I’ve tried 2 AI tools recently. Neither could produce the correct code to calculate the CPU temperature on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. The code worked, looked ok and even produced reasonable looking results - until I put a finger on the chip and thus raised the temp. The calculated temperature went down.
As an aside the free version of chatGPT didn’t know about anything newer than 2023 so couldn’t tell me about the RP2350
Readit Newsmarkb139 commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete
Scarily close to satire of humans in denial about AI capabilities (not saying that it's the case here but I can imagine easily such arguments when AI is almost everywhere superhuman)
I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the values.
Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350.
If it doesn’t know that, then what else doesn’t it know?
markb139 commented on A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science initcoder.com/posts/37-ye... · Posted by u/chbkall
37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60.
My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really badly at school.
I just learnt at my own pace and eventually worked as an electronics engineer in the broadcast industry. Then quit that and moved into sw dev.
One piece of advice is to just build stuff, fail and learn.
Good luck
markb139 commented on The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million calvin.sh/blog/fed-lie/... · Posted by u/c249709
I'd say a small (single digit) percentage of people are able to accumulate $1.5 million over "a few" (2-3) years of working, but maybe I'm out of touch.
It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years.
I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020.
I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.
markb139 commented on How I program with agents crawshaw.io/blog/programm... · Posted by u/bumbledraven
Nobody is saying that you don't have to read and check the code. Especially for things like numerical constants. Those are very frequently hallucinated (unless it's something super common like pi).
I’ve now retired from professional programming and I’m now in hobby mode. I learn nothing from reading AI generated code. I might as well read the stack overflow questions myself and learn.
markb139 commented on How I program with agents crawshaw.io/blog/programm... · Posted by u/bumbledraven
Did you review the code itself, or test the code beyond just putting your finger on the chip? Is it possible that your finger was actually cooler than the chip and acted as a heat sink upon contact?
The code looked fine. And I don’t think my finger is colder than the chip - I’m not the iceman.
The error is the analog value read by the ADC gets lower as the temperature rises.
markb139 commented on How I program with agents crawshaw.io/blog/programm... · Posted by u/bumbledraven
I tried code gen for the first time recently. The generated code look great, was commented and ran perfectly. The results were completely wrong.
The code was to calculate the cpu temperature from the Raspberry Pi RP2350 in python.
The initial value look about right, then I put my finger on the chip and the temp went down!
I assume the model had been trained on broken code. This lead me to think how do they validate code does what it says
markb139 commented on Coordinating the Superbowl's visual fidelity with Elixir elixir-lang.org/blog/2025... · Posted by u/lawik
30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)
markb139 commented on SpinLaunch: Giant catapult launching satellites thebrighterside.news/spac... · Posted by u/DocFeind
With enough force applied, the Earth will no longer be there when it comes back to that point.
Unless it reaches escape velocity (ie its never coming back) then it will always comeback to where it started from. The object is under the same gravitaional influences as the Earth
As others have pointed out, there is a rocket motor to put the payload into an orbit.