amirhirsch

Imagine Volker Strassen, 90 years old, getting a phone call in the middle of the night informing him that his 55-year-old conjecture that integer multiplication requires Ω(n log n) time has just been disproven by a language model.

"By how much?"

"2⁻¹⁸² off the exponent."

"Go back to bed."

My experience with lines of credit isn't unique, and I think it's one of the underrated advantages of doing business in the US: we have a sufficiently stable commercial legal system that a huge amount of the economy can run on credit.

I have thought that there is a big opportunity financing components by optioning the sale of overstocked parts ahead of time. For a consumer electronics product that had heavy Q4 sales, my annual sales were entirely dependent on how many chips I could order by October 19, but then I'd have excess stock every January because things are sold in reels of varying sizes.

Good luck! One valuable differentiation you could provide is a line of credit. If you can’t win on price, you can help your customers win on cash-conversion cycle.

I’ve been making hardware for 20 years. My highest-volume product was Flybrix, a LEGO drone kit manufactured by Seeed and UniPrecision in China and by Sparqtron in Fremont, California. I’d be happy to work with you on a v2 reboot: Flybrix Swarmz, because every American high school needs a drone swarm.

Beyond that, I’ve worked with many domestic suppliers and built ITAR-controlled products as well. Even without owning the production capacity, if you can offer Net 90 on fabrication and extend credit for components--beyond existing DigiKey, Arrow, Mouser, and vendor credit lines--then I can build products and get paid without putting all the capital at risk upfront.

Factoring is expensive, especially against a purchase order rather than an invoice, and I don’t know of anyone offering working-capital credit based solely on an SBIR award.

Credit is what makes the spice flow.

Yea this is the premise behind all the invisible captchas, combined with browser fingerprinting. Same tech is used now to detect distillation rings.

I implemented all of this in hCaptcha 6 years ago, not just to distinguish bot from human but also to recognize the keyboard/mouse behavior of the same person signing up for many accounts or testing multiple credit cards. This kind of abuse detection was a part of Cloudflare when they switched to hCaptcha in 2020 and I had thought they already implemented all this themselves four years ago when they transitioned away from hCaptcha in 2022.

Custom FDTD for the optimizer loop, CST for final verification.

It creates pancake beams so you would usually use a separate Rx and Tx orthogonal to each-other to do imaging.

Oh I dunno. I made a mm-wave radar with a Rotman lens using a generative loop between Python, Rhino, and EM simulation. Pretty sure AI could cook that up.

(Linked VCU128 digital radar was cool but even cooler is using them as digital array beamformers and sending RDMA over fiber into a quad A100s nvlinked to do the whole radar DSP pipeline)

It was designed for automotive as a replacement for LiDAR, also useful for finding metal FOD on runways, or concealed weapons and I suppose also liquids on travelers walking in an airport...

32 port Tx (vertical pancake beams) x 16 port Rx (horizontal pancake), something like 60 by 30 degrees. the entire thing used FPGA transceivers as one-bit DAC/ADC, Complementary Golay Code waveforms with one-bit correlation in the FPGAs (two VCU128s) -- digital logic was essentially the same as a binarized neural network, I squeezed a ton of popcnt performance out of those chips using both DSPs and LUTs

Very cool! Six years ago I worked on a mmWave (76-81GHz) imaging radar with a Rotman lens Tx and Rx. Designed as a LiDAR replacement, but we could see pipes in walls, or detect concealed weapons at ~1km.