Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

This week, Elecia( @logicalelegance ) and Chris( @stoneymonster ) host Kwabena Agyeman, CEO of OpenMV LLC for a chat about more powerful and tiny programmable cameras.

Join them here ( https://embedded.fm/episodes/497 ) on the latest episode of Embedded.

Here's Kwabena on an upcoming MicroPython feature:

#software #hardware #engineering #embedded #camera #iot #openmv #ml #ai

New Change, Technically episode is out: WHO'S AFRAID OF MATH?

We tackle *math anxiety,* @analog_ashley teaches me about vulnerable circuits in the brain and being vulnerable about teaching, and I read a HECK of a lot of science to bring you this episode.

I hope you enjoy our deep dive into math anxiety, what we know about it, what we can do about it, and why we think you shouldn't feel bad if math makes you feel bad ❤️

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/16876929-who-s-afraid-of-math

Two fascinating new papers on LLM interpretability from Anthropic
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/27/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model/

Both papers are great, but the best thing about them is they aren't published as PDFs! They are glorious, mobile friendly web pages which even include several interactive diagrams. Love this so much. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-multilingual

In the first millennium CE, mathematicians performed the then-complex calculations needed to compute the date of Easter. Of course, with our modern digital calendars, this task is now performed automatically by computers; and the older calendrical algorithms are now mostly of historical interest only.

In the Age of Sail, mathematicians were tasked to perform the intricate spherical trigonometry calculations needed to create accurate navigational tables. Again, with modern technology such as GPS, such tasks have been fully automated, although spherical trigonometry classes are still offered at naval academies, and ships still carry printed navigational tables in case of emergency instrument failures.

During the Second World War, mathematicians, human computers, and early mechanical computers were enlisted to solve a variety of problems for military applications such as ballistics, cryptanalysis, and operations research. With the advent of scientific computing, the computational aspect of these tasks has been almost completely delegated to modern electronic computers, although human mathematicians and programmers are still required to direct these machines. (1/3)

Going to put this out there in light of news of other researchers moving, because I think information sharing in our communities is a form of power, but Ashley and I are looking at opportunities outside of the US right now and considering it. I want to signal our openness to it.

Especially for her, as a tenured teaching professor in neurobiology whose entire lab & teaching practice is deeply grounded in equity & increasing success in STEM. Her extraordinary work makes local communities flourish

Models should take languages into account, but also cultures
Arabic is not a culture. It includes many dialects, and many cultures

@amr-keleg.bsky.social
surveys the current practices in https://alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.15003
And finishes with a call
📈🤖
#LLMs #multiculturality #AI #RLHF

"Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) slammed Defense Secretary Pete #Hegseth, calling him a danger to the country and the United States’ military after The #Atlantic reported on Monday that its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been included on a #Signal channel that..." www.ktsm.com/hill-politic... #law

Moulton: Hegseth a danger to U...

Wow - 23andme files for bancruptcy, after the board refused a takeover bid by its current CEO. Now I wonder what will happen to the data of the 14 million samples they gathered so far. While I know that some people using 23andme don't care about their genome being available, others think it is highly private data and should not be publicly available.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/dna-testing-firm-23andme-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy-sell-itself-2025-03-24/

It’s disheartening to see AI reactionism lead my community to a 180° on copyright.

Everyone is merrily attacking LibGen now. If it didn’t exist, big tech companies would still find training data, it just wouldn’t be accessible to regular people.

Intel has a new CEO and it's Lip-Bu Tan! He was such an obvious front-runner that we assumed the more time that passed, the less likely it would be him. And yet! @bcantrill and I were joined by Max Cherney to discuss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sYvYYSxz2Y

If you're a fan of Isochrone maps and US census data (and who isn't?) Dan Snow just released https://opentimes.org/ and it's spectacular - I published some notes about it here, there's some very clever data engineering going on under the hood https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/17/opentimes/

But how to get to that European cloud?
L: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43394087
posted on 2025.03.17 at 19:52:34 (c=1, p=8)

https://blog.cloudflare.com/password-reuse-rampant-half-user-logins-compromised/

the only way for cloudflare to have this data is if it is inside the ssl channel, analyzing traffic to their customers who are logging in.

ssssoooooooo i guess this makes the cloudflare logs a massive target for nation states now?

By the way, if you want some evidence design consulting for your engineering organization from someone who CAN show her work? You know where to find me.

https://www.catharsisinsight.com/

This week, we spoke to Prof. Shimon Schocken about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games among other things.

Join us on the show here: https://embedded.fm/episodes/496.

Here's Prof. Schocken on the importance of hardwork in getting to the depth of concepts:

#professor #teaching #author #software #hardware #engineering #embedded

#insomnihack 2025 - keynote from Mathias Payer. I always like if a researcher presents a slide like this in 30 seconds by going over it "something, something, something" :)

But as always very interesting and eye-opening what kind of (non-)security we're relying on daily.

As people are discussing the issues witth DDoS attacks and attribution, I’m reminded of how the US Government blamed Russia for a DDoS attack against one of their neighbors, which is more accurately (though very indirectly) blamed on me.

Many years ago I complained in an IRC channel about a small website that ripped off the design of one of my sites. A somewhat shady member of that channel happened to control a sizable botnet (with primarily RU IPs). Yep. You see where this is going. (To be clear, I was venting, and didn’t ask him or anyone else to do anything.)

He thought it would be funny to get a little revenge on my behalf. He aimed his entire botnet at that website, and hit the network with so much traffic that it didn’t take down the target server, instead it saturated the core network gear for the country’s main ISP, knocking most of the country offline for several hours.

By pure coincidence, said small Eastern European country was holding national elections the day I complained about the website, something I didn’t discover until years later.

Even the US Government, with all their resources, can’t always tell the difference between a state-backed attack and a teenager “having fun” with a botnet.