> A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing
The lithography equivalents of that are laser direct write lithography and e-beam lithography. They've been used for decades in research labs, but they're impossibly slow for any mass production.
Atomic Semi are trying to make some derivative of these processes happen at a commercial scale.
That kind of clause would be void in many places around the world.
For example, the German Civil Code states:
Section 308 - Prohibited clauses with the possibility of valuation
In standard business terms, the following in particular are ineffective:
[...]
4. (Reservation of the right to modify) the agreement of a right of the user [TL note: this means beneficiary of the terms, eg. party or other subject of the contract] to modify the performance promised or deviate from it, unless the agreement of the modification or deviation reasonably can be expected of the other party to the contract when the interests of the user are taken into account;
> Actually why do we even have rendering with [012345678ABCDEF], when a specific set of (colored/imaged?) glyphs would be able to make more obvious what’s on the table?
Most of us have internalized the relationship between digits in [0-9] for a very long time. Adding 6 more glyphs after that is quite easy (and they're also somewhat well known in the world), and after a while you stop even thinking about the glyphs consciously anyway. A hex 'C' intuitively means to me '4 from the end'. A hex 'F' intuitively means to me 'all 4 bits are set to 1'. I don't see any advantage to switching to a different glyph set for this base, other than disruption for disruption's sake.
> Or even beyond the hexadecimal grouping, wouldn’t be more relevant to render something "intuitively" far more easy to grap without several layer of internalized interpretation through acculturation?
Modern computers deal with 8-bit bytes, and their word sizes are a multiple of bytes - unless you're dealing with bit-packed data, which is comparatively rare (closest is bit twiddling of MMIO registers, which is when you sometimes switch to binary; although for a 4-bit hex nibble you can still learn arbitrary combinations of bits on/off into its value).
This means you can group 8 bits into 1 digits of 8 bits as one glyph (alphabet too large to be useful), 2 digits of 4 (hex), 4 digits of 2 (alphabet too small to give a benefit over binary) and 8 digits of 1 (binary). Hex just works really well as a practical middle ground.
Back when computers used 12 bit words (PDP-8 and friends) octal (4 digits of 3 bits represented in the 0-7 alphabet) was more popular.
I thought about a similar concept for fun - each hex digit was replaced by 4x4 pixel matrix, where amount of pixels roughly corresponded to the value. So dot for 0, two dots for 1, checkerboard for 8 etc.
Then byte was represented as 16x16 matrix where each 4x4 area had the lower digit pattern, and these were arranged in the shape of the higher digit.
But at the end of the day, it wasn't really more readable.
But the current plans are unsustainable and prices will have to be effectively raised sooner or later:
> Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this.
I also never in my career have consciously looked at the GH star counter on a repo, let alone used it to make decisions.
Instead I look at (in addition to the above):
1. Who is the author? Is it just some person chasing Internet clout by making tons of 'cool' libraries across different domains? Or are they someone senior working in an industry sector from which project might actually benefit in expertise?
2. Is the author working alone? Are there regular contributors? Is there an established governance structure? Is the project going to survive one person getting bored / burning out / signing an NDA / dying?
3. Is the project style over substance? Did it introduce logos, discord channels, mascots too early? Is it trying too hard to become The New Hot Thing?
4. What are the project's dependencies? Is its dependency set conservative or is it going to cause supply chain problems down the line?
5. What's the project's development cadence? Is it shipping features and breaking APIs too fast? Has it ever done a patch release or backported fixes, or does it always live at the bleeding edge?
6. NEW ARRIVAL 2026! Is the project actually carefully crafted and well designed, or is it just LLM slop? Am I about to discover that even though it's a bunch of code it doesn't actually work?
7. If the project is security critical (handles auth, public facing protocol parsing, etc.): do a deeper dive into the code.
Good toolkit to have around. Recently used it to verify the true RPM of a system (using the accelerometer spectrum tool) against its control loop implementation.
Indeed. I always keep it installed on my devices, as it turns the phone into a poor man's tricorder, and that's handy sometimes.
Most recently I used it to check light levels at home in different rooms, to determine where we need to boost or replace LED strips. Sure, there's million Lux meter apps, but Phyphox is better than all of them and demonstrates why these things shouldn't be dedicated apps in the first place. In the past I also made use of EM and vibration frequency displays to troubleshoot hardware.
A complement to that is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.intoorbit.... which, once upon a time, helped me track down a source of rage-inducing, late-night high-frequency beeping that was driving us insane - down to specific apartment in a block on the other side of the street. I ended up friends with those neighbors, after teaching them how to disable the alarm clock on their Bluetooth radio when they go away for a weekend.
The lithography equivalents of that are laser direct write lithography and e-beam lithography. They've been used for decades in research labs, but they're impossibly slow for any mass production.
Atomic Semi are trying to make some derivative of these processes happen at a commercial scale.
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