Seems more like he had the patent long enough to build a sustainable business from his own work, and now he’s been able to earn enough from it that others’ implementations aren’t a risk to him.
Which is kind of the entire point of patents, just that they last way too long relative to the speed of technological progress
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term
Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get out of the kitchen”
Microwaves have already won. There will be a microwave in every home over the next few years.
Re: kitchen appliance analogies, I stand by my "AI is a dishwasher" analogy.
It's annoying that the dishes still have some pooled water in them when the cycle finishes; it doesn't always get everything perfectly clean; I have to know not to put the knives or the wooden stuff or anything fancy in it. But in spite of all of that, I use it every day, it's a huge productivity boost, and I'd hate to be without it.
And other people choose to wash dishes by hand and they're fine with it and not significantly less productive. The use of a dishwasher wasn't forced on everyone.
It is significantly less productive to hand wash dishes. But that’s fine to do manually if you wish for something that takes up maybe half an hour of your own time every several days. It’s not fine if washing dishes is your job. No company is going to hire an artisanal dish hand washer that refuses to use a dishwasher.
I was taught to give them a quick rinse but let the dishwasher make them sparkly clean. This avoids clogging the dishwasher's pipes with excessive food waste. Certainly any piece of food you could pick up between your fingers must be scraped in the bin before going in the dishwasher (or before hand washing).
I can tell you that I didn't observe a single hand-wash-only holdout.
Perhaps such holdouts existed at a point, but a restaurant can only flatter the ego of their performatively-unproductive seniors for so long. Competition exists.
> And other people choose to wash dishes by hand and they're fine with it and not significantly less productive. The use of a dishwasher wasn't forced on everyone.
That's completely, demonstratively false. Our dishwasher broke and we couldn't replace it for a month for different reasons – it was a complete nightmare. Without dishwasher:
- You need to have a space to store dirty dishes
- You must wash them right away, unless you want smell of rotten food that attracts all sorts of nasty from insects to rodents
- You need to have a big enough kitchen sink to wash comfortably
- You need to have a steady supply of hot water in the kitchen
- You need to have a supply of latex gloves, unless you want your hands to look like they're 50 years old
- You need to have a drying rack
- It takes a shitton of time compared to loading dishwasher, starting it and forgetting about it
- You need to clean up everything after you're done
> Hand-washing dishes also, from what I understand, uses more energy and water than the dishwasher does.
Correct, more energy, detergent, and water. Dishwashers are more efficient than what you can do by hand because they effectively manage their water usage.
A modern dishwasher will use 3 to 4 gallons on a run. By comparison, my kitchen sink holds about 10 gallons of water on each side. When I wash by hand, I'll fill one side with soapy water and rinse each dish individually. Easily more than 10 gallons of water get used in the whole process.
Dishwashers are so efficient because they rinse everything off the dishes with about ~1 gallons of water, they drain the water, then use detergent in the second run which gets off the tougher food stains, another 1 gallons of water. Then they rinse with another gallon of water.
Dishwashers maximize getting food particulates into dirty water in a way that you can't really sanely do by hand.
Ten gallons to hand wash is crazy. I have and use a dishwasher but when I hand-wash I use maybe two gallons of straight hot water. I wash everything, give it a minimal rinse with the sprayer and then hand dry to remove any remaining soap suds or water.
If I hand wash, I wash as I go. It takes maybe 5 minutes to wash up dishes from breakfast or lunch, maybe a little more for a big dinner, maybe not.
Dishwashers let you accumulate dirty dishes for a day or two which is the real advantage in water savings. But I've noticed a lot of people pre-wash by hand and then load the dishwasher. I don't understand that, if I'm going to "pre-wash" anything I'll just wash it completely and put it away.
5 minutes of most sinks running is 10 gallons of water. (Most kitchen sinks are 2 gallons per minute).
> Dishwashers let you accumulate dirty dishes for a day or two which is the real advantage in water savings.
I agree. If you aren't filling the dishwasher then you are probably wasting water. However, a full dishwasher is going to be a real water/energy saver. Especially if you aren't washing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. (I know a decent number of people do that. It's a hard habit to break).
Who runs the water constantly? I don't. I put a stopper in the drain, get some hot water in the sink, then turn the water off. Wash everything, give it all a quick rinse, then dry.
> A modern dishwasher will use 3 to 4 gallons on a run. By comparison, my kitchen sink holds about 10 gallons of water on each side. When I wash by hand, I'll fill one side with soapy water and rinse each dish individually. Easily more than 10 gallons of water get used in the whole process.
I'm pro-dishwasher, but you could use much less water handwashing.
If I don't have a dishwasher, my normal method is to stopper one side of my sink, squirt some dish soap on the first few dishes, and run just enough water to wet the dishes. Then I scrub some dishes, run the water (into the stoppered sink) just to rinse them as I transfer to the dish rack, then turn off the water and repeat. The dirtiest dishes that have the most food stuck on get done last so they get the most time soaking in the soapy rinse water from the rest of the dishes. I can do a full dishwasher load with one side of my sink maybe 1/4 full of water.
Time how long you run the sink while washing and rinsing. If you run it for more than 1.5 to 2 minutes, you've used more water than the dishwasher would have.
I'm collecting all the water in the sink, I can measure the volume directly. 10 cm of water in my sink in about 13 litres. My dishwasher is specced for 16.5 - 29.7 litres on the "Energy Saver" cycle that I normally use.
(The "normal" cycle is specced for 11.0-27.7 litres but uses more electricity, which is more expensive than water.)
This is in fact true (in the US at least), but part of why it is true is that people don't wash dishes the way they used to (with multiple bins of soapy + rinse water) and instead just run a bunch of hot water.
Modern high-efficiency dishwashers probably beat the most efficient humans now, but that's relatively recent and not a huge margin (and may not get the same results).
I use the time I spend to hand-wash my dishes as a time to pause and to let my mind wander.
Having the hands in water is soothing.
And its a pleasant feeling, where cleaning is part of the food workflow : I cook, I eat, I clean (the kitchen, the dishes, my teeth).
I hate home dishwashers: you have to play Tetris after each meal to fill them, trying not to get your hands/arms dirty, then you have to let it do the work, and now you have to spend a few minutes to get the dishes out and store them where they should be, even though most of them are not linked to a meal you just had.
Maybe worse, you could unload the dishwasher at a time completely unrelated to food, so that breaks the link.
On the other hand, having worked in restaurants, industrial dishwashers are awesome.
From my experience, restaurants hand-wash some stuff (anything that needs scrubbing such as cookware) and use dishwashers for light-soil service items (plates, glasses, cutlery). But these aren't dishwashers like you have at home. They run very hot water and complete a wash/rinse in just minutes.
This is a great analogy, because just like AI, microwaves are good for quick fixes, tasks where you don't really care about the quality and would rather minimise the effort.
I think the analogy is a bit inaccurate here when people are talking about automation.
Microwaves do one thing, but they do it reliably. Microwaves didn't affect the culinary industry because cooking is far more than just heating food, and many tasks are very difficult to automate. LLMs are more general-purpose - the average Joe is now relying on them as a source of truth, advice and mental work across the board. However, LLMs can't be guaranteed to always be reliable, it's all probabilistic. The threat of automation here is in taking away a lot of the less important or less complex work. Low impact + high precision (microwave) vs. high impact + low precision (AI)
A better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
I know it's not the point of the comment but it's a bit of a flawed analogy. Microwaves have wone to a large extent, such that people without them are a bit of an oddity, and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
> cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
This is an incredible self-report. If you consider microwaved meals to be your default method of cooking and not something primarily for reheating leftovers or defrosting frozen meat, I sincerely hope you've gotten your cholesterol and blood pressure checked recently. That is not normal.
Not to mention the amount of plastic they're adding to their body and the amount of trash they're creating. I know cooking for one can be arduous, but meal prep is a thing.
I haven't used my oven since buying a counter top air fryer (and a sous vide) a couple years ago. I can't think of a single reason why anyone needs a full size oven on a daily basis unless you're cooking for a large family.
Owning a counter top air fryer requires you to have enough counter space for one, I have been in kitchens where there is an oven built into the stove but counter space is at a premium.
I’d also say that while I like my air fryer oven, I would prefer to do some of the bigger things like a whole bird in the oven. It’s cheaper to buy a whole bird for meal prep.
I’m from northern Europe. I might use the micro to heat up leftovers or a cup of water for tea or whatever in a pinch, but in this household (and at all my friends’), the stove and the oven cooks the food. I know literally no-one who could say they cook most meals in the micro.
I didn’t have a microwave oven before we bought a house. It took up too much space to justify, for such a relatively rarely-used appliance.
Same. Microwave is mainly used for defrosting or warming up leftovers. Maybe baking a potato in a rush, it works and it's faster but it's not as good as oven-baked.
Seems like a lot of people are dunking on this comment with anecdata.
Thankfully there is real data if we want to know how microwaves are used. Survey below says they are used a bit more than ovens, but half as much as cooktops/stoves. Varies by cohort and meal.
Most houses still have ovens. Microwaves are pretty widespread as well. But, their main job is to warm up food which was cooked in an oven (either locally or at a centralized oven in a food manufacturing factory). Microwave and ovens are mostly complementary tools.
Although, the analogy seems sort of useless, in that the food preparation ecosystem is really not any less complex than the program creation ecosystem, so it doesn’t offer any simplification.
When I had neither I found it convenient to buy a small oven - the size of a microwave. It performs both functions. It doesn't reheat things as quickly as a microwave.
I've lived without a microwave for a long time and it's only a little bit inconvenient because things take longer to reheat.
Ovens are a special occasion thing in my house because our oven is huge and I can usually do the same thing in the air fryer, which is just a small convection oven.
There’s a bit of irony here. A lot of commercial kitchens already rely heavily on microwaves and rapid heating equipment. In many restaurants the microwave is a very important tool in the workflow rather than something unusual. Do your friends not eat out much?
Sort of, although there's importance nuance. One would be surprised how often microwaves get used in proper commercial kitchens, as in places making their own food & not reheating stuff from a central commissary. But it's not being used in the way one likely pictures when they hear this. An example is that microwaves are great for par cooking vegetables, especially potatoes.
> and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
That really only makes sense if for households with a toaster oven, single adults, childless couples, and retired people. A toaster oven makes a lot more sense for small meals, in part because it can heat up much faster than a full oven.
Otherwise, a daily family meal isn't a special occasion.
> [...] and cooking with an oven is more of a special occasion thing than the default cooking method that it was before.
Not true in my household, in my parent's, in my in-laws, or any of my closest friends'. And none of us are cooks, so it's not a niche thing.
I'm sure in a lot of households the microwave oven is the primary form of cooking, but it's important to look outside the bubble before reporting trends.
It’s a great analogy because it is something that is everywhere, that everyone does use from time to time, but the idea that it magically displaces everything forever (with no downsides) is naively optimistic
(The original phrase was not just made up, it was sourced from actual news articles and marketing about microwave ovens, that’s why it feels relevant to a hype cycle like this)
You also see this kind of naive optimism if you go look at illustrations from the early 1900s. People believed everything would eventually be a machine: that a machine would feed you, wake you up in the morning, physically move everything within your home etc. And yeah those things are possible to do, but in reality they aren’t practical and we do not actually use machines to do everything because it has costs
So, you know how people talk about AIs as dumb pattern matchers?
So, you know how looking at one pattern and then just saying "this one will be like that one?" without considering the similarities and differences is similar to what people complain about AIs doing?
Consider: Unlike my Microwave, Claude can work on Claude. Unlike my Microwave, Claude gets better at more things. Unlike my microwave, we do not know what causes Claude to work so well. My Microwave cannot improve the process that makes my microwave.
Also, um.
I'm not sure if you noticed?
But machines are everywhere.
I'm typing on one while another one (a microwave, in fact!) heats my breakfast, while another one washes my clothes, while another one vacuums my floor, while another one purifies the air in my room, while another one heats the air in my room, while another one monitors my doors and windows for unauthorized entry and another one keeps my food cool and another one pumps the Radon
gas out of my basement and another one scoops my cat's poop.
> I'm typing on one while another one (a microwave, in fact!) heats my breakfast, while another one washes my clothes, while another one vacuums my floor, while another one purifies the air in my room, while another one heats the air in my room, while another one monitors my doors and windows for unauthorized entry and another one keeps my food cool and another one pumps the Radon gas out of my basement and another one scoops my cat's poop.
You’re kind of missing the point a bit. Yes, machines are everywhere but the details are very different.
The machines don’t magically do that stuff for you. You have to buy them, plug them in, turn them on and off. Lots of people don’t have any at all. They can’t do most things unsupervised. There are still lots and lots of tasks for which a machine exists, that people will still do entirely manually
There is a naivety to these predictions that is chipped away by the mundane details of having to exist in the real world. Cost, effort etc
Are you saying that instead of directly pointing out something that really bothered me, I should instead of reported him to someone higher up? Should I have bitched on Glassdoor? Oh, I guess I could have complained to the to recruiter where there is a zero percent chance that my complaint actually gets sent to them.
It’s “rude” in that I embarrassed the person for a minute, but it’s not like I went and tattled to their higher-up, or was out for blood or anything. If they’re going to waste half the interview then they can fucking deal with being embarrassed for a few minutes.
I think it is inappropriate in an interview situation 100%. If you can’t hold your tongue on some slight discomfort or perhaps talk about in a more diplomatic way (eg not singling out the specific person but rather just stating your upset at the interview being delayed) how are you going to react if clients/customers make you uncomfortable on conference calls? Are you going to be tactful and polite, or are you going to be direct and rude to them?
Obviously I don’t know the role you were going for etc. this is just an example, but I think doing this gives a bad impression that goes beyond just whether that specific person was irritated for you calling them on their lateness
No, it really isn’t inappropriate. The listing that the recruiter sent me said that they “value directness”.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview they would likely not make an offer, and if they had called me out for being late then no one would call them an asshole.
There is "pointing out something that bothers you" which was the first part of the story. But, the reaction to interviewer who tries to explain himself "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch." is an asshole reaction.
And yes, if roles were reverts, the manager saying the same "I dont really care" thing after you are trying to explain yourself would also be an asshole.
Why should him being busy matter to me? For all he knows I am equally or more busy than he is. For all he knows I am skipping my mother’s funeral, or taking the entire day off of work, or turned down a dozen other potential interviews just to make this interview.
I will admit it’s a bit douchey, but why should I just nod my head happily and pretend that his excuses actually matter? Especially when all of them boiled down to “I was really busy”. We’re all busy.
Would you want to work with you? Maybe yes. But if I am making a choice about who to work with, I would prefer someone who has enough empathy and awareness to realize that it's possible that the interviewer might be running behind through no fault of their own. I would extend that to the my team members, and I hope they would in-turn, extend that to me.
You sound to me like someone who sees "please be direct and straight forward" as a free pass to nit-pick every little thing. Like maybe it's your duty to criticize even when it has little to no bearing on future success.
If I showed up late halfway through the interview, I would almost certainly not get an offer, and if the hiring manager called me out on that fact then no one would call that manager an asshole.
I am not “nitpicking every little thing” and I feel like there’s a lot of extrapolation going on there. I do think it’s extremely disrespectful to schedule a meeting and show up very late so that the interviewee doesn’t have time do do the full interview. In fact I think it is categorically more disrespectful than a snarky comment about lateness.
One of the best people I have ever worked with was somebody I interviewed and recommended be hired. She missed her first interview entirely. I was waiting for her to show up, annoyed that she was late, and she called me and said she needed to reschedule. At the time, she was hiking in the greenbelt on a beautiful day. I said, sure, we rescheduled, and she was a huge asset to the team. I kept the details of having to reschedule her interview quiet - because they had no bearing at all on her ability to do a good job.
Have I not established quite thoroughly that I am an outlier in many ways? Also, outliers exist. Also, being an outlier does not automatically equal "incorrect".
I have had hiring managers tell me that, almost verbatim actually, when I forgot about the interview and showed up significantly late.
I was embarrassed and yeah I admit that it wasn’t exactly fun to be called out like that, but I would much rather they say that than for them to pretend everything is fine, let me leave the interview thinking I didn’t annoy them, and then have it be a mystery as to why I am declined.
I felt embarrassed in the moment, and I should feel embarrassed. It is very rude and inconsiderate to not show up to meetings that you agreed to show up for and it signals that you don’t take the other person’s time very seriously.
To be clear, it wasn’t like I was being pedantic to the second; I know Zoom and Google Meet can be finicky so I understand being a minute or two late for a meeting and I generally don’t say anything if they are within the “my fucking microphone isn’t connecting gotta fix it” threshold.
I’m not in the US but yeah the country has always had a strange relationship with law and order, at least from an outside PoV. The Kent State massacre is always one that sticks with me as particularly messed up.
I don’t think the USA is necessarily changing at all, this is what it has always been the whole time
If it also uses screen emulation, SPI protocols, IC2, and sensors, it's built from scratch. It also integrates the Arduino CLI for compiling the project and using external libraries.
I created an algorithm for the wiring (currently working on it). I've also integrated more Arduino models and the Raspberry Pi Pico. I plan to integrate ESP32, but I haven't been able to finish the emulator using QEMU as a base.
It's not just an avr8js frontend
One of the things that irks me about this whole thing is, if it’s so clean room and distinct, why make the changes to the existing project? Why not make an entirely new library?
The answer to that, I think, is that the authors wanted to squat an existing successful project and gain a platform from it. Hence we have news cycle discussing it.
Nobody cares about a new library using AI, but squash an existing one with this stuff, and you get attention. It’s the reputation, the GitHub stars, whatever
I mean, Blanchard was the longtime maintainer of chardet already, and had wanted to relicense it for years. So I think that complicates your picture of "squatting an existing successful project".
Honestly it's a weird test case for this sort of thing. I don't think you'd see an equivalent in most open source projects.
Which is kind of the entire point of patents, just that they last way too long relative to the speed of technological progress
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