show me your home lab! “What’s your choice for a single best aid to an interesting and productive circuit design career? A PhD? An IQ of 250? A CAD workstation? Getting a paper into the Solid State Circuit Conference? Befriending the boss? I suppose all of these are of some value, but none even comes close to something else. In fact, their combined benefit isn’t even worth a fraction of something else. This something else even has potential economic rewards. What is this wondrous thing that outshines all the other candidates? It is, simply, a laboratory in your home. The enormous productivity advantage provided by a home lab is unmatched by anything I am familiar with. As for economic benefits, no stock tip, no real estate deal, no raise, no nothing can match the long-term investment yield a home lab can produce. The laboratory is, after all, an investment in yourself. It is an almost unfair advantage. The magic of a home lab is that it effectively creates time. Over the last 20 years I estimate that about 90% of my work output has occurred in a home lab. The ability to grab a few hours here and there combined with occasional marathon 5-20 hours sessions produces a huge accumulated time benefit. Perhaps more importantly, the time generated is highly leveraged. An hour in the lab at home is worth a day at work. A lot of work time is spent on unplanned and parasitic activities. Phone calls, interruptions, meetings, and just plain gossiping eat up obscene amounts of time. While these events may ultimately contribute towards good circuits, they do so in a very oblique way. Worse yet, they rob psychological momentum, breaking up design time into chunks instead of allowing continuous periods of concentration. When I’m at work I do my job. When I’m at home in the lab is where the boss and stockholders get what they paid for. It sounds absurd, but I have sat in meetings praying for 6 o’clock to come so I can go home and get to work. The uninterrupted time in a home lab permits persistence, one of the most powerful tools a designer has. I favor long, uninterrupted lab sessions of at least 5 to 10 hours, but family time won’t always allow for this. However, I can almost always get in two to four hours per day. Few things can match the convenience and efficiency of getting an idea while washing the dishes or putting my son to sleep and being able to breadboard it now. The easy and instant availability of lab time makes even small amounts of time practical. Because no one else uses your lab, everything is undisturbed and just as you left it after the last session. Nothing is missing or broken, and all test equipment is familiar. You can get right to work.” - Jim Williams “The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design”

being your own energy producer is one of the best feelings one can have.

guess my age

It has officially been one year since I started my hardware arc! One day I woke up and decided to commit to a new path and change my identity. I didn't know anything about electronics and in many ways still don't. I've learned everything by throwing myself into projects and figuring it out as I go. This journey has taken me on so many tangents I can't even keep track of them all. While there is always more to be desired I am really happy with where I am at and hope to turn things up from here! Thank you all for your constant support throughout this as I definitely wouldn't be here without you. I can't wait to see where the next year takes me and the projects I will get in to! If you want to get into hardware, just do it, there is never a perfect time, it will always be confusing and frustrating, but just keep pushing and you will be glad you did!

would much prefer a female soldering instructor… who is naked. who chose this guy?

she’s an unusually influential person at anthropic while being essentially absent from their org chart. she connected dario to eric schmidt and other investors who helped with anthropic’s early funding.

love this. sam and dario can go fuck themselves. for as much as i hate facebook and insta, zuck is based in this regard.

x is awesome

imagine spending $80,000 going to uni to study compsci and you show up to your first full time job and they give you one of these

@grok read all the replies in this post and tally up all the age guesses. make a bar chart showing number of guesses on y axis and age on x axis.

$10 dollar bet no one uses it except people who don't actually design things for a living.

okay i'm 39 you can stop guessing haha

show this vid to ur girl if you tryna get freaky tonight

been having fun making these short EM field animation videos. still kinda sloppa but i can see this making high quality educational content in the not so distant future.

I honestly don’t care at all that I spend 30 years of my life learning syntax and now that knowledge is essentially useless. Frankly, I’m relieved that I don’t need to care about it anymore. That stuff never really mattered anyways. Code was always just a means to an end. All I care about is building products that users love. Now I can do that faster. That means I can have bigger impact. If anything, software engineers should all be celebrating. I don’t understand why you’d “mourn” not needing to write code. The code was never the point.

one of my favorite quotes of all time: "simple can be harder than complex. you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." - steve jerbs so many ppl keep things messy and complex when it doesn't have to be that way, just to endlessly trip over themselves.

i owe almost all success i've had in my life to one video game: Ultima Online (1998 era). UO existed at a unique time period in gaming where games were made by nerds, not MBA types. there were no instructions, no youtube, no influencers, no guides. it was difficult to advance and it was unforgiving. a misstep could set you back days, weeks, or months worth of effort. there was no pay to win. the dopamine hits were more consistent with reality. it taught me about human psychology, markets, fiat, inflation, economics, strategy, exploitation, entrepreneurship, efficiency, programming, how to communicate/type fast, how to use things in ways they weren't intended to be used to gain an edge... the list goes on. it makes me sad that this style of game is mostly lost for kids today.