markb139

I think the Australians have a good PR team. The whole story has been framed globally as AI bad, we’ve been attacked etc. Nobody seems to be talking about the web server and sw being deployed was insecure.

There was also s80 for the 9200/9500 and the s90 family of devices that didn’t get much beyond 2005. Sad really as I worked several of the UI parts. We had a fully customisable Home Screen where you could add and remove pages, move app icons - long before iPhone or android. It all got bined due to management preferring keyboard devices over touch screens.

I’ve driven around the Hemel Hempstead one a few times. Very confusing when I first saw the sign.

Programming languages, design languages and architecture are all inventions made to help humans write understandable source. LLMs don’t really need to do any of that. They can store very large trees of understanding and therefore implement any application in raw binary. Why bother with abstractions at all

Agree. Transistors really are worth learning about to any level - its certainly possible to get lost in the physics.

I’d find some high level tutorials online that maybe use one of the free circuit simulator tools.

falstad.com/circuit/

Nice animation on this site

If you are really curious there are many simple circuits you can build.

It’s quite a thrill to get an LED to blink with a self built circuit.

I’m also a crusty old sw eng. I did spend sometime being a young electronics engineer.

Good luck with the journey.

As a 17 y.o (way back in the last century) I didn’t need to be advised to learn about transistors. I just had a thirst for the knowledge. I would encourage everyone to learn something about transistors. They are one of mankind’s most useful discoveries.

Way back in time (1980s) I worked in the broadcast tv industry. We used to used digital still stores. A single frame of PAL took up 1MB of RAM. The machines had 2MB fitted. The board had a hardware cross fade function implemented in discrete logic chips. They also had a 20 or 40MB scsi drive. It was all controlled by a 6809 cpu. Quite impressive for the time

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication.

Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.

My best is 980W - for 1 second

I’m a leftie and I don’t think I learnt it. My mother said as a very young child she noticed I’d mainly used my left hand to take things - probably food :) These days the only real problem for me is scissors, especially the ones with moulded plastic handles.

I’m a leftie from a 50% leftie family. Apparently I showed my left handedness as a baby when grasping for things and hardly used my right hand. My mother was also a leftie, but in her generation she was forced to write with her right hand. The net result being she could write equally well with both hands. When I learnt this I tried to copy it.

I think this was also a “look what we can do at short notice” kind of exercise. Just in case a country was thinking of maybe trying to take over another set of islands in the south Atlantic

Why use any high level language at all if AI is writing the software. The high level languages seem mostly about humans not being able to handle complexity. Not an issue for an automated bot.

I’ve recently built a disassembler and emulator using Claude to help reverse engineer a 90’s ECU based on an Intel embedded cpu. It was quite impressive to watch when Claude started to use the emulator to help understand how bits of the code worked.