I thought the same thing, and then wondered if this must be an enterprise problem, because what home user adds loads of icons - so many that IO becomes a concern - and also wants them to be randomly assigned to other family members?
But then it occurred to me that XP was of an era when you would absolutely spend an afternoon downloading some megapack of 10000 cool user icons.
Bootstrap was/is popular for the same reason. One framework and your site looks decent on almost any device. The downside is a bit like LLM work in that it all ends up looking like a Bootstrap site unless you’re a good designer.
IANAL. In states with multi or all-party consent, there is usually some wording like "reasonable expectation" of privacy, which you don't have in public by default. The store could argue you have no expectation of privacy there, so they can record audio. There might be other legal codes, but I think this is how smart doorbell manufacturers are allowed to operate in those states.
> (c) For the purposes of this section, “confidential communication” means any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive, or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.
> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail
I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder.
PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.
Not sending you anything before you make a purchase and providing the unsubscribe option are MAJOR changes from before. Some sites even give you an option at checkout to not have them email you. That is businesses being very careful. In ye olden days you'd get email from all kinds of businesses and scammers completely unsolicited and out of the blue with no way to tell them to stop. It was overwhelming and awful. Things are much better than they used to be. Still somewhat annoying? Absolutely. But much much better.
My advice is to try letting the agent fill in the gaps. You can probably architect better than it can. Write your class outlines, explicitly define the public facing bits and what you want APIs to look like. Write the key integration tests that you know ought to pass.
The real advantage is that agents routinely write code without any silly copy/paste mistakes like accidentally accessing x twice on a coordinate operation instead of x and y. You can add some comments for what the function should do, throw in some real/pseudo code and let the LLM figure it out.
You can express a circuit as a graph, and many schematic formats are plaintext. Same goes for the Gerbers which are an ASCII format used to describe the masks that are used to define the PCB traces. The models are trained on a lot of academic information about how circuits work, most component datasheets are public and they've sucked up all sorts of niche greybeard advice from internet forums.
A huge advantage of electrical design is that the connectivity is testable with Design and Electrical Rule Checks (DRC/ERC). I suspect you could even tell the models to run physics checks on the traces that are important for things like crosstalk.
There's some cool research that looks at how strongly the weights are aligned through training vs adherence to the system prompt. Like when you know a model is lying through censorship: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.05494v2
Presumably if negative guidance is in the system prompt, there's a good chance that the model would happily comply if it wasn't there.
For stuff like this, definitely. It’s already exciting. Claude et al are surprisingly competent with real hardware. I’ve also had good success debugging basic issues with micros - not via the debugger, but giving datasheet and written analysis. I’m sure it could do things like capture from a connected oscilloscope (Salaeae have an MCP integration for their logic tools). Also for SPICE which I never bother with because the tools always felt stuck in the 90s, but having some serious automated analog review would be nice. I’m really excited to play with peripherals like the RP2040 or Beaglebone real time logic blocks, or improving/adding real USB support instead of USB serial.
For circuits I would trust a netlist or DRC/ERC review, checking a design against reference circuit values, probably not placement as that tends to be guided straight from a datasheet where it makes a difference and I like the artistic side of it.
The temp sensor and transceiver PCB are cast into urethane and the coil gets installed into the hotplate. In theory lets you do all kinds of interesting stuff like monitoring when you can't get a wired probe into the vessel, or to drive a control loop that actually monitors the liquid and not the plate temperature.
But then it occurred to me that XP was of an era when you would absolutely spend an afternoon downloading some megapack of 10000 cool user icons.
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