My suspicion is that it's because the feedback loop is so fast. Imagine if you were tasked with supervising 2 co-workers who gave you 50-100 line diffs to review every minute. The uncanny valley is that the code is rarely good enough to accept blindly, but the response is quick enough that it feels like progress. And perhaps an human impulse to respond to the agent? And a 10-person team? In reality those 10 people would review each other's PRs and in a good organisation you trust each other to gatekeep what gets checked in. The answer sounds like managing-agents, but none of the models are good enough to reliably say what's slop and what's not.
There is a real return of investment in co-workers over time, as they get better (most of the time).
Now, I don't mind engaging in a bit of Sisyphean endeavor using an LLM, but remember that the gods were kind enough to give him just one boulder, not 10 juggling balls.
It's less about a direct comparison to people and more what a similar scenario would be in a normal development team (and why we don't put one person solely in charge of review).
This is an advantage of async systems like Jules/Copilot, where you can send off a request and get on with something else. I also wonder if the response from CLI agents is also short enough that you can waste time staring at the loading bar, because context switching between replies is even more expensive.
Yes. The first time I heard/read someone describe this idea of managing parallel agents, my very first thought was that this is only even a thing because the LLM coding tools are still slow enough that you can't really achieve a good flow state with the current state of the art. On the flip side of that, this kind of workflow is only sustainable if the agents stay somewhat slow. Otherwise, if the agents are blocking on your attention, it seems like it would feel very hectic and I could see myself getting burned out pretty quickly from having to spend my whole work time doing a round-robin on iterating each agent forward.
I say that having not tried this work flow at all, so what do I know? I mostly only use Claude Code to bounce questions off of and ask it to do reviews of my work, because I still haven't had that much luck getting it to actually write code that is complete and how I like.
Built-in no, but the Pi Pico W is decent and inexpensive if the form factor isn't an issue. The RP2040/RP2350 are nice chips to work with and documentation is good. I can live with an external module, and it's certified too.
Have you tried it? It's simply not in the same league of battle tested as the ESP one is, and I will happily agree almost everything else about the RP based ecosystem is superior.
Yes, I've use them for ESPHome and other small jobs like lighting controllers, but not for production. They're cheaper than most Arduino or hobbyist breakout boards like Feather. I can't comment on battle-tested, but I've also bought some pretty shoddy ESP breakouts in the past and I've had trouble with unstable WiFi performance when I've meshed them. The PIOs are cool, and better documented than Beaglebone/TI (maybe that's improved). Toolchain is also decent.
I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a local company (though for transparency I do hold some stock in RPI).
Seagate Expansion drives are in this price range and can be shucked. They're not enterprise drives meant for constant operation, the big ones are Barracudas or maybe Exos, but for homelab NAS they're very popular.
I have such a NAS for 8 years, (and a smaller netgear one from maybe 16 years ago), and have yet such a disk fail. But you can get unlucky, buying a supposedly new but "refurbished" item via amazon or the seagate store (so I hear), or have the equivalent of the "death star" HDDs, which had a ridicilously high burnout rate (we measured something like > 10% of the drives failed every week across a fairly large deployhment in the field - major bummer.
If you use such consumer drives, I strongly suggest to make occasional offsite backups of large mostly static files (movies for most people I guess), and frequent backups of more volatile directories to an offsite place, maybe encrypted in the cloud.
Of course you would stagger the offline backups. But if we are talking storing e.g. movies, the worst case scenario is really not so bad (unless you have the last extant copies of some early Dr Who episodes, then BBC would want to have a word with you)
I've visited New Zealand a few times en route to Antarctica. The only time I've ever needed to take out cash was for the Christchurch bus service. I was in MIQ on the way in, but they gave us free reign on the way out because Antarctica was considered virus-free (and according to immigration NZ, it counts as the Ross Dependency). There was obviously a lot of push for contactless payments in 2021. I get the impression that the pandemic helped really cement it, although it sounds like the UK where we've had widespread contactless for almost 20 years.
The pandemic helped the banks push contactless which they love, because it’s not EFTPOS.
EFTPOS is our national post of sale system, it has very low or no fees for any party involved. Merchants pay a fixed machine rental per month which can include unlimited transactions, or may have a per transaction fee of up to $0.20. Most individuals do not pay a fee for using EFTPOS and there’s normally no card fee, though some banks have accounts with fees that have other benefits (eg higher deposit interest rates to encourage saving).
Contactless goes via the standard card network extortion. Since 2022 the interchange rate has been capped by legislation which has helped merchants a lot, but the per transaction fee over the card network is still far higher than EFTPOS.
Contactless EFTPOS does exist in Australia - we share a lot of the underlying tech - but the banks won’t activate it here because they’d lose the interchange fees.
Online EFTPOS is starting to gain market share though, which is nice.
"don't have to screw in every drive" is relative, but at least tool-less drive carriers are a thing now.
A lot of older toploaders from vendors like Dell are not tool-free. If you bought vendor drives and one fails, you RMA it and move on. However if you want to replace failed drives in the field, or want to go it alone from the start with refurbished drives... you'll be doing a lot of screwing. They're quite fragile and the plastic snaps easily. It's pretty tedious work.
I think pre-commit is essential. I enforce conventional commits (+ a hook which limits commit length to 50 chars) and for Python, ruff with many options enabled. Perhaps the most important one is to enforce complexity limits. That will catch a lot of basic mistakes. Any sanity checks that you can make deterministic are a good idea. You could even add unit tests to pre-commit, but I think it's fine to have the model run pytest separately.
The models tend to be very good about syntax, but this sort of linting will often catch dead code like unused variables or arguments.
You do need to rule-prompt that the agent may need to run pre-commit multiple times to verify the changes worked, or to re-add to the commit. Also, frustratingly, you also need to be explicit that pre-commit might fail and it should fix the errors (otherwise sometimes it'll run and say "I ran pre-commit!") For commits there are some other guardrails, like blanket denying git add <wildcard>.
Claude will sometimes complain via its internal monologue when it fails a ton of linter checks and is forced to write complete docstrings for everything. Sometimes you need to nudge it to not give up, and then it will act excited when the number of errors goes down.
Very solid advice. I need to experiment more with the pre-commit stuff, I am a bit tired of reminding the model to actually run tests / checks. They seem to be as lazy about testing as your average junior dev ;)
The way these systems are controlled (in my terrestial experience) is to have the system be capable of cooling below the desired set point. Then you can PID the temperature using a heater or a thermal bridge/heat switch that will cause the system to warm up. It's complicated, and a lot of very interesting thermodynamics involved.
It also depends if you just need "as cold as possible" or if you need to know the temperature and can calibrate out fluctuation, or if you genuinely need stability.
The highest sensitivity cameras tend to use cryocooling rather than TECS. But you're correct that a lot of mid to high end astro cameras are Peltier cooled, and many hobbyist imagers. Satellites are a mix, you have to get rid of the heat, so some missions also use cryocooling and are limited by the amount of cryogen on board. Some instruments also get away with passive cooling, if you can radiate it fast enough.
I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless.
I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.
"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.
But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't.
Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful.
Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.
When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games.
At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle.
I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping.
Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler.
Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate.
If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
I’m not going to use force against him. Threatening to take away the computer or tablet is generally plenty. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a precondition to using these things is ‘go to school’.
I’m referring to governments, not parents. If I don’t send my child to school, the state of Washington will have a word to say about it. There are laws.
> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back?
Agreed.
> I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
Disagree. The justification for why they should learn $FOO may never be understood by a mind that we are teaching $FOO to.
There's good justification for learning to read, but not one that would be understood by a 6 year old.
There's similarly good justification for teaching Maths, but you'd be hard pressed to convince a 16 year old of the value in practicing abstract reasoning, using Maths as the vehicle.
Sometimes, the only good answer to give a kid is "you'll see the value when you're older".
As parents do, I had numerous discussions with my kid about math and additional languages. Here's my usual explanation: it's existing knowledge that opens doors, not theoretical one, and you want to have as many doors open as possible.
Well, I use other words bit that's my message anyway :-)
And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.
I also disagree that there needs to be justification. I don't think students' minds work like that. What's needed is something different and probably many kinds of something different since there's many kinds of learners.
So far, a huge percentage of students are getting left behind when teachers and material fail to have a good answer.
> And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.
With an insufficiently developed brain, there is no answer that leads to engagement or interest.
Sometimes you'll find yourself telling kids "How do you know you won't like it unless you try it?"
If you, personally, claim to have never told a kid that specific sentence (regardless of context), I have serious doubts that you actually have kids.
Sometimes engagement and interest only come after the kid has been forced through a little bit of it.
They are children; you can't always reason with them because they have not yet developed sufficient reasoning skills. Making the claim that reasoning is all you need to get children to do the right thing is plain nonsense.
> I also disagree that there needs to be justification.
Sounds like we're in agreement, after all? I also don't think there needs to be a justification for "You need to learn Maths". This is why I said an answer along the lines of "you'll understand why later" is all you can do when asked for a justification.
If you ask adults about their school experiences, they very often say that it was a waste and they remember nothing and just remember hating math and that they never use any of that. And that we should teach about finance like loans, mortgages, bureaucracy, jobs, contracts, warranty rights, how to buy a house, how to buy a car, how elections work, etc. and other real life things that average adults do. It's super common outside the tech circles that you may be in.
I’d invite these adults to consider what their life might be like had they never learned maths, or other school subjects they considered a waste of time.
I asked my math teacher for applications and she just mumbled something, embarrassed. Took me until a while later to realize that most of my teachers had never stepped foot outside a school in their entire life.
Later at university I complained about the lack of applications in the textbook, and my classmates became very upset. One of them responded, "we are mathematicians, we do not concern ourselves with applications."
That's a bit of a caricature, but would you ask the same of an English major or an art historian? Math is an intellectual activity that's about sharpening and chiseling the mind, and the satisfaction of figuring things out and seeing things fall into place neatly. Thinking about real things out there in the world in math ways (~= applications) can also be fun.
Just look at software. It's undeniably useful with many applications. Still, some people treat it playfully and in an enjoyable way, they learn about algorithms they won't ever use, just for the elegance, read Knuth, even if reading some React handbook may be more useful for their day-to-day. There are more considerations than "but how will this make my employer richer?"
I agree this is a problem. The best reason I can come up with is “because it is fun/beautiful/interesting” (to some people).
But IMO that pushes you to making the curriculum more flexible and not forcing every student into the same sequence where math is the core IQ test for STEM. If a kid doesn’t find it interesting I struggle to justify forcing them.
Personally I also think trig and calculus are far inferior to statistics for most people. If you have an intuition for probability distributions, precision/recall, and a few other basic concepts, you’ll be guaranteed to apply them everywhere in your life.
Of course if you are interested in STEM then calculus must be available too, but it’s pretty specialized in practice.
It is also a fallacy. Interesting and practical are two different things, especially for kids. Kids will happily learn completely useless things and will dislike clearly practical and important subjects.
Because they can not go to the department that uses trig in university. This is the basic design of society; people want to remind these kids they are not good enough forever.
That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.
Kids are interested in learning. Adults are interested in learning. The human brain is interested in learning. It becomes tremendously happy when it learns and so do the humans. The problem is that the brain doesn't like effort and is very good at thinking about things that are more fun to learn. There's skills that can help with directing it back, but they need to be learned.
Or drop the idea that everyone has to be forced to learn the same academically-inclined curriculum. Of course this is a non-starter, because it sounds like "giving up on" some kids.
All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them.
Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry.
Your suggestion is interesting but I am not convinced that a student would be helped by aligning the examples with their interests.
I could see a student asking how trig relates to computer games and the example the LLM generates becoming much more involved.
I see no problem with the examples being boring. The people that developed these techniques had such fundamental problems to solve and the wonder to me is the human mind that came up with these
methods.
All this to say, maybe we lack appreciation for the fundamental sciences that underpin every aspect of our modern lives.
> All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry.
The trouble is a lot of those practical examples fall into the, "why would I care category". I had a high school physics teacher who described his university antics, one of which included a funny story of a bunch of his friends climbing on top of each other to measure the height of a flag pole. I guess the profs got tired of dealing with students scaling flag poles because I was measuring the height of mountains on the moon at the same university a couple of years later. The thing is nobody really cares about the height of a flag pole, while only a few would care about the height of the mountains on the moon.
The reality is the interesting applications are much more involved. They either require a depth of thought of process or a depth of knowledge that isn't appropriate for a textbook question. Take that trigonometry in games example. The math to do it was in my middle school curriculum, but it becomes obvious that computer graphics is more than trigonometry the moment you try to frame it as an example. I had linear algebra in high school. That will take you pretty far with the mathematics, but it will also be clear that a knowledge of computer programming is involved. Even knowing how to program isn't going to take you all of the way because few are interested in rendering verticies and edges ...
And that is just the obvious progression of knowledge in a simple application. Physics itself involves buckets full of trigonometry in extremely non-obvious ways, non-geometric ways.
I agree with your point in general, but I do find myself actually using trigonometry for fairly basic real-world purposes more often than one might expect. For example: how big of a piece of material fits in a particular position if it’s not parallel or perpendicular to the stuff around it? If a rope supports a load in the middle, how much tension does the rope need? How much of an angle should be cut into a door to comfortably clear the jamb? (If you’ve never contemplated this before: a door with a rectangular cross-section will have less clearance to the jamb when almost closed than when fully closed.)
Rambling off-topic, but I remember being very impressed at how a uniform hanging rope makes a catenary [0] shape which is related to making strong structural arches.
So maybe if the students were somewhere where the class could design and make an igloo... :p
Fun exercise for the reader: if you have that uniform hanging rope support a uniform flat suspension bridge (via a bunch of closely spaced vertical ropes), and the bridge is much, much heavier than the ropes, then you get a parabola instead of a catenary. Wikipedia gives a derivation involving differential equations, but it glosses over the actual fundamental difference between these situations. But you can explain what’s going on with just trigonometry and no calculus, let alone differential equations: consider how much weight a small section of chain that isn’t right in the middle is supporting. You’ll end up with a drawing involving a right triangle and some numbers associated with the sides, and those numbers will line up differently with the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuses in the two cases.
So your off-topic rambling isn’t off-topic at all :)
I think for me personally although I don’t use maths often enough in any practical sense, the one thing I think has stopped me progressing in life how I feel I want to has been my lack of maths knowledge. I don’t mean in a career sense but in an enjoyment sense. I watched a video about proving that the square root of two is irrational and that made me irrationally happy, and I’d love to keep going but a lot of the maths in other proofs or concepts gets absolutely insane. I don’t know how to express that to kids learning maths for the first time, though. It also almost feels like the world of math is so vast there’s something for everyone to enjoy casually. That feels like a video game analogy to me with all the different genres built around basic fundamental concepts.
> I see no problem with the examples being boring.
I'm in agreement with this point; the examples are boring, but that's not really relevant. After all, we're mostly talking about Maths ITT, not history or social sciences.
1. Some foundational study is needed before you get to the really interesting problems at a higher grade/level/school/university.
2. Who cares if they are boring? A spectacular facility to learn Maths which is demonstrated by high marks indicates better abstract reasoning skills, making it easier for specific trades to decide who is more suitable.
3. How will the kids know whether they like Maths or not if they skip trig in high school?
(Sidenote: Am I the only one who finds trig easy and everything else in Maths hard?)
The "trig in real life" is a common question, but its deeply flawed. You can use trig in real life - I used it last time I bought a monitor because I wanted to compare the areas of models with different aspect ratios and I only had the diagonal size and aspect rations.
There are much deeper flaws in this question:
1. That you only learn what you are guaranteed to use in everyday life. Education should leave you with choices. You learn trigonometry so you can later choose to do things that require it.
2. That everything you learn in school has to be something that is likely to be useful. When did you last use history or literature or art?
Look out for sparks as well. There was a period when everything had sparks. It seems to have calmed down a bit but you still see it on action posters. Orange and teal is fascinating. Once you know it's a thing, you can't unsee it. Especially when the set dressers are in on it and characters have orange and teal books, light fittings and clutter.
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