Comments by "TheEvertw" (@TheEvertw) on "Curious Droid" channel.

Going to the moon was a walk in the park compared to the epic journey made by the semicon industry. And it ain't finished yet!
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Ah, the wonders of analog electronics! You only need a single diode to create a functional AM radio receiver, you know.
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Research & development is a field where experience does count.
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keith moore Have you noticed the maneuvers made by the last sidewinder in the video? That dance involved an awful lot of decision making! Alternatively, as all robotic behavior has been somehow programmed or trained into it, one can argue that no robot has the ability to decide anything.
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keith moore "a robot would be able to tell" Only if you, the programmer / trainer, told it very clearly how, and what to do in either case. For a robot, the task to differentiate between a cargo or fighter plane is little different from optimizing its flight path to intersect with its target.
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The most important tool of the engineer is her/his brain.
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@saudade2100 "They went to the moon" And back again! That was the hard part. (In Dutch, "they / it went to the moon" means the same as "it all went to pieces")
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Many companies do not treat the brains behind their products well. Usually, that does not end well. Boeing itself has recently (re)discovered that.
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@letsburn00 On the other hand, modern engineers don't need to spend days upon days tediously working through equations or hand-crafting prototypes. Computers allow them to investigate the design space much quicker. And I mean MUCH quicker. The modern focus on core work has more to do with the way projects are managed nowadays than with anything else.
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2:14: Nice clip! You can see the soldier putting the tip of the shell inside a device by the side of the gun before loading it. This is where the old Time Fuse is set, using information from (presumably) a director or radar. The device turns the ring that sets the timing of the fuse. Pretty high-tech, for the time.
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What makes the difference in these situation is not any knowledge that can be put in a book. It is more a gut feeling that leads to the root of a problem. It is also the experience that guides in determining which characteristics of a part have system-wide relevance, and which have not.
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@johnsutcliffe3209 "nuances weren't written down" That only means they would not be able to get the design right in one go. They would need to test and refine, re-doing some of the work that was done on the initial F1. But modern engineers would definitely be able to do that successfully, and in much less time.
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@MilanRegec That is a much less heroic story. That is the story of a company that cut corners, only to discover there were consequences, first of all for the people that trusted them.
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Every generation of managers needs to learn the same old lessons: - You can't just replace experienced engineers with cheaper ones. - Throwing more people at a project to save it, only makes things worse.
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@metalbob3335 Just don't let out the magic smoke!
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The imminent end of Moore's law has been predicted since at least the eighties. Yet companies like ASML have treated that Law as Gospel for decades.
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That is because, like valves, MOSFETS are tranducers that control current by gate voltage. Unlike BJT''s where current is controlled by current. Also, BJT's have limited power amplification, but MOSFETS do not as the power they consume at the input is essentially zero.
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It is a wonderful world!
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@rodanone4895 "have you studied fuzzy/neural systems" I have indeed. fuzzy controllers are fine in this context, but I have problems with neural networks controlling weapon systems due to their inherent non-determinism. First there needs to be a legal framework where a neural network (and the company that created it) that caused collateral damage is treated equivalently as a human that does. Humans make mistakes, and so do neural networks. Re: modern Aim9's: Likely these do not use AI / neural networks but instead use some form of predictive control, probably a robust variant. They probably calculate the likelihood their target will be at a certain point in space as a certain time based on observed target behavior, and optimize the probability of intercept, perhaps even using a model of expected evasive maneuvers & counter measures. At least that is how I would do it. As this involves a lot of classification of observed behavior, there might be some opportunity for neural networks to detect e.g. the ejection of Flares and picking the target out of these flares. But I would not let them control the overall flight path planning. Using neural networks as black boxes that get all the sensor data and control all actuators is far too uncertain in my opinion. But to use one or more networks to solve sub-problems of limited scope with well-defined situations seems promising. By limiting the scope of the problem a net has to handle, they become orders of magnitude easier to train.
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3:00 -- The old fuses were NOT called VT-fuse, but simply "time fuse". VT-fuse is actually the old name for what is now called the proximity fuse.
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11:04 - "Capacitively charged" No, the charging of the floating gate is a quantum-mechanical effect. It is called "Quantum Tunneling". Traditional science can not explain how charge can "appear" in these isolated gates, because they are, in fact, isolated.
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@RobinTheBot Up to a point. Smart phones are so complex that no single human being can understand every essential detail. But certainly most people can get an overview of how they really work. I, or for instance Curious Droid, could explain a lot in half an hour.
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I love that Dutch SMART-L radar on top of these ships ;-) G e k o l o n i z e e r d
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