If AI doesn't understand something I assume it's too clever, even if I do get the AI to figure it out I won't understand it in a month and other devs won't understand it at all unless I somehow convince them to read the code(Like as if that's going to happen!).

I think it's definitely improved my own code, because it's like always working with a pair programmer, who represents a very average developer with insane typing speed. I think you kind of subconscious pick up the style like you would learn a literary style by reading books.

With Codeium what usually works is writing a prompt inline as a very descriptive comment.

For a non critical piece of a personal project, I think this section is the most impressive thing I've gotten AI to do:

``` float getFilterBlendConstant(float tc, float sps){ return 1.0f - exp(-1.0f / (tc * sps)); } float fastGetApproxFilterBlendConstant(float tc, float sps){ return 1.0f - (tc * sps) / (tc * sps + 1.0f); } ```

For this to be accurate we first have to decide if pasta salad is a real thing, or if it's actually pseudosalad that most English speakers would understand as sharing properties with real salads, but not actually being one.

I very much agree we could do better than ham for emergencies... But I don't expect an emergency hotline operator to be able to actually help anyone, that's not their job.

I think we should go even further though, and make half of 70cm into ISM band with duty cycle limits, no license, commercial use allowed. Or maybe allow commercial use, but only with open protocols, so you can make an encrypted business radio, but only if you let others make a compatible one.

Then hams could talk to their non ham friends. Getting a license isn't trivial if you're not already an embedded dev, and it's even more of a hassle now that it costs money.

Being able to give someone a $20 radio that they could just use would be awesome. I don't think spectrum crowding is as much of an issue since people use wifi and 5g if possible for everything, aside from ultra slow long range stuff where everything uses lots of airtime.

Unfortunately it wouldn't work anymore, because devs will happily dump gigabytes an hour when completely idle...

It's not something I'd want to actually use, but it seems like many others enjoy it.

As an art piece it's pretty impressive just because of how completely different their perspective on computing is, and how it blends with their ideas on life.

It reminds me a lot of FORTH culture.

Thousands of these kinds of tools would fit in a few megabytes. Seems like we could easily make a GitHub Pages site with every random word counter anyone could ever want, using Web Workers so it's all available offline.

You could probably even have an in-browser LLM frontend for it for less structured tasks.

You could even have an integrated editor for making new tools with AI and creating a pull request to share them.

What would stop people from just not reviewing stuff? If it takes a long time now, wouldn't it still take a long time to review?

Unless you're going to push unreviewed code to production, it's going to block everything at some point.

Is NKN just a regular old Blockchain that doesn't work on isolated networks, or do they do something special to fix that?

Yggdrasil seems to be the best of this kind of thing, but it still has some issues

yeah regular blockchain, with proof of relay (data transmit) rather than PoW. it is limited to ipv4 though. no it cannot be run on isolated networks because every node needs to be able to be reachable by a static IP.

thanks for mentioning yggdrasil, looks interesting.

After years of 3D printing, a technology I love, I thought I'd try CNC, and make a PCB.

Oh boy did was it ever a hassle building the machine then trying to sell everything on eBay.

I am super impressed by people who actually put in the effort to make this stuff work.

The biggest issue is the vias. They have to be done by hand or with more expensive machinery. Then there's solder mask. Then there's cutting the board outline, it's nasty fiberglass.

Once it's all done, you have to actually solder the boards, which is even harder than it would be with a commercial board.

I have a hard time imagining wanting to a DIY board or even hand populating a commercially made board again.

It's so much fun to be able to use accelerometers and USB-C and modern power management chips in DIY projects.

Yeah, vias in particular are a challenge. I've spent time with annoying tiny copper rivets and bits of wire and the rest, and usually end up making one layer boards with perhaps a few wrap around jumpers to a ground plane. Not ideal! Commercial stuff is damn good.

But! Hand soldering boards is a joy. To each their own.

What if someone finds your IP address and sends you a bunch of crap? It would be very easy to use someone's entire monthly data allowance.

Plus, it only works if you can afford and have access to cell service, and in those cases you or have access to normal Internet stuff.

Unless cell towers are able to route between two phones when their fiber backend goes down. That would make this actually pretty useful in emergencies if a rower could work like a ham repeater, assuming it wasn't too clogged with traffic to have a chance.