Pinned Tweet
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”
this was a great watch, so good
My talk from Code with Claude is up on YouTube now! Really enjoyed this one!
youtu.be/tuY2ChJIx48?si=RL1N…
have a stats page for the pcb atlas: zackslab.com/atlas/stats
kinda interesting.
US still winning. USA USA USA
pcb atlas is now up to 646 vendors across 1384 sites, i've added all your suggestions from the original poast.
there's now a "suggest a vendor" button on the page.
improved the UI/filters and animated globe.
enjoy :)
made a tool for searching for PCB assy/fabs throughout the world: zackslab.com/atlas
if you're favorite pcb house isn't on here lmk :)
made a tool for searching for PCB assy/fabs throughout the world: zackslab.com/atlas
if you're favorite pcb house isn't on here lmk :)
the trap of AI is that it allows you to finish many things that should never have been started in the first place.
PSA: if you own a smart TV, disable selling/sharing of your personal data... for some ungodly reason this is on by default.
then, ask an LLM what domains to block to prevent telemetry/ads for your particular model... for example, for my samsung TVs:
there is no such thing as a platonically ideal hardware design divorced from physical reality. the two are fundamentally inseparable. you're misunderstanding hardware design if you think this is the case.
i had claude create a remote repo for me on github and it choose "master" over "main" on its own accord.
the AI is establishing dominance.
such a crazy world we live in now.
this thing is maybe $10 worth of hardware in volume, but i've paid ~$2,000 for the entire suite.
now, for 1/10th of a claude code max sub, i can make more featured/performant software than they could ever fathom providing to their customers.
who remembers this retard?
idk who is more retarded, trevor, or people who listened to him speak and still invested in his company?
such a shame he got pardoned. absolutely insulting.
just out of curiosity, asked claude to see if it can find my wifi meat thermo on my network, probe its API, and add it to my dashboard.
before i had the meat on it already worked out a functioning dashboard for me with alerts...
this still amazes me but this is the norm
i love how this is @BBC_TopGear's response about single charge 0-60 in 800ms ...before they even learned it can fucking fly an do kickflips.
