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Could they have picked a more confusing name? They already had a Turing based Nvidia RTX 6000 from 2018 [1]. Then the RTX A6000 came out based on Ampere. Now this new one has to be called the the "NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation". This is going to be such a headache for anyone who has to requisition things through a purchasing department at work: "No I don't want the RTX 6000 or the RTX A6000. I want the RTX 6000 Ada."

[1]https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-vi...

BEAM Robots [1] were some of the first robots I ever created in the late-90s. They were extremely accessible to someone still scraping together allowance and riding their bike to radioshack for parts. The photovore was one of the earliest designs I copied. It always astounded me how much the simple analog circuit "brain" made the robot's behavior appear complex and bug-like.

Stripped down to the bare essentials, the simplest photovore circuits [2][3] work by setting up a voltage divider between two photoresistors positioned like eyes on either side of the robot's body. The output is fed into an inverter based oscillation circuit biased by the side of the robot light is coming from. This runs through some more inverters in parallel to step up the current high enough for two tiny motors with wheels. It creates a robot that waddles towards the brightest light in the room.

The simplicity of the circuit makes the various emergent robot behaviors that much more surprising and interesting. The frequency of the oscillations get faster in brighter light and slower in dim conditions, almost like the robot is searching harder to find the light in a dark room. If one wheel gets stuck, the torque stalling motor backfeeds into the control circuit and it can sometimes jolt or vibrate itself unstuck. If you power the whole thing with a solarpanel that charges up a capacitor for bursts of runtime, the robot really seems to come alive as it wiggles it's way towards the light imperative that keep it's circuits fed. There is something magical when you see a robot struggling to stay alive.

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

[2] http://solarbotics.net/library/circuits/pix/4_comp_pvore.gif

[3] http://solarbotics.net/library/circuits/bot_popper_240.html

I use a hybrid architecture that is working quite well for interactives in my little corner of the museum industry. I pair a raspi running either node-red or python with a Teensy coprocessor running embedded C code and handling the IO. The two communicate via UART serial via either firmata or a custom protocol as the project requires. Having the Teensy handle IO lets me tie directly into pin interrupts, FlexIO, DMA and other hardware goodies with the very well written PJRC libraries. At the same time, the raspi handles any network connectivity, timekeeping, controller coordination, and HDMI output. I get all the rapid prototyping ability of python or node-red while at the same time having all the raw bit banging power of C on a Teensy 4 at 600mhz.

I got the pleasure of meeting David Byrne and having a lunch with him at Affrah Mediterranean in Richardson, TX in the late 2000s. It was near the end of my stint at Hanson Robotics for the exhibition "Souls & Machines" at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain. He voiced one of our robots singing. He was, without a question, the most down to earth celebrity I have met to this day. I left that lunch struck how genuinely kind and encouraging he was, even to me as a lowly intern early in my career. I try to channel a bit of him at that lunch anytime I’m working with anyone cutting their teeth on anything new. We all need a little bit of kindness and encouragement at that stage.

In M*A*S*H Season 7, Episode 6 "None Like it Hot" from Oct 23, 1978, Hawkeye and B.J. purchase a bathtub from Abercrombie and Fitch

Earlier in my career I was working on components of undersea seismic nodes that were both conformal coated and potted in epoxy. Along the way we realized we were going to have to make a blue wire mod to the PCBs already deployed or loose quite a bit of money. We developed processes to rework these PCBs very effectively, although I can not reveal details. Suffice it to say it was not a fun process, but it was deemed necessary.

Sometimes when all your solutions are bad, you just have to pick the least bad solution. It's still not a good solution, but not solving it is worse. If it is the only available device they know of with the chip they need, they might not have another option.

Surprisingly, because most CAD and computer graphics programs are still largely not optimized for multi-threaded processors, the fastest workstations are typically using whatever processor tops the single core compute performance category, not the multicore. They are then paired with as much ram as the chipset supports. Also, when you are talking about pro graphics cards like Radeon Pro and the RTX A (formerly called quadro) lines, it only pays to upgrade to the next gen graphics card once your software vendor has had a year or two to integrate with a new hardware gen's capabilities. The pro gfx card market (at least when it pertains to OpenGL performance) is one area that will actually punish you for being too early an adopter, which is disappointing when cards go for several thousands of dollars new. The whole area of CG software has been stagnating for 5 years while OpenGL driver improvements have fallen out of favor for more bare metal processing approaches that are only now getting to feature parody and developer adoption like vulkan. Hopefully the next few years brings a positive trend in CG price to performance again as these new architectures actually start shipping in CG software products. As someone who works daily in CAD, the performance stagnation over the last 5-10 years has been depressing to say the least.

TavaresLabs.com

Multiple versions of MKL dlls exist in the install directory of Solidworks 2021. Indeed, the dlls supporting FloXpress and simulation seem to be the updated MKL version that no longer support the flag. However, the main executable only seems to call sldmkl_parts.dll. It appears to be MKL version 2018.1.156 that does support the flag

Last time this came up on Hacker News I discovered SolidWorks 2021 was using an older MKL library that supports the MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE=5 environment variable. I'm on an AMD cpu and measured a small solidworks fps and rebuild time improvement with the flag enabled

Fuzzy Logic as used my Massive might be what you are looking for

You will the distribution of current candidates in the sky on page 6 of this paper cited in the video comments [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01208.pdf

> having markings you can just wipe away and needing to re-measure and re-mark the item regularly sounds far from optimal.

Unless the delibility of ink was a feature they desired. Hypothesizing that they were trying to prevent a working ranger from falling into the wrong hands wouldn't strike me as absurd. Dropping them in a firepit or stream to remove the ink would be pretty handy if you know your military encampment is about to be over-run and you can't save everything.

Node-RED also works pretty well for museum interactives.

https://imgur.com/a/3XAH5LD

I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district I attended, all the vocational and shop classes were eliminated in the mid-90s to make budget for the creation of Cisco networking certification classes that were canned less than 10 years later. This re-budgeting was going on in school districts across America. High school shop after high school shop sold machine tools that they had taught kids on since the 60s and 70s at pennies on the dollar. 10-20 years later when parents started demanding vocational classes back, the school districts realized that modern machine tools are too expensive to get back into schools unless they can pass multi-million dollar bonds. Generally, only the best funded schools in the best run districts have had good enough organization and motivation to make these bonds happen since. As a result, you get one or two specialty shop classes at a single magnet high school in well-funded school districts, but they are few and far between.

This was just my n=1 experience and perspective in my particular corner of the world. I would love to hear if other students or faculty from those eras had similar or dissimilar experiences.

I can only speak to my individual experiences and my admittedly fuzzy memory of things so long ago, but here goes:

"By 3rd or 4th grade, wouldn't you have interacted with a library's card catalog"

In that school's library, they had just replaced the old card catalog with a computer terminal based dewy decimal system a few years before I started. Looking at screenshots today, I'm fairly certain it was Dynix[1]. It was the early nineties, and a pretty big deal they had a computer in the school at all. In those years, the librarian was the only one trained to use the terminal, so you simply told her what you were looking for and she helped you find it. Maybe some of the older kids were taught how to use the computer, but there was serious resistance to letting us sticky handed younger kids touch it. I'm sure I had visited the local public library as well by that age, but again, I probably got assistance from parents or librarians to find things until I got older.

"or say, how your family's cassettes or cds were stored for retrieval?"

My father might have had a few audio cassettes, but VHS tapes were all I really interacted with before grade 5. A few of my family friends had walls of VHS laden bookcases in their living room, but we were not that family. The VHS tapes were bulky, but you could record over old things you had already watched so you didn’t need a lot of them. Our system of organization was more akin to shoving them all in the largest drawer in the living room. If anything, my family’s approach to media storage would have encouraged the “all in one bucket” approach that so many of the students in the article seem to favor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)

I was taught the concept of drafting a hierchical outline [1] around 3rd or 4th grade in language arts as one of the first steps in writing a paper. Even today, this is probably the mental model I most associate with file systems. I am also fairly confident I encountered this before ever having to interact with a physical file cabinet full of manila folders. Is it still common for outlines to be taught in early grade school?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_(list)

rootlab | Mechanical or Mechatronics Design Engineer | ONSITE Houston, TX | https://www.rootlab.com

We are a multidisciplinary architectural design, fabrication, and exhibitions firm working on several large science museum exhibits. We are looking for someone talented willing to push the state-of-the-possible in interactive experiences, moving sculptural elements, and mechanisms with an eye to reliability and manufacturability. You’ll design and prototype components, send parts out for manufacture, and order parts from suppliers. You’ll also work with the rest of our fabrication and design teams to integrate mechanisms with other architectural elements, plan installations, and utilize our unique in-house fabrication technologies. As one of the first engineers at rootlab, you’ll have the chance to take on leadership roles as our team expands.

Useful Experience and Skills for the Role:

● Experience with design tools: CAD / FEA / CAM. Ability to design mechanisms and integrate custom and acquired parts into large assemblies. (Primarily SolidWorks)

● Prototyping and fabrication experience: 3D printing , laser cutting, welding, turning, milling, CNC machining.

● Mechatronics experience: using sensors, circuitry, controlling actuators, specifying and sourcing actuators.

● Experience with design for manufacture: machining, weldments, sheet metal forming, mold making.

Bonus Skills:

● Sourcing Guru: What is available and where to get it (and what to do when McMaster-Carr doesn't carry it)

● Museum exhibit experience: ADA compliant design, child accessible design

● Testing and troubleshooting experience

● Robotics experience

If some or all of this sounds like a good fit, please send your resume and any examples you can share of your past work to hiring (at) rootlab.com

One application I am familiar with is their use in ocean bottom hydrophone and geophone recording nodes for reflection seismology. Land based, transition zone, and boat tethered systems can be synced to GPS time. Battery powered ocean bottom nodes have to maintain an independent clock with a limit on the maximum amount of clock PPS drift from the moment they are deployed. The longer you want it to operate usefully on the ocean bottom, the more accurate your timekeeping clock has to be. I don't know if I would say this is a non-practical purpose, but anything I can think of to do with a highly accurate clock would have some practicality

I highly recommend the BYO route, especially if you have part of a suitable machine already lying around. Just about any x86 based system that can take 16GB+ of memory will be a good candidate. ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC. Load the latest Ubuntu up and give this [1] ars how-to article a read (keeping in mind it is several years old now). Power efficiency will mostly hinge on the cpu and how many hard drives you keep spinning. To scale past the the number of SATA ports you have on a motherboard, add an LSI HBA card like the 9300-8E or 9207-8E.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-w...

It looks like he was developing some sort of nutritional "wafer." I remember when Rob Rhinehart was in the early days of developing soylent, he commented that some of the raw nutritional powders he was sourcing for the mixture could be quite harmful if taken in the wrong dosage. Maybe he made himself sick with a bad batch of wafers?

I use a Dell Precision 5520 as my daily driver and have been very impressed. The things I like about it are a good backlit keyboard that hasn't been forced too thin, a bright screen I can see in sunlight, and a good battery life that hasn't significantly diminished as I have owned the laptop. The only complaint I have is it will sometimes turn itself back on in my bag and drain it's battery. The Precision 55XX line is basically their XPS line with a Quadro card baked in. The new 5550 model has a few spec bumps and a slightly nicer webcam placement and would be my recommendation if you need a Quadro card. Otherwise check out the latest Dell XPS line.

It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all three of these jiggle the same? https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG

Elon Musk before and after hair transplant surgery is a perfect counterexample showing money absolutely can enhance beauty

As someone who attempted to build a small liquid fueled rocket engine in high-school, this was one of the only texts I could find at the time that went into the subject in enough detail to be useful. (circa 2007)

I have used tesseract ocr combined with imagemagick and ffmpeg to great success for video text extraction.

Our device was very similar to this china manufactured version: https://www.melmedtronics.com/product/the-inhibitor/

A project I worked on suggests vibrating the bone just under the earlobe at around 50kHz with a piezoelectric stack might help. 8 years or so ago I helped make a pocket sized and rechargeable medical device that operates on this principle. Last I checked it was still in FDA hell but helping the majority of sufferers in the trials. The theory of operation is that is breaks up tiny air bubbles stuck to the hairs in the inner ear.

An interesting side note is that you could 'hear' a very high pitched sound when using the device even though 50kHz is far outside the standard human hearing range. We still are not sure but think we were hearing a lower harmonic of the tone bouncing around the skull.

"The Stratasys printed part was printed with ABS material, 100% infill with a standard layer height on normal detail settings. Not having direct access to the machine I was not able to extract any real nitty gritty details on the overall print set up. For the Lulzbot print that I created I used HIPS material with a 0.5mm nozzle, 0.1mm layer height, 25% infill, 4 top and bottom solid layers, 45 mm/s print speed with standard acceleration, 240C extrusion temperature, 110C bed temperature, and an extrusion width of 0.6mm."

This is an apple to oranges comparison. I work with a Lulzbot 5, a Lulzbot Mini, a Stratasys dimension elite, and two polyprinters on a daily basis and have been working with 3D printers for over 10 years as part of my job. Why was a material like HIPS ever used for comparison with ABS if both machines can print with ABS? Why was the extrusion width 0.6mm on a 0.5mm nozzle? Why is he comparing a 100% fill print with a 25% fill print? Why didn't he mention that the Lulzbot Taz 5 he was using has a $500 print head upgrade to let it print soluble support material as well? This whole article just reeks of either someone who is either very new and inexperienced to Hobby 3D printers or was intentionally trying to make the TAZ 5 look bad. I have done similar comparison studies myself and have come to drastically different conclusions. We sold the dimension elite a while ago.

Certain FOX episodes have shown up on file sharing networks over the past years with trailers for other FOX shows preceding the actual content. You don't think networks are already promoting their tv shows directly to the file sharing demographic?