taffronaut

In the 90s, NASA refurbished and extensively modified a mothballed supersonic Soviet-era Tu-144. The modifications included fitting different (Tupolev) engines. The total cost was $350M. It was used as a flying laboratory.

This answers a question that I often have in the UK - "Do I have a non-zero chance of being able to get (near to) to somewhere by bus?". There's no clear way to answer that since UK buses were deregulated in 1986 [1]. For me, this isn't a tool to plan an immediate journey. Yes, UK buses are sparse and unreliable in rural areas. Often it's quicker to walk 1-2 miles than to wait for a bus. The service might not even run every day. Personally I've had pretty good experience of occasional recreational travel on main bus routes outside of cities and towns in Wales which is why I am interested in this.

[1] https://www.regulation.org.uk/archive-buses.html

There is a meat option

At one point in the past a major UK a medical school adopted random selection for qualified candidates (Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry - part of Queen Mary University of London). The approach benefitted qualified students from less well-off backgrounds vs those who can afford to win at the ever more elaborate (manual at the time) hurdles of resume assessment criteria and effectively game the system. There was an orchestrated campaign against the lottery around "Why gamble with would-be doctors?". Random selection was quietly dropped.

Having an adversarial relationship with your suppliers is not necessarily the best arrangement. It means that suppliers will nickel-and-dime you for every change and ship minimum possible quality to you. The cost of loss of agility and quality will impact your bottom line.

I miss the quaint DVB SI (ETSI EN 300 468) Content Descriptors with values that lumped together arbitrary categories (someone's subjective opinion) like: "serious music/classical music", or "popular culture/traditional arts". I thought they seemed strange in the context of a formal standard.

I'd respectfully challenge that your opinion reflects reality. Nihilism [1] is just one philosophy amongst many. It's no more 'the one truth' than any of the others. Many of the other philosophies have evolved in the light of folks living for centuries through harsher reality than most of us are experiencing today. You might consider other philosophies to be delusional (as others consider nihilism to be delusional), but even in that different delusion they provide a framework to relate your love of your own personality and humanity with the same feelings that a lot of other people also feel about themselves and also each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

I have struggled to understand why houses don't get built and land sits idle for years. I can only assume that it's significantly more complicated. I'm not trying to excuse the complications. I guess if the house prices are forecast to go up, you build some houses, but not all that you can because the longer you wait, the higher the profit will be on the ones you start later. If house prices are going down, even if it's profitable when you start, you're not likely to build houses because you might be left holding houses that will sell at a lower margin. If there was a tax on unused land, that might skew things towards building more even if prices are declining, but I'm sure there are lots of views on that.

No, I think he searched for the ETA App and was disappointed at the lack of emphasis on an alternative to the app once you are in it. If you just search the web for ETA and gov.uk it takes you straight to the online portal (which also asks for feedback as it's a service in Beta). The gov.uk website is neutral between you using the app or the online portal.

The only point I can see here is that once you are in the app it keeps encouraging you to use it and doesn't keep suggesting you might like to use the online portal instead. But I don't understand the initial premise about not using app stores. If the author didn't want to use an app store, why did he download an app instead of going to gov.uk?

I worked at a company where managers would endlessly push this argument to open a job posting. Of course there was no budget to hire, but they would delude themselves that the perfect candidate was out there and they'd 'be able to make a case' for the budget with the stellar application in hand. Of course they had no idea what that actually entailed otherwise they would do it in advance. To HR's credit at that company their policy was never to advertise a post unless the budget was signed off. They would patiently explain this each time some deluded optimist showed up at their door. I can easily believe in companies where the rules are less explicit that the delusion would manifest as an endless procession of advertised postings that could never be actually hired because there is no money to fund them.

There is jazz improvisation handbook "Harmony with Lego Bricks" written in the 1980's by Conrad Cork in the UK. It's pretty niche. Conrad approached Lego at the time and they gave him permission to use the Lego name. It's written "LEGO(R)" on the cover. Those were more innocent times I guess. (edited for a typo)

I'm not sure that the RK3688 and a big chunk of the article spent on its specs belongs in a "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview" given that it's due sometime in 2026. I'm sure it's going to be great but I suggest it belongs to a future state.

On the other hand, CIX have been putting actual Arm v9 hardware in developers' hands for some time.

The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".

Thomann - for musical instrument stuff

I misread that as "the bassoon of security standards" and it sent my brain in a whole other direction

Most posts here seem to be offering easy on-ramp listening for jazz, but they seem at odds with the spirit of the original post. For jazz that is off-putting at first listening but rewards deeper study, consider Thelonious Monk (Blue Note sessions 1 & 2) or if you are really up for it, Coltrane's Interstellar Space.

Arm isn't competing with its biggest customers here. This doesn't affect their relationship with e.g. AWS or Azure (Cobalt) as those folks are not selling CPU chips on the open market. Nvidia probably couldn't care less as commodity Arm IP isn't anything they make their margins on. It affects anyone selling Neoverse server chips which is ... Ampere, but Ampere is bankrolled by Oracle and Oracle could take them in-house.

From TFA "decoding rare and lost languages of which hardly any traces survive". Assuming that's not hype, let's see it have a go at Rongorongo[1] then.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

As British as the British Royal Family then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Windsor

Ubuntu has historically had a business model that is more open to supporting out-of-tree kernel patches

The UK government ran an initiative in the mid 1980s to get electronics CAD into every university and polytechnic. The institution I worked for got a lab of DN300 and DN500 workstations running various digital and SPICE-based tools. We used them for undergrad classes and also for some consultancy projects. They felt like a huge leap to us. To put it in perspective, our other labs at the time were either CP/M or mainframe terminals.

This is good advice. There are many boring jobs in 'cost side' departments of big companies and the only attention they get from upper management is a continuous focus on reducing costs. Even the most inoffensive manager can get ground down by having to do more with less every year. IMHO, a sweet spot is rather where you can trace that you contribute to revenue but you are not on the critical path.

Here's a link to the Arm program: https://www.morello-project.org/

From TFA, "the case was a high-net-worth family matter" so probably not an existential threat to anyone.

It's not inherently ridiculous. Administration is a non-zero cost. Anything below that cost is cheaper to give rather than administer.

Hip operations are a weird counter example to refute UBI. They're obviously not universally applicable and are more expensive in cost and resources than the administration overhead. That's leaving aside the ethical issues of giving people unnecessary surgery.

I have multiple problems with this comment

> 95% of health is being proactive about your health: food, fitness, sleep, dentist, etcetera.

This is a statistic pulled out of nowhere.

>> But we're all going to have severe medical problems at some point.

>Which often are untreatable - and the doctoring is regularly prophylactic. Hip-replacements are an obvious outlier.

Again this is pulled out of nowhere. All types of joint replacement, stents and heart surgery are major procedures which are common and not prophylactic. Prostate cancer surgery has an 85% success rate in eradication where I live, and no, I didn't get it from bad lifestyle choices.

> So, you're not supposed to buy stuff for your hobby nor build stuff for your hobby?

I'm not sure that anyone is proposing that.

> A good counter example could perhaps be table top wargaming, e.g. Warhammer and the likes. Surely, people who call that their hobby like to play the (various different) games. But a lot of people love building and painting their miniature armies just as much.

That sounds perfectly reasonable if the split between crafting and playing is somewhere near the middle. However, in the case that they hardly ever actually engage in a game, I'd maintain that their hobby is not 'wargaming' and is actually model making.

I learned that style pre 1980 in the UK. My writing still looks pretty childish and I don't get any compliments. I can take longhand notes at speed though.

I've used this in the past for power cycling USB-powered embedded boards in a test farm, but the dependency on specific hubs is a pain. In the end it was easier to dedicate an RPi per board. The generation of RPi I was using could switch the overall USB power and that was good enough [1].

[1] https://github.com/bfletcher/remote-usb-target

Oskar Schlemmer was most famous for designs for the "triadic ballet" staged by the Bauhaus. It's nice to see his wider work represented in the the Bauhaus-style interiors of Rabe House here.