This is the type of thing I want AI to solve for me. I give an English description, I get some Penrose output, I tweak it till I get what I want. Learning curve seems too stiff for something I wouldn’t use too often.

> Thermodynamic hardware many orders of magnitude faster and more energy efficient than CPUs/GPUs.

I’m sorry, but is this thermodynamic hardware real? Are there any benchmarks? Those claims are pretty strong.

"Yes", but only extremely simple demo circuits.

Basically, they are hedging a bet on the following: When you perform a calculation, the electricity that went into the circuit only exits as the answer, anything else that didn't become the answer turns into waste heat and electromagnetic fields.... what if you reversed the calculation, and the only waste produced is transmission of the answer?

If you know anything about EE, you'd know that what I said is an extremely simple view of how modern ALUs are made, and ignores the past 40+ years of optimizations; however, they believe by "undoing" the optimization and "redoing" it as an entirely reversible operation not only will work, but will the final optimization we can make.

There will be no benchmarks of the kind you want, because that isn't the issue: I can take any CPU off the shelf today, and run it 10 times faster: it will melt because of self-generated heat, but for a glorious microsecond, it will be the fastest CPU on earth.

They are stating that they have potentially fixed one of the largest generators of waste heat, which would allow us, using all of our existing technology, to start ramping up our clockspeeds, and our true final frontier will be trace lengths at macroscale (which is already a problem at the clockspeeds we use for DDR5 and PCI-E 6).

However, given how Extropic's website says none of what I just said, they're probably just some startup trying to ride the AI wave, and then close shop in a few years. I doubt they've magically figured out one of the hardest problems in EE atm. They are also not the only company in this space, and every single major semiconductor company in the world is trying to solve it.

from my understanding, this will only be able to accelerate EBM (energy-based models) which they could scale up in simulation to show that they would be useful

EBMs as of now are not really that useful at all.

Well you've got Beff Jezos. This is as real as it gets.

The "Glass frame & color" section brings Firefox to a crawl on my desktop. Chrome seems to handle it better.

firefox on android doesn't complain

My biggest gripe with my Firefly workflow is how difficult it is to automatically handle Amazon orders. I’ve setup rules to automatically organize/label the various types of transactions that I export from banks to CSVs, but having to break down Amazon orders is a tedious nightmare. If anyone has any ideas for how to automate this, please share. One idea is to have Puppeteer just open the order page and get the invoice, but that doesn’t seem to secure to me, even if it’s on machine.

For Amazon orders in GnuCash, I've been idly thinking about making a browser plugin that scrapes the Amazon order page, since that's less likely to be cut off than a standalone scraper is.

How I'm currently manually doing Amazon orders in GnuCash is I go to the register for account "Liabilities > Credit Cards > Chase-CC-1234", and add a transation with description, say, "2024-02-16 Amazon order 113-1234567890-987654 (bobs red mill, soy curls, yaktrax)", with a split for each item and for each payment method used (credit card, CC rewards, gift balance).

I keep the order date in the transaction description so that the GnuCash date can be the date that the CC is charged. If Amazon splits the shipment and does multiple CC charges (potentially on very different dates), so that GnuCash reflects those dates, I'm currently duplicating the transaction in GnuCash, and then editing the splits in the original and the duplicate to match the CC charges and what they're for. And each transaction description gets a "#1", "#2", etc. added after the Amazon order number.

One upside of the manual process is that the work is negative feedback for spending money. :)

For Amazon I sometimes have items grouped differently in the order overview on Amazon itself then in the credit card charge. That makes it quite tedious to actually find out what charge goes where.

Amazon's transaction engine is bananas. I've seen it split an order for multiple items across two unequal card transactions. Try reconciling that without parsing every single invoice page.

Amazon has a data export here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html

It’s fairly detailed. One issue is that matching refunds to line items can be ambiguous.

I have a side project that does a best effort match, when I get around to completing it I’ll publish it. If you build it before me please share :)

This is the type of thing I want to use AI for. Beautiful tool, but this looks daunting.

I've used ChatGPT to generate chart wireframes in Mermaid. Basically 'create a mermaid chart for the whole year'.

Not exactly the same as data viz, but it worked for my use case, and cut out a heap of stuffing around and googling.

It would be interesting to see someone like Wes Bos build an LLM from end to his graph packages.

Yeap there is ChatGPT for this.

Yeah, definitely a fair critique. Actually, we have been researching the usage of LLMs to generate Penrose diagrams! We presented a poster on this at SPLASH 2023 in October: https://2023.splashcon.org/details/splash-2023-Posters/14/Ge... I'm not sure if Rijul updated his poster before the conference, but here's a photo of it from a different poster session in August (hopefully this Discord media link works): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1136758988751503381/1...

These days I just use ChatGPT for my LaTeX documents. Works great.

I unzipped the latest release and ran the executable and it was immediately flagged as a Trojan by Windows Defender and removed from the folder.

That makes sense, its purpose is to alter the behavior of other programs.

No std::format? Or am I just not searching for the right thing?

No clue what it will appear as once it is there, but I'm not seeing it listed as Apple supported in the cppreference table either. It is listed as "Text Formatting" there.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support

I tried rolling my own system using Markdown, where I create a note every day with the following headings:

  - Tasks/Agenda
  - Meetings
  - Work Sessions

I used plain Markdown files, one for each day, but later discovered NotePlan[1] and it seemed to be the perfect organization tool for my system.

[1]: https://noteplan.co/

Noteplan looks nice but kind of crappy that they don't allow you to try before you buy.

Is there anything similar for Unreal Engine?

If you haven't already, check out the Unreal Engine Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/UnrealEngine/videos.

While it's only available for iOS/iPadOS/macOS, I can't recommend Debit and Credit enough: https://debitandcredit.app/

It's a very straightforward application for logging, categorizing your transactions. The UI is clean and simple, the features like Budgets/Plans/Scheduled Transactions are great, the visualization features are meh, but I don't use them that much. Another great thing is how easy it is to reach out to the developer. I've personally asked for a feature through Twitter and had that patched in within a week.