Svarichevsky Mikhail - RSS feed
  Today we are used to luxury of fully integrated microcontrollers - all key components are conveniently integrated into single reliable part: non-volatile memory, SRAM, CPU core, PLL, ADC/DAC, PWM, serial ports, e.t.c It was not like that in the past and embedded systems typically required lots of chips, until Intel 8048 (MCS-48) was released in 1976 on n-MOS technology. Intel expected…
Back in the early 2000's I was looking for a camera to replace my compact one. I was choosing between Sony F828 and DSLR's, especially Sony α100. Eventually I've decided on α100 (and don't regret it). Now in 2024 I've noticed Sony F828 on local marketplace, and also learned that it was an extremely unique camera: the only one having CCD sensor with RGBE Bayer matrix (I will need to measure…
I always liked small laptops and phones - but for some reason they fell out of favor of manufacturers ("bigger is more better"). Now if one wanted to get tiny laptop - one of the few opportunities would have been to fight for old Sony UMPC's on ebay which are somewhat expensive even today. Recently Raspberry Pi/CM4-based tiny laptops started to appear - especially clockwork products are neat, but…
Some time late 80's Ronald Reagan told a joke : You know there’s a ten year delay in the Soviet Union of the delivery of an automobile, and only one out of seven families in the Soviet Union own automobiles. There’s a ten year wait. And you go through quite a process when you’re ready to buy, and then you put up the money in advance. And this happened to a fella, and this is their story, that they…
Many of us have heard stories where one was able to complete days worth of work in minutes using AI, even being outside of one's area of expertise. Indeed, often LLM's do (almost) miracles, but today I had a different experience. The task was almost trivial: generate look-up table (LUT) for per-channel image contrast enhancement using some S-curve function, and apply it to an image. Let's not…
Many had noticed that bright stars do twinkle, while planets do not. Recently, when looking at Sirius at low elevation I noticed it's not just brightness but also color twinkling. I took Sigma 50-500mm lens at F8 (62mm aperture), and did 4 second exposure while allowing camera to wobble so that variation of brightness and/or color would be recorded. Results really surprised me. Why it happens?…
Last few years we see more space games in the news - No Man's Sky, Starfield, long awaited Star Citizen and many more. In light of new competition it seems EVE Online also perked up and started to try to get old players back into the game. They were successful with me, so i dug up my old 13-year old account to look around (now it's easier - one don't need money any more to look around). Surely, in…
16 years ago dog ate my AI book. At the time (and way before that) common argument on «Why we still don't have AI working and it is always 10 years away» was that we can't make AI work even at 1% or 0.1% human speed, even on supercomputers of the time – therefore it's not about GFLOPS. This weekend I ran gpt4-alpaca-lora_mlp-65B language model in home lab on CPU (using llama.cpp , due to model…
5 years ago making microchip from high-level HDL with your own hands required around 300k$ worth of software licenses, process was slow and learning curve steep. Yesterday I've submitted my first silicon for manufacturing and it was... different. In the evening wife comes as asks "How much time until deadline?". I reply: "2 hours left, but I still have to learn Verilog." (historically my digital…
Stable Diffusion model that was publicly released this week is a huge step forward in making AI widely accessible. Yes, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are impressive, but they are a blackbox. You can play with it, but can't touch the brain. Stable Diffusion not only can be run locally on relatively inexpensive hardware (i.e. sized perfectly for wide availability, not just bigger=better), it is also easy…