I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.
But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?
Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.
It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project.
Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons.
As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.
Thank you for sharing. As a hobbyist with a devotion to the field, I'm fascinated by how the actual professionals work. It's a very challenging domain.
From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software and language while others use the lower level toolchains.
This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.
//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
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Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
LLMs don't have enough of a model of the world to understand anything. There was a paper floating around recently about how someone trained an ML system on orbital dynamics. The result was a system that could calculate orbits correctly, but it completely failed to extract the underlying - simple - math. Instead it basically frankensteined together its own system of epicycles which solved a very narrow range of problems but lacked any generality.
Any coding has the same problems. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. And if you strap on an emulator and test rig and allow the machine to flail around inside it, sometimes working code falls out.
But there's no abstracted model of software development as a process in there, either in theory or practise. And no understanding of vague goals with constraints and requirements that can be inferred creatively from outside the training data.
> LLMs don't have enough of a model of the world to understand anything.
This is binary thinking, and it's fallacious.
For your orbital mechanics example, sure, it's difficult for LLMs to develop good models of the physical world, in large part because they aren't able to interact with the world directly and have to rely on human texts to describe it to them.
For your software development example, you're making a similar mistake: the fact that their strongest suit is not producing fully working systems doesn't mean that they have no world model, or that their successes are as random as you seem to think ("Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't," "sometimes working code falls out.")
But if you try, for example, asking an LLM to identify a bug in a program, or ask it questions about how a program works, you'll find that from a functional perspective, they exhibit excellent understanding that strongly implies a good world model. You may be taking your own thought processes for granted too much to realize how good they are at this. The idea that "there's no abstracted model of software development as a process in there" is hard to reconcile with the often superhuman responses they're capable of, when you use them in the scenarios they're most effective at.
It can! Though you might need to ask for it, otherwise it may take what it thinks you mean and run off with it, at which point you'll discover the lack of precision only later, when the LLM gets confused or the result is nothing like what you actually expected.
//If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs,
That's part of the FPGA business model - they have an automated way to take an FPGA design and turn it into a validated semi-custom ASIC, at low NRE, at silicon nodes(10nm?) you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
And all of that at a much lower risk. This is a strong rational but also emotional appeal. And people are highly influenced by that.
Is this still an active thing? My understanding is that both Xilinx and Altera/Intel have effectively discontinued their ASIC programs (Xilinx EasyPath, Altera HardCopy); they aren't available for modern part families.
For what it's worth, Xilinx EasyPath was never actually ASIC. The parts delivered were still FPGAs; they were just FPGAs with a reduced testing program focusing on functionality used by the customer's design.
I'd be amazed if that were still possible, in fact. Real-world FPGA designs lean heavily on the vendor's proprietary IP, which won't port straight across to ASICs any more than the LUT-based FPGA fabric will.
Anyone who claims to turn a modern FPGA design into an ASIC "automatically" is selling snake oil.
Oh, these programs were always in-house. The offering was essentially "if you pay an up-front fee and give us your FPGA design, we'll sell you some chips that run that design for cheaper than the FPGAs". If there was ever any custom silicon involved - which there may have been for Altera, but probably not for Xilinx - the design files for it were never made available to the customer.
Z-Library has a keyword search. Personally i didn't find it too useful, especially given Google Books exists. It's not easy to create a quality book search engine.
Would it be possible to create a Zorin OS USB drive that after inserting it into the USB drive of a laptop:
The user would get a running Linux, with the UX they know(win 10/11), with full speed and full capabilities - without installation ?