jrexilius

One thing you might consider is being close to customers and other entrepreneurs. Lower burn and better taxes are great. If you stay near a large enough market to meet some customers in person and other founders, that is a big bonus. Seattle or Vegas may be good to be close to (driveable) if you are looking at WA or NV.

I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted.

[1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/

This is a story, more than a How-To, but hopefully it'll help other software people get into hardware products.

No pics of a problematic nature, more anonymous (thus more approachable) I'd wager..?

I think people imply too much evil-intent with funding rather than understanding the mechanics of it. If you take money from an investor you have an obligation to them to make a return on that money in a finite time frame. The VC has LPs who want their money back in a finite window, so paying tiny dividends over 10 years to see a return on capital and some profit just doesn't work. Building a low-margin, profitable business does not return that investment.

So if you understand the mechanics behind it and have a reasonable path to return, say at least 5x the capital in 5 years (they want more obviously) then VC may not get in the way of your mission. But you have to ask yourself the hard question and be honest in answering it: "Can I return this investment five fold in five years without harming my customers/users/business/etc.?"..

Ethical obligations go in multiple directions.

[edit to add] Obviously there is also a fair amount of dihonesty and ill-intentioned greed out there as well, but that isn't the driver.

Perhaps these days, more correctly framed as: "duty to feed proprietary AI's to enhance VC value and strengthen walled garden platforms" or some variation thereof.. I still have a knee-jerk reaction that information should be open and defeating walled gardens is best accomplished with more open data, but looking back at how much of the open web was just used to strengthen Google, FB, etc. I am.. concerned? AI chat bots are a very strong decoupler of platform users to data sources...

[edit to add] still generally like this piece and agreee with the intent. I have benefited greatly from all the information shared by people online..

"the government" isn't really a single entity. domestic LE and foreign intelligence have different laws and processes enforced by the constitution (thankfully). Its certainly reasonable that domestic LE really can't force Apple to handover US citizens data, while foreign intelligence services can effect supply chain attacks, back-dooring and other methods not permitted for US citizens..

The "mission" terminology is common in the NGO world and not everyone is hired as a "coder". Quite frequently these are projects to effect outcomes rather than support billets to be filled by coders. There is a wide spectrum out there, your experiences may vary..

It sounds like we overlapped in a few locations and missions ;-) One thing I would add to your list is extra USB drives with lotsa storage (>256GB), and at least one with a hardware write-protect switch (like the Kanguru ones). Collecting and sharing data is like collecting and sharing beer.. great way to make friends and build network effects. The Kanguru ones are nice when you need to share with a risky machine (cyber cafe, hotels, etc.).

Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware of SoftIron. I think its a big deal that there are two vendors on this path. And both seem to be doing it the right way. I think it makes the whole, stronger than the sum.

That is a rare combination skillset. And awesome for the company that needs it.

It's all OK if you frame it as a "privelage" the government is gracious enough to bestow.. then of course it's not censorship!

I'm in the same boat as you. Tried ergo keyboard once and it was really awkward for me.

Sounds like a great professor. "Think about what you are doing" is probably good advice for any discipline.

What I worked on was more of a community of interest brainstorming conference where all the participants had an interest in seeing a good outcome of a DARPA program. You could call it "free ideas" but everyone knew that going in and it was the point after all. Research and development usually benefit from a free exchange of ideas from stake holders and people with expertise in the field (or adjacent fields).

Recruiting is never secret and DARPA, DoD, and the IC are just like the rest of the tech industry and _always_ looking for scarce talent (except they have to pay less than commercial sector thanks to congressional laws).

You seem to have convinced yourself of only negative interpretations as being options, but there really is a lot of overtly beneficial research done by DARPA and a lot of people who really believe in the good they do involved. Not to say that there isn't also occasional bad actors, bad policy, or mercenary transactions, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.

I participated in a DARPA brainstorming conference a number of years back. It was not paid, but a fun experience. So in addition to bidding on contract topics they propose, you can get invited onto working committees or symposiums and such (but that usually means you have expertise on the topic and someone involved knows who you are). It's a pretty good gov agency to work for as well from my various friends who have worked there.

My solution to that was simply to add this model as an optional output transformer: https://steganography.live/info

This is good if your threat model doesn't include the phone itself. I built something simliar to this as an external hardware implementation a few years back to deal with the phone itself being rooted:

https://www.anomie.tech/products/anigma/

Been working towards getting it ready for open source release later this year.. password manager, two factor auth, and message encryption accomplished in the external hardware, was the core idea.

So much this.. Although I know the frustration and desire for change from those still in uniform is very real, sadly its congress and the beltway bandits that actually get to dictate policies and programs..

My god.. if you gave it real time stock updates to adjust BoM answers to availability that would be amazing!

for passive sniffing, it looks like you can run the cheaper module at only $2k, which is approachable for researchers.. actually fully loaded price tag is $11k or $4k as you need GPSDO also.. but $4k is almost approachable I guess..

[edit to add] https://www.ettus.com/all-products/ub210-kit/

That is pretty neat!

If it was possible to drive a touch interface and SPI display of that size from an MCU of that size/speed and still be responsive. I have only driven them from Pi Zeros, PocketBeagles and other much larger/faster systems, and still noticed some drag. Up to now, I've stuck to smaller displays without a touch layer for projects where I'm using the RP2040. [caveat: I am _not_ an embedded systems SWE so still figuring out where limitations are hardware vs. my knowledge]

wow. this is amazing work, and answers a question I've had for a while. Thanks for putting this out there!

I suspect sanctions and international finance laws are a bit more complex than that. It could be that a US legal entity that is fronting for a sanctioned country can indeed be blocked from receiving money, but you'd have to get a quorum of international finance lawyers to hammer out an agreement on that to have any chance of drawing a conclussion...

The actual source of Flipper is a Russian company. Forming a shell company in the US doesn't change that. Sadly the Flipper team is a casualty of Putins ambitions, because they seem a good team of hackers that did a good job with their product. But the platform and software updates they provide may be susceptible to Russian gov coercion, which is I suspect the risk that many are concerned about.

[edit-to-add] that issue is orthogonal to Amazon yanking it for being a tool that could be used for potentially criminal activity. but maybe added to their decision..

This seems like a good fit, but I'd echo some other requests on here for yearly plan (hate monthly), and playlists. I personally am fine with the barebones aesthetic but you may want to do a bit more for general marketability.

Good job!

I don't think it's so much dealing with resource constraints that made it more exciting, but the fact that you were often originating things, rather than (haphazardly) stitching together exisiting, known works of others. It's always more exciting to create something from scratch rather than "just add water and stir" sorta thing.

[edit to add:] Although, another part of having to understand memory usage, for example, meant that you really had to understand the fundamental building materials you were working with. Where as now, no one has the man hours to really understand the stack of tens of thousands of lines of node shit you have to glue together to do some basic task.. you feel more excited when you are really mastering the materials, I think..

Native Chicagoan here as well. When I was growing up we called this "party" style pizza, while deep dish was just called pizza. After living in Austin for last 8 years, I still desperately miss good deep dish pizza, but thin crust is easy to find outside of Chicago...

I believe three of the four contenders for round 4 of the NIST competition are still showing secure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography...