This little baby class D PAM8403 5V mini amp, driving 8ohm speakers.

In actual use, it seems to use surprisingly little current (<<300mA RMS\* I think) as I'm running it fairly low power. Low enough, I think, to reasonably run through a USB smart switch.

The problem I'm having is the initial inrush current on power on, which severely upsets the USB smart switch, causing it to get stuck in a reset loop.

That's messy, nasty, I best clean that up.

I imagine it's caused by the decoupling reservoir cap, the 470uF built into the PAM8403 board (+ I originally had an extra Panasonic FL 1500uF 6.3v across the USB C input socket.)

What would be an effective tidy small way to limit the inrush current to sane values for this wee box?

* A low value resistor? (Feels wasteful/messy.)

* Inductor (intuition says There Be Dragons if I'm not careful? DIY choke maybe?)

* NTC thermistor (they're mainly designed for mains though aren't they?)

___

\* As opposed to torture testing it between 20Hz to 20KHz square wave full scale into 4ohm load resistors. Wild that such a little chip can do that and not turn in to fire!.

Unwisely, I've been at the soldering iron again!

BEHOLD! MY LIFE'S WORK!

MY MAGNET POSSUM MAGNUS OPTREX MANGY OCCULTIST MAGNIFICIENT OCTOPUS!

The CHARGE it you BASTARD™ cable!

• Why? - Because I needed one
• Does it work? - Well enough
• Is it wise? - Errr r/lostlostredditors/ ?
• Are you proud of yourself? - Oh yes, very much so, thank you, and thanks for asking!

I got a shock today when asking ChatGPT 5.3 (mix of instant and thinking) about a physics concept, when it spontaneously included an ASCII diagram that seemed to be correct (until recently, ChatGPT has been hilariously bad at ASCII art.)

The success with the ASCII diagram piqued my curiosity to follow up a *very* informal unscientific rough test I've been doing over the last few years, of the various evolving ChatGPT models' inherent "understanding" of what objects look like in 2D space, by asking them to generate an svg file of a Roman Centurion.

The attached images are renders of these svg files (available on request), numbered 1 (oldest using old ChatGPT models) to 5 (the latest, today, using ChatGPT 5.3.)

I got quite a big shock given how well ChatGPT 5.3 did on this task compared to previous models?!

Prompt: *Could you do a Roman Centurion as an svg file? (Actual svg file as an output)*

Conversation link (scroll to the bottom for the pertinent part): *https://chatgpt.com/s/t\_69f68234272881918da2e1706a0854d2\*

**Q: Has this model sucked up a lot of new vector art of roman soldiers that the previous ones didn't have, or is this real evolution in this model's abilities to "visualise" in 2D space?**

I got a shock today when asking ChatGPT 5.3 (mix of instant and thinking) about a physics concept, when it spontaneously included an ASCII diagram that seemed to be correct (until recently, ChatGPT has been hilariously bad at ASCII art.)

The success with the ASCII diagram piqued my curiosity to follow up a very informal unscientific rough test I've been doing over the last few years, of the various evolving ChatGPT models' inherent "understanding" of what objects look like in 2D space, by asking them to generate an svg file of a Roman Centurion.

The attached images are renders of these svg files (available on request), numbered 1 (oldest using old ChatGPT models) to 5 (the latest, today, using ChatGPT 5.3.)

I got quite a big shock given how well ChatGPT 5.3 did on this task compared to previous models?!

Prompt: Could you do a Roman Centurion as an svg file? (Actual svg file as an output)

Conversation link (scroll to the bottom for the pertinent part): https://chatgpt.com/share/69f6a330-bf28-8384-9c64-1b625ebcf6fb

DON'T attach a photo, let it hallucinate one!

EDIT: Looks like the fox is a real piece of bad taxidermy art (overtrained on that image maybe?) Bit naughty that it's doing such replication of real photos without the safety filters jumping in.