lightedman

"What makes software any more or less of a profession than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of industry wide criteria?"

Many states require you to pass a test and get a license/certification before working in fast food.

That is not a requirement in the SWE world.

The sheer lack of accreditation and standards-enforcing body is what makes sofware engineering a non-profession.

You don't accept industry standard formats and require source... that rules you right out of the aerospace company I work for. That's billions of dollars gone from your potential pool.

You spent 5 years developing this fab and somehow ignored regular industry standards the entire time? That does not instill confidence in your services, at least from my standpoint.

Needing to sign up for a quote? Who are you selling this data to?

"Not being familiar with this, I'm curious where the humans are still required in the process of doing a dozen or hundred of each board."

Some components have large amounts of mass and need to be manually placed because the PNP doesn't have the vertical space for pickup and movement to the pad or do not have feeders which can successfully hold onto the part.

And some times it's just faster to have the human place the part because they're faster than the machine due to physical limitations (like needing to move slowly so as to not drop the component or throw it at the end of travel.) Many board shops will have the PNP places the ICs/Caps/Resistors/diodes and then the placement of connectors (especially zierich) or inductors gets done manually. That is how it worked where I worked. This also provided an opportunity mid-process to do quality checks instead of just letting things go from the PNP straight into the oven.

"unless you wire up a debug-message callback via the optional KHR_debug extension which isn't available everywhere"

The beauty of OpenGL versus say Direct3D is that OpenGL is extensible and thus you can add that feature should you so choose.

"Most people cannot install the equipment themselves"

This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)

It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.

"Who cares what the person describes themselves as."

Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.

And that fact taints everything from the get-go.

" but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear"

Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.

As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.

"Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt."

Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.

Solar isn't expensive - you are.

"But no such cheaper options exist"

Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)

Sure you can. Code is code. I took a machine without brush cleaning for transfer sheets and hand-tapped, mounted motors and controllers and brush assemblies, ran the connections into the PLC, install and connect the power relays, reflashed the PLC firmware with custom code, BAM it works.

As long as you have room in memory, you can add functionality.

"The PLC is fixed hardware, you can't simply patch that."

Oh yes you can patch it - that's how I got the 20 year old laminator working where I work. If the hardware is still good you can absolutely change firmware if you have the PLC control software (like RockWell ControlFlash) or know how to manipulate the ladder logic directly.

"Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes"

Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.

I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.

Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.

This was a solved problem long ago - page/text the person responsible for that facility. If Fac. Man. is too lazy to properly-staff critical things, they deserve every pain they encounter.

All of this remote crap is meant to try to eliminate a physical presence on-site, which is stupid because when things eventually break, a physical presence is required on-site anyways.

One of my jobs in aerospace is systems reliability - an unstaffed system is not a reliable one.

Epoxy is useless, we have materials to dissolve cured epoxies for rework in aerospace.

Man can make it, man can break it.

Ledger provides a 'Genuine Check' mechanism to determine the authenticity of the device; however, it explicitly warns that it cannot detect added implants when the device's original Secure Element remains intact.

And as this workaround leaves the original Secure Element intact, good luck detecting the supply chain attack.

"Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge."

You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.

Not me, because Apple still disallows direct competition with their other 'apps/features' like Compass.

Of all the things to put on a network, this ranks as one of the dumbest, ever. You don't need control of the unit done over a network, just the data on whether it is working or not. Anything else is simply asking for someone else to come along and break your stuff.

To boot, refrigeration has been wholly automatic for decades. It literally runs itself. It doesn't need any network connectivity other than to say "I work" and "I'm broken" and that's it. Allowing control commands to be sent over the network is, yet again, just asking for trouble.

I see this as a good thing, QGIS is already a bit of a mess to begin with (seriously, what mapping program starts you off without a base map? Even Google Earth gives you a starting globe to lay your info upon) and could really use the bandwidth to focus their attention on making things actually make sense rather than goofing off with AI-'assisted' coding where the 'programmer' doesn't even know how things work.

"How does your pinky naturally rest on Control?"

30 years of WASD gaming will do that.

I'm still using DOS to control a galvo-steered LASER animation system from 30 years ago. 133MHz Pentium, non-MMX, 16MB RAM, 16MB Voodoo3.

"The US for instance can ignore the Geneva Conventions willy-nilly"

In many cases this is simply because we did not sign and ratify parts of the convention updates, thus we are not a signatory to those statutes. No way to truly punish those that aren't willing participants, except to make them unwilling participants.

Yea my Thinkpad 11e is still going and running software. That's 12 years old, now.

"Nobody in GitHub Trust & Safety is sat there watching HN"

Please, any competent software dev business has eyes on this page on an hourly basis.

I'm in aerospace and we're crawling on this site, all the way at the top levels.

AS9100 is based off of ISO9001. It doesn't fucking matter, the responsibility is on both parties.

Again, tell me you don't actually handle quality without directly saying so.

"Actually no, it's Lockheed's that should have had a test-suite and conformance-suite for it"

Tell me you don't run AS9100D quality inspections without saying so directly.

I work in aerospace.

Both parties fucked up.

Lockheed's job is to follow the customer's specifications.

NASA's job is to check to make sure what they paid for is what they received.

I do this every single day as a quality inspector here. I don't know why a bunch of highly-degreed engineers can't do a simple job that a person with oonly a GED does without fail.

"Its not expensive because its niche, its expensive because its hard."

I'd counter and suggest it is expensive because almost nobody gives a damn about the first 3 layers in the OSI model, and have pushed most security responsibility up to layers 4-7. That's roughly half of your attack surface still exposed.

"Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. "

And they're never installed in config chains that high voltage - cell spacing between cells is typically very low and only capable of withstanding ~5kV before internal arcing occurs.

Also, your typical 72-cell solar panel is only 32V.

"Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon."

In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.