What intrigued me was the "just use a microcontroller" comment at the bottom of the page - I genuinely don't know if it was pinned because it's a joke, a genius idea or just top 10 dumbest comments of 2025
The comment is by the author. And it's not wrong! You can get super cheap microcontrollers for pennies that will act as an easy to use programmable oscillator, if that's what you want. And more to the point, you usually want an oscillator to _do something_, not just to wiggle in isolation, and the cheap microcontroller lets you skip the middleman in many cases.
Yes, you're using a million transistors to do something you could have done with a couple of discrete passives, but it will often result in a lower total BoM and development time. Not always.
Well, it's a bit of a chicken and the egg, no? Microcontroller won't work without a (most likely) crystal oscillator or something to act as a clock signal.
Now that I think about it, no, it's not even cheaper as XTALs are quite pricy compared to other discrete components.
I didn't mean to be rude - I interpreted the comment as "Would you like to build an (insert random object here)? Well, you can just BUY it and be done with it" - may not be as I put it (dumb) but certainly... simplistic and purpose-defeating
I mean, yes, if you're designing a microcontroller you need a clock source, but from the perspective of implementing a circuit as a more normal designer, the UC has it already. And lots of small UCs have an internal clock source so you can omit the external xo unless you need a particular frequency, accuracy, or in some cases a precisely timed micropower sleep. For example, the sub-$0.10 32 bit PY32F002A can do 24MHz internally -- but I would bet it doesn't have great temperature compensation or other things you'd want for timekeeping or being a good frequency ref. (But you're not going to get that out of $0.20 of components anyway.)
I have exactly zero functions that are written in both. So comparison is just intuitive:
My current projects make extensive use of numerical functions AND of regexes and grammars. Both used extensively. I am very satisfied with the performance on both aspects. It does the job. And there is no question that for the regexes and grammars, what I have goes FAR beyond what I ever dared to run in perl 5. Performance is good, including on this stuff that I feel would have been pushing perl 5.
Still, I write for expressiveness. It matters to me how fast I can write. And I am NOT satisfied with "searching through the doc". That's the main sore point for me. The doc is very good but online-first and local... eventually. So I am stuck using an online search function... which constantly falls short.
Not the person you replied to, but I'm a programmer and up until ~3 weeks ago I really only used AI for auto-complete, looking up API information, and constructing arcane CLI commands.
I decided to take a leap and use AI as much as possible to complete a ticket at work. Now, 3 weeks later AI is writing 90% of my code.
Granted, I'm not sitting back sipping on a latte while AI does my job. It's a very interactive process, I spend more time reviewing code and going back and forth with the AI to get the result I want. But it's become surprisingly good.
I wouldn't say I'm anywhere close to 10x more productive, but perhaps 50%.
It definitely has its amazing moments, but sometimes I get caught in a loop of expecting it to do the thing, it not working, and spinning my wheels a lot instead of just solving it myself. I think I’m still learning how to use the tools effectively, but the random nature of it makes it difficult.
and then it generated something that looks like valid source based on that garbage.
is the source it spat out runable? then it is not the same program as the input and (any way you spin it) nothing has been deobfuscated but just dreamed about the prompt a bit and then shown you its dream diary notes. wake up boy, this is statistics, not a magic swiss army knife API.
https://wccftech.com/no-samsung-isnt-phasing-out-of-the-cons...