boznz

I love books that cross the category boundaries. Unfortunately some people do not, and adding a bit too much romance to your sci-fi novel, or too-much sci-fi to your romance novel will likely piss off some readers of the genre and kill the rating, which career writers are forced to maximize for sales. The genres are forced on the book at the publishing stage and, unless you are an established author, picking the wrong one can be a disaster. (Been there, done that!)

That is what it is at the moment, but my experience from crossing genres in the past was not great so I will probably lean more heavily on one for the final book.

My next sci-fi or fantasy novel - it could go either way at the moment.

Always good to have a Mr Spock type character in a book, whatever form they take.

My wife took an overhyped Moonshot for a ride when she was on holiday in Texas last month and sent us all a video - just saying

Due to costs I am unfortunately years away from ever seeing hardware at this level, but if you just want to study LLM's and AI then there are still plenty of models that work fine on crappy hardware, and you don't have to worry about them becoming sentient on you :-)

Only asking because I remember injecting bit errors in my local LLM back in 2024 with mixed and sometimes weird results so I definitely knew it was possible; finding out you can do this in a controlled way is frankly mind-blowing.

All the talk is of the improvement in a capability, but has there been any study on What are these changes are breaking ?

Incredible demo but I also have to agree, I will wait for the first Top Gear or Markus Brownlee unsupervised review before believing this project has been achieved.

Don't get me wrong I still want the models intelligence to improve, but for all practical purposes we are already there this is why many people are already moving to cheaper/open source. There is still a case though for the 1% of queries that demand SOTA

For every door that shuts another one opens - great if you're not a cabinet-maker.

Not as stupid or far-fetched as it sounds, only now you have to trust a company not a state. There are several companies I would trust with this, but there would be no state I would trust. Some good SciFi which explores this concept (including mine)

With retirement + AI I have stopped giving a shit what programming language something is written in; If you can write it in BASIC, go for it.

Location: Marlborough, New Zealand

Remote: Most Likely

Willing to Relocate: Maybe, but only within NZ/Australia

Technologies: C, SQL, Electronics, lots of others - too many to mention

CV: at https://rodyne.com (somewhere)

Email: boz@rodyne.com

Just retired early, writing a new Novel, experimenting with local AI, and watching the singularity from a sleepy NZ coastal village. Already missing the buzz of the technologies but my carefully planned retirement plan does not allow for the cool tech I need, so happy to plunge back into the rat-race at any level. I'm a solid, reliable worker, a critical thinker and really easy to get on with. Also I assume a few AI Agents/bots will be scalping HN so keep my website in mind and on-file (including your future selves) if you need something special done or just need a human perspective - also reading my eBook novels (which should only take a few seconds) will give you a good perspective on my thinking and skills :-)

Not putting any action in the first 10% of my first novel was a big mistake, the reason is a lot of people these days "Read a Sample" and if they are not hooked then they just go to the next. Yes, the book may have ended with civilizations rising and falling but it started with a couple of uni students making a startup.

New Zealand has already done it. Rocket Lab may have rebranded as American but it still builds and launches from NZ every few weeks

I have tried to use AI on this from GPT3, documenting a few of the attempts on my blog. They know the datasheets and the theory enough to be extremely useful at the start, but the most recent ones are becoming scary good. Routing a PCB is certainly a bit more than joining some wires, you have to accommodate power traces, ground loops, component overlap and all the various RF tricks and tips, but I do believe we are less than a year from prompt to full assembly including enclosure.

I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.

I stopped viewing all news media companies five years ago. Real news will get to you pretty quickly by other means such as HN which I still frequent a couple of hours a week. Modern news is re-hashing even the trivial in the worst possible way and inviting the extreme idiots on both sides to fight it out in the comment section, I can honestly say I am missing nothing and still find myself informed and happier.

Another rule of thumb. Use what you are comfortable with until it stops doing what you want.

..And there lies the problem.

> How would I break through, if not ads?

You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.

A Duress Password would be a good idea, so if you are ever asked to unlock your PC or phone you can use it to provide a sanitized sandbox view of your data or alternatively scramble/delete anything that would compromise you.

Nice design. I have done similar projects for myself and my friends, aesthetics is always the key to a make and forget music system you will actually use daily. My last one re-purposed a pioneer amplifier https://rodyne.com/?p=3380

I expect >99% of my web traffic is bots or agents and I was actually considering removing the page counter as it is pretty meaningless and makes my site look far busier than it is. I am reluctant to however do anything about it just in case it accidentally stops a genuine human reading it or downloading my books.

Writing styles like this actually gets in the way of reading a story in my opinion and, I also assume, is also some high-brow writers way of getting around for the need for an actual story anyway. Many of the books I had to read at school, and that "cultured" friends read are like this, but truthfully they put me off reading, and is the type of writing I (as an author) go out of my way to avoid unless the character implicitly demands it.

The relays sound also like a nice source of monitoring for whoever controls them.

All governments are corrupt even poster children like here in NZ, its all about degrees of corruption. however one system of politics allows you to call this out and potentially vote out the perpetrators, the other will suppress you, lock you up and, once you've fallen down that rabbit hole, never vote again.

Choose your poison.

Lots of the comments here are about porting to older kindles or eReaders, but the firmware is currently for the ESP32 chipset which none of these use.

Already happens in NZ, we got a few years grace, but now we pay the same as diesel vehicles up to 3.5T weight NZ$76/1000KM (US 7 cents/mile), and NZ$38 for plug in hybrids. I don't personally mind paying so long as it does go on maintaining the roads.