summa_tech

Can always go splice some PCF or PMF if you like to feel appreciated for your splicing. I swear I'd rather splice 100 SM fibers than 1 PMF.

The monkeys in my last experiment got there in 221 years, in particular.

It's funny. I think a lot of more software-y people just don't see the need for a lot of Framework features. I deal with a lot of hardware (as a hobbyist and a hardware engineer) and I've seen every USB standard connector in the last week.

I also own something like three different Framework products (16, 13 and Desktop) and gifted two more (13 and Desktop) to people. Really, apart from the fit issues on 16 spacers and perhaps the speakers, the only really unforgivable issue is the size of the expansion cards (too small for interesting hardware like a good LTE modem).

It may appear to work, but it uses a lot more CPU than a decent 10G network card, despite being half the speed. I shudder to think what their 2.5G must've been if this is better.

I feel ya on the PCIe slot. And the on-board NICs are sub-par Realtek garbage, unacceptable both on features and quality. However, you can fit a small SFP+ card inside if you (a) cut out a correctly shaped hole in your case, and (b) turn the fan on at 40% instead of letting it turn off. The card will sit at a small angle but work fine, and with some 3D printing I even got a mounting bracket in to keep it stable. A lower profile connector, like USB 4, might fit outright.

Would a SLG46880 work for you? It has 28 GPIOs, enough LUTs to make a 21-input OR gate, runs off 2.3-5.5V (two VCCIO partitions, but you can tie them together). It costs like a buck in 5k quantities - they used to be much cheaper when you bought them directly from Silego, but now that they've been acquired the price has been _improved_.

https://www.renesas.com/en/products/slg46880

I don't know... Two people around me recently switched to Linux because they could not stand how bad Windows 11 got. I did not encourage either of them (I've got my share of frustrations after running a Linux desktop exclusively for 25 years, and will not consent to be the object of their ire when they inevitably get frustrated - I'd rather help them on neutral ground instead).

We have GHz femtosecond lasers. It's commercialized! Amplitude Systemes has them for sale! We build time references out of them!

You can also make them out of semiconductors. VCSELs and other semiconductor gain media naturally have short upper state lifetimes. It makes for a happy stable femtosecond laser with a semiconductor saturable absorber.

Oh, fusion has been ready for this sort of application for over 70 years.

3% FWHM for something you could, at one time, buy for under $100 on eBay is very good. A typical scintillator + photomultiplier detector will get you about 6-7% (NaI:Tl scintillator). The Radiacode, which is super cute and all, gets about 7-9% depending on model.

Narrower FWHM means you will miss fewer energy peaks from isotopes.

A few years ago, CZT detectors made by eV Products showed up in quantity on eBay. Pretty much everyone interested in radioactivity seemed to snap one up back then. It took a fairly long time for folks to figure out how to use them well! But they're really not bad, especially for the size.

Here's some spectra with 3% FWHM @ 662 keV:

https://maximus.energy/index.php/2020/05/01/gamma-spectrosco...

> sound money

Perhaps they're the new incarnation of audiophiles.

Is this really even a little cursed? It's a perfectly nice device, and in fact has been manufactured as a chip before. Enpirion has made this under the name of EC2650QI 6A Voltage Divider:

https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/632833/ec2650qi-datasheet.pd...

Enpirion's first products - integrated-inductor DC/DC converters - were limited to fairly low input voltages. This allowed them to run very fast with the technology of the time; they needed to run fast, because the integrated inductor was not very large. But this was severely limiting Enpirion's market: if you wanted to make something 5V-powered, they were great. But a PC motherboard application with 12V input?

This device was the answer: convert 12V to 6V with this switched capacitor halver, and then use other Enpirion parts. I don't think it was super successful, though, because at this point you were no longer winning on board complexity by using integrated inductors.

Does KVM hypervisor work? Previous Qualcomm CPUs have locked hypervisor mode behind Qualcomm proprietary blobs, and only allowed HyperV to use it - this was definitely the case for WOS laptops.

I believe the proper term for this kind of "as a one-time gesture of goodwill" is "ex gratia", and is more-or-less a standard form for compensation without admitting liability.

I think a lot of the negativity comes from the odd choice of keyboard layout.

You can think of it as a weirdness budget: this is an odd-purposed device, running a specialty distribution of Linux by design. It is not portable despite having portable-like specs. And on top of this, it has an unusual keyboard layout.

It costs a lot of money and requires pre-orders, so you can't even impulse buy it. You can't actually see if you'd like the keyboard switch or layout in stores, either.

Agreed, and I'm fairly impressed by the GPU effort. That said, it did take a very long time, even with the demonstrably extreme amount of excitement from the Linux community (Linus himself was thrilled to use a Macbook). What do you do for parts that are useful but don't get people this excited?

What really burned me on this kind of stuff was the disappearance of Xeon Phi drivers from the kernel. Intel backed it out after they discontinued the product line, and the kernel people gladly went with it ("who'll maintain this?"). Intel pulled a beautiful piece of process lawyership on it: apparently they could back it out without difficulty, because the product was never released! (Never mind it has been sold, retired and circulated in public.)

I mean, part of that is the difference between how easy it is to build a platform in Linux vs how hard it is to get into the tree. This is actually, in my mind, a major change in the Linux development process.

Nobody expected Intel to provide employees to write support for 80386 pagetables, or Philips to write and maintain support for the I2C bus. The PC keyboard driver was not sponsored and supported by IBM. Getting the code into Linux was really easy (and it shows in a lot of the older code; Linux kernel quality standards have been rising over time), because everyone was mostly cooperating on a cool open-source project.

But at some point, this became apparently unsustainable, and the expectation is now that AMD will maintain their GPU drivers, and Qualcomm (or some other company with substantial resources) will contribute code and employees to deal with Adreno GPUs. This led to a shift in reviewer attitudes: constant back-and-forth about code or design quality is typical on the mailing lists now.

This means contributing code to the kernel is a massive chore, which any person with interest in actually making things work should prefer to avoid. What's left is language lawyers, evangelists and people who get paid to sit straight and treat it as a 9-5 job.

I wanted to give a quick explanation of the odd and off-hand "lightbulb" comment in the article. Why would an oscillator need a lightbulb? Especially since the article does not get into the weeds of building oscillators that would actually care about this.

A somewhat difficult part of making (moderate-frequency) analog oscillators is getting a clean sinewave without harmonics. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world: a delay, a low-pass filter, a linear amplifier that compensates for the loss in the delay and filter, and boom, sinewave. You can even put the low-pass filter and the delay in a single phase shifter circuit.

The difficulty is hidden in the "compensates for the loss" language. If you amplify too little, your oscillation will decay. If you amplify too much, you will inevitably saturate the amplifier, introducing lots of harmonics (like a squarewave output in the article). So you need some way to stabilize your gain at exactly the right level.

A lightbulb is an interesting device: it is a very linear resistor at short timescales, but nonlinear at long timescales. As the filament heats up, resistance rises. The thermal constant can be fairly substantial, certainly more than kHz or MHz oscillator frequencies. So you can exploit this sweet and clean nonlinearity to produce an oscillator that self-stabilizes!

Design your circuit so that the amplifier gain is controlled by lightbulb's resistance (which is quite easy: you use the lightbulb as one of the gain-setting resistors). And boom, pretty much a perfect sinewave.

The issue with the lengthy deliberative process is that it provides multiple opportunities for motivated, but ultimately damaging to the public, operators to intervene. In this case, I present to you the Americans for Common Cents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents

They care more to keep the cent than normal Americans, who ultimately pay for its cost of manufacturing, care to get rid of it. So they'll always win a careful, deliberative process; because they'll show up for the cent _every time_ this comes up. And everyone else gets mildly shafted for no reason.

Unfortunately, the symmetry provided by higher levels of your software stack is not always reflected by the lower levels. This causes your symmetry to be created as an abstraction. (Subroutines are more efficient to implement than co-routines on real hardware.) Abstractions are leaky and this, in turn, causes the superficial symmetry to merely mask the underlying asymmetry.

If done exceptionally well, the only visible evidence of the leak will be substantial performance disparities between seemingly symmetric features (well done! this is unusual).

If done with the normal level of software design quality, the evidence will show up as quirky behavior, imperfect symmetry, "well this one always works but the other one is not reentrant", etc.

The thing is, when you're 95 years old with a trillion dollars, you have lived 70 years making a trillion dollars (which can be quite fun! Warren B certainly seems to have enjoyed it) and along the way you've - no doubt - spent a decent amount of time as a billionaire. Do not discount the part of life behind you... it's just as real as the part ahead.

If you don't vote, you agree with the majority. Plain and simple! If you want to show your protest, go vote and explicitly vote with an invalid ballot or a third party. Don't give yourself the convenient "out" of staying home and then feeling like you're such a counterculture warrior for doing it.

What does the Supreme Court or White House have to do with the bipartisan agreement between Senate garbagepersons to retain the insane filibuster policy that guarantees non-resolution of simple deadlocks?

You could also make a high speed signal sampler.

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Sampler

I'd expect the loss coefficient (tan d) to be terrible. Cellulosics hold onto water quite well. You will not have a good time pushing anything high-speed through this kind of board.

I would say the only practical application would be disposable things like PCBs in single-use vape pens. (Which are pretty environmentally offensive on other levels anyway.)

Long ago, before access to the Internet was cheap and plentiful, and way before search engines made finding this kind of information easy, this was a priceless find for an aspiring low-level programmer. All the (semi-)common PC hardware and software documented in one place.

Endless hours spent exploring VGA hardware registers and trying to apply them for cool visual effects. Learning how the then-new 32-bit Windows interacted with DOS extenders, and trying to make a homemade - very basic - operating system that could do it, too. The thrill of writing a Terminate and Stay Resident alarm clock, and having it finally not explode...

I have very fond memories of the Ralf Brown's Interrupt List.

You see it used sometimes for plating thickness, for instance gold plating on PCBs or connectors.

Fortunately, they all come from the same LLM article factory as the western-branded ones. So, no loss.

It's MTE4. The "enhancements" mostly make it easier for Apple developers to hack XNU into continuing to operate with MTE.