oscillonoscope

Anyone can build a bridge that stands, it takes an engineer to build one that barely stands.

I started playing with this not long ago. Using pythonSCAD is way easier for LLMs and it can generate functional tests for it. Claude was able to one shot a relatively complex assembly of multiple custom parts where it made nonsense in pure openSCAD

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. An FPGA is inherently more general than a CPU because it implements any digital logic including a CPU. They're just more expensive and have clock speed limitations. Saying if you had a CPU that could do 1.2Tbps is just as silly as saying if you had an FPGA that easily operated at 5GHz.

The middle ground is pretty much nim.

My belief is that LLMs will fundamentally change how we approach domain expertise. From what I've seen, SDEs tend to be over-specialized compared to what the company actually needs to implement due to the need to understand enough of the domain to pick a best path. If an LLM can see the domain enough so that someone in an adjacent field can be confident in their approach and quickly change course then you don't need as many niche SDEs

I've been playing in this space as a hobby for a while. I agree the current round of startups are dead ends but I doubt LLMs will be good enough without drastically different tooling than today (ECAD and ATE). I've been playing around on a DSL for schematic capture alongside the design contract and it works for most subcircuits quite naturally. From that you can deterministically create a set of simulations and hardware tests to validate everything.

It's a shed, you can just compact gravel and put it on pavers

It believe the most likely consequence of AI is to promote generalists: people who have a domain expertise, can work cross discipline, and has enough programming knowledge to keep the LLMs on track. I don't think 'pure' software engineers will end up being as highly valued as the last decade though I also think that will be true for other disciplines as well. Just as an example, in signal processing, it's not uncommon to have a person designing the general algorithm and another person dedicated to implementing the algorithm in the embedded system. With the quality of coding agents, it's not really necessary to have both of those people anymore. A person who is moderately experienced in both can do the job now.

I think it's less a middle path than a third option. I see the type of thinking the author is commenting on whenever there is a tight requirement on a feature. Especially when you know you have to add some custom magic to meet the requirement. People tend to psychologically buy into a fully custom solution early on. So they either hack in a custom solution using abnormal data paths or known bad solutions or they fundamentally rearchitect the system around it. The third path is sketching out the feature so that it's modular and can be replaced. That way you can start out with a standard solution which gets you 90% of the way there then replace it as development progresses.

If I need to move a 'branch bookmark' around a lot, I usually just tie it to an empty commit and then rebase changes before the bookmark.

Congress is completely nonfunctional. It doesn't work. Americans are just too dedicated to American civic religion to admit it isn't working.

It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner

This might have made sense for the original 13 colonies but after westward expansion, it clearly does not. Most of the western state borders were formed for administrative reasons

There is no legal mechanism left that could correct course at this point. You would need to have a constitutional amendment to drastically reshape government and that's DOA. All that's left is snow decline and eventual dissolution