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mud_dauber

1,128 karma · joined November 9, 2013

Chief getting-things-done officer. Product manager. Data geek.

I've led product management and design teams of 4 to 40 people across the globe. (Compilers, RTOS tools, IP, semiconductors.) I'm not the smartest guy in the room. But I know how to connect the dots.

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mud_dauber··on A Place Among the Fiddlers
+1 for the Rhiannon Giddens reference.
mud_dauber··on RF Cafe
Old school Japanese sites - same vibe.
mud_dauber··on ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style
I previously asked ChatGPT (albeit several months ago), as an experiment, to answer some general questions in the voice of Don Rickles. I’m hoping this capability somehow survives.
mud_dauber··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
Don’t pass up Marfa Burrito, just off Highland Ave. Gigantic and extremely good. It’s a cool town on the edge of nowhere.
mud_dauber··on The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
It did my heart good to see Forth listed.
mud_dauber··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
Location: Charleston WV

Remote: yes (reluctantly)

Relocate: no (elderly parents)

Technologies: semiconductors, rails, bash, python

Resume: LinkedIn.com/in/brianpiercy - bjpcjp@gmail.com

I’m in WV helping my parents. That workload has diminished over the last year, and I need a purpose.

I spent 30+ years at Freescale Semi, GSI Semi, AMD and a couple of startups. PM, operations, supply chain, SW development.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

mud_dauber··on Eat Real Food
I'd almost pay attention to the message, but Kennedy has no credibility with me. Giving up 90% of animal protein has made me leaner with vastly lower cholesterol.
mud_dauber··on 27M Fewer Car Trips: Life After a Year of Congestion Pricing
Sounds like a good reason to not invest in parking garages.
mud_dauber··on California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month
Meanwhile over here in WV, we are saddled with above-market electricity rates thanks to our state (non-)regulatory commission and a desire to keep old coal-fired generators operating. It drives us nuts.
mud_dauber··on The Beer Can (2023)
R.J. MacReady approves this sentiment.
mud_dauber··on The Unforgotten
It’s an incredible piece of writing.
mud_dauber··on Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance
his notes are EXACTLY my experience. bookmark it.
mud_dauber··on The append-and-review note
I use RememberTheMilk for this work - especially the notes feature for appending thoughts. Giving items a due date ensures I need to review things.
mud_dauber··on Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?
Raindrop
mud_dauber··on Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)
Kinda surprised to not see Forth listed.
mud_dauber··on OpenEoX to Standardize End-of-Life (EOL) and End-of-Support (EOS) Information
JEDEC has long maintained an EOL/EOS standard for semiconductors. This was a big part of a previous PM gig. Sounds boring, and it was. But having a process kept us out of serious hot water.
mud_dauber··on When flat rate movers won't answer your calls
Boy, if robotics could learn how to bubble wrap, tape, box and stack both hard and soft items… They could hitch a ride on the back of a panel truck. Somewhat similar to forklifts on the tails of Home Depot delivery trucks.
mud_dauber··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
Not exactly Nobel worthy. :-)

I’m rebuilding a learning library. Webpage bookmarks (with big help from raindrop.io), PDFs (hundreds of them, mostly book chapters), images, jupyter notebooks, markdowns, etc. using a Jekyll static site generator to minimize the tech stack hairballs.

The interesting part is that nearly all of the content is tagged to associate with two or more domains ex:

Goodreads-history-truecrime

PyTorch-Jupyter

Rubyonrails-Testing

Behavior-Gaslighting

Semiconductors-GPUs

And so on.

It’s an exercise in taxonomy creation. Searching by tag doesn’t quite get it. And we all know PDF auto summaries are tough.

I’m not expecting anybody to be impressed. It keeps me occupied while learning how to be (unfortunately) retired.

mud_dauber··on I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
It certainly was for me. I learned how to build Forth on my Commodore.
mud_dauber··on Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur?
I’m hesitant to simply say “read this”, but please consider The Mom Test. It’s a quick read & teaches how to structure conversations with potential customers.
mud_dauber··on My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)
I got a taste for this years ago at Harris Semi. Grokking their RTX microcontrollers was a ton of fun. (Not so much for customers, who'd never seen such a thing.)
mud_dauber··on ASML Twinscan EXE:5000 Lego Set
Vastly underrated. Props.
mud_dauber··on Twitter's heir apparent isn't X or Threads – it's Bluesky
Agree. Feedly is my first open tab every morning.
mud_dauber··on MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
My mom is in an assisted living center. The floor above hers is reserved for memory care residents. I'd love to see how to incorporate this into their affairs.
mud_dauber··on Admiral Cloudberg: the TWA 800 investigation
The kicker for me was hearing that the NTSB - and NASA - rejected Boeing's fault tree.
mud_dauber··on Foraging for America's Forgotten Fruit
I live in WV. This explains why my local farmer's market doesn't stock them.
mud_dauber··on The Canary
I lost an uncle to black lung in a WV underground mine. One grandfather lost an eye (explosion), the other broke his back.

I’m happy for Chris’s dedication - but this industry needs to die.

mud_dauber··on Show HN: Mark CLI – use Markdown, images and links to interact with GPT4o
I installed mark to investigate turning lots (a couple of hundred) of local PDFs into study guides and/or summaries. All of the PDF links bombed, mostly due to UTF-8 decode errors - which is fine. I pdftotext'd a few and ran into RateLimit Errors.

Otherwise - very promising!

mud_dauber··on America is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom
You’ve got to have a local core of people to bounce ideas off each other.

I moved from Austin to Appalachia to care for parents. The lack of any entrepreneurial spark here is just jarring. People just keep their heads down. They want better - but there’s zero intellectual infrastructure.

mud_dauber··on Enron tried to trade memory chip futures; why didn't it work?
It seems to me that liquidity in a semi futures marketplace would be much better if you traded on a lowest common denominator - cents per square millimeter of a finished wafer. Same units of value regardless of underlying technology. Am I wrong?
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