dosman33

You're suggesting this is an accident. Lawmakers don't write any laws any more, that happens on K-Street by lobbyists. But the same idea applies to whoever is writing these horrific things. We're still living with the DMCA all these years later too.

Moar people need to be talking about this guys work, a buddy clued me in to it last year. Creating new species without any genetic changes... it's huge. Not only has he discovered a new communication control channel in biology, machine learning is unlocking the commands to intelligently manipulate that channel at will. It's many times deeper this too, this is incredible work.

Want those tree-grown steaks rather than a stew of muscle cells with no structure? This work is how you grow an intact cow muscle without the rest of the cow with ease. Want to tell those cancer cells using your body as a petrie dish to knock it off and to start working with the rest of your body again? This is a direct path towards that too.

Comparing his 2020 ALife talk to another one published in 2021 he's still making progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0

The mainstream of higher-ed biology is not yet fully on board and is still snickering at his work because he is an outsider, but his results are impressive enough that doubters will become irrelevant soon enough.

I'm calling BS on this. Total lack of any specifics, and I don't need to know what brand of hardware is giving them fits. I've been responsible for tens of millions of dollars in hardware over the years of my career and PCIe has never been the source of my headaches. Disk drives, memory, and firmware bugs are the usual suspects. They can get right out of here with their holier-than-thou attitude on this.

Separate from the article, the damming thing in his email release is the strong suggestion that he knew it was engineered early on and may have participated in hiding this fact.

You're dating yourself. XP from 2001 is 20 years old now. I get it, I cringe when I realize this too.

If you are powering off a very old system that spends most of its life powered on, don't let the hard drives or power supply cool down. Do your best to keep your work as brief as possible and get the thing turned back on before it assumes room temperature. These components tend to run the hottest, you can have cold solder joints contract and stop making contact when they cool down.

Also check any socketed chips and make sure they are fully seated. Chip creep happens when frequently thermal-cycled boards cause the IC's to slowly lift themselves out of their own sockets.

In unrelated news, people experiencing depression tend to sleep in an extra hour, film at 11.

Yes. Once while touring a space museum in Switzerland I was reading the placards about the Russian and US space programs. Yuri Gagarin was consistently referred to as "the communist" which seemed perfectly normal to me as an American. Then I saw one that referred to John Glenn as "the capitalist" which was a novel concept to my brain. It wasn't until that moment that I realized just how ridiculous it was for us to refer to random Russians as communists, these were both seasoned military men who had nothing to do with either ideology other than the fact that their governments were pushing these things.

Also, the "winning side" is allowed the freedom to move forwards and forget the past quicker. As a Yankee we don't think much about the US civil war. The deeper a northerner goes into the south the more you are reminded that their side did not win the civil war, they remember that shit, and you better be careful what you say about it less you get run out of town.

[edit spelling; I had double checked myself but still fucked it up]

In the US, universities use the term "Institute" mostly as marketing. They can take existing related units and organizations within the uni and package them under the term Institute for the purposes of creating a single cohesive brand for said discrete parts. The point of this is to be able to more easily solicit funding now that you have a more cohesive description of these areas under one identifier. It sounds strange, but after seeing it work first hand I get it now, it can also help fund areas that may be underfunded.

So, taking that knowledge, you can potentially collaborate with other existing organizations to help build your institute "brand" which can help further your mission. You might consider a discrete research lab as a separate entity under your broader institute brand. Collaborating with other existing groups is a powerful way to amplify your impact as well as easy publicity for your larger mission.

Just some food for thought.

The article every so slightly touches on radium products but doesn't expand on what those are, I suppose that's to draw less attention to them.

I sometimes take my Geiger counter with me when hitting flea-markets and such. In our area we have a very large fall festival way out in the country-side with lots of flea-markets setup. I found my first radium clock there, the guy selling it knew what was special about the clock and thought the geiger counter was neat, the piece I got gave off a mild CPM of about 600. This helped set the stage for me forgetting I live in a bubble of smart and educated and people around me at all times... Later that day I found another dealer with a large platter of antique watches. Woot! Pulled out the geiger counter again and found the tray had a number of very hot watches... and then I saw it. A radium dial watch missing the glass cover and covered in rust and dust, I only got a 20 second reading of around 6000CPM and then I realized my face was about 1 foot from this thing... The danger of radium clock hands is the paint flaking off and inhaling bits of radium dust. CPM is counts-per-minute, so that ~20 second reading I got before I was startled probably translates to ~18000CPM. I stopped and tried to explain to the dealer that he needed to take this watch and bag it and keep it away from the public, especially children that could have access. I was trying to explain what radium paint was and he stopped me and repeated "Radon what?". I tried again, he stopped again and repeated "Radon what?". It was at that moment my bubble collapsed and I realized I had gotten WAY off on the wrong foot. Radium was a word he had never heard, radon was the closest thing (it's not uncommon to have radon gas vents on house basements in our state to prevent buildups of radioactive radon gas). This guy got real quiet as I tried to dig myself out of my hold, but the damage was done. Another person working with him came over and I explained the issue to him, he understood but was making jokes about the government shutting them down or something. At this point I also remembered that there is a strong "prepper" vibe at this particular flea market area, and this poor fellow was probably afraid I'd someone get him "vanned" by the government. Anyway, I tried to buy some of the other watches from him and he outright told me he didn't want to talk to me any more, and that he was not going to sell me anything cause he didn't need for me to sue him for getting cancer or something. Right right, I'd dug a pretty large hole for myself and just needed to walk away, his weekend was ruined and now he had to figure out what to do with this radioactive watch he didn't understand at all.

So, I learned a bunch of things really quick that weekend. One of those things is that our country-side is littered with radioactive artifacts that most people have NO idea about. Most of them are harmless, but the radium stuff is still dangerous for another 1600 years even though the radium paint stopped glowing many decades ago. When people randomly get strange cancers I can't help but wonder if there's a lot more incidental exposure that goes on than people realize. I'm not saying all cancer victims had exposure, but it probably happens more than people suspect.

Another thing I learned was just how much of a bubble I exist in, and all of you reading this as well. You work with fellow smart people, your friends are smart. Probably your family too. My point is that we end up isolated from other classes of people and coming together is a good thing for multiple reasons. Think of those in classes above you too. Anyway, that's enough about that.

Yep, agreed. But when you're first starting out you have to make some sacrifices and employers know this.

In IBM's case, they've been burned pretty bad in the past. Gene Amdahl was one of the engineers that designed the IBM 360, the first mainframe. After having a rough go inside IBM's bureaucratic system he left to found the Amdahl Corporation that built hardware compatible mainframe computers. That REALLY pissed IBM off, mainframes are a huge money maker for them and sipping from their own drink was a declaration of war.

I'm not defending their behavior, but IBM really clutches it's pearls. I worked on iSeries hardware (AS/400) among other gear. Even inside IBM and taking IBM classes on the system it was next to impossible to get free-time on OS400 to learn on your own. I got to be friends with the 400 instructors and even then they wouldn't help me learn more than what I was allowed to know about the system. My speculation was they didn't want us field guys getting side work doing stuff for customers that IBM wanted to bill for. Just one of the many reasons I left.

Sounds like a simple misunderstanding to me. Employee thought they were doing something acceptable to formally disengage from the project and just wanted to monitor traffic. IBM interpreted it as an attempted end-run-around. Not surprised, virtualization stuff is still in demand, sounds like typical IBM-internal perl-clutching going on.

I used to work in Global Services for a few years starting in 1999 when I was fresh out of school (on-site "Customer Engineer" for hardware break/fix). I don't think all divisions have the same requirements, but we had to sign documents explaining IBM owned everything we created on our free time at hire-in. I was young but I had built enough software and hardware projects by then that I realized this was a bad deal. Linux was just starting to get enterprise recognition and open source in general was starting to really take off. My manager and others all laughed when I pushed back on signing this, "what does this kid thing he's going to invent on his own time?".

I filled out the paperwork noting the exceptions of things I had already built. However because my location was fairly distant from any central IBM office I rarely saw my manager (he worked about 80 miles away from my location). Once I realized this paperwork never got filed I just let it drop. When I left the company I noticed they had this same paper signing over all my IP rights to IBM at my exit interview. I was still young and dumb so I signed it rather than telling them to get bent. However I had been so busy those years that I hadn't done much of anything in my free time. But yea this sucks and it's a thing. Yet another reason why anonymity is still needed in the modern world.

They forgot to mention the part where the goal posts get moved and you have to keep apologizing each time this happens. You may find yourself running out of rope as you are pushed further and further out until you don't have much left to give.

Modesty and realizing you've made a mistake are good qualities, no doubt. But those traits will be used against you if you foolishly think others will be also acting in good faith when they publicly point out your mistake. If you wish to publicly apologize that's fine, but don't for a second fall for the notion that this will appease the mob. They want blood when they smell it in the water and each apology just squirts more blood into the water for them to feed off of.

Riiiiight. Just look at how districts are gerrymandered to realize this is not what politicians of either side want.

I think this is the right thing to post here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Heck ya, Sidekick! I remember writing html in sidekick in high school. Until my files got larger than 2k anyway, that was the largest file sidekick could handle. Then I had to switch back to edlin :-(.

Eh, sure it matters somewhat. But if you think you're getting matched cells when you buy anything with a battery pack from China you're kidding yourself. So a home made pack isn't going to be any worse off that the cheapest kit you already have. If you go to the trouble to assemble your own pack with matched cells you'll be ahead of the game, if that floats your boat.

You also have to realize things like this have to take scale into consideration. No one is going to do mass manufacturing of battery and electronics enclosures with 3D printing, this is a prototyping and hobby level manufacturing system. So the odds of injury and damage are a lot less with this as you automatically self-select down to a tiny fraction of the market share, and only a tiny fraction yet of those will ever experience an explosive outcome from a battery.

Also I'm sure that most of this market violates someones IP so again, this ensures that this type of thing (custom making battery enclosures) will never reach a critical mass where worrying about the world burning down due to non-fireretardent plastics is something to be concerned about.

But if a person is very concerned about this issue then certainly there are options out there.

I've become a large user of PET-G for some of the reasons you outline. I've never had a problem with strength the way that I use it in my designs, PET-G is plenty durable for a small device which spends 99% of its life inside a larger device. Also the heat resistance makes it tolerate the summer heat of cars which is also important.

Also PET-G has the added benefit of not giving me cancer like ABS. It definitely has a learning curve and I wouldn't fault anyone for going other routes rather than taking the time to get a feel for it.

As far as I'm concerned this is one of the main killer apps for 3D printers - making battery packs for vintage electronics. It's great to breath new life into old equipment which just needs a shot of lithium to be revived. I'm not a huge fan of Thingiverse but I still try to curate a couple of battery related channels there:

https://www.thingiverse.com/dosman33/collections/two-way-rad... https://www.thingiverse.com/dosman33/collections/power-tool-...

I also released a universal battery charging cradle system I call the Gadget Hamper to help people out who design new battery packs: https://github.com/dosman33/Gadget-Hamper