to11mtm

FWIW, I think it was determined that the patent violation here was not 'willful'.

That said, we are talking about patents here, which are sometimes their own minefield of bullshit.

For example, Having to deal with a jury that may or may not be able to discern (Especially how a patent is written nowadays) versus an alternative but non-infringing design that accomplishes the same thing, and/or being able to properly discern similarly alternative 'prior art' from before the patent existed.

I don't know how guilty Apple is, or isn't, to be clear, but I remember how close to 25-ish years ago, a paintball company named Smart Parts managed to snatch up certain patents and then bully most of the industry into either paying them royalties or ceasing manufacture of electronic paintball markers, even despite the presence of prior art [0] and in many cases a very different fundamental design [1].

Or, as another curiosity, the whole thing where Doom 3 only got EAX support to keep Creative Labs happy, about them holding a patent on Z-Fail that Carmack didn't know about when he independently discovered it. And hell, the irony is, the technique is still instead known as 'Carmack's Reverse'.

Or, I remember the time I was at a company and I got to sign patent rights away for a dollar. The overall concept was so vague, I had to cringe in every meeting around describing the so-called 'novelty'.

tl;dr - patent 'infringement' is a murky field, and certainly different from hoovering up material protected by copyright, regardless of your opinions on current copyright laws (I do think they are way way way too long, also I think patent law has changed for the worse in the last 20-ish years.)

[0] - Specifically, there was a patent for a US Navy 'Pneumatic machine gun with photo cell interrupted circuit' that was actually listed as a prior art citation on the Smart Parts Patent, but most of the companies that were truly non-infringing were also too small to have the cash to fight in court.

[1] - The original Smart Parts markers used a mechanical/electrical switch, board controlled air valve to move bolts and hammers back and forth, but they would even go after manufacturers that used a mechanical solenoid and hall effect sensor to do the trigger pull. i.e. Smart Parts markers were designed for electronic valves from the start, whereas many of the other manufacturers pursued, the 'electronic' upgrade was just a different Grip and trigger setup.

> One thing I noticed was that walkability wasn’t priced in the rents at all since after a 1 mile walk from the city center, studio apartments were about 800$ (2024) whereas in the city center itself it was more like 1100$ IIRC. In my view going 300$ while just having a 1 mile walk seems like a steal.

A surprising number of people in the state would not consider 1 mile 'walkable'. I'm not saying I agree with that, however in general our car culture and the related urban design means it can be a PITA for a lot of people to live their lives without one.

> MSU is massive nowadays. It’s crazy how big it is. It feels like an actual town. I wonder how big it was then.

For whatever it's worth, MSU was still more of an agricultural college than anything back then. Heck, one of my ancestors actually got indoor plumbing installed by the college as part of a study into how it could benefit the life of a farmer.

My father actually went there near the end of that era, I can ask him for some stories this weekend when we do breakfast. Will be 20ish years off but while it was handled by the 'Board of Agriculture'.

> The car manufacturing culture in Michigan in general is a low-key tourist worthy thing to check out (e.g. in the Detroit Institute of Art)

The DIA has Diego Rivera's mural, worth also noting the Detroit Historical Museum has an example of part of an older style body-on-frame line alongside a lot of other interesting automotive history bits. (Also, in general other important sections for parts of our history, The basement even captures the 1800's cobblestone aesthetic.) Both the Motown and Riot exhibits are worth a good visit.

In general the state has one of the most curious meshes of industrial and rural/agricultural history, between the mining towns in the UP, the Logging towns in the norther LP, the farming history in much of the LP, and the 'Arsenal of Democracy' that was Detroit.

I remember rumblings a decade-ish ago that basically their hand was possibly forced to release the thing to avoid a full on revolt about abandoning all of their work; after all, Intel had been investing in deep pipelines for a while before, they were strapped for cash after the ATI Acquisition, and other 'server-ish' CPUs had done CMT type things in the past (keeping in mind that AMD was seeing a huge surge in server market share due to Hammer.)

Well, 'core' gets weird when we talk about Dozer. And where everything else had problems making it work.

AFAIR, a bulldozer 'module' has what is exposed to a core as two CPUs, but, per everything above, is two integer cores, one shared FPU core, and depending on the version of the arch, possibly shared fetch/decode/other resources between all of that. Also AFAIR the decoder sucked as far as being able to feed both the integer cores, and the integer cores were more anemic compared to what was in, say, a K10H Phenom.

AFAIR Steamroller was a big 'correction' of the Shared resource issues in the arch (I can't remember if other revisions had other improvements).

AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal.

Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once.

FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing.

It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today.

[0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd that they never did a dual channel Jaguar laptop part. I still ask whether it was because it would have made the FX look that bad...

I actually got to see one of those once.

For a major trans-oceanic backbone provider, at least 15ish years ago they had a mile or two between Detroit and Chicago where both ends were on the same side of the interstate highway.

But it's more frequent on DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems, AKA small-cell or micro-cell) networks.

Also the challenge of when fibers are leased (if that's still a thing, based on the networks I helped design I'd say 'probably').

They really are analogous to Lamport's "Distributed System" quip; A damaged fiber owned by a company you have never heard of can wreck your day.

Also the case of 'learning that someone did updates directly on AWS console instead of terraform and losing 0.5 or more days cleaning up the resulting mess'

This still surprises me.

Mostly around, at least the majority of 'stuff' I've worked on (both before and after the rise of coding agents) myself or others took enough time to make sure that anything done locally, if you run the tests locally, you're at least 90% of the way there as far as what CI/CD does.

I suppose the flipside being, most of those projects had less churn (i.e. one person was working on a service at a time, and we had good contracts between services.) Also, Our local boxes were way better than our CI boxes, so there was incentive to run locally versus waiting 2-10x the time for CI to run...

I'll admit I am not well versed on this subject on any measure, but there is this [0] paper indicating FinFET is doable, although IDK if there's any sort of hand-waving or other limitations involved.

[0] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8614555

It gets confusing...

eDRAM isn't the same as 1T-SRAM, which isn't quite the same as 1T-1C SRAM...

But overall they run into the same problems that you mention; it's just too hard to get a capacitor in play.

There is Zeno Semi's Bi-SRAM, buuuut it hasn't seemed to catch on for one reason or another.

It depends a bit on context... and scale of scale.

At my first software engineering role the system I 'inherited' (The guy who wrote it quit after it launched, I was hired on after) was only used by 5-10 users at a time. On the flipside, one or two of those users would do things that the system was advertised as being able to do, but would really stress out the system and slow certain operations down for everyone, including exposing our company to financial penalty risks. We actually for a time slowed down trying to get large customers signed up, because even the business folks had to manage enough complaints that they didn't want to risk damage to our reputation. [0]

At my second job, well, I remember the debate I had with the manager about a change I suggested to improve memory allocation on a new email templating process he wrote. He then gave me a lecture about 'premature optimization'. Then when the thing kept crashing with OOM errors he cribbed the parts of my changes that solved the memory leak but left out the pooled buffer to save face. [1]

[0] - The thing was written such that we could only process 2 messages concurrently from a given integration partner at a time, we eventually fixed it by moving the processing to actors behind a consistent hash router.

[1] - The pooled buffer changes were 5-10 extra lines total, lol.

One of the earliest 'mountain biking' trails, before real mountain bikes existed, is called Repack because they were using Coaster brakes and you'd basically have to rebiuld/repack the coaster brake hub with grease after a run due to all the heat forcing the hubs to expel.

TBH I don't care for hydraulic disc brakes much.

My -favorite- setup for Discs, at least use to be, Avid BB7s with Avid Speed Dial levers, with Flak Jacket Housings.

That combination was super simple to 'dial in' (Hydraulic brakes tend to be a lot more inconsistent on 'feel' unless you are very persistent about bleeding and know how to use a disc tuning fork) and honestly had a lot less overall drag than I've experienced with most hydraulic discs. Replacing cables is way easier than re-doing hydraulic lines, also you don't have to worry as much about overheating janking up your fluid. Only drawback is, yes, make sure your cables are set up right and clamped down good.

But yes, Coaster brakes suck, especially since 'failure' means either rebuilding the wheel or outright replacing, because nope, not gonna do that sort of hub job.

One of the things I liked about my Windows phone, was the relative lack of apps made it very hard to fall into addiction 'traps'.

On the flip side, my partner has fallen deep into the cesspit, either seeing her doom-scrolling through Facebook for hours, or the way she talks about all the things she saw on there despite not handling any of the things that she said she would get done that day (FWIW... My partner does not work at this time, she quit her job under the auspices of taking care of the house. Has not gone well. I guess at least she stopped playing cow-clicker games on her phone...)

If I will give my first 'real job' some credit for anything around their Blocking policies, they had extremely strict blocks around anything that could be 'personal use' and had very alarming warnings pop up if you happened to hit one of the blocks. (To the point where even doing legitimate work research I more than once freaked out and went right to my manager and the IT managers explaining my case and what I was doing.)

But it's also part of why the open office / panopticon layout has become more popular; It provides at least some vague threat to somewhat lower the risk folks get sucked into their phones out of view...

> a small point and shoot,

Actually the Point and shoot market has largely dried up, even the 'fancier' point and shoots.

Apple did a very smart thing, using Sony BSI[0] and Stacked[1] Sensors in their phones.

As the 'Camera Snob' in the family my Brother recently asked me to help look for a small point and shoot for his wife for their child's events, and I was shocked at how few options there are compared to a decade ago (And how little most have improved since!)

To be clear, the 'ILC' (what many might think of when they think of when they say DSLR) market has continued to advance and the tech is better than ever, but the simple built-in lens point and shoot market has gotten very small outside of certain markets.

[0] - Back Side Illumination, basically a way to build the sensor that allows more light to hit it, but has some yield implications

[1] - Stacked sensors is again another sensor-build optimization, but it allows for faster readout of the full sensor with less rolling shutter, makes 'computational photography' feasible.

Nuclear, FBOW, has one big advantage.

Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.

Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.

Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.

I don't think there's a law or precedent for that.

The Tucker Act allows for a company to claim damages related to the seizure of property. That is not the same as having a product being stopped from 'shipping'[0].

Also, despite the US Concept of 'Corporate Personhood', Even the Citizens United decision did not set the bar for civil damages to be awarded for a civil rights violation to a 'corporate personhood'. i.e. While they were ruled to have had their First Amendment Rights Violated, there was no financial compensation to be had. The bar for waiving sovereign immunity for an individual/bureau/branch is very high and AFAICT requires specific action from congress.

[0] - The Tucker Act was written in the late 1800s, long before even the concept of Nuclear tech 'Born Secret' doctrine became a thing.

I'll be rude/bold enough to say that Canada's ability to argue around 'in-country' made goods has been eroded for decades;

I will admit I'm going to point to a specific example; Canadian Bike makers have been able for at least a decade to get an unpainted frame from Taiwan/China/Etc, components from wherever, but so long as they painted the frame in canada and did final assembly in Canada... 'Made in Canada' alongside all of the tariff exemptions that came with that.

> But from Canada's point of view: they have already been threatened enough that im sure those remaining ford,gm and stellantis jobs might be gone eventually...

Guess you didn't hear about Brampton in the news, the Stellantis plant there might be on the chopping block...

TBH I agree with you, even mentioned it in my other reply.

Modern China is not like the Soviet Union; it is much closer to a capitalistic society, but instead of private equity there is a (heavier than even the most 'socialist' of EU nations) government planning push.

In some ways, one could argue they're just taking lessons learned from all of the current systems and applying them aggressively in their centralized planning.

As someone who has lived in/around the heart of the 'Arsenal of Democracy' for my whole life, gotta say they are taking better lessons learned than the US has.

The thing people tend to handwave about China's manufacturing prowess is that they have spent the last 25-ish years getting really good at 'making things to a spec' at a cost in-line with their labor market, being bolstered by their government's approach at Economy planning (i.e. subsidizing certain industries, required partnership agreements when foreign companies want to use that labor market to build things).

The quality of the product you get, like always, is about what people are willing to pay. The big difference is that the current cost of labor/material inputs there, is low enough that you can get the same or often better quality for less.

I wouldn't call that dumping. And to be clear, yeah they've done dumping in some cases.

But when we look at what's happened in the last 8 months or so around various AI SaaS-ish offerings, one could argue that plenty of US companies have done 'dumping with extra steps'. (And that's not even the first time necessarily, e.x. the DoorDash Pizza Arbitrage thought experiment...)

> It's also worth noting that many Chinese manufactured goods would mostly substitute for US manufactured goods (eg cars).

Heck, GM was (although they are moving it due to the Tariffs AFAIR) building the Buick Envision (Compact CUV) in China and shipping it to the US for sale. GM Announced in January that they'd move production to the US by 2028.

Similar for The Lincoln Nautilus (Midsize CUV), The current Gen is built in China and they only in the last month announced that they would move production back to the US... by 2030.

I tend to agree, it's one of the things I like about this era.

My first 'Programming' Job was actually doing automation for CAD drafters. They would ask about a feature, I'd have to estimate the effort to implement versus how much time it would save over 1 or 2 years. If I could implement it quicker enough over the estimated time savings, I got the green light to code it instead of doing CAD work.

Which, frankly was good experience for me; I was translating semi-to-barely-technical people's requests into requirements.

Skip to today, I can have a complaint about what someone has to do manually, and can easily turn it into what's necessary to get Copilot/Claude to spit out a usable, simple tool to automate the needs of many teams. Sure, it's not always super fancy stuff, but 30-60 minutes of prompting/reviewing/testing the results can save 5-10x that time if not more for teams.

Somewhere in my Dad's house, I think I still have the 'free' DOS 6.22 update disks that came if you registered 6.21.

> Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.

I will admit, My judgement of 'non-consumer-software' is somewhat based on my corporate experience, where either:

- The contract with the vendor writing/providing software to the company is written so poorly that absolutely counter-intuitive decisions are made to try to steer the ship at the last moment, because the contract was written so bad there is no support

- For SaaS-ish offerings, the company would have some guy in a corner fixing the bugs in the data within the SLA, not necessarily fixing the actual bug causing the problem.

- You're lucky enough to be at a shop where the requirements are handled well enough that, yes, to your point, You have SLAs and things get fixed or there are penalties involved.

I will however stand by my original point; Before the days of the Internet and automatic updates (let alone 'SaaS web apps',) shipping an update could still be very expensive from a cost perspective.

Huh! Didn't realize P2 had THERMTRIP. Thanks for the correction!

To your point... yeah, Switch was the only 'real' big volume hit for Tegra that I remember (Although I did like my 2012 Nexus 7) with any staying power.

Hell Nvidia was so desperate they did the whole Shield thing...

Eh?

Intel and AMD were more or less 'Jitting' since the PPro and K5, and that's ignoring NexGen's Nx586 (which was shipping in hardware about a year before the PPro).

All of them are way before Transmeta shipped a CPU. Where Transmeta tried to innovate was by using VLIW rather than a RISC-like core, along with their other special tech (Which they later licensed to lots of companies, including Intel,) to provide reasonable mobile performance with a low power draw. Oh, there's also the bit where Transmeta CMS is much more software based (likely, partially to push enough to software and avoid an x86 CPU license lawsuit) but even modern Intel chips AFAIK are still doing more translation on the CPU layer.

.... I -so- miss RealWorldTech write-ups, I'd love to see what David Kanter would have to say about this thing...

I'm guessing that they were safe in that it was more or less a 'codename' for a specific product's CPU that nobody else could buy, versus a product out on the market, left enough clear separation to avoid Trademark complaints.

The combined might of IBM and Microsoft's legal teams, even (possibly even moreso?) then, was better than Intel's to be sure.

It's a little more complex than that, IMO.

For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that.

On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.

I think the big 'X factor' though, was that, for as much pain as it caused AMD in the short term, (it's so easy to forget their 'malaise' era, i.e. Early Bulldozer and the GloFo split pains to their margins[1]), AMD made all the 'right' choices to let the console vendors have their cake and eat it too.

Namely, AMD was more than happy to do a custom core if there was a volume contract (similar to what IBM was willing to for the 360/GC/Wii) but also now had a capable, in-house GPU. (And thankfully had Bobcat as a stepping point towards Jaguar[2])

There's part of me that asks, if AMD had an ARM core, if we would have all Consoles powered by AMD chips now. Nintendo likely bought into Tegra because it was an ARM core, and for better or worse their mobile stuff by the time of making that choice had 15+ years of proven ARM success (GBA, DS, 3DS) behind it.

(See also, Intel in the 2010s scrambling with half-assed promises of integrating custom functionality or FPGAs with x86 cores.)

[0] - https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/

[1] - From what I recollect, the GloFo split and how the contracts were drawn up as far as their production, had a huge impact on their ability to produce due to yields and thermals, as well as the contracts for how GloFo got paid; it was at least part of them diversifying with TSMC as soon as they reasonably could.

[2] - As a Rant, I am pretty sure, if Jaguar had Desktop/Mobile versions that included a Dual channel DDR controller, they would have cleaned up on the low cost laptop market. I had one with, I think it was an A5000 or A5200, and for how tiny the battery was it could last wayyyy longer than any of the intel laptops I had for the time, but churned if you were doing memory heavy stuff.

Possibly dumb/silly question.... Are there any sorts of reverse proxies out there that provide their own layer of jittered/exponential backoff based on patterns? (i.e. requesting IP, cookie, etc.)

I suppose the main reason I think it might be a bad idea, is that it would add complexity to the reverse proxy (i.e. now it's having to track whatever thing is being used and that complexity itself becomes a potential failure point...)

(To be clear, the clients should have their own backoff procedures, but I'm thinking about cases involving naughty clients, which are sometimes a harder problem to correct for...)