With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)

“Some exhibited “haunted” behavior, seemingly jumping to random sections of the mcu program code, outputting messages on the display that made no sense given the context. One of them appeared to work in slow motion, with LED blinking and display updates noticeably more sluggish than normal,”

my first thought was that it smelled like a clock issue.

Some of the nastier issues I have had the pleasure to debug included (a) traces that had microcracks which affected analog readings when the PCB heated up after prolonged usage (QC issue from the PCB fab) and (b) a (suspected) ESD strike that gradually took out several components in the weeks following as I was investigating the device while new problems kept popping up. Marginally stable composite amplifiers have also caused some headaches over the years.

Hardware really is hard.

Of course, for readers here with a solid grasp on how LLM's operate it's not exactly surprising. Still, I feel this is exactly the kind of thing that drives home that the way we reason about (general) intelligence does not map cleanly to LLM operation, no matter how advanced the current models are.

With the ‘dangers’ touted by these insiders, it’s all “trust me bro”, hyperbole, and very little hard evidence. As such, a skeptical mind would question their motives.

The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people driving a Volvo won’t experience a breakdown (and then generalize from that). Another one is of a very different kind known as post-purchase cognitive dissonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Consumer_...).