cognitive: as in reasonable
technical of, relating to, or involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, *understanding*, learning, and remembering)
You read your chips' datasheets that go in detail on pinouts and protocols. You use logic analyzers that capture signals and programmatically decode a multitude of protocols from those signals. When you don't know what are the pinouts or protocols, you compare against similar enough known ones, or bruteforce them.
Some examples:
* Once you've learned a few chip pinouts, you can pretty much guess unknown pinouts just from identifying a few ground/control/address pins, as even chip-on-board globs follow similar layouts [1]. However, despite plenty of datasheet archives being publicly available, none of them allow you to actually search by pin function [2], so you potentially have to go through dozens of datasheets of similar model ids to find what you need.
* UART baud rates that are likely used are in the single digits, they can be easily bruteforced.
* JTAG pins you need to interface with can go up to a dozen or so, there are enumeration scripts you can run in an Arduino to identify which pin has which function. These scripts also identify the IDCODE which you can lookup against boundary scan files if you need so [3]. But in most cases, you will interface with JTAG without thinking of the state machine behind it.
* Reverse engineering memory maps is a matter of following data read/write patterns and inferring associated functionality. You will bump into several address cross-references that also hint at what are the base addresses of each map. It's a more general skill you develop as you go, and Ghidra's decompilation made it much more accessible in the last years. The author went with a elaborate linker script but a more bare-bones approach would be to link code as a distinct ELF object, then copy its text section over to offset 0x20A0000-0x2010000 in the firmware image, and patch the initializers.
* Soldering and associated skills can also be self-learned from tutorials, pick several videos and learn the tricks/mistakes each of them cover.
So, in practice? Each of these does not require a vast amount of knowledge for things to happen, even allowing one to skip required reading of huge bibles that are recommended to electronics beginners. This is how a lifetime gets reduced to a few months of non-working hours.
When getting into hardware hacking, what I felt was the main blocker is how a lot is described at a superficial level, without enough breadcrumbs one can follow to reproduce the same results. Sure, the pictures of spaghetti wires and decapped chips look awesome, but nobody learns from that. Unlike the software side where you are given the source and everything you need to lookup is in front of you.
> Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?
"Neurons. Cells that fire impulses. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but neurons."
"Neurons doing what? Where do the words come from?"
"The neurons make the words. Are you understanding me? We opened it up. There's no dictionary in there, no grammar rules, no little man. Just neurons. A whole cortex of neurons sending each other impulses."
I don't believe this is accurate. Failing grades are what the observation entails, and the data clearly depict an abrupt change; not a gradual one.
In section titled "Failing grades in 3 CS classes skyrocket in spring 2026
", there's a clear jump in failing grades for for all cited courses between 2025 and 2026. Failing grades for every course jump by multiples of the previous year.
It’s only going to get worse. The second things like Claude Cowork get opened up to non-technical teams you start to see the influx of emails and Slack message written with LLM’s for absolutely no productivity gain (in fact probably a loss given how unnecessarily wordy the messages are). Too many people want to give up any and all responsibility.
Agents have personalities (anthropomorphising for a sec) right? What if you had one coding agent be a workhorse, and a different one ideate with you, and a different one be your personal assistant?
I built this tool called repowire to get agents talking to each other, and collaborating. As a result, now I have a telegram bot, a remote relay, an orchestrator and a personal assistant.
God, what would I do without tmux?
Repo is constantly in flux, easiest way to install is to point <your-fav-coding-agent> at it and explore the code
AFAIK pi's approach is to be quite minimal and allow extensions for customization, making it a more flexible solution, but you need to do work to make it fit your use case. OP mentions one extension, but perhaps it'd have benefited from more.
Another choice would be opencode which has more functionality and is a more heavyweight option out of the box.
>My job is uniquely creative and human, other jobs can be automated away but mine is just so special.
If you love mathematics so much, and it's not the prestige and accolades that drive you, then what stops you from just solving problems on your free time even if they are already solved by AI?
Why does your field have to remain economically viable for you, why does this not apply to textile manufacturing or something? Someone's positions in society is owed to textile manufacturing too, and it has a culture that some people would lament the loss of and so on.(See guild system, craftsmanship in Europe).
I can't predict whether this will be a good thing in the long run, but this is literally the same complaint that every industry affected by automation ever had, and many who are now complaining would dismiss it if it were about something they personally do not care about or isn't sufficiently "noble" or intellectual.
I know it hurts, but the core complaint is just economic displacement, many have had to deal with that before. Most people who have something they love have to do that on their free time because it's not economically viable as a job, tough luck.
I suggest trying out AMD. Not an evangelist by any means but on Linux there's really no choice. I have one myself since I moved from Nvidia and don't regret it.
I'm a bibliophile. My current library stands at over 600 books, I'd wager I've purchased around a thousand in my lifetime. Please shed any assumption that this is the only way I read.
I am one of the book industry's better customers. This is pretty typical, AFAIUI. We see study after study suggest that pirates spend more on music and film than non-pirates.[1] Just the other week, I bought a physical copy of a book I'd first read from LibGen.
I pirate when I'm broke, or when living somewhere where certain books are hard to come by, as I did for a good 15-20 years of my life.
I have zero qualms about anything I've pirated. Not because of my prior "support" to authors, but because I'm aware most people in the world cannot afford to spend 65 dollars (plus postage) on a book.
Let me invert your claim on rights. What right do US lawyers have to deprive the majority of reading? Why should only the wealthy be able to access quality material on Linux? There is a particular irony in your gatekeeping of knowledge on an operating system which is designed to be free and accessible for all.
Imagine a world in which there was no Libgen, or Anna's Archive, or people sharing PDFs on forums. Would this be a better world? These things exist today, authors still get paid. In a world without, we'd have worse engineers, dumber people.
Frankly, I wish book piracy was much more mainstream. I'd much rather everyone was sat down of an evening with a copy of Linux Basics for Hackers, or The Leopard, or God-help-me, even Harry-chuffing-Potter, than doom-scrolling bile on their social media platform of choice.
Piracy is, all told, globally, a service to humanity, and we'd be better off with more of it.
As said, I believe you are simplifying the problem significantly and thus making general claims which do not hold water.
Eg. even if you are DNS based but have direct SSH access to the system which has a query cached and root access on it (you need to manage all this too!), you can temporarily edit /etc/hosts or /etc/resolv.conf to workaround the cached value.
So my suggestion remains to keep working on a better argument and scenario by trying to understand exactly where your intuition applies — but be critical to yourself too, and think through if your alternative has any other cons too.
By doing so, you will likely find why everybody defaults to DNS for a named service registry in a sense.
> There's not a chance that anyone has read the code in any significant portion
Sure, but that wasn't really the question, the question was why it's obvious no-one or no-thing have closely reviewed the code? Given they use LLMs to produce the code, wouldn't surprise me if they used LLMs to review it too, and I don't see it as unfeasible to be able to review a lot of code on a lot shorter timeframe.
It's not like they're doing something unique or novel, they even had an implementation in another language they knew did the right thing, so all the review would have to do, would be to make sure it's the same in the new language.
Don't get me wrong, again, probably there is plenty of mistakes in there, and might catch on fire when run in the wrong way, but I still don't think it's obvious how they've done things, unless you have insights into their process which seems clear to me now that you don't.
I have had an upgrade maxing out the memory of my works thinkpad. It was a number of years ago, 2020 or 2021. Might be less common these days for obvious technical reasons (solderd ram on many models) but if the hardware allows it why not?
Agreed on the guardrails bit. My point is that we still don't have much evidence that static types are the most effective way to constrain the search space for coding agents, or how much value they add on top of other mechanisms. Redundancy can be beneficial, but is it strictly necessary?
On expressiveness, people often frame it as a dynamic-language feature, but a large portion of type system research is precisely about making type systems more expressive so they can describe a wider range of programs and invariants. Expressiveness is clearly something both camps value. I suppose another interesting benchmark would be: how do coding agents perform across languages with different degrees of type-system expressiveness?
We may directionally agree but it is hard to draw conclusions without measurements.
It's not that I like or dislike SQL, it is just that it has such raw power and mature tooling/resources, I wonder what an alternative could even offer me.
It's like C. It does such a great job at being structured assembly that it is hard to displace it for similar reasons.
The other day I watched a YouTube video on a work machine with no history and got 2 AI generated video ads for scam products before the video played.
An AI generated man talking about his product building journey to make a pressure washer hose that didn't need power (in the AI video it didn't even have a water supply connected!) that was going to be banned in a week because it was too powerful so buy now.
I've seen AI slop before and scam ads before but the combination of the two gave me some real tingly spider-sense that things are going to get worse and that some unethical people will make a lot of money from it so be in no hurry to stop it.
But that toaster would just be a device to talk about consciousness in general.
In this case it does that and also it talks specifically of the LLM case, which can spark the discussion. Unless you believe to have the only valid and true opinion on the matter, and affirm that a normal toaster is just the same as an LLM in this topic.
cognitive: as in reasonable technical of, relating to, or involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, *understanding*, learning, and remembering)