I have tested it out with CAD and PCB circuits and it is a huge jump compared to Sol. I agree though when trying it with programming I don't notice a huge jump.
Using KiCad by uploading their _sch and _pcb files. Originally with Sol, I stuck to using it for finding parts and double checking my KiCad schematic. Definitely good at finding parts quickly from JLCPCB's stock and for quick cosmetic edits of the schematic. I found its PCB editing abilities pretty bad, though it was useful for cosmetic edits (quickly relabeling silkscreen labels) and for creating a nice custom DRU file. With Astra on the other hand it can actually make good PCB edits. Still not great but usable and editing it quicker than starting from scratch. I do doubt you can go 0-100 with just Astra but definitely sped up my work. For reference my circuits are high amperage, noise sensitive, and interface with sensors. They are pretty simple circuits though, just fairly simple ICs with no MCU or anything like that.
Anecdotally (I did try it myself, but wasn’t blown away) many seem to like it for 3D modelling. That was emphasized in the promo too. I think this kind of ”general intelligence” is what is meant to set it apart from 5.6.
Yeah my scenario was we had old paper drawings without actual CAD models. Fed those into Astra and it did it 100% perfectly. Honestly might be the easiest scenario for it, but that's also what I thought for Fable and Sol and those completely butchered it. Wish I could share pictures of those attempts but just imagine a completely mangled model that barely looks good if you squint. These were not simple models either, pretty large/complex machinery.
I have heard that audio engineer's don't necessarily master to a flat EQ because such a small section of listeners are listening with a flat EQ. Most are using car speakers, airpods, etc so they master it based on those expectations.
Can confirm. When I was in that world we'd have a shitty boom-box on a shelf that got pulled out for exactly that purpose. But you'd always start from the studio kit and work down, never the other way.
In my understanding, this whole thing is basically 1:1 with color spaces in display tech, except with pictures/video you at least get to encode what you targeted, versus with audio, you don't.
Yeah that's pretty good way to put it, except I'd say the average person is using way better screens with smartphones than the quality of speakers/headphones their using.
I think writing was forced more by demand than the ability to do. Before the first city states which needed laws, taxes, debts, etc to be recorded, people just did not need to write detailed information. Like most technology it could have been invented earlier, but the need just wasn't there. Simple oral story telling and a few written symbols was good enough.
Yeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to 'liberalize' their infrastructure planning; something like having internal business units bid on space, power, and compute instead of distributing it top-down. He said that yes, this was actually something like their original operating model, and the outcome was that YouTube basically bought up every piece of hardware in the company and then leased them out to other verticals at a profit.
That's pretty interesting. I always found the idea of democratizing a company pretty easy to understand (can easily just mirror civilian governmental structure in some sense), but creating an internal free market system harder to wrap my head around so pretty cool to see an example of it.
> whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
There are a few small examples that come to mind (co-ops and communes mostly), but I can’t think of any that have been successful at scale. Running an internal market would be almost pure overhead, so if it worked it would really have to be efficient to be worthwhile.
I understand that line of thinking and honestly think it's possible you're correct. On the other hand, this is exactly historical rhetoric that was used against republicanism/democracy, with people saying the only successful examples were city states and that it was impossible to scale. Maybe we just need a corporate "America" that figures out the correct governing structure. If anything I think it's possible it might only be possible with extremely large firms while small firms stay autocratic to stay dynamic.
Internal pricing always turns out to be problematic because the various divisions have neither the incentive nor the leverage to negotiate prices in the way that "real" customers do.
In addition to your Samsung example, I know of a major tech company whose services division often buys hardware from competitors because they get a 40% discount and priority deliveries when stock runs low. If they were to buy the in-house alternative, they'd be paying list price and be at the back of the queue for deliveries.
There's also huge scope for "funny money" Hollywood accounting-style practices, where internal prices become entirely disconnected from supply, demand, or any sort of underlying value - which actually results in the organisation being even more dominated by the whims of senior leadership than they otherwise would be.
(These problems are very similar to those experienced in country-level command economies too, of course)
I imagine it might look something like a company-internal gig economy; someone puts out a request for a code review and a bunch of fellow employees bid on doing the job, and the requester provides a tip for good service at the end, etc.
Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:
How I see it, is if the human brain does lossy compression/prediction of the natural world that learns from its "training set" (sensory inputs) and we have been able to come up with new ideas, then it seems like AI would be able to as well.
Pretty odd to say Mohammed a) isn't Asian, and b) isn't widely known across the continent, because he is, not just in western and central Asia but even in places like China, Jakarta and Mindinao. Islam is expanding rapidly in Japan now.
Yeah this is a crazy comment to me. I know multiple people who had entry level Wall Street and NYC/SF SWE offers back in 2022-2023 and I feel like $120k was really good for even an entry level position, let alone an intern. I guess maybe inflation in the past few years might have changed this.
