No matter how inevitable the AI-takes-all scenario may sound, as long as there is a person in the world who still wants to own their means of computation, we will be here to build the hardware that enables it.
"Last year, when I saw that Windows NT had been ported to the Wii, I felt a renewed sense of motivation. Even if my lack of low-level experience resulted in failure, attempting this project would still be an opportunity to learn something new."
The Saturnix camera is designed to evoke the industrial aesthetic of 1980s science fiction, featuring a chunky body that feels more at home on a spaceship than in a pocket. The design is intentional, aiming to create a functional tool that stands apart from the sleek, uniform consumer electronics of today.
RAM prices are skyrocketing, driving up the cost of products that rely heavily on memory. The price of Raspberry Pi boards has now soared to the point where two 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 boards will cost you as much as a new laptop.
The new Arduino Ventuno Q is a very different beast. For one, it's powered by the Dragonwing IQ-8275 chipset. This contains an 8-core Kryo CPU (2x Gold Prime at 2.35GHz + 2x Gold at 2.1GHz + 4x Silver at 1.95GHz) and an Adreno 623. The Ventuno Q offers up to 16GB of RAM and up to 64GB of eMMC storage plus an M.2 NVMe Gen 4 connector for SSDs.
When we decided to build our tiny home in late 2024, we had no building experience whatsoever. Simone had never even painted a wall before. Thankfully, ChatGPT had arrived at the perfect time. We spent our evenings asking it about almost everything. While AI was genuinely helpful during the building process, we quickly learned we couldn't rely on it alone.
The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.
Free open source software is fundamentally broken. In 2023, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the widely used core-js library, vented his frustration with the fact that users of his software seldom offer financial support, highlighting the disconnect between widespread dependency on open source and inadequate financial compensation for developers maintaining critical infrastructure.
Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.
AI coding tools have caused as many problems as they have solved, according to industry experts. The easy-to-use and accessible nature of AI coding tools has enabled a flood of bad code that threatens to overwhelm projects. Building new features is easier than ever, but maintaining them is just as hard and threatens to further fragment software ecosystems. The result is a more complicated story than simple software abundance.
Steve Syfuhs, a Principal Engineering Manager at the Windows behemoth, managed to release the magic smoke from a Raspberry Pi 5 in five minutes, he says. Outside his day job dealing with authentication, Syfuhs is not averse to a bit of tinkering. He's not alone. Microsoft has more than its fair share of curious people, keen to poke hardware to see what it does.