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.

It seems to be perfectly happy to run on virtual box with a Debian install. The host pc is running a local model. I’m quite impressed with what it’s capable of.

I’ve got the solar version. It runs a long time between charges. Maybe I haven’t done enough tracked exercise recently

I used to think photography was an expensive hobby until my wife got back into the horse world.

Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to think about a simple disassembler. 2 weeks ago we decided to try Claude to see what it could do. We now have a disassembler, assembler and a partially working emulator. No doubt there are bugs and missing features and the code is a bit messy, but boy has it sped up the work. One thing did occur to me. Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task.

“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool”

Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the 5)

I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the context switching between ARM mode and Jazelle mode. Turned out a carefully tuned ARM JVM was in practice th best

I’ve tried 2 AI tools recently. Neither could produce the correct code to calculate the CPU temperature on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. The code worked, looked ok and even produced reasonable looking results - until I put a finger on the chip and thus raised the temp. The calculated temperature went down. As an aside the free version of chatGPT didn’t know about anything newer than 2023 so couldn’t tell me about the RP2350

I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the values.

Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350. If it doesn’t know that, then what else doesn’t it know?

37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60.

My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really badly at school.

I just learnt at my own pace and eventually worked as an electronics engineer in the broadcast industry. Then quit that and moved into sw dev.

One piece of advice is to just build stuff, fail and learn.

Good luck

It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years. I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020.

I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.

I’ve now retired from professional programming and I’m now in hobby mode. I learn nothing from reading AI generated code. I might as well read the stack overflow questions myself and learn.

The code looked fine. And I don’t think my finger is colder than the chip - I’m not the iceman. The error is the analog value read by the ADC gets lower as the temperature rises.

I tried code gen for the first time recently. The generated code look great, was commented and ran perfectly. The results were completely wrong. The code was to calculate the cpu temperature from the Raspberry Pi RP2350 in python. The initial value look about right, then I put my finger on the chip and the temp went down! I assume the model had been trained on broken code. This lead me to think how do they validate code does what it says

30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)