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nudgeeeon Signal reflections in electronic circuits

In RF electronics, wires end up looking like transmission lines.

Here’s one of the classic lectures on wave propagation and reflections, where it looks at similarities in wave behaviour across mechanical, electrical, acoustic and optical systems.

AT&T Similarities of Wave Behaviour (1959): https://youtu.be/DovunOxlY1k

nudgeeeon Speaker Support in Asahi Linux

I think modern Intel chips contain Tensilica Xtensa HiFi DSP [0] cores for audio processing, I’m pretty sure this is what SOF targets.

I’m not an expert, but probably used for speaker DSP as well as mic/speech processing (think for Cortana/etc).

Manufacturers of laptops probably provide their own firmware to load onto these cores as part of a driver.

[0] https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/tools/ip/tensilica-ip/hif...

nudgeeeon Berlin's famed nightclubs, losing customers, face an uncertain future

He’s the real deal, he also started Aslice [0] to fix the broken state of music earnings between DJs and producers.

[0] https://aslice.com/

nudgeeeon Linux gives up on 6-year LTS kernels, says they’re too much work

Isn’t this what the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) initiative [0] was also proposing? Maintenance of Linux kernels on the 10+ year horizon aimed at industrial use cases. Has backing from Toshiba, Hitachi, Bosch, Siemens, Renesas, etc, though a marked lack of chip vendors as members. Not really sure how well it is going though.

[0] https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform...

nudgeeeon Arm’s Neoverse V2

When I was in chip design about 15 years ago, we did transaction level modeling (TLM) using SystemC. Not sure if it’s still a thing these days.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction-level_modeling

nudgeeeon Gen Z is giving up on college

Engineering = mechanical/aerospace/chemical/electrical/biomedical/material, etc.

nudgeeeon Apple supports right-to-repair bill

I can think of a myriad of things such as enabling a feature that was previously disabled/in development, updates to calibration values/curves, tweaking timing and power saving control registers, etc.

Any of these could throw off a third party part if not implemented exactly the same way.

nudgeeeon Apple to pay up to $500M to iPhone users

+1 a total failure on the PR/comms side of the situation.

Even some of my technical friends don’t understand the issue and solution which is worrying. I like to explain it like this:

Imagine you a driving down the highway and step on the accelerator to give the car more gas, but there is an issue with the engine. The worst thing for the engine control unit to do is to cut off the engine while you’re driving at 60mph, this can be dangerous and cause a safety issue.

Same with phones, you could be in a situation and need to make an emergency phone call, or need the last bit of juice from your device to check maps/GPS to get you out of the woods before dark. The worst thing here is for the phone to shut itself off when you need it.

Car manufacturers will turn on a big red engine warning light, put your vehicle into failsafe/protection mode (but still let your drive it with reduced power) and tell you to get it serviced ASAP.

This is what Apple failed to do correctly.

nudgeeeon Micron Unveils 128GB and 256GB CXL 2.0 Expansion Modules

We’re talking DRAM here, not NAND?

nudgeeeon Learn electronics by practice

Analog Electronics

Microwave/RF Electronics

Power Electronics

nudgeeeon Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

Side gig designing and maufacturing niche tools for DJ's:

https://cardinia.net

nudgeeeon An Architectural Overview of QNX (1992) [pdf]

The Secure Element in the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, etc runs L4: https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/...

It's gotta be creeping up on QNX numbers slowly!

nudgeeeon Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

Good summary — Parasolid is indeed the key here. I think it’s a similar story in the chip design space — there are not many good open source tools at scale, most people turn to Cadence and Synopsys who have been developing crazily complex (and buggy!) EDA tools since the 1980s.

nudgeeeon The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

For sure — the convergence towards Ethernet based AV protocols (esp. in broadcast) seems like it has a promising future (as we’ve seen with Dante), possibly for video too (SMPTE 2110, etc).

But we’re not quite there yet.

nudgeeeon The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

I see alot of people asking what kinds of PCIe expansion cards are likely to be used with the Mac Pro.

Here are some examples, used mainly in pro audio/video/broadcast workflows:

RME MADI/AES cards: https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html

ProTools HDX cards: https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx

BlackMagic DeckLink cards: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink

UAD DSP cards: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html

Plus 25/40/100G Ethernet, NVME SSD and Fibre Channel/SAN cards.

nudgeeeon Meta developer tools: Working at scale

I don’t work for Meta, but you can see their product announcements here: https://about.fb.com/news/category/product-news/

nudgeeeon Moog sells its business to InMusic

And for those that aren't in the area, this video tour is pretty neat: https://youtu.be/NIDinx83Vs8

Really shows how the people there love music and what they do.

nudgeeeon Growing from engineer to manager

> The difference from project management I understand, but a lot of what you described regarding keeping the progress going seems to be a SCRUM master's job. Would you say that is also management?

These are my rough notes on project management (from an engineer’s lens):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XFdBUfi3MvQuh9NTFBJMQFA0...

Lots of blanks to fill still, but I am a proponent of engineers owning their own project management.

> I think it should be done by senior engineers organically as engineering is a social activity. No one person can achieve greatness and to me an engineer becomes a senior engineer not by being a brilliant coder (for example) but by understanding that the job is to solve problems.

100% agree, lots of overlap between responsibilities and often a good thing! Roles from all parts of the org coming together to solve problems is the ideal situation.

My first approximation is that engineering managers are responsible for the team health, whereas engineers are responsible for project health, or at least raising issues when things aren’t so healthy.

nudgeeeon Growing from engineer to manager

Things off the top of my head:

- Alignment / priority management / keeping team focused

- Saying yes/no to projects

- Medium term planning, resource balancing

- Helping to set team vision and mission

- Reporting to upper management (up)

- Keep up to date and abreast with what’s happening in the org, filtering info to the team (down)

- People management (career, performance, strengths/weaknesses etc)

- Spotting and creating opportunities for the team

- Often acting as a tie breaker for decisions (including technical)

- Often involved in steering technical design and solutions

- Help keep the team productive and happy

- Probably a ton more I’m forgetting

Tons of finesse and strong communication skills required for this as well as strong technical experience.

And then there’s project management which I haven’t touched on — either can be done directly by engineers (personally I enjoy it, some don’t which is fine), engineering managers or dedicated technical project/program managers.

nudgeeeon Growing from engineer to manager

IMHO engineers should also (and should be expected to) lead through influence. In my mind, as engineers grow they should be expected to tackle problems and influence solutions of increased scope, complexity and ambiguity.

Junior engineers should be able to drive smaller, well scoped projects.

Senior+ engineers should be expected to tackle complex, cross-org, ill-defined technical challenges, examples include technical mergers of company acquisitions, large scale migrations of business critical systems, technical design of big bets (also analysis on which big bets to take), evaluate new technologies/platforms, dev tooling to multiply productivity, etc

A lot of this requires buy-in and stakeholder management to succeed.

nudgeeeon DirectX 12 Support on macOS

Apple has MetalFX upscaling: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx

nudgeeeon Satellite Tracker 3D

Nice little easter egg: If you zoom into the center of the Earth you’ll find the monkey puppet meme on a cube.

nudgeeeon Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

SEPA DD is suited for recurring payments as it relies on a mandate. It doesn’t make sense to set up a mandate for every one off txn, and at which point you’ve authorized the merchant to pull money from your account at anytime. The ball goes back to your court to contest afterwards, as well as keep track of all the mandates you’ve signed.

nudgeeeon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://nudge.id.au

A bunch of side projects/gigs and ideas. Site is almost all static HTML/CSS.

nudgeeeon The Design of the Roland Juno Oscillators

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25598656

nudgeeeon EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024

Closer to mandating common EV charging connectors, which has already happened in the EU (CCS Type 2).

nudgeeeon EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024

Lightning had a good 10-year run. Let’s not forget that it was released a full 2 years before USB-C, and one of the first to being reversible connectors to the masses.

Also, here is the final report commissioned by the EU: “Impact Assessment Study to Assess Unbundling of Chargers (July 2021)” [0].

[0] https://op.europa.eu/o/opportal-service/download-handler?ide...

nudgeeeon To Become Wise, Do Less

Agree, after years and years of being inundated with self-help messages, platitudes, and coming-of-age teachings, I find most of it comes from a good place — however the messages are so context specific that it probably doesn’t apply to you in your current juncture in life right now.

I find what is crucial when it comes to taking advice, is figuring out when advice makes sense to you — and try to synthesize it as food for thought within your world view (or not).

nudgeeeon Ask HN: Alternatives to Apple Music App?

Nope, the songs that match with your files are DRM-free, possible to copy and open the Apple catalog versions in Audacity just fine.

More details: https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/420ab399-c6...