petsfed

Just to buttress and embroider around your point that a fab is not a small business:

If there was a realistic way even to go from bare wafers to non-trivial custom chips in a small-batch fashion, you can bet there would be a cottage industry around it. I would love to live in a world where I could manufacture custom silicon as easily as I can manufacture a custom PCB or custom mechanical part.

But as it stands, quick-turn, rapid-proto "micro" fabs are obscenely expensive, to the extent that if you aren't absolutely certain you need the performance gains from custom silicon, justified by years of R&D that confirms the inadequacy of a multi-chip solution, then the idea is killed before any layout engineer is contacted.

Microfabs are either operated by research institutes, or they're booked solid for years, and basically printing money.

... which sort of assumes that the global downturn and the local downturn are completely unrelated.

Like, if a rent hike pushes out the tenant who has been there the longest, who has the most consistent revenue stream, in other words is the surest bet, then that, all by its lonesome, should be a pretty clear risk indicator to the bank.

Which has led to police officers using "the punishment I received is far in excess of the last time an officer of this department was punished for habitually arresting and raping minors!" as a defense, and it works.

I was working retail in Eugene, Oregon during the 2014 University of Oregon grad student strike. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because I was working retail with a master's degree in physics (because I did not have the endurance to complete a PhD, but had not yet accepted that fact).

My then-partner was part of the strike. One of the strike demands was higher wages as teaching assistants. And while I worked 40 hours a week, for $11/hr, I made considerably more and worked fewer hours than her. She put in probably 30 hours a week just on her teaching load, plus an additional 30 hours split between explicit course work and dissertation work.

It's crazy that a job that requires excellent marks while completing a 4-year degree pays worse, has worse working conditions, and is considerably more competitive to get into than a job selling office supplies.

One of the other things the grad students were demanding (which they only sort of got) was paid parental leave, because they did not fail to notice that most of their professors were in their late 30s or early 40s before they could afford to stop work long enough to start a family. It was very rare for two academics to have children together, because of the heinous, career ending financial cost to having children when you were young enough that their high school graduation date was before your expected mortality.

Generalized in the sense of "this interface works as well on a tablet as a desktop computer", or "we can also generate ad revenue with this operating system" or "there should be constant invasive AI integration, even for users who don't want to and should not use such features, and who would pay a premium to avoid it if possible".

Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil engineering operating system, which is different from your structural engineering operating system, and neither bear any similarity to your gaming operating system".

Not to white-knight microsoft here, but I think the problem they run into with every product is that because of their ubiquity, they rapidly reach saturation with most every specialized product they sell. You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated, even if you're the only one selling. So they have to find a way to expand their market. With specialized tools, that's done by generalizing, right? And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools. Thus, Word ultimately sucks. Windows ultimately sucks. Github ultimately sucks. They are all of them trying to be everything for everyone, because the alternative is just mumbling along, being really good at being tools, but being really bad at conveying profit to their creators.

There are a million ways to express the fact of the hormonal backlash without including a quote that makes it sound like killing will improve your sex life.

In context, its correct, that's not up for dispute. The question is "does it add anything to the context?" and more importantly "could a student misconstrue its inclusion as something else?"

You'd think that, being so educated on the hormonal backlash from experiencing trauma, that cops and the greater judicial system would be more forgiving of e.g. emergent hypersexuality in rape victims after experiencing a rape that Grossman calls out there. But you would be wrong, because even if Grossman wants his students to understand that concept for their own health, he wildly misunderstands the culture he helped create where the police view themselves as a thin blue line holding back the manifold forces of Chaos Undivided.

I was initially confused because blat (блат,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds, to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (блядь, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"

So he had a pretty good (not perfect) run up until the final 1/3, then had a staggering turn that only the author thought was profound or earned?

That's a man who lived his craft right there.

I've been saying this for years.

Yes, we have a gun violence problem. But notably, we do not have a heavy weapons problem. By and large, gun crimes are committed with guns that can be purchased legally somewhere inside the US.

So if the silver bullet to the gun violence problem is taking away all the guns (please do not misunderstand me, I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT TO BE THE CASE), then step 1 is to limit what guns can be purchased anywhere in the US.

But this whole 3d printer farse reveals something we sort of already knew: if people want to have guns (or have weapons in general), they're going to find a way. If you want to address the gun violence problem, you have to find a way to make people not want to kill, nor own guns, that's unrelated to how difficult/expensive it is to get guns. And you're going have to do that in the shadow of the constitution.

I don't know if its still true, but I recall reading once that CEQA had never been used to actually prevent or even slow the building of a dam or a mine or something. It had only ever been used to hobble otherwise neutral development. Its a good idea in theory, but I feel like the plaintiff ought to be able to articulate what environmental impact they are concerned about and maybe require a study from them in support of that claim too.

My number 1 complaint with Ubi games is that they all feel the same. Sure, in this one you stab, and in that one you shoot, and in that one over there you stab AND shoot, but it's all fundamentally the same. You've got a drone or a bird or a droid to tag enemies for you, and there's a straightforward shopping-list style crafting mechanic. There's also some vehicle combat, but its very limited, and its pretty rare that you're part of a larger group of vehicles attacking together - at best its a group of enemy vehicles coming after you (and the comedy of errors of those enemy vehicles crashing into each other trying to get to you, because apparently they didn't turn on pathfinding while in "alert" mode...). The whole thing looks like its chasing the annual-release pattern of Call of Duty, and the major sports franchises.

> Locks do not provide real physical security, they just keep honest and lazy people out.

Really?! I had no idea! I had such a miniscule understanding of what portion of the threat space locks address that the second sentence in the very fucking post you're replying is this:

> Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people.

I'm so ignorant of the threat space, that the sentence immediately following that one goes:

> They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door.

I guess you're right, the two sentences I wrote 76 characters before the one you're shitting all over as evidence of my ignorance have absolutely no bearing on the context of the statement I made. They just exist entirely disconnected from any other sentences in that same post. I bow to your superior intellect and analytical skills.

Eh, its more that any one security tactic will almost certainly not cover the entire threat space.

Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people. They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door.

Locks are no obstacle if the intruder is willing to use social engineering. But if all they're trying to do is get into my garden shed, they're going to have to manipulate me or my spouse. Or somehow get past my dog. Meanwhile, my dog has absolutely no bearing on a bad actor getting access to my bank account. But similarly, bringing the full might of the best electronic security to bear to protect a chainsaw and a rake seems a bit excessive. And sort of beside the point, since I've not built my garden shed to withstand creation of an additional door (by e.g. a sawzall or a fireaxe).

I mean to say that the only time I've ever needed to diagram a sentence to figure out what was being said was while taking Philosophy 1010, because the cheapest translations available of e.g. The Republic was a bit too opaque for me.

There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"

The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.

My point was not "oh, social media bullying is some kind of special case compared to other ways kids today bully their peers". My point was "modern bullying is different from historic bullying, and dismissing modern bullying as the same as historic bullying is intellectually lazy"

I remember when a bully would have to go up to you themselves to mete out whatever harassment, and you could avoid a lot of it by just being aware and avoiding that particular person.

Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.

This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.

Nowadays, when I hear "German Engineering", I internally translate it to "German love of complexity and bespoke/manual manufacturing".

The extreme depreciation of BMWs and Germany's loss to the Allies in WWII are both aspects of the same phenomenon; that fact is very funny to me.

The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.

Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.

All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.

Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s.

The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.

I think its not just recency bias at work, but also the broader experience that nothing changed after the first straw. If the complainant can't assemble the various issues into a coherent narrative that signals that they should leave, then they're not going to. So its not just fixing issues as they come up, its fixing the right issues before they can spread.

I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.

The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".

Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.

I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.

A lot of reasons, but the two big ones are:

1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.

2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.

All of the velcro katanas I've ever owned ultimately ended up pretty stank. I think its the textile lining. Meanwhile, my Muira VCS have stayed pretty clean. My Muira Lace, not so much.

A nit: There's a subtle distinction between an individual human and the power of human organization and civilization that is implied by the article, but never outright stated.

One-for-one, there are many creatures that are individually more dangerous to humans, and a decent number of people are killed by such animals every year. Indeed, a naked human in the wild is going to be quite fragile and easy to kill until they can bring some technology to bear. But there are no animals or even set of animals that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity at any of our technological peaks from the last 100,000 years. Even the number one killer of humans, the mosquito, is gradually being defeated, going from a vector for disease to just an annoyance, just like the flea.

This is true up until it really REALLY isn't.

The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that) is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not including the RPI Pico). After that, with microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in the standard Raspbian linux distro.

They are foundationally different items, and it does not take a tremendously complicated project to reach the boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks or blocking other operations? You need a microcontroller.

Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.

I used to be all boots all the time, but I realized somewhat recently that unless I'm carrying a heavy load, boots are significantly less comfortable than good e.g. trail running shoes. If I'm carrying the load that the OP is, hiking boots are not really useful for me. If you look at what e.g. extreme long-distance hikers are wearing on the Appalachian trail or the Pacific Crest trail, its usually trail running shoes, because it makes more sense for carrying a light load an extremely long distance.

Certainly, if you've a history of ankle injuries or some other podiatric necessity, go for it. But for me, a pair of good walking shoes and a pair of good sandals is all I realistically need.

Especially in the context of recent (that is, last 10 years) removal of data from Center of Disease Control sources due to changing political winds.

I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.