I dove into a new area recently: hardware. I have a bit of a sim racing hobby, but I only have a Bluetooth game controller. I found a project to make your own force feedback wheel base, called FFbeast. But before that, I've taken up designing and building my own shifter and (3) pedals.

I printed the main pedal frame and base with PETG, and I found some M5 hardware on amazon for pretty cheap. The pedals use a hall effect sensor to measure the proximity of the pedal to the frame base. They're wired to an esp32 ADC ports and I wrote a simple USB HID device with tinyusb and esp-idf which mounts as a generic game controller - good enough for my case. I saw some designs for a load cell brake pedal, but I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible first, so I found a stiff spring. Big inspiration was cncdan's design.

They feel great - I borrowed some old logitech pedals to compare the feel and these are much better! I think all in I spent ~$40 USD for the raw materials (spring, hardware, filament, hall sensors + wire, esp32) and a weekend of time.

I wanted badly to keep my 12, but it was too slow. I missed many things because the camera wouldn’t open most of the time. I changed the battery but it didn’t help. I had plenty of free storage. I almost wonder if it was a dud, I never observed the same on other of the same phone. I got the 17 and it’s been a great upgrade.

I don’t think so, here’s why:

I have a few co workers who are deep into the current AI trends. I also have the pleasure of reviewing their code. The garbage that gets pushed is insane. I feel I can’t comment on a lot of the issues I see because there’s just so much slop and garbage that hasn’t been thought through that it would be re-writing half of their PR. Maybe it speaks more to their coding ability for accepting that stuff. I see comments that are clearly AI written and pushed like it hasn’t been reviewed by a human. I guard public facing infrastructure and apps as much as I can for fear of this having preventable impacts on customers.

I think this is just more indicative that AI assists can be powerful, but in the hands of an already decent developer.

I kind of lost respect for these developers deep into the AI ecosystem who clearly have no idea what’s being spat out and are just looking to get 8 hours of productivity in the span of 2 or 3.

Are you talking about human generated code or machine generated code?

99% of the work I've ever received from humans has been error riddled garbage. <1% of the work I've received from a machine has been error riddled garbage. Granted I don't work in code, I work in a field that's more difficult for a machine

> there’s just so much slop and garbage that hasn’t been thought through that it would be re-writing half of their PR

If I were their tech lead I would make them do exactly that. Over and over until they got the point or they got a bad performance review and got PIPed out.

The quality bar is the bar, and it's there for a reason (in my case, I work on security and safety critical stuff, so management has my back (usually)).

I'm glad when people can use AI to help themselves. If it speeds them up, great. I don't care if it writes 100% of their code. They still are responsible for making sure it holds the quality bar. If they constantly submit code that doesn't meet the quality bar they have a performance problem regardless of the tools they used.

C++17 has the [[maybe_unused]] attribute.

My real moment of shock and awe was flying over the pacific earlier this year on Hawaiian and measuring ~350mbps down.