Machines and computers use different communication protocols because they have different communication requirements. CAN, Modbus, EtherCAT, IP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, and TLS are examples of protocols that operate at different levels and solve different problems. CAN (Controller Area Network) is designed for multiple electronic controllers to communicate over a shared bus. It is widely used … Continue reading How Machines and Computers Communicate

Before PLCs, industrial machines were controlled largely by physical relays. A relay is essentially an electrically controlled switch. Engineers could connect hundreds or thousands of relays, buttons, sensors, and motors to build the machine's control logic. The problem was that the wiring itself became the program. If the machine's behavior needed to change, engineers had … Continue reading PLC: From Relay Wiring to Programmable Logic

A digital signal may look like a clean square wave on a circuit diagram, but after traveling through a long wire surrounded by motors, power electronics, and electromagnetic interference, the signal can become distorted or rounded. At some point, the receiver may no longer be able to reliably distinguish a 1 from a 0. One … Continue reading From CAN Bus to RTOS to PLC: Making Robots Work Reliably 02

I have started learning PLC and embedded engineering as a way to get closer to the actual hardware of robots. I have spent a lot of time thinking about AI agents, but an AI agent ultimately has to cross a very different boundary: from software into electricity, motors, sensors, and physical movement. The microcontroller (MCU) … Continue reading Learning PLC, Embedded Engineering to Robot Hardware 01

Studying Unitree's Go2 EDU robot through its website and support materials, the interesting part for me is the possibility of controlling the robot with an LLM. But before getting there, I need to understand the layers underneath in some detail. If I want to tell the robot something like, "Walk forward, look around, find a … Continue reading Pondering an Idea of LLM-Controlled Robot

The better model is not just a little better. In daily coding work, it can save huge amounts of time and mental energy. The difference is often whether you spend an hour going back and forth with the model or simply get the problem solved. I recently experienced this with GLM-5.3 Flash. I had been … Continue reading Use Better Model; Fable5.1 > GLM-5.3 Flash

The essence of an agent is surprisingly simple: codify the know-how of an expert. AI is already remarkably capable—it can reason, write code, analyze data, and solve many difficult problems. What it often lacks is the specific workflow and practical know-how of a particular job. It doesn't automatically know all the details, nuances, conventions, and … Continue reading The Essence of an Agent

The older I get, the more I believe that the ability to think clearly—to understand how the world works, how people behave, and what truly matters—is the foundation of a happy, fulfilling, rich, and successful life. Much of what I once experienced as mental or spiritual pain now seems, at least in part, to come … Continue reading Thinkability: Learning How the World Works

There are broadly two types of people when it comes to someone like Donald Trump. Trump constantly promotes himself. He doesn't seem particularly embarrassed by self-promotion. He can say, in effect: "I'm the best. I'm successful. I'm great." Most people, at least internally, would probably have a reaction like: That sounds very arrogant. How could … Continue reading Why Some People Love the Trump Type and Others Can’t Stand It

Context degradation is real. This session started with a long summary of prior work which is useful for continuity but it also means: stale information gets treated as current, AI check memory which could be outdated. The more context I carry, the harder it is to distinguish what's verified vs what's just noted. lose track of user's question … Continue reading AI Degradation in Long Contextual Conversations