Josh's Blog

The WS2812 protocol is simpler than it first appears. Here's a great blog post about it: https://wp.josh.com/2014/05/13/ws2812-neopixels-are-not-so-finicky-onc…

A great blog post here (https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/) about some different auto-routing software.

My intuition is that you should leverage your strengths, rather than try to fit your talents into someone else's idea. It sound like you have a broad array of talents, which can be a blessing for some businesses and a curse for others. Consider not even creating a new new business. Do someone else's better than them. And there are several companies that seem to grossly overvalued by the standard of "if I gave you [their market cap], could you make a better version of them?" Since one of your strengths is an endless flow of capital, get $1b and make a better Twitter (or whatever). Maybe just follow Josh Levine's blueprint for $100mm? https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/

Great work! I was just thinking the other day how an interface like this would be useful, it seems strange we don't see more UI attempts beyond basic linear chat. I find most need for managing context for problem solving. I describe a problem, LLM gives me 5 possible solutions. From those I immediately see 2 of them won't be viable, so I can prune the search. Then it is best to explore the others separately without polluting the context with non-viable solutions. I saw this problem solving approach described as Tree-based problem management [0]. Often when solving problems there can be some nested problem which can prove to be a blocker and cut off whole branch, so it is effective to explore these first. Another cool attempt was thorny.io [1] (I didn't get to try it, and it is now unfortunately defunct) in which you could mark nodes with metadata like pro/con. Higher nodes would aggregate these which could guide you and give you prioritization which branch to explore next. Also graph rendering looks cooler, but outliners seem to be more space efficient. I use Logseq, where I apply this tree-based problem solving, but have to copy the context and response back-and-forth manually. Having an outliner view as an alternative for power users would be neat. [0] https://wp.josh.com/2018/02/11/idea-dump-2018/#:~:text=Tree-based%20pr… [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240820171443/http://thorny.io/

IME, you can use 3.3V logic with 5V WS2812B/SK6812 strips, no trouble. Each LED reforms the signal before sending it to the next LED in the chain, so voltage dropping over distance shouldn't a huge issue for the logic line unless the strip is very far away from the controller. And the datasheet almost agrees with my experience; the "high" voltage threshold is listed as 0.7×VDD, and 0.7×5=3.5V. That's a bit over 3.3V, but I haven't had any issues across several projects. Maybe it's because many USB supplies provide a little over 5V to account for droop? Maybe the datasheet is slightly pessimistic? Maybe 0.7 really means 2/3? Whatever the reason, it simplifies the wiring for small displays. Here's my favorite reference for the single-wire protocol that these LEDs use, since everyone seems to be chiming in with one: https://wp.josh.com/2014/05/13/ws2812-neopixels-are-not-so-finicky-onc…

Be careful which search result you click: https://wp.josh.com/2019/05/06/breaking-news-google-adwords-exploit-se…

TopoR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR#Features TopoR, destroy all autorouters: https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/

iMessage has had some interesting bugs: * 2014 -- if you switch from an iOS device to an Android device, iPhone users who try to send you text messages that are channeled via iMessage will have their messages silently vanish ( https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-fix-apples-imessage-bug/ ; IIRC after a lawsuit, they added a remarkable little support page, https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ ) * 2016 -- Apple iPhone devices were being used to send text messages which were going to the wrong recipient ( https://wp.josh.com/2016/10/26/divorced-by-apple-in-california/ , discussed at e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12797249 )

The price is a good conversation about globalizing supply chains. But what's really cool is they have a way to program radios which are sealed inside a cardboard shipping box, without batteries installed. https://wp.josh.com/2017/03/18/capacitive-coupling-casestudy-programmi…

This isn't a new problem. Cloaking[1] has been around for a long time. Google[2], and Facebook[3] have been fighting this problem for years. Even Google hasn't had perfect luck with fighting off cloakers[4]. [1]: https://charlesngo.com/cloaking/ [2]: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en#319 [3]: http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/facebook-cloaking-spam-advertising/ [4]: https://wp.josh.com/2019/05/06/breaking-news-google-adwords-exploit-se…

I don't think the consequences are the same, but I do think the underlying idea is applicable. Two things to keep in mind: A) uBlock Origin doesn't just protect me from ads, it also protects me from many trackers. I'm in the (maybe minority, I don't know) camp that says that excessive tracking and de-anonymization attempts cause people tangible harm. They're not as drastic or as harmful as installing malware on my computer, but I put these practices in the same category as a malicious attack. B) Under the most recent stats I've checked, Malvertising has almost surpassed general unsafe sites like porn/torrents as a source of consumer malware. Even Google Ads aren't immune from some of these attacks[0]. So for less computer-literate friends that I have, I consider a gimped adblocker to be a malware risk source. But to your point, maybe a less emotionally charged comparison could be Chrome's automatic whitelist for autoplaying videos. Nobody is going to die if a video autoplays on their tablet, but at a fundamental level the point of blocking autoplay is to actually block it, everywhere. Not to block some of it. People didn't want Google trying to guess which video sites were the most annoying, they just wanted Google to turn off autoplay. In the same sense, if someone installs an extension that says it's going to block ads and trackers, I don't think it's unreasonable for a consumer to want it to block all of the ads (or at least as many as is possible to detect), not…