Edward Wang

Family Guy Cutaway 2

Lois makes Peter do a menial task. Peter does it for a while but can’t make any progress. He looks up and says: “this is worse than trying to sleep with 2 blankets!” cutaway The camera is aimed downwards at peter in his bed at night. He has two blankets...

Against Atheism

A common idea nowadays is that Atheism is the most logical position. In face of scientific discoveries that have disproved practical details of most religions, it is weird and unnatural to believe in God. This position couldn’t be farther from the truth. Throughout all of history, humans have had a...

Memory and IQ

When solving problems, we’re often limited by how much information we can hold in our head at once. If the information was simpler, we’d be able to hold more of it. So you can increase your “functional IQ” by simplifying your representations of the world.

How to copy paste PCB layouts in KiCad

You can bring circuits into KiCad from other projects by copy pasting. But when you are “importing” from more than one project, the references (e.g. C12) will collide (e.g. both projects will define C12 but there can only be one). This can be resolved using the “Annotate Schematic” tool. But...

Against Agentic Coding, For Collaborative Coding

The Problem Agentic coding is bad for 3 reasons: You lose focus You lose understanding of the code The AI subtly introduces bugs and conceptual errors 1: Focus Letting the AI write the code for you (as opposed to typing it yourself) causes you to context switch out. So you...

Family Guy Cutaway 1

Peter and Brian are at the dinner table. Peter is eating while Brian is texting. Peter drops his chicken leg on the ground. He bends down to reach it while exclaiming “Five second rule!”. Brian responds: “Oh come on. You can’t possibly believe that the bacteria are waiting 5 seconds...

How to add a mounting hole to a footprint in KiCad

I ran into this problem recently and there isn’t a clean way to do it. The best solution in my experience is to define a pad using the “Add Pad” button. Then set: Pad type: “NPTH, Mechanical” (Non-Plated Through-Hole) Pad shape: Circular (Pad) Diameter: your target hole diameter (Hole) Diameter:...

Why Evolution is the Best Theory of Human Behaviour

I really like the theory of Evolution because of its simplicity. I think if there had to be a “theory of everything” for explaining human behaviour, Evolution would be the best fit. One strong piece of evidence is the existence of genetic algorithms. Nobody would ever write a “Historical Materialist...

A neovim config in 1 file

Previously, I used LunarVim a lot, but it had a big install process and I would always run into errors with different versions of neovim and plugin updates. I saw some starter templates for making your own config but they all had a bunch of files (usually 10+) and a...

Fossil Fuel is actually renewable energy

Fossil fuel is actually renewable energy because the production is pipelined. If it takes 1 million years from the time an animal dies at time N, then the fuel will “mature” at N+1e9 Animals have been continuously dying since the beginning of time, so we actually “produce” a stable amount...

Refute to the Unabomber Manifesto

One prominent idea in the Unabomber manifesto is that technology has created an absence of material need, and our lives have been replaced by a set of meaningless “surrogate activities”. We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set...

box

Latest: Jan 25: Mac CI It’s crazy how fast the M1 chips are. Github provides 3x M1 CPUs in CI (for free). It compiles the project in just 3 minutes (as opposed to the 4x CPU ubuntu machines taking >30 minutes). I don’t wanna spend crazy time on this because...

Juno 106 Clone

Ever since I heard the tame impala live album, I wanted the Juno 106. The only thing was, it was insanely expensive, and I knew my parents would never let me get it, so I decided to make my own. Original Synth To start off, I chose the teensy 4.1...