show me your home lab! “What’s your choice for a single best aid to an interesting and productive circuit design career? A PhD? An IQ of 250? A CAD workstation? Getting a paper into the Solid State Circuit Conference? Befriending the boss? I suppose all of these are of some value, but none even comes close to something else. In fact, their combined benefit isn’t even worth a fraction of something else. This something else even has potential economic rewards. What is this wondrous thing that outshines all the other candidates? It is, simply, a laboratory in your home. The enormous productivity advantage provided by a home lab is unmatched by anything I am familiar with. As for economic benefits, no stock tip, no real estate deal, no raise, no nothing can match the long-term investment yield a home lab can produce. The laboratory is, after all, an investment in yourself. It is an almost unfair advantage. The magic of a home lab is that it effectively creates time. Over the last 20 years I estimate that about 90% of my work output has occurred in a home lab. The ability to grab a few hours here and there combined with occasional marathon 5-20 hours sessions produces a huge accumulated time benefit. Perhaps more importantly, the time generated is highly leveraged. An hour in the lab at home is worth a day at work. A lot of work time is spent on unplanned and parasitic activities. Phone calls, interruptions, meetings, and just plain gossiping eat up obscene amounts of time. While these events may ultimately contribute towards good circuits, they do so in a very oblique way. Worse yet, they rob psychological momentum, breaking up design time into chunks instead of allowing continuous periods of concentration. When I’m at work I do my job. When I’m at home in the lab is where the boss and stockholders get what they paid for. It sounds absurd, but I have sat in meetings praying for 6 o’clock to come so I can go home and get to work. The uninterrupted time in a home lab permits persistence, one of the most powerful tools a designer has. I favor long, uninterrupted lab sessions of at least 5 to 10 hours, but family time won’t always allow for this. However, I can almost always get in two to four hours per day. Few things can match the convenience and efficiency of getting an idea while washing the dishes or putting my son to sleep and being able to breadboard it now. The easy and instant availability of lab time makes even small amounts of time practical. Because no one else uses your lab, everything is undisturbed and just as you left it after the last session. Nothing is missing or broken, and all test equipment is familiar. You can get right to work.” - Jim Williams “The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design”

been having fun making these short EM field animation videos. still kinda sloppa but i can see this making high quality educational content in the not so distant future.

I honestly don’t care at all that I spend 30 years of my life learning syntax and now that knowledge is essentially useless. Frankly, I’m relieved that I don’t need to care about it anymore. That stuff never really mattered anyways. Code was always just a means to an end. All I care about is building products that users love. Now I can do that faster. That means I can have bigger impact. If anything, software engineers should all be celebrating. I don’t understand why you’d “mourn” not needing to write code. The code was never the point.

one of my favorite quotes of all time: "simple can be harder than complex. you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." - steve jerbs so many ppl keep things messy and complex when it doesn't have to be that way, just to endlessly trip over themselves.

i owe almost all success i've had in my life to one video game: Ultima Online (1998 era). UO existed at a unique time period in gaming where games were made by nerds, not MBA types. there were no instructions, no youtube, no influencers, no guides. it was difficult to advance and it was unforgiving. a misstep could set you back days, weeks, or months worth of effort. there was no pay to win. the dopamine hits were more consistent with reality. it taught me about human psychology, markets, fiat, inflation, economics, strategy, exploitation, entrepreneurship, efficiency, programming, how to communicate/type fast, how to use things in ways they weren't intended to be used to gain an edge... the list goes on. it makes me sad that this style of game is mostly lost for kids today.

my 2fa was a palindrome. what are the odds?

i love SI (super intelligence).

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

yoo @ATaylorFPGA hooking me up with his latest book and some swag! thank you so much! gonna be reading ch 4 tonight

really surprised he didn’t rename it to America Intelligence

okay now shipping to US and Canada. buy my shirts so i can afford a kicad license. zackslab.com/store

wtf claude cooked so fast. we in da future.

what's the bandwidth of this method tho? it would take weeks/months to convey anything meaningful i would think, with a lot of noise. this is what research/hype types have no idea about... actual physics. the shannon limit doesn't gaf about your AI.

loot crate just dropped