summa_tech

Good point. Or repair rows (like Virage/Synopsys STAR).

Hacker News is still skewed towards people interested in programming languages (as opposed to actually programming). Probably some sort of Y-combinator Lisp heritage. There's also a persistent minority of CS grads who think that developing / using new programming languages is the most fascinating thing in the world, and some of them hold on to that thought.

It's reasonable that such people would also be interested in design aspects of languages, and UB in C is in that field. Though I would argue that a lot of it was originally accommodating old CPU architectures without compromising performance too badly, and about as much a "design choice" as wheels being round...

If you don't have space for a microscope, you can also get yourself the long-range (~400mm) 2.5-3.5x magnifiers that you may have seen your dentist wear. They're easily available on Amazon, not too expensive, and comfortable for hours of wearing. These are 2-element lenses that work really well.

Higher magnification variants (8x etc) are not nearly as comfy. They get quite long, heavy and expensive. I tried them and did not like them nearly as much. Also beware of short viewing distance, ultra-cheap products that are just a single lens element per eye.

It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH.

Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8

In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.

I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.

The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.

Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.

I'm sorry to bring the mood down somewhat further. But a lot of the successful protests just end up re-rolling the dice instead of improving the conditions, and you actually end up possibly worse off than before. "More like, under new management", as the meme goes.

It takes a period of worldwide prosperity and, perhaps, substantial foreign entanglement to allow revolutions / coups to actually improve the situation of people living through them.

Standard ITU grid is 100 GHz channel spacing, with subdivisions of 25 and 50. We're routinely using symbol rates high enough that the channels are fairly well filled.

Zephyr support lazy FPU context switches. So the downside from enabling FPU sharing is fairly limited.

Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers.

What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.

First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.

Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town.

So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off.

Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.

We could be breaking new grounds with spinning band distilled moonshine.

While hydrogen-air mixes explode really readily (outstandingly wide flammability and pretty wide detonation range), and the energy released is considerable for the weight, the actual explosion does not produce a particularly high overpressure wave.

That's because the starting density of the hydrogen air mixes at near atmospheric pressure (such as in a balloon) is pretty low. Also, the balloon does not significantly contain the explosion, which reduces the danger a lot. I would not want to do it in a glass container.

Well, consider that the alternative is a _corporation_ manipulating the algorithm per their own _corporate_ political needs. That's really not much of an improvement. Unless you also think that corporations should have more rights to political speech than individuals, which goes even further than the usual representation of Citizens United.

For the traditional "100 nF per pin" problem, there is an actual constraint based solution. What you _really_ want is an impedance and cross-impedance constraint on current loops through power pins. That's, ultimately, what matters: not some rule of thumb, but actual physics that attempts to quantify the board's response to the chip's changing load.

Interestingly, Qualcomm actually gives you these, but I haven't seen many (any?) other chip manufacturers do that. I wish that'd became common practice.

The next step up is HDI. I knew it was (still) expensive, but I did not realize it was a cost multiplier, not adder :-)

The name of this project brought many memories of the HP 48G to the forefront of my mind, after so many years. Its 1 bpp pixelated icons and drawings were indeed called GROBs - there are collections of these online. What a coincidental but fine name for a pixel-capable graphics editor.

Sometimes, the bigger physical size of through-hole crystals gives them a higher Q. I, too, prefer surface-mount everything but have been defeated on that sadly ;(

The self-synchronizing scrambler of 10GBase-SR and its relatives is a beautiful piece of engineering.

Interestingly, I heard that entrenched telco people were pushing for a much more complicated, SONET-ish approach. But classic Ethernet simplicity carried the day, and it's really nice...

I... actually really liked these. And yes, sure, they aren't completely obedient to Tolkien's descriptions of the characters, but the atmosphere feels right.

But then again, I grew up with the Moomins.

And honestly pretty great, unless you are a collector. It's well done.

The book itself is beautiful and haunting. But I don't think it's for everyone... I have a copy, and I gifted one to someone in my family who really didn't understand the point.

I think the issue at the core of the analogy is that factories, traditional factories, excel at making a ton of one thing (or small variations thereof). The big productivity gains came from highly reliable, repeatable processes that do not accommodate substantial variation. This rigidity of factory production is what drives the existence of artisan work: it can always easily distinguish itself from the mass product.

This does not seem true for AI writing software. It's neither reliable nor rigid.

You could also consider MRAM. Which is available in larger sizes - up to 4 Mbit on SPI bus in the MR20H40, and 128 Mbit in EM128LXQ (but it gets unreasonably expensive when this big).

https://www.everspin.com/family/mr20h40?npath=259

Selective amplification of true events as well as selective reporting are bread and butter of modern propaganda. It works a lot better than saying outright falsehoods, which - in the long-term - cause people to lose faith in everything you have to say. And there's always someone jumping to your defense - after all you did not outright lie...

The "interested" part does a lot of lifting though. It's really hard to explain things to uninterested people.

If the person you are explaining your project to is not interested in the technical side, presumably under the rather confused but popular theory that technical aspects are not relevant to technology ventures, you'll not be making headway. It's much better to just make up some dollar numbers and run with that.

In theory, that's true.

In practice, any unexplored corner of the field will contain surprises; these will require extra theoretical development to cover.

Usually things like imperfect understanding of materials get in the way. Pretty much the reason you need both theory and experiment to make progress in every single area of matter-based technology (i.e. not software).

To some degree, this is a consequence of the nature of the field you're working in:

* if the physics is so completely understood that you can confidently predict something will work from your sofa, and give an error-free recipe to build it, you indeed can invent from theory... but how deep can this invention be if the problems of the field are completely solved?

* if you are working in a field at the edge of human understanding, you cannot have the confidence in your ideas without having tested them experimentally; a theoretician makes at most a minor contribution to the actual inventions being realized, because he's producing - most likely somewhat wrong - hypotheses.

This latter kind of "theoretical" inventions are heavily subject to survivorship bias. Fifteen competent theoreticians make different predictions - all according to best, though incomplete, model of the world; a successful experiment validates exactly one of them, and we end up exalting the lucky winner as the "inventor".

The issue is that China has done, on the whole, fairly alright for itself. So everyone with any power in the West is looking and thinking: "huh, so the freedom and rights and property were really not important for progress at all - might as well can it".