10 ms·
The fact that one person can manage this (which would back in the day have taken god knows how many man years of dev time) gives me hope in terms of humanity's
by dingdingdang 11y ago
The fact that one person can manage this (which would back in the day have taken god knows how many man years of dev time) gives me hope in terms of humanity's capability to somehow deal with the ever increasing technological environment we're enmeshing ourselves into. Thumbs up for a mega cool project!
- stuxnet79 11y agoIndeed. I personally wished I majored in computer engineering instead of CS.
- dave_sullivan 11y agoWith the amount of content online, email, and a couple days per week of dedicated focus, you still can! I think if you set a goal like "build x for y" and struggle through it, learning as you go, you'll learn faster because you skip all the stuff you don't need (because you literally didn't need it to hit your goal). And think of all the money you'll save! Skip college. And if you already went, don't go back!
- bcook 11y ago"... you'll learn faster because you skip all the stuff you don't need". Assuming that nobody can predict the future, how can anyone know the usefulness/uselessness of any knowledge?
- ianai 11y agobecause every field has the 101 stuff that nobody uses anymore but they teach to the newbies 'for experience'
- erikpukinskis 11y agoGenerally, the stuff you need to get something done overlaps pretty well with the stuff you need to get other stuff done. Not 100% but enough you're probably not wasting your time. It's at least as good a heuristic as "prof said it's important".
- analognoise 11y agoMost people who are successful as autodidacts are successful in college, it makes zero sense to avoid it if you're already the kind of person who learns well. Most people are not great autodidacts, as shown by the miserable cometion rates of online courses.
- wolfgke 11y ago> Most people are not great autodidacts, as shown by the miserable cometion rates of online courses. For me (though I consider myself as a pretty good autodidact) the reason why I didn't complete many MOOCs (before you had to pay to even get a certificate) was simply lack of time: My main "job" is completing a PhD in applied mathematics, so if there happened anything for my PhD work that required some time-intense intervention (say, I found out that my proof idea didn't work so well as I originally thought; or if the advisor got the idea (which does not mean that it was always a bad idea, just to be clear) that I should read up more papers in some specific area - also very autodidactic) I sometimes had no other choice than stopping some MOOC that I was attaining.
- 9erdelta 11y agoMeh, I'm an autodidact and I rarely complete a MOOC that I sign up for. There are many reasons for this. Quite a few try to just be copies of the campus course. Others focus too much on lecture and not enough on doing. In some courses, there is a huge disconnect between the difficulty of the assignments, and the content covered in the lectures. But the biggest reason for me is, I usually sign up for a course as a means to help me get going on a project. As soon as I'm up and going with the project, I leave the course behind. There are only a handful of courses where the content was so interesting and well paced that I stayed for the whole thing. The embedded electronics course at edx being one of them.
- patates 11y agoWould you like to share the interesting ones? That'd be great.
- dave_sullivan 11y ago
- userbinator 11y agoOne talented person. I don't think the typical CS grad would be anywhere near this level. This is pretty much a "10x". But there are a few others too; here is someone who made an entire SoC (including CPU, GPU, and audio --- all of his own design) on an FPGA, plus wrote the software to run on it. And this is apparently his first FPGA project: http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/ http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/
- noonespecial 11y ago10x indeed. This is an example of that even rarer creature, the "unstoppable" engineer. Need an FPGA? I'll just learn verilog. Never made a pcb but need one? No prob, just learn kicad and figure out how to solder SMD. No docs? Just reverse engineer. No tools? Make my own. This approaches Woz level engineering, if not 100% technically, at least philosophically.
- SwellJoe 11y agoI believe we're seeing the lever that the Internet provides produce results, in cases like this. Smart kids before the Internet had to dig up information in widely disparate sources; some of these skills and knowledge were the exclusive purview of universities and research institutions. You simply couldn't do some of this stuff if you didn't have access to a lab and someone to show you how to do it. The Internet has caused an increase in access to knowledge comparable to, and maybe even surpassing, the leap from the pre-Gutenberg printing press world. In other words, the Internet is a multiplier that applies to the incredible curiosity and enthusiasm and intelligence of bright kids. So, multiply your 10x (or whatever #x) nerd by the 10x (or probably much greater multiplier) of the Internet, and you get the world we're living in now. Amazingly, the multiplier will likely continue to increase over time. I don't know if it will accelerate in a way comparable to the Internet coming along (I mean, we had centuries between early really big knowledge multiplier leaps), but it might. We live in amazing times is what I'm trying to say, and I'm genuinely jealous of kids coming up today, despite some minor caveats. I was bright and curious, and lucky enough to have access to a computer (C64 first, later C128 and Amiga 2000), but the access to knowledge was still quite limited. Internet didn't come for me until I was an adult. Internet and a boundless curiosity and practically unlimited free time is heady stuff.
- rwmj 11y agoIt's a very cool project. However back in the day I knew someone who made a half-height accelerated graphics card for MVME (68020 processors, VMEbus so similar era and processor). He pretty much did it on his own, although it was his full time job at the time and he had some support selling the boards. Also he used an existing (Hitachi?) GPU and some existing VME interface chip.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoIt's probably not common knowledge that Hitachi even made (and Renesas still makes, apparently [1]) graphics hardware. To the best of my knowledge, they designed the sprite/polygon rasterizer ("VDP1") for the Sega Saturn, and the off-the-shelf Hitachi/Renesas chips seem to be loosely related. [1] http://am.renesas.com/products/mix_sig/graphic/index.jsp http://am.renesas.com/products/mix_sig/graphic/index.jsp
- sklogic 11y agoYes, we live in a very interesting time. You can order a decent quality PCB from the likes of OCHPark for peanuts. You can fit an SoC capable of running a usable Linux into an FPGA well under £50. MCUs are cheap and powerful. Great time for a tinkerer.
- amelius 11y ago> gives me hope in terms of humanity's capability to somehow deal with the ever increasing technological environment we're enmeshing ourselves into On the other hand, FPGAs are still complicated pieces of hardware, similar to what a CPU is for normal programming. It's not like anybody could make an FPGA by themselves in their basement in any reasonable amount of time, with limited resources.
- sklogic 11y agoJust for fun: http://blog.notdot.net/2012/10/Build-your-own-FPGA http://blog.notdot.net/2012/10/Build-your-own-FPGA
- amelius 11y agoCute, but of course that approach will not stand a chance in any realistic application.
- sklogic 11y agoJust wait for the plastic circuits printers to become a commodity: http://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-plastic-chips/ http://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-p... With this, a homebrew FPGA would become a reality. As well as homebrew ASICs in general.