tda

I don't know the numbers, but I live in NL and I can't recall the last time I encountered a traffic light that just runs on a timer; as far as I know just about all traffic lights have some awareness of traffic.

Lowering the number of traffic lights in and of itself is a good idea. Overpasses and (turbo)roundabouts, clever right of way, better road hierarchy; there are lots of alternatives that may provide better throughput and more safety for a given intersection.

The Netherlands as a country with 18M inhabitants is best compared to a big city with the surrounding metro area.

Was it possible to build it for $60 when you built it though?

As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely

Yep, everything is lacking. No version control, ladder diagrams instead of written code, goto statements as primary control flow in code. A $500 PLC with less processing power than a 1985 086 and 1 whole MB of memory. Upgradable with a $200 license to 1.5MB, only programmable with a 20GB monstrosity of a piece of software in which download means copying a program.e to the PLC, and upload means downloading a backup to your laptop. That world needs some disruption really really bad

Nice, but not sure I agree with your use of voxels. It appears more like pixelated height map, not the use of 3d pixels. From what I see every position on the globe can only have a single elevation

Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...

Reminds of Digital Logic Sim by Sebastian Lague, which I really like as you start with just a NAND gate and go from there.

https://sebastian.itch.io/digital-logic-sim

To me (EU) that seems like a pretty generous limit. A normal house connection here is limited to 8kW single phase or 17kW for a 3 phase connection. You can get more, but that is very uncommon and gets expensive quickly

What is seen, cannot be unseen

I wonder if and how you can use this for steganography, hiding data in plain sight. I bet most automated image analysis programs would only consider the final image. I sure some highschooler can use this to bypass their schools contentfilter

I installed Claude Code on the Mac Studio, and gave it access over ssh to a Linux box. I instructed Claude to first compile on Linux, create reference artefacts, and only then start the work on mac. And then to make sure the Linux version still would compile with the changes made to the compiler toolchain, the Mac specific instructions etc.

I told Fable to make a nice plan, and fan out work to opus and sonnet agents. I then enabled remote connections and checked every few hours from my phone and nudged it in the right directions where needed. Have some push back once in a while. And once done I asked it to make a nice commit history and remove all the dead ends.

I ported a decades-old piece of scientific software (Delft3D — Deltares' Fortran hydrodynamics engine) to run natively on Apple Silicon. From my phone, mostly, because I could (and because AI could). Runs pretty decently on a Mac Studio M3 now.

It was officially Intel-compiler + Windows/Linux only; the port gets it building with gfortran on macOS/arm64, PETSc+MPI solver and all. Fable and GPT-5.6 chewed through the compiler warnings, dependency hell, and portability bugs largely on their own. 30 or so bugs uncovered and fixed along the way, several of them real and platform-independent.

I'm not a C or Fortran dev. Mostly I argued with the agents about benchmarking methodology and told them to re-measure when the numbers looked off. The rest was up to them. Still amazed about this AI thing going on

https://github.com/tdamsma/Delft3D

Nice use of civic tech! Have you ever showed this to open state foundation? https://openstate.eu/

Record the audio, transcribe it later. Your AI note taker will mangle some of the details in a subtle but wrong way. Or not, who knows? But if you have ever transcribed anything with whisper, it is both amazing how well it works, and how it can go completely off the rails if there is a prolonged pause or noise. It will just make up words, fill the gaps. I am assuming the transcription process for an AI note taker will not use anything fundamentally different than Whisper

> ... oxygen generation mechanism of diving suit for cyborg cockroaches

An actual quote from a Nature article

Though I fully agree a passive heat prevention solution is better, for my house the number were: nice shades (that open and close electrically): 7K, AC unit that also functions as heater in winter allowed the central heater to remain off foor all but 2 days this winter: 1800 (including installation). I used to hate AC's, and kinda still do hate the how they look. But I am pretty happy so sit in a 25 deg living room when it is 35 outside. And the AC runs on my own solar, I have plenty anyways

I was using fargate, route 53, managed postgres. Also the container registry i think. Not nothing, not too complicated

I literally migrated last week, and saved 8x by ditching AWS for Hetzner.

I run Nextcloud at home with 1.5TB of files and 2 users, on a reasonably sized server. It is painfully slow. Still better than OneDrive, but only just: synscing takes forever, never reaching a fraction of available bandwidth. Upload from my phone is flaky, often hangs and needs manual intervention. It is a battery drain. The whole experience with add-ons and the general UI feels like a 2010 PHP app.

I am grateful Nextcloud exists, but no app deserves a vibe coded Rust rewrite more than Nextcloud. Literally nothing to loose

You might want to add a filter to the colorings page. Under the "realistic" category, it is filled with images of Hitler:

https://www.coloringsai.com/en/coloring-page/hitler-doing-a-...

The filament handling is part of the printer to me. You wouldn't want a car without a gas tank (just strap a jerrycan on the roof), or a table saw without dust collection. Ok, bad examples but to me the filament handling is part of the problem I want solved. And I want it solved in a single machine/ setup. I have an old prima that I made en enclosure for and a bit Ikea tub with silica beads and 5 spools of filament routed through custom tubes to the MMU. That is a messy setup, takes a lot of space, and look like crap. If I spend north of 1k or maybe 2 for an upgrade, I want the entire problem solved. Not 80% with an implied hobby project included. No thanks

But what does Prusa offer for dust and moisture free filament storage? Why doesn't Prusa copy the "enclosed filament storage on top of printer' solution that is so much better then spools dangling on the side? I don;t want to but a BamuLabs I am willing to spend 2k+, but not on a printer that does not have a properly integrated filament solution.

https://archive.org/details/psychopathcode/psychopathcode deserves a mention here

Nice model, but also a great notebook. Really like this "literal coding" style for CAD in a notebook. I still sometimes prefer GUI cad for simple stuff, CadQuery is not always that easy to write. But when iterating over something complicated, the notebook style development is really nice. And being to compose a model using functions and iterators instead of the clumsy GUI workflows is a godsend. Also time I tried Opus was more helpful and capable than I would have thought. Not good enough to one-shot yet, but it is very helpful nonetheless

I think the comparisons were referring to land area, but I agree this is not that clear from from the comment

Ome advantage of python is that it is so slow that if you choose the wrong algorithm or data structure that soon gets obvious. And for complicated stuff this is exactly where I find the LLMs struggle. So I make a first version in Python, and only when I am happy with the results and the speed feels reasonable compared to the problem complexity, I ask Claude Code to port the critical parts to Rust.

Is there a video somewhere of the one inch microdrive with acrylic display shown in the article?

One thing with python is that usually I will use one of the many c based libraries to get reasonable speed and well thought out abstractions from the start. I architect around numpy, scipy, shapely, pandas/polars or whatever. So my code runs at reasonable speed from the start. But transpiling to rust then effectively means a complete redesign of the code, data structures, algorithms etc. And I have seen the AI tools really struggle to get it right, as my intent gets lost somewhere.

So what I do now (since Claude Code) is write really bare bones (and slow) pure python implementation (like I used to do for numba, pypy or cython ready code), with minimal dependencies. Then I use the REPL, notebooks and nice plotting tools to get a real understanding of the problem space and the intricacies of my algorithm/problem at hand. When done, I let Claude add tests and I ask it to transpile to equivalent Rust and boom! a flawless 1000x speed upgrade in a minutes.

The great thing is I don't need to do the mental gymnastics to vectorize code in a write only mode like I've had to do since my Matlab days. Instead I can write simple to read for loops that follow my intent much better, and result in much more legible code. So refreshing!

And with pyO3 i can still expose the Rust lib to python, and continue to use Python for glue and plotting

Some operations (downsizing already heavily compressed video with the latest and greatest compression techniques) are CPU or GPU bound, but others, like bunching thousands of high res jopg into a lightly compressed timelapse are more likely to be IO bound. So how does this tool make the trade-off? I imagine some things can best be dealt with locally, whilest for ither operations offloading to a external GPU will be beneficial. Also makes a lot of difference if your bandwidth is megabits or gigabits.

The best thing about the average speed cameras is that between the checkpoints all cars drive at almost exactly the same speed. No one trying to overtake, just 5 lanes of traffic at 1km/h below the speed limit

I love these kind of stories, and I appreciate the effort to write these histories down.

I do think the interview could use a bit more editing, it now reads more like a literal transcript and that is somewhat exhausting to read. Take this excerpt:

>> "Like it just fit my brain. It’s one of those where I don’t have to think about it, it just automatically makes sense to me. Much more than any other programming language. Even though I quite like C, I quite like all the pitfalls in C, I’m very comfortable in C and C++ and pretty comfortable in Java and PHP, but Python is just fun and it’s enjoyable and it makes sense. And this was the Usenet days, of course. I think the Python list, yeah, the email list gateway existed as well. So I think I just subscribed to Python-List and learned a lot about Python just from using it, following along."