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I can also imagine the problems when someone has, for instance, their work and personal phones with them.

People seem to be pretty universally incapable of not assuming computer products to be infallible, especially when they might get some extra money in "over occupancy" fees.

Merlin got me into birding, and I've found this to be true, at least in some regions, especially if there's lots of background noise.

Unless a species has a really, really unique call or song, I've made it my personal rule to get eyes on it and, if I'm still not convinced, to take a picture and cross reference with iNaturalist and what folks on there think of it.

I've learned to curse the species that differ from others by the sheen of the backs of the males' necks or the angle of a wingbar. Also, gulls that only differ by things like the color of their feet or beaks.

The article mentions, but doesn't explicitly state, that they're going to be using electron beam lithography. Makes sense for their low volume and/or prototype fab goal, but I'm curious how well that would work for prototyping to fab at high volume with the likes of TSMC or Intel.

I would assume that re-targeting a design to a different fab's process would change enough about it that you might as well just do verification in simulation rather than sidetrack through Fab2.

I think people have a heightened reaction to threats based on the CFAA for "the door was open" circumstances because that law is so widely known for being used in threats against folks who were trying to ethically report things and in overly-aggressive prosecutions.

Of course, we don't yet know the specifics of this particular case, but I'm willing to lean towards the people receiving legal letters threatening CFAA action until there's more information.

Yeah, fair enough. "Compliance" is probably the phrasing I should've used, rather than "security".

I've been curious for a while about the overall taxonomy of security, especially for embedded platforms. It seems like the only hope is defense in depth, given the power glitching attacks and the like that you can find demonstrated.

Specific to the Raspberry Pi, I believe I even saw a thread at some point where one of their firmware engineers was making the case that secure boot on the Pi 5 was equivalent to a TPM in almost any reasonable threat model, since, in either case, you were out of luck if an attacker had physical access and was willing to put in enough effort.

I think at this point the brand reputation and software quality are a big selling point.

If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor will be making the exact thing you bought for 5-10y.

For hobbyist stuff at home, I agree, though. A mini PC is probably better for homelab stuff, and an RP2350 or ESP32 is probably better for anything embedded or battery powered that you want to do.

A physical TPM with their overall high-quality software support would be awesome.

I've spent far too much time messing around trying to get TPMs working over SPI or I2C to meet security requirements with 4Bs and 5s over the years.

I can't get myself to do the battery-built-in-to-charger thing. I've always treated portable power banks as semi-disposable since they do eventually get worse and fail, and it feels icky to me to tie ~immortal charging gear to something that will die.

I did have the same feeling about flashlights for camping/hiking with lithium batteries, though, until someone walked me through just how much better they are than lugging around AAs.

I wouldn't be against better labeling, but I've found that I don't have to worry about it too much, day to day.

USB-C has allowed me to grab one decent two-port charging brick, two solid 6ft cables, and charge just about everything I own just by keeping those in my backpack. If I think I'll need to move any data fast, etc., I just throw my one good USB4 cable in my bag, too.

I will admit, though, that I've had some crappy situations at work where it turned out my flaky monitor setup was due to the stupid work-provided docks coming with cables that only supported 10Gbps. Better labeling would've solved those ones.

Where I live these days, it's 50/50 heat included in rent versus not, and I have to remind my friends that literally all of the buildings they rent in are 50+ years old.

And if your landlord is balking at including heat in rent, there's a decent chance it's because your bill will be outrageous because there's zero insulation, and as a tenant there's little you can do to fix that.

Interesting, I would've guessed that they would've forcibly been on Windows since time immemorial.

Entirely unsurprised that someone would refuse to give up their workflow, though! I've rarely found a user with specific needs who wants to change literally anything else about their system, since what they have works for them.

I was curious to see the "Innovative DICOM Medical Imaging" section. I wouldn't have thought that Apple would be interested in niche applications like viewing radiology imaging, but I guess they're probably interested in any cost-insensitive market for these since they're so expensive.

Seems to be the expected relatively small refresh, mostly just adding the M5?

The language towards the end of the press release implies to me that they're targeting last-gen Intel MacBook Air users thinking about upgrades more than anyone with an M2/3/4 MacBook.

Echoing a sibling comment, lots of landlords require it now, and the basic packages that insurers offer you as a bundle with auto or other forms of insurance are pretty decent, depending on state.

Typically seems like $100-200 per year for coverage that would handle the loss of most of one's possessions, provided you don't get screwed by "well, you don't have the receipt" or "we only cover water ingress, not floods or leaks".

> But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.

As someone who recently started using iNaturalist, I've been curious about this. I think it's an awesome platform and really cool that people can share what they find, etc, but I noticed that people would pile on with species-level IDs on pictures that were obviously ambiguous between different species known to exist in the vicinity.

I of course want as much data as possible to be available to science, but it piqued my interest about whether a negative feedback loop of misidentifications to future identification models could form.

I find this stuff really interesting, so if anyone's curious, here's a few more tidbits:

GPS system time is currently 18s ahead of UTC since it doesn't take UTC's leap seconds into account [0]

This (old) paper from USNO [1] goes into more detail about how GPS time is related to USNO's realization of UTC, as well as talking a bit about how TAI is determined (in hindsight! - by collecting data from clocks around the world and then processing it).

[0] https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N... [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19960042620/downloads/19...

I think GP might’ve been referring to the part of Jeff’s post that references GPS, which I think may be a slight misunderstanding of the NIST email (saying “people using NIST + GPS for time transfer failed over to other sites” rather than “GPS failed over to another site”).

The GPS satellite clocks are steered to the US Naval Observatory’s UTC as opposed to NIST’s, and GPS fails over to the USNO’s Alternate Master Clock [0] in Colorado.

[0] https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...

Raspberry Pi seems to have been on a tear of good stuff this year. Lots of activity on both the hardware accessory and software side. I've been following their secure boot provisioning work in particular.

Conveniently for me, they keep releasing things right as I start to have an interest in using that thing.

Networking on Linux in general seems to be very susceptible to "wrong tutorial" in recent years, what with distros switching between different network control suites.

So far, I've been a big fan of netplan (which I guess is tied in with cloud-init?). Dropping a YAML file that declares the network setup I want and lets a swappable renderer make it so on the backend is a nice change from the brittle-over-time series of commands that it took previously.

Yeah, if they had had more altitude, I would guess that this would have looked even more like the AA 191 crash from 1979, with the left wing stalling and causing a roll and pitch down.

That in turn reminds me of the DHL flight out of Baghdad in 2003 that was hit by a missile [0]. Absolutely amazing that they managed to keep it together and land with damage like that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_sho...

The picture towards the end of the antenna in the window is funny, since I personally would be afraid someone would panic seeing it set up.

Don’t like the thought of explaining a radio experiment to a flight attendant at 30,000 feet!

I feel for the families with their reactions to people diving to the wreck, especially the fear that it could become a tourist attraction, but people being so upset at the various submersible and diving teams is curious to me.

Of course, you can't know the true intentions of the teams, but they all seem to have gone down there with great respect for the ship as a gravesite.

Right now, yes. You can pretty easily have a scenario where you’re talking to the agency you’re working with and they’re saying “we want to renew this, but we don’t know if they’ll give us the money in the end”.

So you’ll get a bunch of “hopefully this week” up until it expires.

It’ll be interesting to see if Ariane 6 can ever reach competitiveness with SpaceX on price for commercial launches, but I’m sure Europe will be happy to have their own workhorse rocket for the next decade or two, whatever the cost may be.

I’ve been happy to see more and more of the banking-related services that I use stop requiring that and give each other actual API access.

I absolutely refuse to hand over my credentials and cannot wait for the practice to die.

Given that Starship and Super Heavy are both methalox fueled, wouldn’t the combustion products in the exhaust be carbon dioxide and water?

I would imagine that plenty of users these days wouldn't bother to save their order details on the grounds that "oh, I'll get a notification with those".

Personally, I appreciate getting an email with details and a link for tracking. It does get annoying when it turns into low-grade spam, though.

The car that I'm most interested in fixing something on at the moment is a Toyota, so that's great to hear about their manuals. If one finds a manual from the manufacturer itself is it safe to say that that's the true FSM versus something else they may have produced?

Thanks for the tip on the Bentley manuals, too!

I’ve always been curious about how many different manuals there seem to be for every car. I know that the manufacturers create one for dealers and that there are/were companies that tear cars down to make their own, but it feels like when I’ve needed to go find instructions for things there’s a staggering variety of manuals of varying levels of helpfulness.

Even when I manage to find what I think is an FSM it seems a little hard to follow what’s really going on in a given section without reading the section for every other assembly involved.

I hadn't thought of that as part of why finding good dark roasts has been hard for me. I've been annoyed at light roasts for a long time because I tend to find them acidic to the point that they're not enjoyable. I appreciate the bitterness and toastiness of a good dark roast, but finding good ones has been few and far between in my experience.