Aromasin

I don't disagree with the sentiment of returning ecosystems to their balanced ideal, however it should be pointed out alongside your statement that overgrazing is by far and away more common as it stands than undergrazing, and there is a concerted effort by the cattle industry to change the narrative to one where they become "land custodians" rather than exploiters. Large ungulates are a keystone species, however they are more often than not grazed in herds far larger than the land they are on can sustain. Illness, famine, water shortages and predatation (by many species long extinct now) kept these herds in check - they don't so much now. This article summarises it better than I ever could:

https://westernwatersheds.org/the-history-of-public-lands-gr...

And I'm sure they'll do what every pricing model analyst does, which is simplify things to N=1, average across all factors to determine what the market is willing to bear according to GDP, missing out how inequality of wealth plays into these market dynamics and potential customer base. The price is affordable as per the model, but in reality the only people that can afford it are a fraction of people who have most of the wealth, because N=!1 but 8.2B, of which only a fraction have the money to spend of frivolities when fighting tooth and nail for food, housing, and healthcare.

Our club uses Spond for invites. I'm not sure what the financial side of it looks like, but it's been great for coordinating training/games/socials.

I spent some time in Lossiemouth as an engineering officer in the RAF. There was a period during the start of the Crimea War (2014/15~) when Russian fighter aircraft were circling the edges of our airspace almost every day for months on end - it's been going on for over a decade now if not longer. Russia and the UK have a much deeper adversarial relationship than any other European nation outside of the ex-Soviet states. This is in part due to the complex relationship between Russian oligarchs and London (it's often considered a haven for them from the Putin regime), and the active resistance the UK intelligence service puts up to Russian interference in the West. We're seeing that play out again in the substantial support that's been provided by the UK since the start of the full invasion of Ukraine.

This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. It's deluded to think it could be stopped.

Scientists aren't just finding biomass, stating that as the figure for the total, and adding to it. 15% will be an estimate with variance as stated by a predictive model. We have found fractions of a per cent, with 15% being a predicted upper limit.

A very similar play book to the one used by the Conservative Party in the UK. They were somehow deemed the "anti-immigration party" of the two major ones, despite having been resposible for some of the highest immigration rates of any era. There's nothing better to distract from rampant inequality and a rapid transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super rich than a boat load of immigrants, that were somehow granted visas by the same government that supposedly reviles them. Without the racial tension, who else is there to point the finger at for the countries woes?

The classic walled garden approach - make everyone buy lense mounts that only fit their cameras, people collect lenses for their brand of choice, then make them regret ever making the purchase by racking up subscription costs and introducing 3rd party spyware to sell your data. Sunk cost fallacy makes people eat shit because they're already too deep. Capitalism at it's finest.

I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.

I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.

Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.

I've worked with a few teams based in Israel during my at Intel, namely in networking and transceiver technology space. I try to make a point of getting to know the people I work with through 1:1s, and you'll be pleased to know there is a good mix of Palestinans and Israelis working together. Everyone there was proud to have a very diverse team.

I don't think OP disagrees, or their mother. I think it's more the time spent on such things. They might be worth a semester or two, but the world would be a much better place if we learnt a little about a lot, because to functionally understand one thing means to understand the links between things. I person would have a much deeper understanding of the American Civil war if they understood the British Empire at the time their competition with France to dominate the world stage, and how the US fits within that. Instead, the US seems to teach about the Civil War as if it were an independent conflict when not much happened before or after.

I went to a state grammar school, graduating in 2012. They still exist. There's a map of them here: https://www.theexamcoach.tv/grammar-and-independent-schools/...

I can back this up. I work as an FPGA engineer, which is very much an amalgam of software, "firmware" (RTL), and hardware. If I find a software bug or want to spin up something quickly on the HPS (on chip CPU) it might take me a few days - the reward cycle is really quick. Hardware issues on the other hand might take months if not a year+ to fix depending on complexity, meaning the design cycle is long. It might involve multiple board respins because something has been incorrectly connected, whole redesigns because there was a baked in bug on the chip that we need to workaround, or there's some really ethereal signal integrity issue that can come up when working with high speed interfaces that nobody can work out why its failling 1/4000 times. It's fulfilling, but really is a slog at times for a smaller reward financially for something that cost so much more (12 hour day crunch times I've found are way more common in hardware).

They brought them back during my recent tenure at Intel, just after Pat joined. I was an application engineer, so my purpose was to debug customer support issues on our chips, filter between the customer and the engineering staff, write some User Guides and helpful collateral to developers, and open tickets with engineering when problems were severe enough. My OKRs could have just been "close tickets" and I think that would have been the best ROI for the company - there was never a point in my career where I didn't have tickets that needed working on that were halting multiple millions in revenue, but somehow my time was always spent having to work on other things.

Management insisted on filling my OKRs with low-value 1:N activities - spending time on the forum (full-time forum people were paid to do that), helping sales with technical discussions with customers (field engineers were paid to do that), creating demos/PoCs for marketing (technical marketing engineerings were paid to do that), or being part of one "centre of excellence" or another wasting time in meetings with non-technical people talking about how we were all going to tackle problems when the reality was that no one in the team had the time, talent, or political capital to do any of the things we spent hours discussing.

To me, OKRs seem effective for the workforce in the same way scout badges are effective for children to learn skills - good for those who otherwise would do nothing. The issue is, for intrinsically motivated people who are incredibly specialised in a largely reactive role they are a distraction at best, and when used for quarterly and yearly performance tracking, a detriment to the core role at worst.

Arguably the plastics break down until they become basic short polymers that exist in everything though no? At some point they progress from micro-plastics to non-harmful substances. So having a break point where we stop producing plastics would mean that we stop adding then to the environment whilst allowing the eventual half-life of the material to take its course (granted that's probably 10s of thousands of years from now, but with clean up operations that could be accelerated).

But that second argument of "saving grandma" isn't an issue in Europe either. You think we just abandoned old people with difficult health care needs to the dogs? They get first class care in most European countries - if anything, the issue is the reverse of what you describe. Most young people resent how much they pay in tax for a system they rarely use, while the elderly spend much of their geriatric life bed bound in hospital getting 24/7 care, all for free on the working person's dime despite them being long retired with no private health coverage. I'm typing this right now from a general practice surgery in the UK. The place is full the brim with older people getting local treatment, fast. I booked this morning and they're seeing me the same day. Much of what Americans get fed on the news about waiting lines is exaggerated from the days of Covid. For most services you get seen in a few weeks. My local allergy checks happened within a week. I broke my ankle playing rugby a few months ago and was seen, xrayed, got surgery, and was out the door within 48 hours. Some specialisms are still struggling to get through the backlog of patients, but it's just that - a backlog from when all the surgeries were closed and running on no funding because everything went into Covid-19 treatment.

If you're so concerned about not getting the latest and greatest treatment, in the UK private and public health care have started to work progressively more hand in hand. My family are all covered by my private insurance through work. We get consultations online through an app, and they refer us to either and NHS surgery or a private one, depending on which is fastest and has the best health outcomes. That's a privilege not everyone has, but everyone gets the next best thing which is free universal health care covered by all tax payers - corporate and individual.

This "decision" that you seems to think exists isn't one. We get the best of both worlds - a society where the poor don't fight tooth and nail for health care with the risk of becoming forever indebted and subjected to poverty, and the rich get whatever level of service they're willing to pay for.

Personally, I think you're all fed a lot of propoganda by folks that make a lot of money out of the misery of your healthcare system.

Lots of interesting things packaged into OneAPI for developers to check out: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...

I quite enjoyed using the CUDA to OneAPI migration tool. Was a bit dodgy at times, but for the most part helped me move a lot of stuff out of the NVIDIA walled garden.

Gelsinger always said this was a 5-year plan, yet the board jettisons him at 4 just as IFS customers are starting to ramp up, the 18A node is close to readiness - the company's saving grace at this point - with Panther Lake on the horizon and Altera preparing for IPO in 2026 which should be a relatively good cash injection with PE investors already negotiating stakes. Maybe I just don't have the whole picture, but it seems poorly timed.

I hate the idea that the board might do this just as Intel's prospects start looking up after years of cost-cutting measures to bring the company back to profitability and take credit for a "miraculous turnaround" that was actually instigated 4 years prior by the same person they sacked. It's like an incoming political party coming in and within a couple of months of office taking credit for a good economy that they had no hand in creating.

Agreed. My career at Intel coincided with Pat's, although I jumped ship a little earlier. Admittedly this means I probably have a little bias, but based on my hundreds of conversations with Intel vets I do think his business strategy was the right decision. He came on board a company years behind on process, packaging, and architecture technology after years of mismanagement by a largely nontechnical staff, which favoured buybacks and acquisitions over core business practice.

He had two routes with the capital available following a cash injection from COVID-19 and the rapid digitization of the workplace - compete with AMD/NVIDIA, or compete with TSMC/Samsung. The only sensible option that would capture the kind of capital needed to turn the ship around would be to become a company critical to the national security of the US, during a time of geopolitical stability, onshoring chip manufacture and receiving support from the government in doing so. He could either compete with competitors at home or those abroad, but not both simultaneously. The thesis makes sense; you've lost the advantage to NVIDIA/AMD, so pivot to become a partner rather than a rival.

I don't think it's a coincidence that just a week after Intel finally received the grant from the government, he announced his departure. The CHIPS act was a seminal moment in his career. It makes sense he'd want to see that through till completion. He's 63; now is as good a time as ever to hand over the reins, in this case to a very capable duo of MJ and Zisner (who were always two of the most impressive EVPs of the bunch in my book).

> 1-bedroom studio flats, shared ownership, starting as low as £1.4m. Larger apartments PoA.

I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple acres across. It doesn't work like that.

The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.

Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.

I wasn't at all, to be honest. I joined a multidisciplinary team and they were short an Ethernet SME. I said I'd be happy to just in feet first and learn, as I was desperate to get into anything and everything FPGAs at the time, having become bored by the CPU world I resided before. Mostly I learnt everything through building stuff using our User Guides. Everything else was just reading; the Ethernet spec, random Cisco stuff online, Wikipedia, etc. I just searched for any word or acronym I didn't understand, and read up on it (meaning of 64/66b encoding, PCS vs PHY vs MAC, PTP, OTN, FlexE, FEC, ANLT, and so on). Once you get passed the TLAs, it's actually pretty simple (except for PTP - that's the bane or my working life at the moment).

I took a strange career jump recently into FPGA engineering with a focus on Ethernet. It's been a fun journey, which culminated in me finally designing my own Hard MAC IP and sending a packet over some custom PHY IP. I'd highly recommend it for those looking to try a "Hard Mode" version of this challenge. I feel like networking is very abstracted from users, so understanding how Ethernet cards, modems and switches put together and pull apart sections of packets, and how the PHY/PCS recovers signals over a link was really valuable.

The Cowley Motor Company factory they mention is still operational and building the Mini to this day (although now owned by the German automaker BWM!)

Any experienced Stein drinker will attest that the solution is to drink it at the same pace as you would a smaller beverage receptacle.

I think it's a case where modern journalists (and in many other parts of society) find a hypothesis they think will do well and hunt for leads/studies/data that fit the hypothesis. It's easier to do because you only need to do as much research as to prove the outcome demands, and does better with the readers because they're interested in the result less with how they got there. It's like going out as a hunter knowing your only goal is to hunt a buck. You know what you're hunting, so you can prep accordingly with the deer call horns and other paraphernalia.

Good journalism - something I believe was done more by the journalists of the past - go out to interesting places and talk to interesting people to gather whatever they can, and find a good story within that. In terms of the hunter analogy, it's more like laying a whole bunch of traps, be it fish, bird, beaver or bear, and seeing what you end up with at the end of the day. You might not always get what your readers want, but it's also more fulfilling and often important when you land a prize catch.

To be clear, when I said that I didn't mean the joy is in chasing numbers. That's a bit reductionist. Some people enjoy that, but I was implying that the downstream effects of chasing numbers are the exciting part; challenging yourself and going through suffering to get a good physique or lift heavier things. Increasing reps/weight is the way to increase workout difficulty, thereby stimulating growth.

I don't think there's a fitness discipline out there that can put you in as much 'injury-free' pain as strength training does - at least, not acute pain like after a heavy leg press. It's almost sadomasochistic, which is why I think calling strength training boring is a little off the mark.

Absolutely. I work with salespeople I despise; ones who actively hamper the company's success because of their demands in pursuit of commission. Trying to explain to them that you're working on a problem faced by a 100M/yr account so don't have time to service their 1M/yr customer doesn't fly, so they jump over everyone's head shouting so loudly that a director or executive tells you to reprioritise to get them off their back. 1:N activities get sidelined, the high revenue but quiet customers get ignored and upset, but sales reach their design-win targets. It's incredibly frustrating and I think if they continue that behaviour despite warnings then they're not a team player and should be replaced.

Equally though, the old phrase "we all work for sales" always rings as true now as it ever did. The best engineer with the best product will make diddly squat if they can't sell the product. The best salesperson could sell rocks off the roadside if they're good enough - the product is often irrelevant. Personally, I wish more engineers went into sales because the best salespeople have deep product knowledge and are way more empathetic because we've gone through trials and tribulations.

Good weightlifting should rarely feel boring - maybe only one week in every 4 or 5 during a de-load week (when I'm aiming for 3-4 reps-in-reserve), but boring feels good then because you're resting after weeks of hard work. If anything, you should feel fearful when training. A good weight-centric workout, at least when targeting hypertrophy, hurts. I feel equal parts scared and excited. I think what you're missing is intensity.

Good tracking is the best way to make it interesting. If I know I did 120kg for 7 on the bench last week, I know I need to beat it either by increasing weight or increasing reps. I remember how hard it was but I've done it, so I need to beat it. It's fulfilling in ways that I find other workouts just can't be.

In terms of intensity, this video is great for working out if you're quantifying it correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77nX_bMe5fA

I work as an application engineer in the semiconductor industry; basically tech support for engineers. I get customers from "We're going to build a product" to "Design is finished and we're ready to sell our system". As such, I work daily with the field team who are out there winning business. I can say without a doubt that whatever a buyer's perception of their sales rep, that person is the best internal advocate they're ever going to get.

The salesperson has a vested interest in getting the customer everything they need to win business so they get their commission. A good one is an utter pain in the ass internally because servicing them and the customer is quite often at the expense of everything else. 1:1 sales tactics don't scale unless the customer is huge. It's a classic 80:20 rule - 20% of customers normally drive 80% of revenue, so it's only sensible to focus on certain customers and ignore others - but obviously that only makes sense in a vacuum where businesses don't rise and fall, and suppliers alongside them, so you need to toe the value threshold when it comes to exposing customers to engineering - which is where a good salesperson is gold.

Product designers, developers, executives, and support staff - all of them have better things to do than service a single customer most of the time. Building features, marketing, hiring staff, documentation, validation, and making new products. All these things are 1:N activities. If they're sucked up talking to one customer, they're not doing 1:N. It quite often feels like the salesperson works for the customer, not us, because it's clear to everyone that the demands are hurting the product in the long run by sapping everyone's time doing servicing when the opportunity:cost ratio isn't there.

To your point, it feels great when a customer follows the expected flow. Planning/marketing/engineering/executives can be brought in as and when needed, rather than when they're demanded of. Almost all customers demand the time and attention of everyone but the sales team, but I've often found that the ones who provide all the info and jump through all the hoops get what they want much faster.