I recently built something[1] similar, though with far less effort and sophistication than the author. The goal was to have a plug-and-play audiobook player for an elderly family member with impaired vision. In retrospect, it would have been better to adapt an old phone or tablet with a macropad rather than build this on top of an espmuse speaker[2].
I keep thinking that a cassette player would be the ideal interface for something like this. The controls are as obvious and as tactile as it gets and the whole analog-mechanical experience is familiar to folks from that generation. If only tapes could hold more than two hours of audio ...
So much for "but deepseek doesn't do multi-modal..." as a defence of the alleged moats of western AI companies.
How ever many modalities do end up being incorporated however, does not change the horizon of this technology which has progressed only by increasing data volume and variety -- widening the solution class (per problem), rather than the problem class itself.
There is still no mechanism in GenAI that enforces deductive constraints (and compositionality), ie., situations where when one output (, input) is obtained the search space for future outputs is necessarily constrained (and where such constraints compose). Yet all the sales pitches about the future of AI require not merely encoding reliable logical relationships of this kind, but causal and intentional ones: ones where hypothetical necessary relationships can be imposed and then suspended; ones where such hypotheticals are given a ordering based on preference/desires; ones where the actions available to the machine, in conjunction with the state of its environment, lead to such hypothetical evaluations.
An "AI Agent" replacing an employee requires intentional behaviour: the AI must act according to business goals, act reliably using causal knowledge of the environment, reason deductively over such knowledge, and formulate provisional beliefs probabilistically. However there has been no progress on these fronts.
I am still unclear on what the sales pitch is supposed to be for stochastic AI, as far as big business goes or the kinds of mass investment we see. I buy a 70s-style pitch for the word processor ("edit without scissors and glue"), but not a 60s-style pitch for the elimination of any particular job.
The spend on the field at the moment seems predicated on "better generated images" and "better generated text" somehow leading to "an agent which reasons from goals to actions, simulates hypothetical consequences, acts according to causal and environmental constraints.. " and so on. With relatively weak assumptions one can show the latter class of problem is not in the former, and no amount of data solving the former counts as a solution to the latter.
The vast majority of our work is already automated to the point where most non-manual workers are paid for the formulation of problems (with people), social alignment in their solutions, ownership of decision-making / risk, action under risk, and so on.
You might find this course helpful then. There is a huge amount of information you need to consume to make an IC so having it all organized for you is pretty valuable. It will save you many, many, hours. :)
I'm not in the field, but I highly recommend Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic. Not a textbook, but an excellent one (and I've had people in the field speak highly of it to me).
My go to reference when I want to reduce rust binary size is the excellent https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust, a set of guidelines on how to reduce size with explanations of the consequences
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
Racing through his mega tutorial was a great refresher for me on the fundamentals, and it's easy to plug in computer vision & related libraries/extensions/packages.
You don't need a computer, or even electricity. Thermostatic shower valves are 100% mechanical, and work beautifully. There are models available that will automatically compensate for both temperature and pressure changes, keeping the output temperature constant.
>Regarding manufacturing and machines/machining, any book or resources that stood out? I'm most familiar with the Machinery's Handbook.
I went to a top tier school for MechE and Materials, and would recommend two intro books: Engineering Mechanics Statics by Meriam and Kriage and Shigley's Mechanical engineering Design in that order . If you fully understand the contents of these book, it probably puts you in the top 10% of mechanical engineering graduates.
For a broader education, you can read Fundamentals of Heat and Mass transfer by Incropera, DeWitt, Bergmann & Lavine as well as Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics by Munson, Young & Okiishi.
Understanding these two books will probably as well will probably put you in the top 1% of grads.
If you have a strong background in mathematics, these mostly deal with applications of linear algebra and differentials, so the value is understanding the applications.
From there, you can branch out. If applicable, Ogata's Modern Control Engineering and Tongu's Principles of vibration
Most undergraduates dont really understand these due to the heavy application of Laplace and Fourier transforms, but are relevant if you want to build complex machines.
CO2 sensors for every room in my apartment. Before monitoring the CO2 levels I did not realize the relation of tiredness, mental fatigue and high CO2 levels.
Cost about 30€ instead of previously used 3€ cotton T-shirts.
Can wear one for about 3 weeks without washing, with no body odor. Much more pleasant to the skin, even for doing sports, driving, etc. Also, warm in winter, airy in summer. Plan to switch most clothing to merino wool.
We set up a motorized curtain in our bedroom. It's been really nice to black everything out at night while sleeping (some of our neighbors leave outdoor lights on) but in the morning, wake up with natural light
If you need something portable while walking around the house, I recently bought this rechargeable heated vest for my wife https://fieldsheer.com/products/summit-vest-women-s# who hates the cold. She LOVES this vest, wears it every evening. This was possibly my most successful gift in our 12 year marriage.
And I don't mean to keep promoting this brand but I've got their heated ski gloves too and they're amazing. I was night skiing and saw that one of the ski patrol ladies had a lit LED on her gloves. I asked her what that was and he told me it was this: https://fieldsheer.com/collections/womens/products/storm-glo... (wait, I wear women's gloves?) They're fantastic, I wore them skiing in 10ºF Vermont weather from 9am to 3pm on low heat. The batteries died around 3ish but I had hand warmers after that.
intro: freedman, Pisani, purves. Very clear and accessible.
Intermediate/advanced: casella and Berger
Advanced: Bickel and doksum
Overview of ML and modern stat methods: efron and hastie
You are spoiled for good choices frankly.
What’s the best textbook you have read about X? In general the answer is “the third one.” By that time things sink in and the third book seems super clear and understandable.
I wonder what the battery life. ESP32 tend to be very power hungry with WiFi, not sure about pure BLE operation. This is why simple long-lasting (eg Withings, misfit) watches use nrf52 chips.
Currently using Time4VPS with no issues so far: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link, personally i find it to be an affordable VPS host that i've used for years and host most of my stuff on).
I think the actual question would be: "Which VPS hosts have the least blacklisted IP addresses for hosting mail servers?" But i'm afraid that i cannot answer that one, because after a brief search i could not find any articles, which would check the IP blocks owned by different hosts and what percentage of them are in blacklists, which would probably be a large undertaking.
Until then, most of the answers will probably be subjective, along the lines of: "I use $HOST without many problems." (like my answer above, though even then someone could get a blacklisted IP address and their answer would be the exact opposite to mine).
I'm currently an undergraduate math student, and had similar frustration, but I reached a different solution. I built a cheap chalkboard in my room (hardboard panel that I painted with chalkboard paint – $15 total since I used a trash-picked board). For scanning, I mounted a Raspberry Pi with a camera, and did some basic OpenCV image processing to extract the image. All told, it took a weekend to build and set up, and I have used it every day since.
This same setup could easily be mounted at a different angle for scanning papers laid flat on a desk, and would work with nearly no modification.
The image processing pipeline for me was:
- Gaussian blur
- Brightness/color thresholding
- Finding and simplifying the contours
- Computing the convex hull for each contour (in case the board is partially occluded)
- Using a heuristic to pick the contour most likely to be the chalkboard
- Extracting corners from the contour and doing a "getPerspectiveTransform" followed by "warpPerspective"
- Sharpen the image (subtract Gaussian blurred version)
- Return the image via Flask server so I can pull scans onto my phone or computer over LAN
The same pipeline is reused for a live feed (MJPEG) that I can split-screen with my webcam (via OBS) for collaboratively working on homework problems via video call. The live stream is accessed via a different Flask route that calls many of the same helper functions.
The code is not yet publicly released, but was very straightforward to write; each of the steps mentioned above is pretty much one OpenCV function call. Here is a sample scan and a demo video:
For someone looking to get started, with the knowledge I've gained over the past year, I'd recommend starting with a Kratky grow [0]. It's extremely simple and extremely inexpensive (you basically just start some seedlings in rockwool [1], then when seedlings are an inch or two tall, transplant them into a container with nutrient solution in it. A lot of videos and online articles are very finicky, but from trial and error, the only things I've discovered that really matter are A) the pH of your water (pH impacts plants ability to absorb nutrients [2], anywhere in the range of 5.0 to 6.5 has been fine for me), and B) the amount of light your plants get (suspend your light(s) so you can always keep it a few inches above your plants).
To do any kind of hydroponics grow, you'll need (and you can pick up most of this locally (for far less than on Amazon) at a garden center or hydroponics store if available):
- a way to measure pH (you can get strips for next to nothing, or an electric meter (~$15 for a cheapo one, maybe $40 for a reliable one))
- a way to adjust the pH [3]
- nutrients (I have just used FloraDuo 5-0-6 [4] without issue, 2ml per liter of water has been perfect)
- a way to start your seedlings (I've used rockwool [5] in a clear rubbermaid bin)
- lights (doesn't have to be fancy [6])
- containers for nutrient solution (could be a bucket from home depot with a hole drilled in the top for net cups [7])
- seeds (any home improvement store with a garden center will have a stand with all kinds of seeds to pick from)
Things that make it much nicer (but are unnecessary if you don't know if you want to stick with this hobby):
- Timers for your lights [8]
- Basically everything in this kit [9] except for the netting, grow bags, and "odor control filters" (unless you want to grow that specific plant with the very particular and easily identifiable odor, and you don't want the odor).
Regarding my own build, the setup I built was needlessly complicated, as I'm an engineer and I tried to automate as much as possible. I made a germination station (with a heating pad and tray [10] with a temperature controller [11]) for seedlings, and I picked an aeroponics setup (aeroponics is a form of hydroponic growing where plant's roots dangle above the nutrient solution and are intermittently sprayed or trickled on; this is approximately the build [12]), and if I hadn't been in my house all the time, I probably would have abandoned it in June (but I'm really glad I didn't, it's been a lot of fun). After I got everything built, it's been maybe 40 minutes of work a week (mostly checking the nutrient levels, mixing up nutrient solution, and harvesting plants). Maybe someday I'll make an even more automated system like this [13] where I don't even have to think about pH level and nutrient solution is automatically mixed and added.
Yes but not much, I earned $5k+ over the course of two and half years.
1. Yes, I am selling ebooks related to iOS development
2. I sell on Gumroad
3. You might have heard this before, but I will repeat it again, build trust with your audience first before selling them stuff, so they know you are actually skilled in your trade and your product is actually worth the money.
eg: if your product is for python dev, then your audience is python dev.
To build trust, help people in public, like answering question in reddit (eg: r/python), stackoverflow, write technical blog post that answers common questions etc, I have been doing this for 2.5 years. Then put a newsletter sign up box below each blog post, this way you can reach your audience who is interested on your content directly, very useful when you want to launch product to them, make sure you use it to regularly send useful information to them too, not just use it to launch product.
My iOS blog : https://fluffy.es , I have stopped writing on the blog as I no longer work as iOS dev now, but I still get a few sales each month.
I keep thinking that a cassette player would be the ideal interface for something like this. The controls are as obvious and as tactile as it gets and the whole analog-mechanical experience is familiar to folks from that generation. If only tapes could hold more than two hours of audio ...
[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/1269288-audiobook-player
[2]: https://raspiaudio.com/product/esp-muse-luxe/