Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.
You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.
Yeah as a New Yorker and someone that's lived in the Boston to Washington megalopolis basically my whole life, a lot of Europe feels very familiar. I felt right at home in Lisbon.
Also Environmental regulations are like vaccines. They're victims of their own success. In the late 1960s early 1970s, before the EPA, the air and water in the US was a disaster. The EPA documented it:
Yes, but only as a fun retro thing. Not for most calculations, although I have to say for back of the napkin, almost all in your head style things, they can be handy.
Yeah, honestly, smartphones are a very mature category now. Only so much you can do with them. Same with laptops and desktops. Plenty of improvements to be made, but those yearly wow factors are just not coming back.
Yeah - I didn't understand the hostility - if these fixes had been refused or not even considered, than maybe, but they all seem like honest bugs that need fixing.
I’ve known companies to give exit packages on firing to avoid a lawsuit since you sign away rights to sue for illegal firing and it’s a nice cheap bribe. Mostly the big lawsuit targets do this. Not usually as good as the layoff package, but something. But not all places do it, of course. I mean even layoff packages are optional, really.
That’s been my thought since the TikTok ban as well. It was meant for people, but this for sure seems to meet the spirit of the prohibition. Does it actually violate it? We’ll have to see once the cases work their way through.
Maybe it’s just because I’m an EE, but I really got into the data modes too. Like did you know how stupid simple old school
pagers are to create signals for? You have to make some slight modifications get them into the Ham Bands (or buy a new one, apparently a thing!) but after that it’s just 512 baud FSK.
Also AppKit works perfectly well in swift. People just probably remember the ObjC versions of things better since that’s where this all started. But the naming is pretty standard if you remember the old calls.
There isn’t a ton of work being done in ObjC anymore. I’ve interviewed quite a few junior iOS developer candidates that didn’t even know it. There are some holdouts, of course.
As I’ve been doing Mac/iOS programming since the retain release days, ObjC has a place in my heart, but swift is a decade old now (was announced 10 years ago this WWDC) and is pretty much the app language of choice.
Now that the ABI stabilized, even binary library authors are getting in on it.
Newer stuff like SwiftUI and SwiftData you might want to wait on, but Swift is pretty much most of what I’m up to these days.
Verilog is just a logic implementation. It should be pretty portable. There are some issues, and certainly the bitstreams won’t be compatible, but if C still works, I imagine verilog would too.
That’s how I see it too. The FPGA version are knock offs, like would have been done back in the day but with fancy future hardware. A gate level reproduction would be kinda strange aside from pure desire for preservation. (Which is still a decent goal, just not of these projects)
Not even that. They’re suing to invalidate the patent entirely and are also attacking the W1 watch Massimo sells based on Apple Patents. I’m not sure as to why Apple decided to go full scorched earth, but man they pissed somebody off.