Hacker News: awjlogan

New comment by awjlogan in "Mark's Magic Multiply"

awjlogan — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:27:18 +0000

Link to Mark Owen’s excellent QFP library for soft float on Cortex-M0+ (ARMv6-M) and Cortex-M3/M4 (ARMv7-M).

https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib.html

Nice write up here, too, I like the idea of a firm float.

New comment by awjlogan in "BIO: The Bao I/O Coprocessor"

awjlogan — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:23:37 +0000

My feeling about programmable IOs is they’re fun, but not the right choice for commodity high speed interfaces like USB. You obviously can make them work, but they’re large compared to what you would need for a dedicated unit. The DVI over PIO is a good example: showed something interesting (and that’s great!) but not widely useful. Also, a lot of protocols, even slow ones, have failure and edge cases that would need to be covered. Not to mention the physical characteristics, like you’ve said for high speed USB.

New comment by awjlogan in "Maybe there's a pattern here?"

awjlogan — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:35:58 +0000

One person in the Lords raising the issue in no way constitutes widespread calls for conscription.

New comment by awjlogan in "Maybe there's a pattern here?"

awjlogan — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:09:10 +0000

I haven’t heard a peep about conscription, can you provide a source? There was some vague national service proposal for school leavers a couple of years ago, but that was it.

New comment by awjlogan in "Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'"

awjlogan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:11:18 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

New comment by awjlogan in "Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions"

awjlogan — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:03:20 +0000

Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while they're up.

New comment by awjlogan in "Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox"

awjlogan — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:54:07 +0000

https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac

Mac on the RP2040.

New comment by awjlogan in "U.S. Emissions Jumped in 2025 as Coal Power Rebounded"

awjlogan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:12:28 +0000

Hah, also fair point - there are plenty of people who would say this completely earnestly! :)

New comment by awjlogan in "U.S. Emissions Jumped in 2025 as Coal Power Rebounded"

awjlogan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:23:29 +0000

I read this with a large /s on the end...

New comment by awjlogan in "Where do the children play?"

awjlogan — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:04:38 +0000

Maximum power output and maximum (assisted) speed are generally legislated. In the UK, an e-bike is up to 250 W and 25 kph. More than that, it would classify as a motorbike and you'd need a license (not particularly onerous). The bike itself is often built differently to accommodate the different power profile.

As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.

New comment by awjlogan in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left"

awjlogan — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:20:02 +0000

Why not? It's a factual report stating that the AAIB has opened an investigation into a potentially dangerous incident. There's not any editorial bias evident. See other extensive comments as to why this is not just a case of "it landed, so what's the problem?".

New comment by awjlogan in "Show HN: Coding Agents swarming your codebase"

awjlogan — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:22:14 +0000

Based on the title, I was hoping this would be a new subclass of tower defence. Vibe coded, naturlich.

New comment by awjlogan in "Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?"

awjlogan — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 07:45:30 +0000

I chuckled seeing it in the first presentation of the conference. By the end of the conference, it was numbingly banal.

New comment by awjlogan in "The HackberryPi CM5 handheld computer"

awjlogan — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:21:29 +0000

The Raspberry Pi SoCs optimised for cost rather than power consumption (or maximum performance). This is an engineering trade off, not a criticism. More power partitioning requires more area, more complexity in design and verification, and more expensive external components to support the internal voltage domains.

Another comment mentions the RP2xxx microcontrollers. If you look at those, they are optimised for compute power and data throughput rather than low power operation. I think it's a reasonable choice - the Pico boards are pretty sturdy and the original target is people running MicroPython, Arduino, etc rather than looking for µA standby currents.

New comment by awjlogan in "TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning"

awjlogan — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:43:36 +0000

It seems that the very long videos are a reaction against the very short clips. Usually the topics and density of information are not enough to consistently fill that amount of time, whereas it would be perfect in 10-30 mins. 60 secs: too short to convey much, 60 mins too long to convey too little.

New comment by awjlogan in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

awjlogan — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 07:32:38 +0000

This is a pretty standard document length. Modern microcontrollers have similar lengths (e.g. ATSAMD51 is ~2000 pages). Some of it is not software related, things like pin outs and electrical and mechanical descriptions.

It does take a huge amount of work to write and maintain. Typically the authors are not technical, so it also relies on the designers being available to answer questions as well. Then there’s a choice of how it’s written: narrative and potentially imprecise but readable, or terse and precise but hard to read. There’s both styles in the same document, terse for register descriptions.

New comment by awjlogan in "As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer"

awjlogan — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:22:25 +0000

The two big differences are 1) the rate of change (a huge amount higher than most planetary systems) and 2) that we have a large and growing population dependent on the many services our planet provides at a stable temperature. Of course, completely neglecting the rest of the natural world.

New comment by awjlogan in "Funding Open Source like public infrastructure"

awjlogan — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:15:25 +0000

Much of the actual day to day work is. Typically graduate students, so they’ll be 22-26. That’s not a critique of their intelligence or potential. Students get progressively more experienced of course, but professors aren’t writing code most of the time.

A problem with academia in general is the lack of staff positions. Post docs finish their time then it’s either leave academia or become a professor. There’s few positions for those who want to just do research as a career, rather than pushing for a professorship. This means there isn’t a stable and experienced core of people.

New comment by awjlogan in "When we get Komooted"

awjlogan — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:51:54 +0000

Do users share some “responsibility” (for want of a better word) as well? If people were happy to share their experiences to personal, or at least smaller, groups rather than with some implicit desire to be widely acknowledged then a portion are of the use of these platforms would not exist. Keep a blog of your routes, shared with your friends - others can stumble upon it (obviously less easily these days) - or even go with your friends and don’t bother sharing it to the rest of the world. Your activity might not be the best by some metric, but who really cares? Some of my favourite trips have been those that have gone completely wrong, as compared to the original plan, and enjoying that with the people who care about you is far better in the long run.

New comment by awjlogan in "Solar-plus-storage technology is improving quickly"

awjlogan — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:34:06 +0000

Because conversion to chemical storage and then back is very inefficient. Also ammonia, specifically, is highly toxic and nasty to handle.