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I wonder if you could throw a small microcontroller at the bottom of a canal, powered by water passing through a fan, to hide it. And why you would want to do that.
Water quality monitoring. Communicate back to the surface with ultrasonic pulses.
Website design comment: I love the orange/teal theme! Really drawn to the details such as illustrations carrying the orange/teal theme. Inspired me to re-color a project with this split complimentary color.
I'm looking at it from a crappy screen, though.
Website design comment: I love the orange/teal theme! Really drawn to the details such as illustrations carrying the orange/teal theme. Inspired me to re-color a project with this split complimentary color.
I personally hate the colors; I don't know if it was vibe coded, but it resembles the browns that GPT loves a lot. I'm looking at it from a crappy screen, though.
I would also say that productised general-purpose software was an undue bonanza taking unfair advantage of copyright, which shouldn't have allowed so many restrictions on code which is necessary to make devices perform their intended tasks.
Fortunately AI has been able to get started accomplishing some of the much-needed workarounds to these annoying copyright issues, like few humans have been able to do.
Regardless of whether programmers are scarce or abundant.
On a tangent, it sounds like a famous canal, but I would figure there are a number of little-known waterways where there might be a high-performance 21st century PC resting underwater along with some poor soul's bitcoin wallet :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water quality monitoring. Communicate back to the surface with ultrasonic pulses.
And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.
Your tool has to set up a pressure wave in the mud column that is detectable miles away from the tool while the well is being drilled.
This is a good recent paper authored by an experienced drilling engineer about MWD/LWD drilling history and pulser designs and data rates that can be expected.
https://www.aade.org/application/files/1917/4604/2319/AADE-2...
I read about them in Byte Magazine - the names were memorable - Objek - Numerik and a third chip - there were no silicon afaik but jsut emulator circuit boards run by a Sun workstation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv#Physical_packaging
I wonder if you could throw a small microcontroller at the bottom of a canal, powered by water passing through a fan, to hide it. And why you would want to do that.
canals have negligible water flow (except during disasters!) so I don't think that'd work very well. They also get dredged occasionally so there's a decent chance anything you leave down there won't last more than a couple of years
And it's fascinating to watch!
They got crushed by the commodity curve and Moore’s Law. But still a great story - and thankfully written by a real person.
The author’s idea that the commodity curve is over and that hardware is now cheap enough to make special purpose hardware viable is intriguing. Standardization used to be important because you needed to convince scarce programmers to invest in the platform, but AI has ended the scarcity of programmers so dedicated purpose hardware is more viable than ever.
>In my essay a distribution of one I argued that bespoke software was the original, correct arrangement, that fifty years of productised general-purpose software were a compromise forced by the economics of scarce programmers, and that AI has ended the compromise. I would also say that productised general-purpose software was an undue bonanza taking unfair advantage of copyright, which shouldn't have allowed so many…