It is a great interview, thanks. Never heard of him, he's a smart young person. Goes hand in hand with Charlie's post. Hey it's Saturday night we can talk about culture stuff, right? Edit to add: young prodigies in artistic pursuits have similar choices as young tech prodigies.
Do you want to be the best rapper in Sweden? Do you want to be the best engineer at EA? 2 million a year to work at Palantir? Sign with a label and get 2 million a year to live in LA and have your music in Pepsi ads? Start an open source greenfield passion project that has only your vision as the runway? Work your own musical genre even if your audience isn't there yet?
As a talented young person (or at least you believe in yourself!) it's early in your life/career where you can sculpt and morph yourself while you are still formable.
You're talking about technology that's only become realistic in the last couple years. Even then, there's probably nothing off-the-shelf that would serve the current need.
LAPD has been patrolling with helicopters for decades. I have yet to see a drone follow a car in high speed pursuit down the 5 at 100+ MPH.
As far as I'm aware, high speed drones tend to have quite short flight durations due to battery limitations. Drones that have the range to follow a fleeing suspect for a long time would probably have to be big enough that they could cause a fatal accident if they crash, and in that case I'd rather have a pilot on board. Better reaction time, no risk from jamming, much better field of view/awareness, decades of testing, etc.
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area.
Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.
Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.
Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.
Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
> why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
AFAIK they've changed their tactics in recent years, but growing up around LA these we're like sporting events on TV. It's a guilty pleasure, but almost everyone I know tuned-in and watched the chase.
Their popularity for viewers (even more so now with YouTube, but they’re long been a staple of live news and late night tv) and the fact that police like any excuse to do “badass” things are big parts of why they still happen. They’re a pretty bad idea. Endangering lives (including bystanders) over mostly relatively-minor crimes.
But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)
sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.
can the world and tech survive fruitfully without AI? yes. can the world and tech survive without electricity and transistors - not really. the modern world would come crashing down if transistors and electricity disappeared overnight. if AI disappeared over night the world might just be a better place.
When I see this, I suspect the vendor is operating under conditions that approach absolute chaos: dumping whatever junk someone imagines might be necessary into the stack with zero resistance, for years on end. Zero effort spent on any factoring that might threaten redundancy.
I'm not saying the tools aren't bloated, but I believe that a lot of the size (sorry, can't quantify right now) are the datasets for each and every FPGA model that the tool supports. This includes, among other things, timing information for every wire in the chip. You really only need the files for the device that you are targeting and you do have the option to install only that, or you can install larger groups (e.g. same family, same generation), all the way up to installing every device that ever existed that the tool supports. That's how you get to hundreds of GB.
Are you sure about that, or is it just a guess? If that is the case, how will the open source toolchains avoid the same problem when they eventually become the industry standard? (I can imagine something like a software repository for serving device-specific information on demand.) Are they planning anything right now?
Xilinx toolchain installations used to include a file which was just the concatenation of the license files of every single open source library they were using somewhere inside any of their own software. Now if you installed two or more components of their toolchain (for example, Vivado, Vitis, and PetaLinux) into the shared installation directory, this same file was installed several times as well. Together, they made up something like 1.5 GiB alone.
Welcome to modern development lol. Try to refactor it and get an answer of "no money for testing".
On top of that, the "agile" mindset all too often also means there is no coherent vision where the project should go, which can and does lead to bad fundamental architecture decisions that need extensive and expensive workarounds later on.
And yes, there have been people describing exactly that in ASML [1], although the situation seems to have improved [2].
I grapple with this all the time. my wife is very eco-conscious and will scrub out a deeply moldy glass jar just to recycle it (whether the recycling system works is a separate issue here). On one hand there is some truth to the fact that if we all just work together to do the right thing the world is a much better place to live in. Sometimes i don't want to do this (scrub gross shit out) because i'm lazy, other times it feels futile. or maybe its just that the latter is a good excuse to be lazy.
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
Developing nations generally leapfrog by adopting the latest generation of developed world tech.
Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.
This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.
Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:
> I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do.
On the other hand, growing poor behind Iron Curtain, thinking about not recycling glass jars was crazy.
The thing is wealthy societies just buy things. We were not only washing those jars but re-filling as well with what we have produced.
And I think same goes when one is 'eco-conscious'. Recycle sure, but buy less.
I just finished up some freelance (hardware/embedded software) where I had to talk to a “software” engineer who was sort of the “lead”. Every time we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
I had this experience at a recent job, where I'm working with, theoretically at least, the people who literally wrote all the software I'm trying to learn about, and half the responses I got were "just ask chatgpt". Like, you wrote this stuff, why am I supposed to ask an LLM??
I've noticed this lately too, I think everyone is like posing as an AI-influencer or something and copying the "Just use AI" slogan that everyone is repeating right now. What if I don't want to use AI for this problem, and instead want to learn a re-usable and more deterministic skill for debugging?
Oh boy does this ring true to me. Worked briefly with a contractor who wanted to do something with some internal tooling and couldn't figure out how. Said he asked ChatGPT and it doesn't know either. Terrifying how little supposedly qualified people understand what they're even doing.
I think the terrifying part is just how fast software practitioners completely gave up trying to understand anything. As if these oracles actually know anything about our bespoke systems. It was almost overnight that SMEs were lost.
The content of your post made me think you’re a real one and I wanted to reach out as I’m thinking of hiring a freelancer to help me build some stuff I am working on, but the site in your profile is not responding.
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