Archives for August 2026

August 30, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Embedded AI Book – PCBWay Offer

Five of the projects in my book on Embedded AI are built using custom PCBs: the Noise Suppression carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, the Pico MIDI Keyboard and VS1053 Synthesizer that form the AI music project, and the Battery Monitor and Display & Logging shields that make up the battery characterization rig. These are circuits that do not work well on a breadboard, so each was designed as a proper board with the Gerbers, schematics, and bills of materials released under the MIT license. Getting them manufactured is straightforward: all five are shared projects on PCBWay with the fabrication files already attached, so ordering takes a few clicks and boards typically arrive within one to two weeks. To make building the projects even more affordable, PCBWay is offering readers a discount.

PCBWay is offering 200 readers of Embedded AI a $10 discount on orders over $30 (one use per user). Redeem the code EmbeddedAI2026 at checkout. The code is valid until April 30, 2027 (once activated, it must be used within six months). Each board costs around $5 but shipping is roughly $25 (depending on your location), so order the boards together to minimise freight, and the combined order will clear the $30 minimum.

https://www.pcbway.com/project/member/?bmbno=994A3415-F0F1-41

August 29, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Large Language Monkeys: Why Noise Yields No Knowledge

There is an old claim that a truly random source contains all knowledge: give monkeys enough time at typewriters and Shakespeare falls out. In 2024 two Sydney mathematicians did the arithmetic and found the universe ends first. But the idea has a modern tail. We now have language models that can spot meaningful text instantly, so why not let randomness generate and an LLM extract? This episode works through why that fails, and why the failure is precise: in a random stream, the address of any text costs as many bits as the text itself. Along the way: Borges’ Library of Babel, a website that actually built it, DeepMind systems that made the generate-and-filter idea work by cheating in exactly the right way, and what your brain does with noise that an LLM cannot.

August 29, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The Language LLMs Need Is Not the One Being Built

Vibe coding did not make the programming language irrelevant. It changed which properties of a language matter.

While vibe coding my latest application I got to thinking about whether someone needed to create a computer language which explicitly targets LLMs. Assuming we get to a point where you don’t need to review the underlying code (a big assumption I know), then does the language used matter as long as you get the required outcome?

If a human never reads the code, the argument goes, why generate syntax built for human eyes at all? Proposals are being circulated for machine-native formats. For example, JSON programs, semantic graphs, and languages with grammars minimised for constrained decoding. The premise is that human readability is an obsolete requirement we can now delete.

I think the premise is wrong, but the question underneath it is good. There is real value in a language designed around how LLMs fail. It just looks nothing like a machine-native syntax, and the solution has already been found.

August 23, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Great Minds Think (a Little Too Much) Alike

Anthropic gave thirty AI agents the same coding task. Eighteen of them named their git branch exactly the same thing.

That result opens one of the strangest findings of 2026: when teams of AI agents face the classic “hidden profile” experiment, where the shared evidence points to the wrong answer and the decisive facts are scattered across individuals, they succeed only 17 to 36 percent of the time. Human groups in the original 1985 study? 18 percent. Forty years, a completely different kind of mind, the same failure.

In this episode we dig into why. We trace the mathematics of groupthink from information cascades to Condorcet juries, then follow the trail into territory embedded engineers know well: the 1986 Knight and Leveson experiment that shattered the independence assumption in N-version software, Airbus’s dissimilar redundancy, and the Lufthansa flight where two frozen sensors outvoted the one telling the truth. Along the way, honeybees show us a working reference design: a two-milligram brain that refuses to repeat a rumor.

We close with the fixes: engineered dissenters, forced disclosure protocols, reputation infrastructure for agents, and the case for “keeping the weirdness alive” through a genuinely diverse AI ecosystem, including heterogeneous fleets of small models at the edge.

August 18, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Purpose as a Service

What happens when work no longer gives our lives structure, identity, or meaning? This episode explores “Purpose as a Service”—the idea that purpose could be intentionally designed and delivered in an age of mass automation.

We examine the decline of traditional anchors such as employment, religion, and community; the rise of wellness programs, professional coaching, and AI companions; and what universal basic income trials reveal about the limits of financial security. Can external services genuinely help people build fulfilling lives, or does true purpose depend on personal agency and authorship?

Consider this a blueprint for one of humanity’s biggest future challenges: learning how to live well when a job is no longer at the center of life. #embeddedAI #podcast

August 18, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The Correct Path to AGI?

Recursive self-improvement, Google’s world models, and what the jagged road to AGI looks like. Good sketched the idea in 1965 — build a machine slightly better than us at designing machines, and it designs a better one, which designs a better one, until you get what he called an intelligence explosion. Sixty years later the loop exists. The question is what kind of loop it is, and whether it gets us to AGI before the money or the science runs out.

August 15, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

The One Rule You Cannot Talk Your Way Past

On August 14, auto mode becomes the default permission mode in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans. Instead of asking you to approve each shell command, a separate classifier reviews every action and blocks the dangerous ones. I wanted to know what “dangerous” means in concrete terms, so I dumped the classifier’s rulebook. There are 17 allow rules, 65 soft_deny rules, and one hard_deny rule. All 65 soft rules can be overridden. The single hard rule can’t. That asymmetry is the interesting bit.

August 13, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

An AI Text Watermark Will Not Survive the First Paste

Since 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act has been enforceable. If you provide a generative AI system to users in the EU, its output must be “detectable as artificially generated”, and the Act’s associated Code of Practice makes it clear that regulators expect this to mean watermarking: a hidden signature embedded in the text itself. The problem is, it can’t be reliably done. #embeddedAI #AIAdvances

August 9, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Atlas and Embedded Architecture

Trust, reflexes, and what a Disney animator knows about robot safety

Leland Hepler spent fourteen years as an animator at Disney before he ended up at Boston Dynamics, and he told a story in a recent webinar that has stuck with me. He works around Spot robots every day. They wander the office and nobody gives them a second thought. But when colleagues run experiments that destabilise Spot’s behaviour, making it slightly less predictable, Hepler finds himself getting uncomfortable. Not because Spot could hurt him. Because, in his words, he no longer has a mental model for what is going on under the hood.