Quentin

I've been thru the "wow photonics yes put as many things onto the chip as possible" phase, and now I'm getting old and would start asking the annoying questions of "oh what's your grating coupler efficiency, why are you spilling light everywhere and heating up your fridge" (absolute good direction, more cryogenic RF people should learn from RF photonics people and do more plumbing with fibers and less with coax cables. Same for carrying any signals out.)

@photonjaeger @RYANHINGSHING Just stop using the word "vibe coding". No serious person "vibe codes" or if they call it that they are - I would say - just misusing that word or intentionally trying to frame other people's work as being poor quality or even evil.

@QuentinWach @RYANHINGSHING I think the qualification noun here is “system”. There is no “vibe coded system” that is valuable.

I am sorry for my technical friends here, but technical capabilities don’t mean anything if they don’t meet market need. A common failure mode is overengineering (common in Bay Area, Japan, Germany, etc.), @RYANHINGSHING - why do you need semi spec equipment to make solar cells?

Absolutely beautiful rant about AI in Linux Kernel from Linus yesterday: I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it. Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint. But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do. The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side. We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either. The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology. Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the _point_ of the project. This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be. In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools. Linus

I think many hardware people went into hardware because they want to work with their hands - on things that are tangible. There is an inherent rejection of anything ephemeral and abstract, like mathematics or software. Realizing this divide is what initially motivated me to really go all-in on software within the hardware world. Having been interested in generative and inverse design for over a decade and then finding myself in an environment where people would happily run broken software on Windows XP seemed like a clear opportunity for me to try and make a difference. Germans though have rejected the digital age more than most countries for a very long-time and still struggle with this "Neuland". World leaders in communication technologies but incapable of making use of these technologies ourselves. I have no answer for why that is.

@jwt0625 You don’t have so general - I can be far more specific. Why can’t Germans produce far better software to work on their world class hardware, @QuentinWach @iamfabian?

i see many hardware people trash talk about software here everyday, but do you realize how bad software is in many hardware industries? how deep in the caves and trenches are people that they don't even realize they are suffering? this divide between software and hardware makes no sense, you always need good understanding of both to do things well, and there's only the division between people who want to keep doing things the old way, and people who want to change, who want automation and optimization.

@bzogrammer That looks awesome though really complex for an ALU! Can you annotate this to show where what functionality is located? Also, it does look like much of this can be modularized on the layout-level as well to clean things up. How do you approach that in digital design?

Current ALU layout, clock timing has improved

Waveguide crossings are interesting structures - if you are an electrical engineer, you want to avoid crossings. But if you are a photonics engineer, you can have crossings. Check out my friend @QuentinWach’s open source simulation package featuring an example waveguide crossing!

People get a rush from murder because it makes them feel alive - as if they are in control of death. I think for many, celebrating the death and the thought of death of others is a way to deny their mortality. It makes them feel superior over the person and the idea. One can analyze this more deeply. I am fan of Ernest Becker's work "The Denial of Death" in which he essentially invents the research area of "Terror Management Theory" as he analyzes how people form and defend their beliefs based on their deeply routed fear of death with the goal to deny it.

The world wants me to die. My incurable disease diagnosis became global news. It was omnipresent on social media and 1,900 articles were written in a matter of days. Many were saddened. However, joy dominated the commentary. People pointed to schadenfreude, the pleasure of another's failure. Yes, there’s that. There is a special place in people’s hearts that loves to see others fail, especially when that person’s presence threatens their own psychological stability in some way or helps them feel better about themselves. But, if you look over the social media commentary about me, you’ll see that pattern: “he deserved it.” I deserved it because I challenged death. The crowd was running a deeply rooted psychological script that represents the oldest, most deeply embedded stories of human culture. This was the first story ever written down, 4,000 years ago. Gilgamesh sought eternal life after losing someone he loved, only to have the plant of youth stolen by a serpent as he bathed. Leaving him to accept his mortality. Asclepius became so skilled at rejuvenation that he raised the dead. As punishment, Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt to enforce life and death authority. This is the story of Jesus. Pontius Pilate offered a choice between a thief and the immortalist, and the crowd demanded the execution. People need this story conclusion to keep themselves sane. The challenger must lose and the loss must appear deserved. It’s a shield of self preservation. For if death is inevitable, their existence and that of their loved ones is justified and unavoidable. If death is not inevitable, nothing about their reality is safe. I occupy the same philosophical and archetypal position as Gilgamesh, Asclepius and Jesus. This statement will draw outrage and accusations of blasphemy, hubris and narcissism. Nevertheless, it’s the pattern that has repeated itself for thousands of years. Death has been the omnipresent concern of the human race. It encapsulates our greatest fears, joy and curiosities. The discourse around it changes over time; however, the fundamentals remain unchanged. What’s different about this moment, that is unlike any other moment, is that physical death may no longer be inevitable. What if I didn’t deserve it? And what if I am your ally, and not a threat?

@jwt0625 my god, this happens to me all the time, too. And I remember many of the discussions quite vividly

in my dream last night my subconsciousness came up with a meetup and made up fictitious characters from various companies and we all sat down and discussed where we should be using vcsels and where to be using SiPho. maybe this is the way to make people who rarely talk to each other to talk to each other.

@RYANHINGSHING @photonjaeger Sry @RYANHINGSHING for catching stray shots here 😂

@photonjaeger @QuentinWach Maybe Only optics😓

If you think about light day and night like me, consider trying @QuentinWach’s solver beamz. For example, @RYANHINGSHING would benefit from doing some of these gedankenexperiment in simulations with beamz before he comments on silicon photonics.

@photonjaeger @RYANHINGSHING 😉

@QuentinWach @RYANHINGSHING Yes, I always have more faith in a practitioner knowing his craft.

@photonjaeger @gevero True!!

@QuentinWach @gevero That is a fair point, but you might want to use floating point with 64 bits for other simulations later if you are going to do multi physics simulations later.

As many here know, I have written my own GPU-accelerated FDTD photonics package for photonic chip designers meant to be practical, familiar, accurate and fast. It is called BEAMZ and it is free & open source. 🎉 It's now quite easy to reproduce common photonics examples and notebooks many of you will know already. And doing so helps me polish up the API and fix remaining bugs. For example, here is the famous cosine crossing by Sujith Chandran et al. (2020). Notebook: beamzorg.github.io/beamz-notebook… This is not a wrapper nor is it supposed to be a mostly academic exercise with to goal to publish papers. Instead, the goal is a modern, reliable and convenient software application for professionals to get work done faster, easier, with more control. Reproducing known examples is one thing but getting feedback from the community is now becoming very important as well... So please try it out! 👏 Tell me everything you'd like to have changed or added! I hope this tool is going to be helpful. And I appreciate any feedback. #Photonics #IntegratedPhotonics #SiliconPhotonics #Simulation #EM

😁 FP32 is fine for photonic FDTDs. In most normal simulations, the dominant error is not floating-point roundoff but grid resolution, staircasing/subpixel averaging, material models, source setup, PML settings, etc. I've put a lot of work into this. You might be skeptical still because other solvers outside FDTD really require higher precision and Meep uses FP64 - and indeed you can enable FP64 in BEAMZ, too - but I just really don't think it is worth the performance trade-off in >95% of cases.

@QuentinWach Thanks for this beautiful software! 😀 What are the tradeoffs for GPU acceleration? Does single precision FP creates problems?

The notebook (again): beamzorg.github.io/beamz-notebook…

My babies are getting so smart, it's freaking me out. I was looking forward to using GA or bayesian optimisation to find a sweet set of parameters, but hand-tuning is giving scarily good results. I cant stop watching! (No global coordinator, all acting entirely on local cues)

It doesn't feel great to be the one who writes the DRC. But I am German... ZE RULEZ ARE ZE RULEZ

@humphilomath Still haven't pushed the official next release but it will be a big one, finally making beamz an actual high accuracy, high performance tool for photonics. 👍

Vibes (of the electromagnetic field) only - go try this out…

should've bought some photonics stocks when I first saw this video.. anyway this is a photonic integrated circuit chip from a 1.6T DWDM transceiver module by Infinera (2 wavelengths x 2 polarizations (DP-64QAM) x 96 GBaud), and I'll make some guess on what is going on on this PIC. before I start, you can zoom in onto the edges and see the facets were cleaved... (the year was already ~2020) (image credit: siliconpr0n.org/map/infinera/1…)