Trace.Space reposted this
Richard Feynman famously said: "Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings." Absurd, and yet that's exactly what building software-defined hardware is about. You get the hardware part which is bound by the cold hard reasoning of the laws of physics. And you also get the whimsical behavior of software that was at some point built by a human and their mental model. To make matters more interesting you now also get non-deterministic systems (autonomous driving, AI etc.) that will act a certain way in most cases.. if you are lucky. Put that all together and you get exactly that: electrons with feelings. What was once a facetious remark about quantum physics is deeply true today. The way hardware is made to perform functions is very different form what it used to be. Yet, many methods and tools still used today come from an era where hardware was mostly mechanical and definitely deterministic.
