Nirav Patel

Founder (and usually tweeting) at @FrameworkPuter

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Standing offer: If you’re building consumer hardware and want advice on anything (business strategy, building a team, finding suppliers, go to market, design/architecture decisions, fundraising, etc), send me a DM and I am happy to have a call with you.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@john_marhefka This is accurate https://t.co/DuxncuITAm

[Shashank Sharma @ssh_sharma135]

Been seeing some SF coffee tier lists floating around, and coffee is like 50% of my personality so heres mine. SF has maybe the best coffee scene in America, mostly because of the density of talented baristas (SF consistently places top 5 in the US barista championships!)

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

This explains a lot about Luminar.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Controversial restaurant opinion of the week: Sungho is better than San Ho Won and should have the star instead.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

My old blog post that the raw image came from: https://t.co/FL6ft7SjkI

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Throwing old projects into Opus 5.5 is fun. It was able to one-shot a solution in 30 minutes to a project I put on hold in 2012: decoding and rendering images from Lytro cameras.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@typesfast @reed You can connect to support during the ride and ask. The answer I got for messed up routing during a trip was road sections dynamically being blocked off. Probably a policy overreaction to the gridlock that Waymos triggered a few times in SF during heavy congestion.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Not a judgement on whether it was good or bad. It was net good for VR (and certainly for Oculus employees), it just has delivered poor financial RoI to date.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

I just realized, in terms of return on investment, Oculus recently passed AOL-Time Warner as the worst acquisition of all time.

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

The 10 greatest acquisitions of all time:

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@LorenCharnley @8753cFan Very impressed!

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Has anyone ever successfully depleted the battery on a Fluke or Mitutoyo tool? These things might be powered from another dimension.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@8753cFan Impressed.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@badlogicgames The Mission one is still consistent and good.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

My last post is evenly split between people who think AI can already (or nearly already) route complex boards, and those who think it may never reach human-level. So, how long until AI can competently one-shot a medium-complex 6 layer design that has a few QFNs and BGAs on it?

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@BackwoodsEnginr Do you believe that AI will never solve PCB routing, or that some other electrical engineering domain will still be beyond that.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

PCB routing is going to be the last engineering job that humans still need to do.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@animeshsingh38 I'd be curious to see examples of 4 or 6 layer boards with larger QFNs or BGAs that it has successfully routed.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Certainly hope so. It seems like part of the challenge is that the scoring function (simulating the physics) is still extremely computationally expensive. However… humans are still routing these things easily without simulating the physics on anything but the most sensitive boards, so our brains are just really good at some part of this that computers aren’t yet!

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

Because it’s excellent at boring math, parsing datasheets, and reading existing reference designs, I’ve found Opus 5.5 to be great so far at electrical and firmware design out to a schematic and working firmware. This is much like it’s able to do a solid job at non-embedded software development already. It’s still PCB layout where it switches over to being an unsolved NP-hard problem that humans somehow excel at with just a little training.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@QVHenkel Playing around with Opus 5.5, it's doing a surprisingly good job of electrical and mechanical co-design, even with high voltage and antenna constraints coming into play, and then it is falling apart completely when it comes to routing.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

The routing of that is about as simple as it gets, since it’s low frequency and can mostly be routed in a single layer. Pre-LLM autorouters would also handle it. Iteratively handling trace crossings across multiple layers is where both get tripped up, even without considering signal integrity, inductance, etc.

[Nirav Patel @cmonkey]

@Neolker Yes, future models will certainly get there, but probably long after they already excel at every other part of electrical and mechanical design!