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show me your home lab!
“What’s your choice for a single best aid to an interesting and productive circuit design career? A PhD? An IQ of 250? A CAD workstation? Getting a paper into the Solid State Circuit Conference? Befriending the boss? I suppose all of these are of some value, but none even comes close to something else. In fact, their combined benefit isn’t even worth a fraction of something else. This something else even has potential economic rewards. What is this wondrous thing that outshines all the other candidates? It is, simply, a laboratory in your home. The enormous productivity advantage provided by a home lab is unmatched by anything I am familiar with. As for economic benefits, no stock tip, no real estate deal, no raise, no nothing can match the long-term investment yield a home lab can produce. The laboratory is, after all, an investment in yourself. It is an almost unfair advantage.
The magic of a home lab is that it effectively creates time. Over the last 20 years I estimate that about 90% of my work output has occurred in a home lab. The ability to grab a few hours here and there combined with occasional marathon 5-20 hours sessions produces a huge accumulated time benefit. Perhaps more importantly, the time generated is highly leveraged. An hour in the lab at home is worth a day at work.
A lot of work time is spent on unplanned and parasitic activities. Phone calls, interruptions, meetings, and just plain gossiping eat up obscene amounts of time. While these events may ultimately contribute towards good circuits, they do so in a very oblique way. Worse yet, they rob psychological momentum, breaking up design time into chunks instead of allowing continuous periods of concentration. When I’m at work I do my job. When I’m at home in the lab is where the boss and stockholders get what they paid for. It sounds absurd, but I have sat in meetings praying for 6 o’clock to come so I can go home and get to work. The uninterrupted time in a home lab permits persistence, one of the most powerful tools a designer has.
I favor long, uninterrupted lab sessions of at least 5 to 10 hours, but family time won’t always allow for this. However, I can almost always get in two to four hours per day. Few things can match the convenience and efficiency of getting an idea while washing the dishes or putting my son to sleep and being able to breadboard it now. The easy and instant availability of lab time makes even small amounts of time practical. Because no one else uses your lab, everything is undisturbed and just as you left it after the last session. Nothing is missing or broken, and all test equipment is familiar. You can get right to work.”
- Jim Williams “The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design”
PSA: if you own a smart TV, disable selling/sharing of your personal data... for some ungodly reason this is on by default.
then, ask an LLM what domains to block to prevent telemetry/ads for your particular model... for example, for my samsung TVs:
there is no such thing as a platonically ideal hardware design divorced from physical reality. the two are fundamentally inseparable. you're misunderstanding hardware design if you think this is the case.
i had claude create a remote repo for me on github and it choose "master" over "main" on its own accord.
the AI is establishing dominance.
who remembers this retard?
idk who is more retarded, trevor, or people who listened to him speak and still invested in his company?
such a shame he got pardoned. absolutely insulting.
just out of curiosity, asked claude to see if it can find my wifi meat thermo on my network, probe its API, and add it to my dashboard.
before i had the meat on it already worked out a functioning dashboard for me with alerts...
this still amazes me but this is the norm
i love how this is @BBC_TopGear's response about single charge 0-60 in 800ms ...before they even learned it can fucking fly an do kickflips.
in late 2021, the small team i was on was presenting to elon in person for what, at the time, was still unheard of by the world or even tesla internally (optimus). it was crazy times, crazier than model 3 in some regards.
this was the first time i saw @Grimezsz in person. I’m sure she doesn’t remember me, but probably remembers the meeting.
we were told it would happen on a tuesday but it got delayed day by day. finally elon shows up really late on a friday evening.
before seeing elon, i see this woman chasing a child around the HP building office, in what appeared to be a Lord of the Rings costume. she had tattooed hands and seemed mystical. at the time i didn’t know who Grimes was.
anyways, we give our demos and present to E with Grimes and baby X by his side.
while driving home from the bay in the middle of the night I started listening to her music and fell in love with this song.
just heard it again today after a lot of time has passed and brought me back, very surreal.
open.spotify.com/track/3LGsg…
Zack's Lab retweeted
You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor, He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes.
If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip, You've dashed no cup from
perjured lip, You've never set the wrong to right. You've been a coward in the fight.
"No Enemies" by Charles Mackay
if i had a dime for every shitty kicad AI autorouter wrapper harness vibecode hardware thing being shilled on my TL i'd have more money than sammy altman
i find it crazy that @Tesla hasn't released a public @Tesla_Optimus update in nearly a year... they must be cooking on gen3.