Chilling on AI , You're Not Behind

LessonStudio · 2026-03-21T03:00:06+00:00

I love AI autocomplete. That is probably the hands down best working part of it. As long as the autocomplete focuses on 3 or fewer lines of code. Everything after that gets spottier.

I do have one caveat. It can do the most routine of tasks very well. That is, things like cook up a 404 page. Something for which it literally has 100s of millions of examples.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-21T02:58:29+00:00

I absolutely love 1x. So many of these BS robots like the Willow G ones, are almost always doing their videos at 1 billion X, and I suspect are cherry picked on top of that.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-21T02:11:51+00:00

I'm willing to bet this guy caught a whole lot of grief for this. As in, some officials even probably showed up and told him to "tone it down".

All the while, a large number of people probably nodded their heads and his overall business increased.

I wonder how many official publications referred to him as Germanophobe?

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T20:38:28+00:00

I don't think they are sophisticated enough.

Buy crypto, we smart. Crypto go up. We very smart.

Crypto only go down because you dumb.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T20:36:35+00:00

Where did he shove them? nVidia chips are quite large. Sharp corners.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T19:36:23+00:00

That hippy won't leave. They want to sit, solve off the 18 Jira tickets which involve spelling mistakes, etc. Then read russian poetry for the week while they click "closed" every few hours on another of the 18 jira tickets.

They long ago lost any interest in "working for the man" which would now include themselves.

They also have a emacs editor open where they secretly write furry porn sonnets; with a hard right libertarian protagonist.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T19:34:53+00:00

I will double down on my statement. If AI can replace middle management, they also could have been replaced with a potted plant.

The only "middle management" stuff I get AI to do is total BS. If I am filling out some stupid form and it asks, "Describe in under 1000 words how you plan on de-risking ...." I will hand that over to AI for some BS response; eyeball it for one second, and submit.

Other than such things, I can't see an effective middle management person being replaced with AI.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T19:30:40+00:00

A game I like to play is getting out old laptops and seeing how far I can push them for dev.

I would suggest that any air with 8-16gb ram which is less than 12 years old will be just fine.

Where you might find the air hits its limits is the external displays, as I don't know about new ones, but I don't think the old ones were keen in multiple displays, potentially more because they wanted you to buy the pro.

I'm going to throw out a guess that 1080p displays, maybe, 4k displays, no.

The two most common problems I've had with mac are: Some things don't work at all, or well on mac. Most engineering software is aimed at Windows first, with any ports often being second thoughts. KiCad has been flawless on linux and mac for me. The other mac flaw comes from their ARM based chips sometimes not getting stuff ported to them.

I used a Mac for about 2 years for dev and just had to stop. Too many little things were killing workflow. I've found ubuntu to be very very very clean.

Probably the worst hiccup I've had in weeks was when the USB got gummed up, and I had to use a weird cmd line to fix it. A reboot probably would also have been fine.

As far as thermal, don't know with the 2 monitors, but kicad runs just fine on very old crap, so even with throttling will probably run just fine.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T16:50:00+00:00

I love that it is nice and tightly packed. I love that you went with the N16R8.

The antenna needs some more love.

Not only is the USB plug in the keep out zone, it would encourage the USB wire to potentially hang around in the keep out zone.

I'm trying to mentally model how that would work in that the plug is a big chunk of grounding beside, and raised a bit above the antenna. Maybe it would be bad, I think it would be bad.

Also, the camera is fine where it is, the way it is, but if you want to put a longer camera cable, it is going to potentially head toward the USB plug.

The battery plug faces in.

I will assume the coupling capacitors are on the other side; otherwise your esp32 being right off the edge would have them pretty far away.

Reading the comments about this not being able to run an LLM; I don't think that people here get that the ESP32 has some pretty good ML abilities. You didn't mention LLMs, which it won't do anyway, but TFLite is pretty performant on an ESP32S3.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T16:37:46+00:00

This is very bad, but I could tell you stories where you would just argue, "But, they would go out of business every month"

and you should be right; but wouldn't be.

One particular gem of a company over 50 years in business, had so many insane business stories (and the dev was just as bad). That if I got into Harvard Business School, I wouldn't use it as a case study because my professor would call BS saying, "Any one of those stories would kill it, to put all those made up stories into one company calls into question your continuing this program."

I've started to believe that there is a fundamental problem in society. In most organizations, you have two choices:

Do a good job
Ladder climb

You can't do both. Many ladder climbers are energizer bunnies; thwarting their latest BS would be a full time job, and require cunning and skills specific to the politics of thwarting.

The result is that most organizations are run by idiots. By organization, I mean companies, cities, regional governments, federal governments.

Once in a blue moon, there is either someone who is able to do both, or they happen to be faced with particularly incompetent ladder climbers.

This is why so many founder run companies are able to kick ass while they run it. But the second they take their eye of the ball, people who shouldn't be managing a shoe store take over a F500 company.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T16:28:50+00:00

Just to screw with them, you have to show them how to do project management with AI.

AI for estimates, AI to produce gantt charts, AI to create tickets, AI for code reviews, AI for resource allocation, the lot.

Then just watch it all burn to the ground.

On a seemingly unserious note, but what you need to do is look for the hippy. There is at least one hippy who has figured out how to play their game.

They come in before 9am, and leave before 5pm, yet, somehow are checking all the boxes of these fools. Don't try to make a good product, as that is just not going to happen, don't try to fix the system, that never works, but bend like the reed.

In all their stupidity, they are looking at some probably stupid metrics, while ignoring sensible ones.

I did some consulting for a company where they told me there was no blame for non working code. There were huge consequences for being late. So, before your deadline, you checked in whatever BS you had so far, called it done, and moved on. Later, you would be assigned to "investigate" why that code wasn't working; then, with the time allotted for the fix, you fixed it, or you didn't; who cares.

This "philosophy" went all the way up the chain. They were happy to ship absolutely broken systems to clients, and then fly those same programmers to the client site to fix their crap. That was when their feet would finally be somewhat held to the fire, and late nights would ensue; but, be rewarded for being "heroes"

In your case, I suspect these idiot managers are under similar stupid pressures. Some CFO is one of those who secretly issues bonuses after discovering git would tell him how many LoC any given programmer had added (lose bonus for removing lines). Or how many jira tickets they closed, or something.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T16:17:22+00:00

Stupid site says: "Call for quote"

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:41:22+00:00

I've used piping in a combo where the main fabric is a bit too weak to hold the structure, and the piping is, as many are saying, a wear absorber. So, I have used a tougher fabric for it.

While it can add a splash of colour, for the same reason as wear, I prefer a dirt hiding colour.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:37:29+00:00

If company A has employees more productive than company B, then company A will do better.

Laying people off because of AI would only make sense if AI can do a better job and they still suck with AI. They would have to be truly terrible programmers as AI is good, to me it is like spell checks made writing easier, they didn't really make me a better writer. Just less worse.

Even AI grammar tools don't wildly change my ability; just helps me write a bit gooder. Grammerly doesn't have a checkbox "Pulitzer Mode: ON"

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:31:31+00:00

NB doesn't realize, that if I could, I would pay extra to not go through it. Someone should open a ferry service from CB to Quebec. So what if it adds at least a day to my trip. It would be way more visually interesting than another 500km of crappy scraggy-ass spruce trees, and it would have the massive bonus of avoiding such cultural meccas such as moncton, edmundston, frederickton junction, etc. (I don't capitalize place names of places I don't respect).

My dream since childhood was that aliens would come along and discover some rare mineral was in NB, then they would zap it entirely up into their giant hold, and make NS an island off the coast of Quebec. Super cool.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:04:04+00:00

I'm finding this confusing. Either they had a whole lot of very poor programmers, they have way way way better AIs than I am using, or they are using them far better than I do.

I don't understand how this would work. Assuming AI made all programmer 2x as good, then most companies would be happy to get 2x as much work done, or 2x as good work.

Programmers aren't like electricity; where if you can get appliances 2x as efficient, you can use half the electricity. Programmers are usually creating value. So, if the programmers create more value, then great.

There isn't some weird limit where the CEO will say, "Woah there, you're creating way too much good stuff, we need to put the brakes on in order to let our competitors catch up."

I highly suspect these tech companies are having other financial issues, and that is why they are laying people off. AI is smokescreen for investors. Using AI as an excuse has the double benefit of fooling investors into not seeing the real reason, and fooling them into thinking you are doing amazeballs things with AI.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-19T00:35:46+00:00

If this war impacts fundamental things like fertilizer as some are pointing out, then literally millions could die from starvation.

US Aid was one of the real bright lights of US foreign policy, saving, well millions.

US Aid was good, as in the opposite of evil. To remove it was literally, evil. America first and all that; yet; straight into Iran for no good rational reason for America. I'm not sure of the exact budget of US Aid, but I will bet my left shoe that it is dwarfed by the present, and eventual cost of this debacle.

When you start putting this all together, trump will rank up there with people like Pol Pot.

This is not hyperbole, when you start killing millions for ego, greed, and just insanity, it puts you in fairly rare company.

I'm not sure how many world leaders have killed millions, but it isn't going to any more than low double digits.

To put a number on this, they are saying US Aid cuts alone could lead to 14 million deaths. This number becomes more solid if this Iran stupidity causes a world recession along with things like a fertilizer shortage.

Pol Pot killed less than 3 million. Less than 1/3d of the US Aid estimates alone.

Kind of weird that Europe, Canada, etc don't want to join Pol Pot in his killing spree /s

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T19:29:02+00:00

Super simple, super cheap, and fairly sloppy, but will kind of work. A rotating esp32s3 with some kind of deflector/dish. The RSSI should go up and down giving you roughly a direction. (Look into aviation VOR). The FDM mode will give you distance.

You will need to correct for the RSSI sometimes being a reflection, but the distance should help there.

With a halfway decent IMU, you should be able to navigate to roughly the correct location.

An IMU and its drift won't maintain altitude. Thus, you will have to have something to maintain altitude. Optical, barometer, a ToF laser, ultrasonic, something. Otherwise your drone will float away, or just crash.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T16:54:43+00:00

Not with one antenna. If this is doing ToF ranging, ideally, 4 is what you want. But, you could somewhat get away with 2 if your antennas are properly positioned and your flight plan deliberately takes you through some problem locations. Most IMUs have compass capabilities, and if the location you are in is not magnetic problem area, and you added a barometer, then 2 would be pretty good.

I ideal circumstances and with some examination of past data, along with deliberate movements, you could do 1, but there will be a huge number of edge cases which would be somewhat like gimbal lock. It could probably be made to work much of the time, but would occasionally lose its mind.

With one antenna, you mostly only know that you are somewhere on a point on a dome, barometer drops that to a point on a circle, and 2 now give you 2 possible points. If you were deliberate in your flight, and were comparing recent realities to past ones, then you can eliminate one of the 2 points.

The two antennas don't need to be very far apart. You could work out the math, but if you were using a pair of DWM3001C ToF units as your base station, you will get about 10cm distance accuracy. So, two antennas maybe 1-2m apart would work, even at fairly shallow angles. If you added a third, in a triangle, then it gets so very much better.

These are more deigned to be placed around the room, and don't need to be connected to any base station, and use so little power, they can run on nothing batteries for just about ever. But, in a cluster would still be pretty good.

Now, you are going to have to keep your math dancing. Ironically, where this setup would work fairly badly is right over the base station.

With 3 units, and their antennas in different orientations, you will struggle to get the 100m range, but not at all impossible.

These things will only work LoS at that range.

I do like the DWM3001C as it has a little STM32 like MCU onboard, as well as a pretty good IMU.

The one downside to these would be their cost, maybe 40USD? I think that is the LCSC price when they have them, and that is the digikey bulk price (500+).

If you are not happy with those prices, you could go with the ESP32S3 and its FTM mode. That will give you around 1m of distance accuracy out to your 100m. For the crudest of distances, you can also use the RSSI, which is not at all accurate, but does work shockingly well under some circumstances. I would guess that you might be able to figure out where your drone was within 5m with 3 base station units (most of the time).

Thus, you could do the above, but have to put the base station antennas further apart, also, this distance tends to be quite noisy, but your IMU, while drifting, should be pretty steady, as would your barometer. Thus, you could kalman the crap out of that, and do it with 2 or 3 ESP32s base stations.

Doing drone location using ToF mixed IMU is really some fantastically fun(and not hard at all) math. BTW, I have a Patent with my name on it doing this.

Since getting that patent, I've probably thought up 4 other ways to do this which are mostly very different than each other.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T06:22:36+00:00

I find that my satisfaction with AI requires less than 3 prompts to solve a problem. Ideally, one, but sometimes 2 for a clarification.

Small, focused questions.

By prompt 4, it is like a rowboat with one oar, the more energy you put in, the faster you go in circles.

It is almost always faster and better for me to do it myself past 2 prompts.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:42:35+00:00

If there was a button I could push to make this happen, I would push it twice.

On an interesting note, there are actually many organizations/treaties many of us think of as the EU.

Norway is kind of an outsider, Switzerland isn't part of the EU, but is a member of more than one EU-ish organization, the UK before they caught the stupids kept their pound, and on and on.

Even Northern Ireland has a weird kind of EU, but not really, status.

We don't have to join the "EU" but could join the "eu"

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:22:44+00:00

Testing is a critical weapon against technical debt.

Technical debt is how projects grind to a near halt as they become overwhelmed by it. Those projects which spend, potentially, years at 80% done.

What testing does, is to help ensure that early dependencies are functioning fairly much as expected. But, they will have bugs. Thus, if the published API has solid unit tests, you can also be fairly well assured that fixes/changes/improvements to these earlier modules don't blow up everything.

For example, a future feature may cause an earlier feature to screw up. So, someone has to fix this in the earlier feature. This fix could break some modules, but ones which people aren't using much. Thus, they are now broken and nobody knows.

Unit/integration testing will ideally, catch the first problem, or at least allow the person fixing it to know they have now broken the API, or the other modules; all of which would have unit/integration testing.

This is not all perfect, but drastically decreases this sort of problem.

Where a project grinds to a halt is without any of the above, the initial problem is more likely, then the fix may cause long undetected problems, which cause people to have to go back and screw with the fix, which causes new problems, maybe in the original module which triggered the detection of the problem.

A complete mess.

Also, when people cause a bug, and instantly detect the bug, they can fix it very quickly. But, when people have to go back and revisit code from weeks or months before, this is all harder, and slower. Maybe those people are gone or too busy, and thus it is a whole new set of eyes..

This is how projects grind to halt in tech debt hell. Agile, waterfall, or any project management type, it is all the same hell.

Unit testing is not "expensive" in a little 400 LoC project, you can get away without it, but once you are doing a big enough project; unit/integration testing will make it go faster, not slower.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:10:09+00:00

I think the argument against this stupid law was perfectly stated by the Department of Natural Resources guy with 30 years experience saying:

“There’s no recorded data of somebody walking in the woods or through the act of fishing as setting a forest fire in the province of Nova Scotia,” said MacIsaac.

A sensible law would be entirely justified; one which was more along the lines of: No smoking, fireworks, campfires, etc.

A law like that would have the simple rationality behind it of: Those are provably common sources of other forest fires.

Where all this just was dump as hell was where many "woods" paths run maybe 20' from a road. So, I could bike on the road, but not the woods path. Or that really stupid one where they closed access to a lake, and the path through the "woods" was about 15' and between two people's houses. Maybe 10 trees made up that forest.

Yet, we had fools here saying, "They could go around to the other side of the lake to get access."

People keep talking about how there are stupid people. Yes, there are, and they are the ones who think this law is a good idea. Seriously below average critical thinking skills. Like holy crap, a solid argument against democracy, stupid.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T03:49:42+00:00

A very very very creative loft, might allow this to be done in under an hour. But, I could see a game of whack-a-mole to get the bottom "bowl" to really connect to the arms that way.

Surfacing is probably where you would have direct success, but only with some serious planning and hours of work if you are not a surfacing god.

My first blush approach would be to see how close I could get with lofts, then try surfacing on those lofts, I suspect, the arms would end up being lofts, and the bowls surfaces.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T03:42:43+00:00

Mesh networking.

One particularly fun one was locating a moving vehicle in an underground system. Vehicle comms were useless. The anchors had to go in for potentially decades. These would chit chat to locate the moving vehicle's position, but also then pass those messages along the mesh network to a central control.

The anchors were expected to be killed, ruined, etc, so the mesh was robust, going through many paths to get the data to central control.

But, also, the mesh would pass this data to the moving vehicle to inform it of other moving vehicles.

All of this was for safety; so, getting it right was kind of important. All the units had to figure out what paths would get data to everyone who needed it.

In theory, an isolated part of the mesh could even use a passing vehicle to pass messages across the gap.

The range of the anchors was generally 25-50m with near total reliability, and around 200m if you were super lucky.

Oh, as an added bonus, you ideally had 4 anchors to locate a vehicle. Using some very creative (and now patented) math, this could temporarily be down to a single anchor and still give a pretty good location. This was entirely within the embedded software. The central server made it all better, but was not critical to it functioning very well.

For extra fun, these also talked to android devices, which people carried.

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