Recent content on mike's website
We discover our sense of self in steps starting in early childhood. It is between 2-3 months, at some point during infancy, when we first realize that the actions of “me”, the self-thing, produce some kind of reaction in our infant caregiver. The famous test of self-discovery is the mirror test, also called the rouge test: place a child in front of a mirror, then put dirt or something…
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all of this. This sounds great. Really, it does. Everything getting faster and…
I remember when I used to play video games. I played lots of games. I have an early video game memory. It was around the 1999-2000 timeframe, my dad had a Windows 98 PC in the living room. We had Warcraft 2 on that computer. I loved Warcraft 2. I used to set up a single-player game that was a little bit easy, and I would painstakingly beat the enemy back into a corner of the map – just…
The Defense , or, The Luzhin Defense, was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel, published in Russian in 1930 and English in 1962. It is a novel about Luzhin (like, “illusion” – the phonetic allusion is apparently even stronger in Russian), a genius chess master. The story proceeds in 3-acts. In the first act, we see Luzhin as a young child. His world is dull and cruel to him, but…
I wrote this up as a youtube comment and then figured I’d post it here. talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko summary: Jonathan Blow discusses the trajectory of technological advancement and decline, particularly in software, by drawing parallels from historical events such as the U.S.-Soviet space race. He highlights that significant advancements, like sending humans to the…
DeepSeek-R1 (the model) is cute. I have an RTX3090, so I can run fairly large models at home. I have an ollama server set up, so I have direct access to the new models. Of course, when DeepSeek dropped, I downloaded it immediately. So the model is: deepseek-r1:32b , this is a distillation of Qwen2.5-32b, which is an LLM developed by the Chinese company Alibaba cloud. So they say: Qwen (通义千问) chat…
Lynn Conway passed away today, 6/11/2024. She is best known for her work on VLSI, (and only recently) for inventing the first superscalar architecture, among many other things. Above: diagram of a single chip, embedded within a larger layout, on a shared wafer. Among the first of countless billions of VLSI chips to be made Here, she explains the symbiotic codevelopment of chip design…
This is the first post, hopefully in a series, about building a flight computer from scratch with embedded Rust. When I say from scratch, I really mean it: I’m designing the hardware, the software, the airframe, and the design requirements entirely from scratch. I have made some progress which is summarized later in this article. Quick bullets: Hardware custom PCB sensors: gyro, compass,…
OllyFC v1 This is a post containing the images of one early rev of ollyfc v1. I got some feedback on this design on reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard . Just needed a place to park the images. 3-D Render Schematics Servo PWM: MCU Power & USB I/O PCB Layout All layers: Top: Power Plane: Ground Plane: Bottom: Top/Bottom Layers Only: Soldermask: Soldermask + Silkscreen
We are working on new hardware. New hardware comes with new peripherals, which is very exciting, and also sometimes very frustrating. Anyone who is familiar with computer hardware (or electrical components, or test equipment and other such EE ajacent things) is going to be familiar with a datasheet. Datasheets are actually amazing. A datasheet is something that basically describes a microchip for…
What Can I Use It For? The Golden Rules What is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM). Basically, it’s a giant neural network that, in short, predicts the next word. That means, roughly, that it can communicate in writing. Its rules for which “next word” to choose are determined by reading trillions and trillions of words. And, it happens that if you read trillions and…
Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? 1 This post is a collection of thoughts that I have about LLMs. The Context Window The…
I’ve been writing a lot of Rust lately. If you are a programmer, you have probably heard of Rust: it’s amazing! it’s really hard it’s safe. safe safe safe memory safety no memory corruption no use after free safe it’s amazing! Well, yes. These things are true. But that’s not all that I like about Rust. I’m a pretty new programmer. I mean, I’ve been…
Problem Statement We are given an initial state and an ordered set of moves. The state are items in “crates” – [P] is a crate, for example. We are then asked to make the moves on the initial state; e.g. move 1 from 2 to 1 calculate the next state. We repeat this process until we reach the terminal state. When we have the terminal stat [D] [N] [C] [Z] [M] [P] 1 2 3 move 1 from 2…
Problem Statement In part 4 B, just like in part A, we need to find overlaps. But now, rather than a subset, we need to find an intersection.
Problem Statement Each pair of numbers in the list indicates a range, so 6-8 indicates 6, 7, and 8. There are two pairs per list item. We want to distinguish pairs like 5-7,4-8 – in those cases, 5-7 entirely overlaps 4-8, from a pair like 5-7 and 6-8 , for which 5 and 8 do not overlap. Our end result should be a final count of every completely overlapping set.
Problem Statement This is a similar problem to 3A. Now, rather than compare between slices for each line, we are comparing between lines. We are comparing groupings of 3 lines. What we aim to do is find the score of the common item for each 3 lines and add it to the accumulator, just like in the previous problem.
Problem Statement We have a big list. Each item in the list is a duo of collections. Each of these collections has a single item (only one?) in common. Here’s my example puzzle input:
Problem Statement Once again, we have a text file (I’m noticing a pattern). Day 2 is a rock-paper-scissors game. We are given a “strategy guide”:
Problem Statement Still a rock-paper-scissors game. But do we get a new ruleset, no! My abstracting the ruleset was all for naught. We are given the same “strategy guide”:
Problem This problem is similar to problem 1A. We have this big list of numbers:
Problem We have a bunch of numbers, separated by blank lines.
Prelude This is the first post in a series of (hopefully 50!) posts. I am going to use the Advent of Code as my “homework” for learning the systems programming language Rust. Advent of Code is a thing that some smart people do every year where they come up with a series of clever puzzles and then release them every day for 25 days, starting on December 1.
So, I have been working on this project. It’s called You Have Type 1. It’s a game where you get diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and then you have to manage your diabetes for a week. You can play it here: YouHaveType1.com
I was biking a few days ago. In the roadway, I spotted what looked like a mobile phone. Once it was safe I went over, and sure enough, a phone. I wasn’t sure what type of phone it was but I picked it up.
I love reading wikipedia articles that are written very obviously by a single person who is highly passionate about some obscure topic. You only need to read one to understand why it’s such an awesome thing. I’m collecting these, so if you see one shoot me an email or something. This post is part of a series about such articles. Ostritches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ostrich…
Requirements I wanted to implement a 2-D path planner for a mobile robot. I really like testing things in software, because it’s cheap. So I want to simulate 2D space.My robot sees the world as sets of connected points. We are given a bunch of lists of points. If the points in a list are “oriented” clockwise, that set defines an “outer boundary”. If that set of points…
This is a test of the website. I am testing the website.
My name is Mike. I created this website to share stuff that I am doing on the computer. Stuff like: writing Rust, making hardware, writing firmware. I am a programmer. Professionally engaged with embedded C right now and I like writing Rust (both no_std and std). I read a lot and I love to write, so this blog will also have ideas I have come across while reading, and the things I think up after…