"Inferior" might vary more than you think. Especially when OSS/repairability/etc. is involved - it becomes a matter of what your personal weights are on values such as performance, UX, durability, "aesthetic choice", etc...
My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.
Pretty sure shellbox.dev has been around for at least 2-3 years though - EDIT nm they have a show HN from two days ago. I must be thinking of a similarly named/sounding service
The frequencies that they claim affect them are disputable but the flickering in some cheap LED lights is real. Badly/cheaply designed electronics can have flicker as bad as 50 Hz if they use half bridge diode rectification only (e.g. that time I was passing through Geneva airport and the Christmas lights flickered in my peripheral vision)
If it helps, I switched from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape many years ago and the latter has only improved since. The multi-user editing is first class and personally I find the user interface more intuitive (plus, web based = Linux support). I don't need the advanced simulation, analysis, etc. features that SW has over Onshape... yet.
Personally not familiar with curved models, but my understanding is that surface modelling with lofts guided by spline contours might be the way to go. Not sure if SW has those features.
Very interesting project! My understanding is that the circuits are human-validated hard coded modular blocks - is this correct? I didn't fully catch how PCB routing and placement is done. I haven't yet seen a credible from-scratch AI schematic design tool (though, admittedly, most of my projects are a mix of repeatable modules and custom circuitry... It would help to have a "known working" setup.)
For AI designed schematics, you need to check out flux.ai (and quilter for layout), I don't have anything to do with this, i'm a little jealous tbh, but having used it, it's not for me (but i'm making fairly complex, FuSa, type approved stuff, for the sorts of boards that would go into phaestus, it would probably be adequate)
I'm pretty in the weeds when it comes to this stuff,
First of all, I made https://www.circuitsnips.com/ , which is like thingiverse for circuits, so users can get bits of designs and copy and paste them into their own designs, but the reception was lukewarm at best, it needed bootstrap data, for which I scraped GH, which could have been a mistake, either way, for the tens of people using it, I think it's pretty neat!
So, then I created a fork of TOON, called TOKN, which is token optimised KiCad notation, which successfully compresses kicad schematic s-expressions by 93%, and is able to regenerate schematics from it. With the intention of trying to generate schematics, one shot them using frontier models, or even post-train an OSS model to see if that works, however when I benchmarked it, I could get 100% syntax validity, but the models hallucinated the components, the pins etc, so they would need grounding.
Which brings me onto my next, next, (next?) side project:
An embedded documentation MCP server!, Load in your PDF's, it parses them and puts things into a sqlite db that the LLM can interact with more efficiently. I mainly use it for writing hardware abstraction layers for chips that have terrible vendor support (looking at you, NXP KEA128). Honestly, everything about this chip is awful, even the GPIO is laid out terribly, it's like the meme where everything gets put in the square hole. PORTB? nah, you need to do PORTA + 16. Anyway...
Yep, exactly. I'll do another blog when I have a little more to show, but the concept is, everything is on a grid of 12.7mm squares, where there is a common bus running through north-south. The boards need to be 4 layer and feature size is pretty small, 0402 passives for example, maybe even 0201 if I'm really optimising for size.
In the Phaestus workflow, it chooses modules, for example the main cpu block just has an ESP32C6-XIAO board on it, since it has massive compute, and radio with wifi6 and zigbee, which covers 90% of IOT. Since this is larger than 0.5" it sits in the middle of a 2x2, which bridges both sets of north-south buses, with all common pins.
It's been a pain in the butt to design for, since the vias need enough clearance, and we are almost maxed out on our bottom side, so on the 2x2's i've given it as much room as I can in the middle to allow for topside routing with a few vias.
Then, when assembling the board, it does a 0.1mm overlap n/s, which merges the nets, whilst the system keeps track of what signals are used, so I2C is all multiparticipant, spi1 gets the default CS line, otherwise it can use the aux pins via a resistor selector, the AUX5/AUX6 aren't connected to the XIAO, so if you wanted to do something like a USB power monitor, the power can run isolated at higher voltages, as long as they get fed through a current/voltage sensing block, which could be 1x1, 1x2 or 2x2.
As for component placing in the enclosure, buttons are sub-boards with a wire-to-board connector, and the 1x1 module is a block that contains a connector and an PCA9570, which allows the button to be placed anywhere with defined mounting features.
Similar for LCD's, the pre-designed block has a FFC connector, and comes with constraints, e.g. place at end of design, so the screen can fold back on itself, whereas if it was mounted in the middle, it wouldn't be able to go where it needs to be.
I don't know why they decided to put the "warning!" text box on the actual thing - it would look much cleaner if it just said "ON AIR" . Inane copyright/trademark reasons?
I'd reasonably expect software to run forever insofar as the environment it's run in doesn't change. Essentially, no OS or dependency updates - network is inevitably going to get broken.
Anecdata: My Wii (2006) console has had a few hardware issues I've fixed, but the software is just as responsive as a decade ago (though many external networks/servers have shut down). Homebrew community is very much alive and has expanded its utility.
I was thinking to defer to the compiler to make things stable. i.e, Go or JavaScript virtual machine should just run forever and able to decide with OS updates.
On the frontend world, the browser so far has been super reliable in maintaining backwards compatibility of HTML, CSS and JS for years and years.
Interesting... What benefits does this have over vitamin D supplements?
I've seen this "optimising for some perceived negative effects" thing with toothbrushes/toothpaste, where "whitening" and stiff bristles actually just means removing more (irreplaceable) enamel from your teeth.
Many people with inflammatory disease like IBD can't absorb oral vitamin D properly
Even in healthy people, oral vitamin D is not always sufficient (there was a study done in Japan where sunlight is low but Vitamin D from fish is high - can't find it right now) and sunlight exposure might have other benefits than vitamin D anyway
Vitamin D supplements are controversial on their own.
There is ample results on better health correlated with higher levels of Vitamin D, but the reverse is far more teneous: shoving in Vitamin D isn't guaranteed to be properly absorbed, and even when it is we don't see conparable results to people producing the Vitamin D themselves.
Unless you are deficient it's not the vitamin D. It's a whole host of other processes that benefit your body from sun exposure and the activities that go along with it. The Vitamin D is just a marker that we can detect that can also be related to that same exposure. So there's a huge number of things for which people with high levels of Vitamin D do not suffer but supplementing has no effect because the vitamin D is only correlated not causative.
But wouldn’t this imply that optimizing the tanning bed properties for vitamin D production is worse than looking for as-close-to-sun-like sources of light?
The paper covers a lot, some are administrating vitamin D as a prevention measure, most are on vitamin D deficient patients. e.g
> Even in the small subgroup of subjects with a poorer vitamin D status (serum 25OHD < 20 ng/mL), no effect on fracture risk was observed (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.07; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.91–1.25).
> A large RCT in Mongolian children with severe vitamin D deficiency did not find a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on the subsequent risk of subclinical or clinical tuberculosis.
I have issues with low vitamin D and even really high supplement doses like 10,000iu/d do nothing at all- my level keeps dropping no matter how much I supplement. Sunlight brings it up quickly but not in the winter from Nov-Jan.
Vitamin D supplements don’t work consistently across different populations. Very few (~10%) of people can absorb dietary vitamin D. If you aren’t some form of Northern European, you probably need to take at least 10 times the daily recommended dose of vitamin D to influence your levels significantly.
Don't most people who take supplements just take 10X the RDA? It is still a tiny amount of supplement that is safer and costs a fraction of the indoor tanning or traveling often to somewhere with adequate Sun.
I’ve never talked to someone supplementing vitamin D who was aware at all.
I think that the correct approach would be start at 10x vitamin D with baseline bloodwork and adjust dosage from there.
But yeah I’m in the camp of “sun is good for you, in most cases.” I would be very unsurprised to find that there are precursor hormones released beyond vitamin D that impact efficacy. We don’t really understand the endocrine system very well.
I think that because we can see and understand the dermatological effects we overly weight them. Anecdotally older people I know who have not avoided the sun seem much better off mentally and physically, but I think because there isn’t a measurable reason we’re aware of, we completely discount any benefit.
Stiff bristles also damage your gum more easily and can lead to gum recessions. I needed gum transplants because of this and a wrong brushing technique. For me even medium stiffness is too hard.
Do you really feel plaque on your teeth with your tongue after brushing gently with a soft brush? My teeth feel perfectly clean after brushing despite using the brush with the softest bristles I could find (Meridol extra soft). I'm brushing gently (sweeping from bottom to top) with little pressure. Regardless of the brush you're using, never use more than light pressure. If the brush looks worn out after a few weeks it's too much, if it looks new after 3 months (recommend change interval) you're good.
That's only if you're using the Arduino IDE though, and it's so commonplace that instructions are widespread. Many are using MicroPython/CircuitPython which are independent from Arduino.
I wonder if it's using a compass and odometry (distance) with dead reckoning. A strange choice when GPS is available, but it would account for the map moving in the car's direction and it not changing locations when it moved without rolling (ferry).
Almost certainly. GPS is not only easily jammed, but easily spoofed. If the car believed GPS instead of its own eyes, so to speak, then there’s significant potential that you’d see glitches more often. It could also be something of a safety risk when using its self-driving capabilities.
Makes me wonder why there isn't a UI feature within easy reach to let the user drag a pin on a map and tap "I know I'm here right now"... and if that agrees with where GPS also indicates, let's it reset its notion of "I must be getting spoofed right now" thoughts in addition to calibrating other notions of current location.
In addition to sibling's comments about jamming and self driving safety, there are many driving situations where there is no or poor GPS reception: tunnels, double deck bridges, double deck freeways, underpasses, urban canyons, actual canyons, etc. Also regional problems. The GPS constellation is in a 55° inclination, so if you are north of ~55N, or south of ~55S, you need a clear view of the southern/northern sky, respectfully, for reception, since there will be no overhead satellites.
My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.
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