed to what happens on the ground where it is surrounded by air or water in the sea. In these conditions, the change in temperature takes a long time.

As stated in the linked article:

"If we put a thermometer in darkest space, with absolutely nothing around, it would first have to cool off. This might take a very very long time. Once it cooled off, it would read 2.7 Kelvin."

So, the vacuum really is the main concern. You'd be long dead before you start getting cold.

"A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/

San Jose :: Build FPGA design tools at Altera

Altera is one of the leading designers of FPGA devices in the world. I'm an engineer in the software team, developing mostly embedded design and instrumentation tools for FPGAs.

We are looking for software developers experienced or with a strong desire to learn about Computer Architecture, FPGA design, Digital Logic, Embedded Systems, and more, while at the same time developing engineering design tools in high level languages. To give you an idea of what we do, these are some of the projects that involved me at Altera:

  * Designed and implemented a high performance on-chip network that's used
    in thousands of routers, base stations, and switches around the world.
  * Created a hardware/software instrumentation framework in a mix of Java, C++, C, 
    and Verilog. This is the foundation for all the debuggers at Altera.
  * Modified the GCC toolchain to add support for Altera's processors, like our
    NiosII soft processor.
  * Implemented a GDB Server from scratch in Java.
  * Defined and implemented the pieces of an ARM CoreSight debug subsystem.
  * Implemented infrastructure used in a C-to-Gates compiler.
  * Spent hours hacking away with the tools and many of the available
    development boards.

If the above sound interesting to you, then Altera might be the place that you've been looking for. Send me an email to sbrugada at altera.com telling me why you think this would be a good match. You should attach your resume too.

The mechanism described in the article, that slime mold uses slime to mark an area as it is exploring it to avoid exploring it again on a later pass, eerily reminds me of graph traversal algorithms.

San Jose, Santa Cruz :: Build FPGA design tools at Altera

Altera is one of the leading designers of FPGA devices in the world. I'm an engineer in the software team, developing mostly embedded design and instrumentation tools for FPGAs. We are looking for software developers experienced or with a strong desire to learn about Computer Architecture, FPGA design, Digital Logic, Embedded Systems, and more, while at the same time developing engineering design tools in high level languages.

To give you an idea of what we do, these are some of the projects that involved me at Altera:

  * Designed and implemented a high performance on-chip network that's used
    in thousands of routers, base stations, and switches around the world.
  * Created a hardware/software instrumentation framework in a mix of Java, C++, C, 
    and Verilog. This is the foundation for all the debuggers at Altera.
  * Modified the GCC toolchain to add support for Altera's processors, like our
    NiosII soft processor.
  * Implemented a GDB Server from scratch in Java.
  * Defined and implemented the pieces of an ARM CoreSight debug subsystem.
  * Implemented infrastructure used in a C-to-Gates compiler.
  * Spent hours hacking away with the tools and many of the available
    development boards.

If the above sound interesting to you, then Altera might be the place that you've been looking for. Send me an email to sbrugada at altera.com telling me why you think this would be a good match. You should attach your resume too.

San Jose, Santa Cruz :: Build FPGA design tools at Altera

Altera is one of the leading designers of FPGA devices in the world. I'm an engineer in the software team, developing mostly embedded design and instrumentation tools for FPGAs.

We are looking for software developers experienced or with a strong desire to learn about Computer Architecture, FPGA design, Digital Logic, Embedded Systems, and more, while at the same time developing engineering design tools in high level languages.

To give you an idea of what we do, these are some of the projects that involved me at Altera :

  * Designed and implemented a high performance on-chip network that's used
    in thousands of routers, base stations, and switches around the world.
  * Created a hardware/software instrumentation framework in a mix of Java, C++, C, 
    and Verilog. This is the foundation for all the debuggers at Altera.
  * Modified the GCC toolchain to add support for Altera's processors, like our
    NiosII soft processor.
  * Implemented a GDB Server from scratch in Java.
  * Defined and implemented the pieces of an ARM CoreSight debug subsystem.
  * Implemented infrastructure used in a C-to-Gates compiler.
  * Spent hours hacking away with the tools and many of the available
    development boards.

If the above sound interesting to you, then Altera might be the place that you've been looking for. Send me an email to sbrugada at altera.com telling me why you think this would be a good match. You should attach your resume too.

San Jose, Santa Cruz :: Build FPGA design tools at Altera

Altera is one of the leading designers of FPGA devices in the world. I'm an engineer in the software team, developing mostly embedded design and instrumentation tools for FPGAs. We are looking for software developers experienced or with a strong desire to learn about Computer Architecture, FPGA design, Digital Logic, Embedded Systems, and more, while at the same time developing engineering design tools in high level languages.

To give you an idea of what we do, these are some of the projects that involved me at Altera :

  * Designed and implemented a high performance on-chip network that's used
    in thousands of routers, base stations, and switches around the world.
  * Created a hardware/software instrumentation framework in a mix of Java, C++, C, 
    and Verilog. This is the foundation for all the debuggers at Altera.
  * Modified the GCC toolchain to add support for Altera's processors, like our
    NiosII soft processor.
  * Implemented a GDB Server from scratch in Java.
  * Defined and implemented the pieces of an ARM CoreSight debug subsystem.
  * Implemented infrastructure used in a C-to-Gates compiler.
  * Spent hours hacking away with the tools and many of the available
    development boards.

If the above sound interesting to you, then Altera might be the place that you've been looking for. Send me an email to sbrugada at altera.com telling me why you think this would be a good match. You should attach your resume too.

The easy conjecture is to point to a combination of trickle down economic policies and the rise of cheap digital replacements, but I don't have a good analysis to back this up.

This could be a game changer to reduce the power consumption in the data-centers and increase I/O bandwidth.

I think Sivers is trying to prove the point that his idea will only become a movement after the first follower joins him. Tricky.

Most people fall for the songs of the unwritten-code. When confronted with existing code, they can see all of the unevenness of the terrain, the special cases that needed to be shoe-horned because the original architecture didn't allow for them. It is at this time when the unwritten-code starts luring them inside their heads, a sweet, seductive melody. They (who am I kidding, we) think of a perfect generic architecture which will take into account all cases. This architecture will be so extensible that when new requirements arrive, it will take care of them without mutating the design. And performance will be equal or better.

It's all good, if it wasn't for one little problem. Unwritten-code is non-functional. Until we sit down and spend weeks --yes, weeks-- working on it, it's absolutely useless. What is worse, once we start getting better clarity on the domain, we start to understand what those architectural bumps were on the original codebase. At best, our new architecture will be better than what existed before, but our codebase is yet to be tested on the wild.

Oh, the wild, the proverbial real world where code is tortured in ways that we failed to imagine. If your code runs on a server, you may be lucky. Given the continuous feedback, you can patch it and evolve it, effectively reacting to the environment where your program runs. But if you pack it in a released form and part with it, then you're in for a ride.

There's a few rules to heed when rewriting something that's readily available, they are:

1- You are an expert in the domain of what you're rewriting. You're only an expert iff you've written the previous codebase and maintained it for years or you're an user of the codebase and worked with it for years. Yes, years.

2- You have the time and disposition to claim ownership (design, implementation, unit testing, functional testing, maintenance) of this code. It's like having a baby, you have to see it through College.

So, what to do? Write new functionality using existing parts. The value is on the new parts, and since they're new, there are few or no experts, and anyone can go ahead and explore that vast unknown.

We are here. I have a feeling we just tend to be a bit more quiet than our web brethren. Glad you like the Nios. I worked on SOPC Builder and a bit on the Nios for a while. It's definitely some of the most exciting things we do at Altera.

In the same way that I wouldn't ask an artist to design a software library, I don't expect myself to choose colors, layout, or design correctly. When shown choices from designers, I can tell which ones I like, and which ones work, and so on, but hacking graphic aesthetics is something that takes years to get good at, as any kind of hacking.

I would recommend that you hire a designer, or make friends with some designers who can help you with this.

This is an interesting case of the relationship between abundant and scarce resources. It used to be that transistors were scarce, so using the silicon in order to pack them well was the optimization goal. Nowadays, transistors reached a point of zero cost, but yield and the process nodes to make them are incredibly expensive, therefore, you get "wasted" silicon.

In programming, this is akin to programming in assembly, when no cycle can be spared, versus programming in the highest available language, when the programmer's attention and productivity is scarce.

That is such an excellent book. If you like it, you may also enjoy "Foucault's Pendulum" by Eco as well.

I've been using GWTCanvas which comes with the gwt-incubator library and it works really well. I've seen it work on Chrome, IE7, FF, the Android browser, and the IPhone browser. I haven't played much with text, but arbitrary shapes and transparency works great.

SOMA

The IF Mode bike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD2lFgMfh2k) folds much faster and the pedals actually connect to the wheel. I've been told that they started selling them already, but they seem to be a bit pricey.

For most applications, the choice between an if-ladder and a switch statement should be driven mostly by legibility and not performance. If performance is at stake, I would look for I/O first, memory access patterns second, and instruction sequencing last.