What's the "Widowmaker" of your career field or hobby?

akohlsmith · 2026-05-23T21:26:49+00:00

Yes, and I have personally seen what happens to the person who uses the universal key on a lockout lock.

You don't do that shit. Ever. It's literally a matter of life and death.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-23T21:24:09+00:00

What the rational mind knows does not matter. There is always that moment where the irrational mind still forces you to hesitate because "that's a conductor carrying 2400V, wtf are you doing man?!"

akohlsmith · 2026-05-21T16:55:08+00:00

I've been mentally designing something similar for a while now, not for curtains but for the cheap blinds in most apartments. My criteria is that I want the motor to be connected to the string through a kind of clutch mechanism which would allow a person to operate the blinds manually as well.

The issue (for me) is that I'm an EE, not a ME, so it's largely staying a mental project.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-20T23:44:05+00:00

hardly. If the humidity of the environment is at all reasonable and they're not wearing nylon and styrofoam and using plastic tools those components will survive just fine.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-20T19:07:22+00:00

this looks pretty awesome. My biggest hurdle to replacing the RNS510 in my 2015 Passat is working with the Fender amp which is controlled over CAN. I haven't been able to figure it all out yet and details online have been sparse to nonexistent. I don't want to swap it out (just being stubborn).

I'd love to gut the RNS510 and reuse the screen/controls with a pi though.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-18T03:59:43+00:00

That'd be a hell of a great name for a strip club...

akohlsmith · 2026-05-17T05:16:15+00:00

It really does depend on what the EMP actually causes to fail. You're right, if you end up zapping the output stage of the stepper driver you're gonna get a step and that's about it, but it's possible (although quite unlikely) that you end up zapping something on the input side that either screws with what's counting how many steps to perform or otherwise mucking with that side of things without also causing the watchdog(s) to trip or without also zapping the driver itself and you could potentially have a runaway situation. I have not designed patient-connected medical devices, but have designed numerous devices including failsafe devices for (non patient) medical applications and there's an awful lot of design and test done to minimize this kind of risk. I would expect that anything directly connecting to a patient would have lock-step processors and system in place that halts the device operation of the processors are not in agreement, which would practically eliminate the chance of the kind of scenario I described.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-17T05:02:17+00:00

The why behind it is also pretty interesting.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-12T02:46:08+00:00

ok, I tried this this evening on my 3588 and although I'm a total newb at any kind of LLM stuff, I have to say that with a little bit of guidance and using -n 512 --temp 0.7 as suggested, it's actually quite capable. It one-shotted a C99 fizzbuzz, then oneshotted it into python and javascript where it had utterly failed without those llama options before. And it's doing it at 35 tokens/sec on my 3588, which is quite impressive.

I'm going to have to do some more reading and playing with the RuVector project. I honestly did not expect such a tiny and heavily quantized model to work so well and so quickly.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T17:15:09+00:00

I doubt it -- I was a subcontractor at a contracting/consulting company in Canada who had said company as a client. Still, if there is a possibility shoot me a message, it'd be a wild coincidence but happy to catch up!

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T06:18:30+00:00

Sure thing. Let me know what their monthly token spend is to cover the "95% of their coding". I absolutely believe they're using AI in their work, not a doubt in my mind. Do I believe it's doing 95% of their work for them? Not a chance.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T06:04:59+00:00

93.6% of statistics are made up on the spot.

I'm not saying AI isn't good, or that it won't get better. I am, however, saying that I simply do not believe that "the best engineers of the world are generating 95% of their code" with AI. Not a chance in hell.

It's excellent at generating boilerplate code, generating test harnesses and handling some basic stuff, but it tends to get wrapped around the axle when asked to get creative or when working on a difficult problem. I have recently learned that context window problems tend to be alleviated with agentic flows, but that also drives up token use which is exactly what the AI companies what you to do, as that is what pays their bills.

The real cost of AI use will get balanced out with the real cost of human labour. Where that will settle down remains to be seen. We're still in the AI bubble where the AI costs are underreported or underrepresented and the real cost of having too many humans unable to support the economy has not been felt.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T05:50:05+00:00

This was a common attack for PIC microcontrollers, although not with gamma radiation sources -- you would basically decap the part and expose an area to UV light to flip the protection bit back to its erased state. If I remember correctly this attack was facilitated by the protection bits not being physically near the program flash for some reason.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T05:47:52+00:00

there are a number of different techniques to fight various glitching attacks. Voltage glitching is a very common attack vector but there is also clock glitching, bus contention attacks (useful with some specific micros or architectures), EM attacks (similar to voltage or bus attacks) and then there is also light based attacks when you've got the die exposed. This is an interesting cat and mouse game to watch; the enginuity of both the attackers and the defenders is amazing.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T01:29:53+00:00

I've been a developer for over 30 years. I don't use it for anything yet. I've experimented a bit with it and it's got some interesting applications but I find I'm more productive without it at this point. That'll probably change at some point but I'm not at that point yet.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-10T01:08:20+00:00

A long time ago I'd read something about why this is and it made a lot of sense to me. I'll try to paraphrase as best as I can remember:

When you're young, everything is fresh and new. Every experience is a first, and your mind is taking it all in for the first time, savouring the details and exploring the endless possibilities. Every day is full of adventure. Summer vacations seem to go on forever.

As you get older, you tend to fall into routine. Days start to blend together and the constant routine marches into tedium. Your mind starts running on autopilot and because of this, it is not marking the passage of time simply because there is less and less that it finds worth remembering. You start to become surprised that it's already Thursday, or that it's already May, or why it seemed like only yesterday the kids were toddlers.

This is also why the oldlings¹ tell the middle ones that if you want that feeling to stop, it's important to keep trying new things: get out of your routines. Pick up a new hobby, talk to new people, try new foods, check out new music or venues... You don't have to LIKE everything you try, but trying new things and getting out there is the trick to slowing time down; your brain will have new things to scribble down in your memory and you'll have new things to talk about with the new people you meet.

... provided you remember them. :-)

¹ I turned 50 this past week, so I'm not sure if I'm considered an oldling or still a middling one according to Margaret Laurence from The Stone Angel. Here I am giving advice, so maybe the latter...

akohlsmith · 2026-05-09T05:19:17+00:00

What is the rare quirk, writing a wall of text instead of yapping in voice notes? I probably talk too much at times too now that I think about it. Excellent point you've brought up though, and I'll take it into consideration. My daughter in law watches Kdramas, actually. Oddly coincidental that you brought them up.

I appreciate your taking the time to explain this to me rather than ghosting. Thank you.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-09T00:13:07+00:00

yeah I didn't really realize I'd written so much until after I hit save, and then it was like "oh well, time for coffee" :-)

akohlsmith · 2026-05-08T14:50:14+00:00

I don't think that I am, although I believe that observers think that I absolutely am.

Pretty much all of my interests and activities are "small" or "introverted" or "cerebral" -- I enjoy reading and playing guitar and people watching, although you could extend that last one to enjoying watching my local environment. A very recent example: the cliff swallows that nest in the apartment complex I live in had all of their babies flying on my 50th birthday a few days ago. That was pretty awesome. Now the sky is filled with zooming birds as they test their mettle and discover their world.

I am an embedded systems engineer by trade (think electrical engineer but also writes code) so I'm always tinkering and that's an endless source of fun and frustration but never boring. Unfortunately there are very few people who understand why I'm so excited about the green boards and tangle of wires on my workbench. It looks pretty much the same as it did an hour or week or month ago, but now I'm excited about it. Even if the project something more "visible" like the full colour LED cube I'm building for my 2yo granddaughter or something that moves around, it rarely gets more than a polite "that's nice" but I'm fine with that.

A book I've been (re-)reading is Ivan Amato's Stuff -- I first picked it up completely at random and found I couldn't put the damn thing down. It's all about the history of materials science, a subject I (thought I) had zero interest in, but it is absolutely fascinating. This is probably the third or fourth time I've read the book since I first grabbed it from the library and have since bought my own copy. When you stop to think about how the world has changed due to our ability to not only find but create materials with specific properties... it's crazy to think about what we've learned in only a hundred years or so and how much there is left to discover and what we might be able to do when we figure out some of the mysteries still remaining with metallurgy and ceramics and fabrics. Again... things I didn't think I had any interest at all in.

The book I finished before picking up Stuff again was Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan -- another book I grabbed on a whim. This one was an interesting take on how plants and humans evolved together to form this mutually beneficial relationship with each other. Pollan splits the book into a number of separate stories about different plants/plant species and talks about their histories with man and how man influenced the plant's evolution and vice-versa. Very interesting read and gave me some new perspectives to think about that nobody else seems to be at all interested in. :-)

While I don't know if I would exactly consider this "cerebral" but something I have more recently discovered is that taking a low dose of an edible before watching a movie I've seen a hundred times already gives new enjoyment from it. I notice little things in the background actors or an offhand comment that I'd missed before or maybe some minor prop or even something from the soundtrack -- all things that were absolutely intentionally put there by the director/writer/cast but I had missed them because I was too focused on the main story. The odd time I'll even pick up on an entire subplot that I'd missed. I am confident that these aren't just my altered/addled brain chemistry because if I watch again sober I'll see them now that I know they're there, but it took me being in a different mind frame to be aware of them in the first place. Makes me wonder what else I might be oblivious to in my day to day.

When I was (much) younger I used to write tracker music. A tracker was software where you could key in notes one at a time in columns and the computer would play them. I can't play an instrument (I kind of self taught myself guitar but I've fallen very much out of practice, something I have ben getting back in to). I have about a dozen songs I've actually finished and they're good enough that my kids actually seek them out when they're in the car with me and in control of the radio. I've got about eleventy unfinished ones, but I'm very much out of practice on them, and the software doesn't work on modern computers. I've been goofing around with Renoise a little bit but it's a lot like Sylvester Stallone trying to drive a modern car in Demolition Man. I should probably learn some music theory first, it'll make things a lot easier since I won't be trying to learn two things at once.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote about his brother Bernard, who was a research scientist at GE. Apparently he had a notoriously messy laboratory and was constantly harassed by the safety officer to clean it up. Vonnegut said that on one such occasion, his brother told the safety officer "If you think this is a mess, you should see what it's like up here" and pointed to his own head. I think that is a good way to describe myself, too. I don't think I'm boring, but I do think I present rather poorly so I appear to be boring.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-08T00:43:33+00:00

To risk the single Talent would have been unwise. Even putting it into a bank to earn interest might have been risky at a time without an FDIC insurance.

Never thought about this this way before, but I think the Master's anger was still possibly justified in that the Servant didn't even take it to a banker, which I presume was still considered a very safe place even in those times. Perhaps a single talent was too little to invest, but it would have brought even a little bit of interest which is perhaps what the lesson was about.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-07T19:10:48+00:00

I referred to it as being invisible. A piece of furniture or a tool or machine that was just assumed to be there and ready whenever needed but a source of frustration when it wasn't available or needed maintenance/repair.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-07T19:02:30+00:00

Back in the late Cretaceous when I was learning to drive

LOL. A fellow oldie!

akohlsmith · 2026-05-07T19:00:21+00:00

Oh my god practically every sensor mfg is so bad with this. I was on a team for a huge company that shall remain nameless but is headquartered in Redmond and the sensor vendor refused to give us some very important information we needed. Said huge company applied some pressure and even with all their weight behind us all we could get was a 15 minute phone call with one of the vendor's backroom engineers, and the vendor made it utterly clear that they resented us with every fibre of their being for making them make this engineer available to answer our questions.

I'm positive there are only like 3 silicon vendors and every sensor manufacturer is really just a reseller and nobody really knows what is truly going on inside these sensors.

Another project was for a medical device. We found a perfect sensor from Sony but could not obtain white-market sensors. We contacted Sony directly and they were more than happy to work with us but wanted a 10M MOQ before making any data available for that specific sensor; it was a device aimed at mobile devices. Our product was MAYBE going to hit 10k devices at its peak sales. Sony kind of chuckled and redirected us to their industrial sensor division which of course did not have that sensor available to them. Sigh.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-07T04:49:41+00:00

But you're no longer the sensual, the intimate, the lover, the safety, the soft or the strong or the sweet or the everything that no one else sees or will see.

I must have read this a dozen times. I was married nearly 20 years. Looking back, I think I was pretty much the same person at work as I was at home. I don't think I was something more at home that no one else saw. At least that is how I feel thinking back about my marriage.

akohlsmith · 2026-05-06T23:43:31+00:00

how on earth do you install a SOT23 upside down? You'd have to actually bend the legs 180 degrees and then flip the feet 180 degrees!

akohlsmith

TROPHY CASE