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amaterasu

120 karma · joined May 4, 2014

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amaterasu··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…
amaterasu··on Code and Trust: Vibrators to Pacemakers
I'm trivialising, but a lot of software in medical devices is turning a GPIO pin on/off in response to another pin, then announcing that it did so. The piece missing from the article is that the assumed probability of software/firmware (or anything really) failing is 1.0. Everything is engineered around the assumption that things (_especially_ software) WILL fail and minimising the consequences when they do. LLM's writing the code will happen soon, it's a GPIO pin control after all. LLM's proving the code is as safe as possible and that they have thought about the failure modes will be a while.
amaterasu··on Australians to face age checks from search engines
The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting:

> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.

amaterasu··on White House unveils Cyber Trust Mark program for consumer devices
Underwriters Laboratories, UL. Look at the back of pretty much any mains powered device and you'll see their mark. They were founded 130 years ago, and test and warrant devices (typically high voltage) to be safe. Security is a new thing for them, but they're well suited to provide the services.
amaterasu··on Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced
In which shell?
amaterasu··on Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad
Ignoring the common trope that developers are bad testers (I am, but not all devs are), QA presence allows teams to move faster by reducing the developer test burden to automated regression, and developer acceptance testing only. Good QA can often assist with those tasks too, further improving team velocity. Also, moving tasks to people who specialise in them is not usually a poor decision.

The best way I've found to sell QA to management (especially sales/marketing/non-technical management), is to redefine them as marketing. QA output is as much about product and brand reputation management as finding bugs. IMO, nothing alienates customers faster than bugs, and bad experiences result in poor reputation. Marketing and sales people can usually assign value to passive marketing efforts, and recognise things that are damaging to retention and future sales.

amaterasu··on Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro
If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned...
amaterasu··on Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro
Some sensors do this internally, unusual though. The rest of the high-end ones apply curves manually in software directly at the egress of the sensor. The reason they don't in all cases is that it complicates black level correction, gamut transforms and demosaic operations (without some assumptions).
amaterasu··on Batman easter egg (click the bat signal)
For the Australians reading this, Gotham city is a brothel in Melbourne, ymmv on clicking this link at work or school.
amaterasu··on Australia has almost eliminated the coronavirus – by putting faith in science
Still ending really... There are still travel restriction from metropolitan Melbourne to regional Victoria - expected to end Sunday at midnight. Retail capacity is also limited still, but ramping back up.
amaterasu··on Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package
I've been using Kicad for the same workloads as you, and Altium + Cadence for heavier ones over the years, and I must say they hit the nail on the head here with their comments about KiCad: https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...

I'll have to find a simple project to test this out on though, because as you say, It needs to be a huge improvement on KiCad to warrant a switch.

amaterasu··on Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn'
Also, there is significant political opposition to this, specifically in the Victorian highlands.
amaterasu··on New South Wales rolls out mobile phone detection cameras
Seconded it not being about safety. In Victoria, traffic infringement revenue is included in the state budget. I'm assuming that the NSW government does the same, so at $344-$457AUD per offence, this is likely just another revenue generating exercise.
amaterasu··on Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution
Every SoC I've dealt with containing a WiFi core has a dedicated coprocessor (RPU is a common name, depending on vendor) running its' own firmware. So more likely, _that_ core would go funky, then crash. The kernel might have code to recover that, but I doubt it, and it certainly would complain the whole way as you say.
amaterasu··on Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution
And unlike hdmi 2.0, 1.4 wont have scrambling in, so any termination issues will sing quite well.
amaterasu··on How to run your own mail server (2017)
Not just the big players, I had a conversation with the administrator of the Australian ISP Bigpond about why my server was being spammed. Their response was verbatim "We blocked Digital Ocean, because we get spam from there" Even with good reputation servers, admins are happy to reject legitimate mail for any reason.
amaterasu··on Developing open-source FPGA tools
The situation for Vivado (Xilinx) is more or less the same, Tcl for everything but terrible documentation.
amaterasu··on Australia Will Join U.S. for 2024 Moon Mission, Mars Exploration
Because Australian politicians are loath to invest in anything, after spending ~20 years convincing the public that government spending is bad.
amaterasu··on FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights
Mine was repaired by apple prior to the recall, and is still listed as requiring replacement via the serial number search too...
amaterasu··on FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights
This database is inaccurate, my machine was repaired early this year prior to the recall (irritatingly at my cost as the batteries were swollen). It is still listed as requiring replacement batteries via this search...
amaterasu··on All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
I'm trivialising the problem, but whichever station energises the grid first becomes the reference. An operating grid has what may as well be infinite inertia (it isn't infinite of course), so new stations coming online must match it (or try and change the phase of the grid to match theirs). I visited a power station in Melbourne many years ago, and they have the shattered remains of a turbine and generator that was connected with a phase mismatch.
amaterasu··on MOVE an injury not RICE (2017)
> I think OTC NSAIDs are abused every bit as much as opiates, though not as harmful obviously

This is true only in the short term IMHO. Most people discount (or are unaware of) the severity of long term use leading to gastrointestinal issues. NSAID enteropathy is no joke...

amaterasu··on Credit cards automatically providing updated card info to subscribing merchants
Related question - Are there any services offering virtual credit cards in Australia presently?
amaterasu··on A 5km Asteroid May Briefly Occult the Brightest Star in the Night Sky
Verb meaning for occult is "to cut off from view by interposing something".
amaterasu··on Munchery Shuts Down
Looks like 3 cities, https://www.fastcompany.com/40571483/munchery-is-shutting-do...
amaterasu··on Platinum from the Road (2016) [video]
Taking a quick look around, the average concentration of platinum group metals in ore seems to be ~1-15g/T, so if his calculations and findings check out, at 6.7g/T this is better than a number of commercially mined deposits...
amaterasu··on World first as wind turbine upgraded with high temperature superconductor
Would be interesting to see the actual cost differential in this vs permanent magnets.

They don't go into details about the cost of fabricating the HTS, but gadolinium is less than half the cost (in oxide form) of neodymium according to the article, and it uses 1/1000th the amount.

amaterasu··on Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038
Off topic, but with smaller lithography, ANY subatomic particle of sufficient energy becomes a problem: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp...

I've spent months chasing random crashes on another vendor's device which turned out to be solder ball alpha emission issues.

amaterasu··on Ask HN: What is one Vim trick most people don't know?
any reason for not using :%s/a/b/g for the last one?
amaterasu··on Ask HN: What is one Vim trick most people don't know?
A couple of nice ones: `gq` for re-wrapping a visually selected block of text (<shift>-v is simplest) to your text width.

`=` for re-indenting a selection to your current shift-width settings etc. (or `gg=G` to just do the whole file)

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