I wrote an open-source simulated-annealing PCB placer to benchmark against Quilter, a commercial placement service. On a dense 161-net Arduino Giga shield, Quilter routed 99.4% of the board; my placer plateaued at 93.8%. Here is the full comparison, the numbers, and the specific class of signals that pyplacer couldn't get routed.
Kyegomez published OpenMythos as a speculative, open-source reconstruction of Claude Mythos. I ran the 1B variant on a Strix Halo (Radeon 8060S, ROCm) to test what an open reconstruction of a frontier model can and cannot teach you. The architecture's internal claims check out: rho(A) at init is exactly e^-1, the spectral-radius stability constraint prevents the failure mode it's designed to prevent, and hidden states blow up exactly as the LTI analysis predicts. What it does not teach you: anything about Claude Mythos.
Part three of a series on designing an Arduino Giga R1 level-shifter shield with Claude Code and open-source EDA tools. Covers the v0.4 respin: what Claude Code actually helped with, what it didn't, and what six hours of Freerouting clearance debugging revealed about the limits of LLM-assisted hardware design.
A subtle pin numbering convention mismatch in a Python-generated PCB turned a working design into a board where every signal on the dual-row headers was at the wrong physical position. How we found it, why it passed every automated check, and what the fix looks like.
A Z80 DIP-40 weighs 5.7 grams. Run Zork on it, or run Zork in a browser emulator. The bytes execute the same way. One of these is a thing in Heidegger's specific sense. The other isn't. This essay works out what's different, why the home lab and retro computing communities feel it, and why cloud abstraction is designed to erase the gathering.
Part two of the dual Z80 RetroShield series. The boards came back from PCBWay, got assembled, and nothing worked. Every address and data bus line was shorted to ground. This post covers the diagnostic process, the root cause (incomplete ground plane clearances in pcb-rnd's Gerber export), and the design fix.
