potatofrenzy

Krebs doesn't report on that kind of stuff, he has a different focus. Dan Goodin has been covering tech for decades and does a really good job.

I think part of the problem is that the rules are just kinda... stupid? There is absolutely no reason why regular alkaline batteries can't end up in household garbage. They don't contain heavy metals or anything else that'd make them dangerous.

The rules are basically like this because the regulators figured you're too dumb to know which types of batteries are bad for the environment (lead-acid, the now-obsolete Ni-Cd, less significantly NiMH). And sure, better-tailored rules would confuse some folks, but I bet that compliance would be higher for the really bad stuff.

I've been playing with this for a while. In my experience, current LLMs work really well for looking up general electronics knowledge and reinterpreting it in the context of your problem. "What are the reasons my resistor-based voltage divider isn't working", that kind of stuff. Not useful for seasoned EEs, great for hobbyists.

But the moment you're asking LLMs to reason about the specs or the applications of specific chips, they will give made-up answers around 80% of the time. This is probably a matter of the data being a bit too sparse. Pick a chip and ask about its supply voltage range, and it will probably get it wrong, even for the most popular stuff.

DDG probably doesn't want to? On the time horizons they're thinking about, it's probably more expensive to develop competitive tech and keep it working than it is to pay for API access.

Great if you don't have a thick accent, no kids screaming in the back, etc.

This, in itself, is an oversimplification simplification.

Signals travel through traces. It's just that the motion of charges in the conductor is mediated by electromagnetic forces, and electric and magnetic fields are not constrained to the conductor. Indeed, electrochemical batteries aside, most of the energy storage in an electrical circuit is mediated by fields interacting with the surrounding space.

At low switching speeds, these effects are inconsequential outside discrete components specifically designed to exploit them (capacitors, inductors). At high speeds, these small capacitances and inductances begin to have perceptible effects, for example turning the PCB a non-negligible capacitor that induces voltages and currents on other layers.

A related problem is that when trace length is no longer negligible in function of wavelength, you can no longer treat signals as changing the potential across the entire conductor in an instant. You get different voltages in different places, and all of sudden, you have to worry about wave propagation - reflections, etc.

Some of the advice in this article isn't entirely sound; for example, you certainly don't need to worry about sharp trace angles or vias at 50 MHz. Similarly to the fetish of (often discontinuous!) ground planes, there's a lot of PCB design advice that matters in specific use cases (and even there, needs to be done well) that over time morphed into a bit of a "you absolutely need to do this in your Arduino project or else".

> This "aCropalypse" event is an example of how making the wrong triage of an issue report can turn out very expensive. All the costs to the world of aCropalypse could've been averted.

Not trying to be facetious, but... what costs? It is unlikely that this cost the company any substantial amount. It probably wasn't even a whole lot of extra work for the PR department, as the bug didn't generate mainstream headlines.

The sucky reality is that employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business. We want constant team growth, never-ending promotions, ever-growing salaries. If another company is growing more aggressively and paying even less sustainable salaries, we tend to jump ship. It's not necessarily wrong, but we really shouldn't act surprised when that backfires every now and then.

Tech leadership bears blame for nourishing that "there's no tomorrow" / "growth will continue forever" culture, but it's such an unhelpful take to portray this as some sort of a class struggle with shareholders. Especially since for a good number of big tech companies, shareholders don't actually have much say and founders hold controlling interests.