kevin42

That's fair. But gerber files are just a step up from reverse engineering a physical PCB. For a fairly simple, 2 layer PCB, the actual hardware will be easier to reverse engineer than gerbers alone.

So even if nobody ever sees my schematic or gerber files, they could still clone a lot of products if they just have someone spend some time with a multimeter on a device they buy.

What did I misunderstand? Their documentation (https://docs.circuithub.com/importing-a-project/files-requir...) says:

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For additional legal protection of your intellectual property please sign our NDA.

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To make it worse, you can't even read what their NDA says without signing up with your email address on a third party site.

Here's what the documentation says:

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In order to receive a quote on CircuitHub, you will need to upload the original design files from your EDA tool, or an export that carries the same data. This allows us to provide instant quotes and automate the manufacturing process to lower lead times and cost. Currently, our platform works with Altium, KiCad and Fusion 360 files, and with ODB++ and IPC-2581 exports from any design tool, including Cadence Allegro and OrCAD.

We do not accept Gerber files on their own because they do not contain all of the design and assembly data required by our automated process. We do use your Gerber files when you upload them together with an ODB++ or IPC-2581 export, or with Fusion 360's EAGLE exports, which describe the parts.

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Other vendors don't require this. They just need the gerbers, BOM, and CPL files. That's way different than source files or ODB++/IPC-2581 exports, which is basically the same thing as source.

I've never had to provide an EIN or SSN when using DDP shipping, which is what you should be using unless you have a huge order.

I agree up to a point. It's like the difference in giving someone binary or source code. Yes, someone can reverse engineer gerbers into a schematic, but that's a lot different than handing over the schematic, which includes more information about the design than the gerbers do. It's much easier to look at a schematic and say "oh, that's a circuit I want to use" than it is to look at gerber files and think that.

I have some level of confidence that JLC is going to protect my IP. They are big and if someone's IP leaked it could be devastating to their business. Their legal agreements are a lot more detailed and favorable than what's currently on circuithub.

Then there's either a usability issue or a bug. I uploaded gerbers but it wouldn't let me continue unless I uploaded schematics and board files.

And why should I have to sign an NDA? You aren't giving me any confidential data, I am giving it to you.

I'd highly recommend you revisit your protection of customer's IP. Considering that you require source files (not just the industry standard gerbers), your legal terms are very unfavorable to customers. This makes me uncomfortable because it makes my IP much easier to leak. As written, I cannot justify the risks given your agreement.

Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.

I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.

Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.

I hesitated to even get a quote when it said I have to upload my schematic and pcb source. Their legal terms offer very little protection or reassurances that they will protect my IP. Giving them source files is was more risky than gerbers to me.

It's industry standard to accept gerbers and BOMs. Now that I've reviewed their legal agreements, using them is a hard no right now.

I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.

I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.

Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.

The band it's operating in doesn't change whether or not it needs FCC certification. wifi operating on 2.4ghz is an unlicensed band, but it still needs certification for instance.

IIRC, Meshtastic has an is_licensed / “Ham Mode” setting that changes the software's regulatory assumptions and power limits so it can be used.

Compared to what a lot of companies spend on software for chip and electronics design (we're talking about $10k-200k/seat per year), AI coding assistants have a long way to go in cost before companies won't be willing to pay for them. Companies pay a fortune for software when it enables their engineers to be productive.

For my company, I'd honestly pay $4-8k/month for Claude if I had to (it would be painful, and I'd try to get cheaper options to work first). I know some enterprise Claude users are paying that much now since they have to pay for API tokens. I am certain it's at least a 2X productivity booster for our work. Compared to the cost of hiring another developer, it's well worth it.

If they stop subsidising Claude Code for the pro/max users, there will be a lot of people priced out of it, especially the casual developer. But I don't see it going away for commercial use, even with a large price increase.

My intention wasn't to attack academics. I was just trying to point out that being wrong is something that happens all the time, especially when something is in-progress (pre-print). How many papers written by people are withdrawn during peer-review, or while in the preprint state?

If someone had a blog about their research on a math problem, and they figure out one day that what they wrote a week before was wrong (retracting it), would that be a bad thing? I don't think it would be bad, but that's not how academics approach things.

The papers were all in a 'preprint' directory in GitHub. Academic mathematicians seem to think all research should happen in secret until it's completely proven.

But how much more progress would have been made in the last 100 years if they collaborated in real time? Watching the work someone is doing and spotting errors, or making suggestions would be a good thing. Unless the goal is simply to claim credit for a discovery vs the discovery itself.

Sadly though, you have to do the cost/benefit analysis of the legal process and your likelihood of recovering anything.

I spent $18k in legal fees over a $22k claim in a construction dispute. I won the suit and was awarded legal fees. So I'm owed $40k plus interest. I've collected exactly $0. The last lawyer I spoke to said I need to cut my losses in legal fees at some point because from a practical standpoint, winning damages isn't the same as collecting them. Especially if the defendant isn't local and has few assets.

The main two issues are wildfire and inversion.

As you said, Boise is in a sort of bowl (more of a valley), in the winter, a cold air system can get trapped in the valley by warmer air in the mountain area. This can lead to some pretty bad air (not nearly as bad as wildfires, just not very fresh). To me, the bigger complaint is about not seeing the sun for days. Idaho has a lot of sun throughout the winter, so it's noticeable. It isn't all winter, just a week or so at a time a few times per winted, depending on weather.

But otherwise, Boise's air is quite clean.

What kind of parameters do you end up changing, and how much difference does it make. Perhaps I am missing something and get more tok/sec, but I usually just do a git pull, then rebuild the latest whenever I get a new model.

In the past, I had to play with chat templates for some models to work with agents for tool calling. But I've never had to do anything other than specify the model, and tweaking the context size in some cases.

What hardware do you run? I have a first-gen mac studio, and I just run cmake and build with no special options. Same thing with llama-server, I just specify the model and use the built-in web UI.

For reference, I get ~26 tok/sec with the new Muse 30B model.

I'm left handed and I never really learned a good grip I could write with. So I've always struggled with handwriting. I also have an essential tremor in my left hand. As I have aged, the tremor has gotten worse. So now, I have to grip tight to minimize the tremor.

I've pretty much given up on handwriting, it's embarrassing to either try to write, or have someone else write stuff for me. I ask my wife to fill stuff out for me all the time, but people probably think that's weird when they see it.

My guess is design (features/functionality, not code). When you don't have to write every line of code and you can quickly iterate on features, you have a lot of freedom to dial in what you really want out of an app.

I have enough experience writing code by hand and designing complex systems with a team working for me. In a sense, this is no different. When I had a half-dozen mid to senior level developers, I did not verify every line of code they wrote. I did not have any expectation that they would write perfect code, and they didn't.

But as the owner of the company, I was still liable for the product my employees made. That is the same thing here. It's not negligent to have Claude code write code for you at 10x the speed you can do it yourself. If I hadn't supervised my employees and put practices in place to control quality and safety, I would be liable. I'm actually far less worried about liability now, because I have my hands in every part of the system.

Calling it vibe coding is pejorative at this point, meant to imply that someone who has no skill or craft in software development just types a few prompts and gets something they didn't have a hand in the design or development. That's not what the professionals who are using AI coding are doing.

You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records.

But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10 developers) I've employed before. Five years ago, I would have needed at least 4 senior engineers to do the work we're doing now, and we're moving faster than we could even then.

And I'm being compensated at a flat rate by a major company so we're making really good money. The customer is happy with the results. Claude easily writes 90% of the code we use.

Can you share the prompt you're using for each model?

“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.

Because you don't keep logs.

That depends on the purpose of the image.

If it's used to create a false narrative (like a deep fake), sure, you should care. But if it's used as an alternative to a stock photo, or as an easy way to make an infographic then no, I don't think you should care.

At this point I wish it were against the rules to accuse people or complain about articles as written by LLMs. It's creating so much noise that useful commentary is hard to find.

I don't see any signs of the parent comment being written by an LLM other than it's detailed and well-written.

If they can't distinguish LLM text, then why should they care?

Anti-AI people like to bring up hallucination as if everything AI generates is false.

I can write pages of text, with my own content, and then use AI to improve my writing and clarity. Then I review and edit. It might have some LLM markers in there, which I remove sometimes because it's distracting. But the final, AI assisted writing is easier to read and better organized. But all the ideas are mine. Hallucinations are not remotely a problem in this case.

"But here's the thing that gets missed in the narrative:"

That's a pretty big clue that it is LLM assisted at least. That said, I don't mind. The article has substance and other than a few LLM markers like that, I think it's well-written.

Most things I use it for could be done without it, it's just more convenient and entertaining.

I had it make a daily aviation weather brief for a private airpark. It uses METAR, outdoor IP cameras I have including one that looks at a windsock and another that looks at the runway surface, and a local weatherstation. It sends me a text message with all of that information aggregated into "It's going to be really windy this afternoon, visibility is high, but there is ice on the runway surface", that sort of thing.

The thing is, all I had to do is point it to a few endpoints and it wrote the entire script and set up a cron for me. I just gave it a few paragraphs of instructions and it wrote, then deployed the rest.

The other day, there was a post here about a new TTS model. I wanted to try it out, so I gave my claw the github URL, and it pulled everything down and had it running without any effort on my part. Then it sent me a few audio messages on discord to try.

When I'm away from home, I can text it to say "what's going on at home" and it will turn on the lights around the house, grab a frame from each camera turn lights back off, and give me a quick report. I didn't have to do any work other than tell it I wanted that skill.

I also have a group chat with some friends on signal that's hilarious. It roasts us, gives us reminders, lets us know about books we might be interested in, that sort of thing. It's really fun.

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage.

There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.