Ductapemaster

Unfortunately the JWST isn't a visible light telescope — it's sensor is for infrared light [1]. It's not going to be providing images like Hubble did, as it was designed to look at extremely far away galaxies and nebulae that have very redshifted light.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/jwst-infrared.htm

Berkeley is a fantastic place to live! Tons of great food (all open for takeout right now), the music scene was really fun when it was open, great fresh produce available at local markets, and most of what we need is walkable from our place, including BART. Also the weather is awesome compared to the city. It's sunny most days now, and the only annoyance is that it's pretty windy in the afternoons.

We been here for 10 months now, and signed for another year at our currently place with no rent increase. I didn't negotiate (our landlord offered us the same rent), but we have the best working relationship with him that I've ever had with a landlord and that's worth it to me. Also he's open to us modifying the property, which is worth something as well — he paid for ceiling fans to be installed and let me build a big garden in the backyard, for example. The place isn't perfect, but for now and especially during SIP, it's great. I expect if and when we move, we will continue to live in Berkeley.

I was there a few years ago in the UK, and I found it to be a mixed bag. While most brewpubs I went to all had very similar beers in the styles one would expect, I found a couple places that really stuck out to me. For example, I discovered Brew Dog (originally from Scotland) while I was there and while, and they have since expanded to the US and kept producing great beer. That discovery, in contrast with being able to taste "classic" English beers made for an interesting trip.

However, that's the UK. Elsewhere I think there is much higher representation of the styles of a particular country. Germany epitomizes this with their beer purity law...

Really sorry you feel that way bud. Honestly, I totally get it — IPAs are way over-represented in the craft beer scene, especially in CA where I'm at. However, their prominence has led to a really interesting market of new IPAs that use brand new styles of hops, or hops that traditionally have been unavailable in the US market. For example, hops from New Zealand have made their way to the US and now that the trendiness of "magic mystery" hops from another place has died down, some beers made with them are just fantastic and taste nothing like the IPSs of yesteryear.

I totally get being tired out of an extremely prominent style, but I'd encourage you to seek out some brews made with new hops as some of them are just very different and exciting. Of course, there's tons of other beer out there that's not an IPA, so by all means please continue to explore those spaces too!

I believe Sonic uses AT&T fiber, so you actually are getting the same service...

"[Education is] all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet" — I experienced this exact thing very acutely in college.

In the first year of my EE degree, I had to jump back a quarter in math to relearn some concepts I just hadn't grasped in high school. This complicated the rigorous schedule laid out for the first two years, as it meant I was no longer taking the prerequisite math classes the quarter before the required EE classes — instead I was taking them concurrently.

Despite the troubles I had with the college of engineer's registration process (I wasn't following their rules), taking the classes concurrently with the EE courses that actually applied that knowledge (for example, taking Electricity and Magnetism at the same time as 3D calculus) was a completely different educational experience! Maybe I was lucky in that the classes were paced similarly, but learning theory in math class and then going the next day to a practical application of that knowledge was an amazing experience.

In my senior year, I worked with the professor I was doing research under to give feedback to the engineering and math departments about my experience, but sadly I don't think anything ever came of it. It's really too bad too — it's a pretty small change to make in the scheduling and I think it would help the people who are more practically minded vs. theoretically minded (builders vs. thinkers). My education was much more tailored to the latter, despite me being squarely the former.

I've thought about this as my grandmother has had a host of computer issues, some of them resulting in fraud scares.

The real problem for me is that support is really hard to come by if something goes wrong. Grandma can't access the internet on her Ubuntu system — who can help her? I'm 500 miles away, my parents are equally as far in the other direction. Neither myself or my parents use Linux as a daily driver either. Her neighbors have Windows or Mac machines. Does she drive to Best Buy with her desktop? Call in external help?

If she uses Mac or Windows machines, help is just a lot closer. My dad can replicate her issues on his machine and walk her through it on the phone, or I can. Her neighbor will at least potentially be familiar with the way the OS looks, so can offer greater help.

I'm not sure how you can close that gap if you're not next door to the individuals who would benefit most from it. While it may be a great individual solution, the support burden just isn't a solved problem in my opinion.

I'm in the IoT space and interestingly had a lot of contact in the last 6 months with firms doing contract work for the oil companies, or providing private services to monitor methane for working wells. The regulatory structures have been changing a lot lately, and now the old methods like flying over a field of wells and measuring aggregate methane levels is no longer sufficient. There now is a lot of interest and energy behind doing per-well monitoring.

I'm hoping that this means wells 50 years from now will be safer, but unfortunately it doesn't address a lot of the old wells that are a problem today...

You're only thinking about the data fees. There's much more to an IoT offering that is priced into that cost. There's plenty of enterprise features, for example. Bulk management of SIMs is a huge one: setting data limits per-SIM or per-fleet, activating/deactivating them for seasonal devices or new distributions. Also consider SLAs for your very important data, or dedicated support from the carrier. You don't need any of these things when you are managing one phone, or even a family of phones, but they are essential for fleets of 100's or 1000's of devices.

Also, keep in mind that is data being sold to you for use only on their network. Roaming fees will be exorbitant if you need to go outside their network, which may be needed to reach rural areas, or when you have an asset tracker traveling between states or territories. Keep in mint that "normal priced data package" has very predictable usage — your phone is almost always online, meaning the backend infrastructure costs are low since it's not constantly going offline/online. The tower going out and verifying an IoT device should be on the network (especially if going through a roaming partner) is surprisingly expensive.

A powerful use case here is at-home medical devices (think blood glucose monitors). With a SIM and cellular service, they can work anywhere, be agnostic to consumer WiFi issues (oops, someone changed the WiFi password!), and give "real-time" updates to a doctor or other health professional. Getting patient data has a huge barrier today and there is a ton of room for improvement, leaving the door open to better/more proactive care.

Thanks for the mention! I'm an employee at Particle, and this is exactly it. I'll be honest and say that dealing with carriers sucks. If you want to bring your IoT device to market, you want to focus on building that device — not negotiating with AT&T or Verizon. We protect our users from that so you can focus on your core competencies and shipping your products.

We leverage our large deployed base of devices for negotiations in a way that you cannot if you are a single IoT business. We've actually had customers use Particle, decide they wanted to do their own thing for cost/complexity reasons, start a relationship with the carriers, and come running back because it was intractable for them.

I work for an IoT company, and I can tell you that data costs are high for IoT because the cost model is different. You purchase a 10GB plan from AT&T for your cell phone and they know that you likely won't use it all, so they can "oversell" data. With IoT, you have a much better handle on how much data you use so when you purchase a 10MB plan, they know you will use almost all of it. Additionally, IoT devices tend to have higher backend infrastructure costs as they often connect/disconnect from the towers as they wake up and go to sleep, or move around between towers /carriers a lot. Plus the "always roaming" statement above adds cost in exchange for flexibility.

It's just a different business altogether.

Woah, this is complete news to me! I have tried with my Macbook chargers (90W and 60W), an Apple USB-C cable, and an Anker USB-C cable and nothing will charge them. They are running the latest firmware too. The only thing that works is the original A-to-C cable, and a cheap one on Amazon that I bought as a backup....

Guess I need to do some more testing — thank you!!

My Sony noise cancelling headphones (WH-1000XM3) will only charge with an A2C cable, and not with a C2C cable. I had to purchase an extra charging cable in case I lost the one that came with it, despite owning multiple C2C cables already that should work fine.

If you're not going to make it compatible, why even put a USB-C port on it in the first place?

That's a really interesting piece of knowledge — thank you for sharing!

Not annoyed at all! I enjoy chatting about these things.

In my dream scenario? I think I'd love to see a scientific analysis on the topic and some real data. A blog post with someone taking apart a DSLR, instrumenting the sensor and the surrounding electronics with a thermocouple to measure how hot it really gets over time, and proving it doesn't get to a point of damage would go a long way for me, and I would generally be interested in it. How hot does it actually get??

The wishy-washy "wear out" arguments I don't find particularly convincing (I did FPGA design for an endoscopic camera company for a couple years, so I am familiar with CMOS sensors in general). These DSLR sensors are quite large and I imagine can produce a significant amount of heat, and for all intents and purposes are built into systems that are intended for periodic use with photography. The manufacturing tolerances needed to build a system safe for continuous sampling/use don't particularly make sense when designing a photography camera ($$$). I'm dubious the manufacturers actually did the design optimizing for video use, and I presume this is why there are warnings in the manuals about continuous video use and limitations in the firmware. Maybe there's enough tolerance to handle some video, but not all the time.

I think I was a little careless in specifically calling out "sensor damage" — I'd actually be more concerned about the surrounding components than the sensor itself. Capacitors age and change tolerance in response to temperature cycling, for example.

You have to do power + volume down to get to that screen if you have a phone with no Touch ID (iPhone X and above). Just confirmed on mine.

At the end of the day, it's just a calculated risk and this is one opinion on one side. My DSLR was quite expensive and I love using it for photography, so if there is any risk of damaging the sensor I will not be taking it. YMMV.

Please take care when using your DSLRs for video. Often the sensors are not adequately cooled for long term usage as a video camera (>30m). You have the potential to damage the sensor if it is not designed for continuous use and doesn't have proper thermal protection. Newer cameras will shut down if they get too hot, or have limits to how long you can run in video mode.

Stackoverflow discussion: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/21932/can-continuo....

That's a fair point, but I think zero gravity + green screens will be a really unique opportunity that is hard to replicate anywhere else but space. You can do things you can't in a studio.

I would argue that "less lethal" tools are used more often, and in cases in which the lethal option would be completely unnecessary. This has the effect of increasing the lethality of these engagements. For example, using a taser during a traffic stop. Using tools like tasers lowers the bar to using the tool in the first place, rather than reducing risk to the receiving party. False logic at the end of the day.

Size, cost, and integration.

Size: SODIMM slots are huge. That space can be much more efficiently utilized when put onto the main circuit board. This potentially leaves more space for the battery, or making the laptop thinner/more aesthetic.

Cost: Supply chain optimizations drive down cost. The DDR chips they are using are likely similar to the ones they use in other hardware (think phones). This increases total volume, and decreases cost. Also chips aren't a finished good, so they are saving on the cost incurred in making RAM DIMMs in the first place.

Integration: They only have to make sure their hardware, firmware, and software works with the RAM they supply. Decreases the testing burden. No lookup tables to see what is compatible, and no guessing when you buy RAM that causes the BIOS to panic. It just works, and is highly optimized for the use case.

For what it's worth, I have _never_ had good luck with "big vendor" software (like Adobe) and using any sort of synced cloud-based filestore. I have had untold issues with things and as soon as I moved files local, everything magically went away. Might try that!

Worked with FPGAs at a past gig, and that is correct. There is heavy markup due to the accessibility of the parts.

Thanks for the insight! I definitely have some introspection to do on the topic, but I like the idea of the "Said I'd Do It" section for to-dos. Those tasks are inherently different than normal ones and I think the separation is a good training mechanism.

This is an excellent observation, thank you for the perspective. I realized that this is likely what I struggle with, and procrastination is rather a symptom of the issue. I find it very hard to make commitments to myself (and sometimes others) that I will follow through on. Once I am in a groove, I will continue, but starting is painful.

Have you dealt with rebuilding this in yourself?

Any disk-IO heavy application will brick a card in record time. I worked on a lot of Pi-based systems at my last job (long term time-lapse photography) and we learned quickly to:

1. Buy high quality SD cards

2. Remove as much disk-IO as possible, using an external USB stick for raw data storage, logs, swap, etc

3. If you really need to make it stable, make the OS read-only

I feel you on that. I was _just_ getting back into climbing after a multi-year hiatus, and I was _so_ excited. Found a climbing buddy, finally worked up the courage to get onto the walls again and "be bad" at it. I was also doing cardio classes multiple days a week. It's all gone now.

I told myself at the beginning of lockdown that if I wasn't going to be able to do that, I had to make another change to make up for it. I was already putting in all the effort, and I just needed to redirect it. For me that was doing intermittent fasting (I just don't buy breakfast foods these days), and investing in cooking, which I already loved but wasn't doing enough of.

Wish you the best buddy. I'm hoping as things open up outdoors (which is the steps we seem to be taking, at least in CA) you can get back outside for some activity.

Love that. I've learned two things about myself in the last 5 years or so:

- I have very little self control when impulses are right in front of me. This goes for most things: drinking (especially out), food/snacks, purchases, even exercise (eg. just keep hiking a little farther vs. stopping).

- I have enormous self control if I "distance" myself from impulse. This means not buying snacks in the first place, trying out alternative forms of exercise, not buying beer except on weekends, putting things from Amazon on a wishlist vs. clicking the Buy Now button.

I know my impulses well enough at this point, and maybe there is something to be said for these methods not actually controlling them (just avoiding them), but they are much healthier mentally for me since I can indulge when things are around that I want without feeling guilty for being constantly indulging.

Anectdote, but I've worked for both a company that does PTO accrual and one that does unlimited vacation. I was not paid out anything at the latter (this was less than a year ago).

From my perspective, unlimited policies have a lot of upside on the financial front — they don't have to keep accrued PTO cash on the books. Of course, it has a benefit to workers, but only to those who take advantage of it and don't feel pressured by management or their peers to meet a certain number. It's been my experience so far that my peers at unlimited PTO companies take less time off, and that their "time off" is less valuable (meaning they are not completely logged out/tuned out of work) because it's coming from an infinite pool. At the end of the day, I think the balance of these policies shifts towards the financial side of the business rather than the employee's side.