I went to ECOC and all I got was a stupid cold 🤒

I'll be leaving Germany tomorrow with no plans of coming back. Might visit - let's not be dramatic - but living here? No, thank you.

optical engine engine engine in gdsfactory

Suppose you want to design a microring resonator (used in modulators in datacom settings), but don’t want to wait that long to get one taped out and tested. Well, you can run @QuentinWach’s beamz solver (beamz.tech/examples/ring_res…) to simulate that beforehand! @RYANHINGSHING

Infinite GDS

Photonic packaging remains stubbornly macroscopic. But this is a nice, approachable example of how an electronic–photonic integrated circuit (EPIC) is packaged in practice. The chip itself is tiny. So most of what you see provides optical alignment, electrical connections, heat dissipation, and mechanical stability...

A Z80 processor from 1976 computing 7*27. Slowed down 800000 times. Credit to the Visual6502 project for the circuit data. #retrocomputing #computerhistory #reverseengineering #creativecoding

We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore. If you’re inspired on a Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in twenty-four hours. I Inspiration is a time machine in that way. Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work. Inspiration is perishable.

in hindsight it was obvious that programmers would automate their job first

Can’t believe I ever had to write pandas data manipulations by hand and it was actually taking most of my workday The second half was taken by matplotlib

Tiny problems that come up all the time troubling many people can be just as valuable to solve as those sexy big problems only few people have. During my first two weeks of creating photonic layouts for polymer-based chips, I became extremely frustrated with the available routing methods as they kept behaving very unpredictably and often overlapped or found obviously inefficient solutions. After a few more weeks of breaking my head, I constrained my search for the optimal waveguide routing to those paths that have a minimum bending radius since that is a basic rule PIC designers apply anyway. The solution was obvious then: Dubins paths. A common technique in robotics and navigation in general and the mathematically proven shortest path between two vectors with a given min. bending radius. As it turned out, using Dubins paths solved all my problems that had me waste hours and days. Suddenly, I was able to create much more compact chip designs and do so very quickly! My colleaques loved it and it was shortly adopted by the entire group. Later, I merged my code into GDSFactory as well. And people approach me still to thank me for it. Solve those little problems. gdsfactory.github.io/gdsfact…

Jax truly is the entry drug to Haskell.

I've been thru the "wow photonics yes put as many things onto the chip as possible" phase, and now I'm getting old and would start asking the annoying questions of "oh what's your grating coupler efficiency, why are you spilling light everywhere and heating up your fridge" (absolute good direction, more cryogenic RF people should learn from RF photonics people and do more plumbing with fibers and less with coax cables. Same for carrying any signals out.)

Absolutely beautiful rant about AI in Linux Kernel from Linus yesterday: I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it. Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint. But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do. The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side. We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either. The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology. Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the _point_ of the project. This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be. In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools. Linus

My babies are getting so smart, it's freaking me out. I was looking forward to using GA or bayesian optimisation to find a sweet set of parameters, but hand-tuning is giving scarily good results. I cant stop watching! (No global coordinator, all acting entirely on local cues)

It doesn't feel great to be the one who writes the DRC. But I am German... ZE RULEZ ARE ZE RULEZ