Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

This week, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.
Take a listen here: https://embedded.fm/episodes/498.

Here's Chris on the relevance of learning to learn:

Thank you to Nordic Semi for sponsoring the show!

#mentalhealth #journaling #embedded #engineering #electrical #electronics

Very excited to be giving a talk today at the Allen Institute about my new beat, technical ability as a networked set of beliefs we must understand in order to rebuild.

Graft is a really interesting new open source replication system designed for read-write multi-leader replication, with a SQLite extension as the first demonstration of what it can do https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/stop-syncing-everything/

Holy shit, the PCB design of this new sensor board, called Ophanim, of CERN’s Aegis experiment just fucking slaps. Right now, there don’t seem to be many images of it on the web, but I hope to see more in the future.

#electronics #pcb #science

I'm so unbelievably thrilled to see a new generation of people picking up the mantle of torrenting in the pursuit of preserving the basic information of our culture. People who have never scraped a site or packed a dataset picking up wget and a torrent client and going like "that's it? I can do that."

That's what actually empowering technologies do - show people they are already powerful, that there is no priesthood that they aren't already in. Bittorrent is an empowering technology.

edit: realized i don't think i've actually posted about what we're doing here, i'm talking about sciop and @SafeguardingResearch - https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114289656473282421

Video games have been largely immune to inflation because Gamers are whiny babies who throw a fit if their Mario costs $4 more than it did in 1996.

And I hate to say it, but the lesson is that we all need to be huge babies all the time. Eggs go up 12 cents?

Threaten the family of the CEO of Egg.

https://youtu.be/Gv8Onf_c5vs

I made a video that shows some MLP learning dynamics, this time a network with shape [10]*10 + [2] + [10]*3.

Expect more such videos to follow, I find them both fascinating and insightful.

Xe google searches:

that thing apple did with old ipad releases to make the software look like physical objects

This is a really neat Python library providing decorator and docstring and type signature based syntactic sugar over my LLM package - I blogged about here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/3/smartfunc/
https://fosstodon.org/@koaning/114274098410057743

Le 10 avril je réitère à l'ENSAD le format "Démontage conférencé" (https://limitesnumeriques.fr/sensibiliser/animation-numerique-responsable/demontage-conference) : l'occasion de parler empreinte du numérique tout en démontant des appareils électroniques.

Plus d'infos :
https://www.ensad.fr/fr/conference-decor-numerique-limites-numeriques-demontage-conference-avec-thomas-thibault

Avec @limitesnumeriques

An Oxide customer encountered a peculiar issue at the intersection of their Oxide network and their broader network. @bcantrill and I were joined by several members of the Oxide team who solved the problem using a combination of tooling, intuition, and dark knowledge. https://youtu.be/1wBZ39q1I80

🚨 BREAKING:
@TheAcornAI
just dropped the first
test-time learning pretrained model! 🚀

It learns on the fly, interacts
adapts to you, and outsmarts anything before it.
Oh, and it's OPEN. 👀🔓

The future just got smarter.
#AI #MachineLearning #LLMs
🤖📈

So weird how teaching is such a punching bag for tech bros including the ones who sit around trying to cash in the cultural cachet of "caring about education" just as much as the ones who like to cash in on "shitting on education"

I think it's revelatory to ask what makes people's skin crawl and clearly teachers make these guys crawl out of their skins. Like I think this is true on a visceral level for them

I am learning some upsetting-to-me things from reading the bash man page, for example that in bash `source blah.sh` will by default search all directories in your PATH for a file called `blah.sh`

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO heritage in Sweden! I was part of making the application, so ofc I think it's great, but I wrote a little bit about how difficult it is to generalize the demoscene. https://www.goto80.com/the-demoscene-as-a-unesco-heritage-in-sweden

After a 1.5 year period where I tried to use an iPad as my laptop, I have just grabbed my 5 6+ year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon for this trip, and while the battery life sucks, it is nice to have my proper OS back.

Models have preferences like giving inanimate 📦 stuff to animate 👳
Is it that they just saw a lot of such examples in pretraining or is it generalization and deeper understanding?
https://alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.20850
#linguistics #language #LLM #AI

Hell is other networks. Today @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by Oxide engineers to discuss an incident where our combination with particular networking equipment resulted in a pathological system -- and how it was debugged and resolved. Join us, 5p Pacific!

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1356306084972986399

I just heard that a cryptography professor at Indiana University had his house raided and was fired. Don’t know much more. https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28/fbi-department-of-homeland-security-agents-search-house-in-bloomington-indiana/82710451007/