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I tried this a while back and found it ended up being easier to just give the firmware agent a dedicated machine, there’s so much low-level stuff you want acces

I tried this a while back and found it ended up being easier to just give the firmware agent a dedicated machine, there’s so much low-level stuff you want access to for iterating on firmware, and the docker layers kept confusing the agents when they were debugging faults, crashes, brownouts etc. Combining a dedicated small machine with a USB hub that supports per-port power cycling lets the agent iterate and un-wedge stuff with no human intervention for very long (days) periods. Obviously any software produced that way is unusable, but it’s incredible for debugging. Agent gets a programmable oscilloscope, power-cycling, and peripherals (also power-cycleable) emulating the various things our product talks to in the wild. TL;DR I found the docker layers just caused confusion for the agent and giving her an old laptop was way simpler and much more powerful

dakolli 1mo ago
[flagged]
- __atx__ 1mo ago
  I find this a rather interesting quirk of linguistics. In many languages, nouns have a "grammatical gender". For example, in Czech, "inteligence" has a feminine grammatical gender, so you are supposed to use feminine pronouns when refering to it. This sometimes leaks through with ESL people. I wonder if speakers of these languages anthropomorphize AI (or even animals or non-living objects!) more than native english speakers...
Avamander 1mo ago
I have to agree. Attaching both hardware and networks to Docker containers is still incredibly cumbersome unreliable and generally garbage. Can't do most things on the fly, if at all. Especially annoying in compose setups or when building a container. Even outside the context of AI agents.
c0nsumer 1mo ago
Not ESP32, but development in general with (let's just say) "AI", I've gone to a dedicated machine. I'm not sure how many peers have told me, or articles I've read, saying to use containers/VMs/whatever, but taking an old-but-still-decent business class laptop, slapping Ubuntu on it, and running right in the native OS has so much less admin overhead. I can just turn it off. I can unplug it from the network if I'm worried. I can easily isolate it network-wise using just a VLAN and normal firewalls. Hardware connectivity (ESP32 stuff I'm doing this weekend) -- as you describe -- is just easier.

dakolli 1mo ago

[flagged]

__atx__ 1mo ago
I find this a rather interesting quirk of linguistics. In many languages, nouns have a "grammatical gender". For example, in Czech, "inteligence" has a feminine grammatical gender, so you are supposed to use feminine pronouns when refering to it. This sometimes leaks through with ESL people. I wonder if speakers of these languages anthropomorphize AI (or even animals or non-living objects!) more than native english speakers...

Avamander 1mo ago

I have to agree. Attaching both hardware and networks to Docker containers is still incredibly cumbersome unreliable and generally garbage. Can't do most things on the fly, if at all. Especially annoying in compose setups or when building a container. Even outside the context of AI agents.

c0nsumer 1mo ago

Not ESP32, but development in general with (let's just say) "AI", I've gone to a dedicated machine. I'm not sure how many peers have told me, or articles I've read, saying to use containers/VMs/whatever, but taking an old-but-still-decent business class laptop, slapping Ubuntu on it, and running right in the native OS has so much less admin overhead. I can just turn it off. I can unplug it from the network if I'm worried. I can easily isolate it network-wise using just a VLAN and normal firewalls. Hardware connectivity (ESP32 stuff I'm doing this weekend) -- as you describe -- is just easier.