riskable

I'm not convinced that humans don't reason in a similar fashion. When I'm asked to produce pointless bullshit at work my brain puts in a similar level of reasoning to an LLM.

Think about "normal" programming: An experienced developer (that's self-trained on dozens of enterprise code bases) doesn't have to think much at all about 90% of what they're coding. It's all bog standard bullshit so they end up copying and pasting from previous work, Stack Overflow, etc because it's nothing special.

The remaining 10% is "the hard stuff". They have to read documentation, search the Internet, and then—after all that effort to avoid having to think—they sigh and start actually start thinking in order to program the thing they need.

LLMs go through similar motions behind the scenes! Probably because they were created by software developers but they still fail at that last 90%: The stuff that requires actual thinking.

Eventually someone is going to figure out how to auto-generate LoRAs based on test cases combined with trial and error that then get used by the AI model to improve itself and that is when people are going to be like, "Oh shit! Maybe AGI really is imminent!" But again, they'll be wrong.

AGI won't happen until AI models get good at retraining themselves with something better than basic reinforcement learning. In order for that to happen you need the working memory of the model to be nearly as big as the hardware that was used to train it. That, and loads and loads of spare matrix math processors ready to go for handing that retraining.

The only reason we're not there yet is memory limitations.

Eventually some company will come out with AI hardware that lets you link up a petabyte of ultra fast memory to chips that contain a million parallel matrix math processors. Then we'll have an entirely new problem: AI that trains itself incorrectly too quickly.

Just you watch: The next big breakthrough in AI tech will come around 2032-2035 (when the hardware is available) and everyone will be bitching that "chain reasoning" (or whatever the term turns out to be) isn't as smart as everyone thinks it is.

Pressing down too hard breaks the pushbutton functionality. It has nothing to do with stick drift.

But since we're talking about what causes things... You know what actually causes potentiometer-based sticks to fail fast? Sweat. That's right!

The NaCL in your sweat—even the tiniest microscopic amounts—is enough to degrade the coating and the brushes on potentiometers. The more your hands sweat, the faster your sticks will degrade.

Got sweaty palms? Best to use hall effect sticks or save up to buy new ones on the regular! 😁

Also: If you allow your controllers to get really cold and regularly (and rapidly) warm them up with your hands while playing that can have a negative impact too.

At scale a hall effect stick is about $0.25 more than a potentiometer version. That's about $38,000,000 if they sell as many Switch 2s as they sold Switches.

Sooooo... Nothing. That's basically a rounding error to Nintendo. Remember: That figure is over eight years.

If it means they won't have lawsuits (which cost millions on their own), fewer returns, and happier customers it most certainly would be worth losing out on ~$5 million/year.

The part you're missing isn't the cost. It's the potential sales from replacement joycons. If you're going to make a devil's advocate style, capitalist argument that's the one to make.

I don't think it's any of that, though. I think it's just management being too strict about design constraints (which I pointed out in an earlier comment).

I design things that use hall effect sensors... The magnets in the joycons would not have interfered. Those magnets are:

1. Too far away from the sticks to matter.
2. Perpendicular/orthogonal to the magnets that would be in the sticks.

Besides, you can cram hall effect stuff super tight just by inserting a tiny piece of magnetic shielding between components. Loads of products do this (mostly to prevent outside magnets from interfering but it's the same concept). What is this magic magnetic shielding technology? EMI tape.

There's a zillion types and they're all cheap and very widely used in manufacturing. I guarantee your phone, laptop, and many other electronics you own have some sort of EMI tape inside of them.

Just about every assembly line that exists for mass produced electronics has at least one machine that spits out tape a bit like a CNC machine (or they pay the cheapest worker possible to place it).

Note: Hall effect sticks aren't that much more expensive than potentiometer sticks (difference is less than a dollar at scale). However, they require more space than potentiometer sticks and if you're doing something custom (which Nintendo always does) it can be a great big expense to change your manufacturing processes to insert tiny magnets into injection molded parts.

I suspect the latter is the reason why they abandoned using hall effect or TMR sticks for the Switch 2.

My wild speculation: Nintendo probably gave their engineers some design constraints that limited their ability to use off-the-shelf HE parts (everything I've seen really is too big). Rather than change the constraints slightly in order to make the product usable with such parts they stayed stubborn in the hopes that their engineers would come up with an innovative solution. This sort of thing can work to force innovation at really big companies—if they're not super top-down in terms of decision making.

I'm sure that the Nintendo engineers came up with their own perfectly-workable HE/TMR stick designs but had them shot down in meetings where they discussed the manufacturing costs.

Hall effect encoders/sticks are not new tech. They've been around for decades.

Remember the Sega Dreamcast? It came out 26 years ago and featured hall effect sticks in the controllers.

This just proves that Google's AI is a cut above the rest!

Everyone that works with Trump always regrets it eventually. Everyone.

It is true. What's your upload speed? 😁

Fiber connections are synchronous. Meaning that the download speed is the same as the upload speed.

A gigabit fiber connection gives you 1 gigabit down and 1 gigabit up. A "gigabit" cable connection gives you 1.something gigabit down (it allows for spikes... Usually) and like 20-50 megabits upload.

Fiber ISPs may still limit your upload speeds but that's not a limitation of the technology. It's them oversubscribing their (back end) bandwidth.

Cable Internet really can't give you gigabit uploads without dedicating half the available channels for that purpose and that would actually interfere with their ability to oversubscribe lines. It's complicated... But just know that the DOCSIS standards are basically hacks (that will soon run into physical limitations that prevent them from providing more than 10gbs down) in comparison to fiber.

The DOCSIS 4.0 standard claims to be able to handle 10gbs down and 6gbs up realistically that's never going to happen. Instead, cable companies will use it to give people 5gbs connections with 100 megabit uploads because they're bastards.

This guy does berry good work.

This assumes the people in the Trump administration are capable of feeling embarrassment or shame.