5,833 karma · joined October 29, 2009
I do custom electronics, robotics, and embedded software development - I specialize in quickly turning ideas into prototypes. I've built custom automation equipment for chemistry labs, sensors that are in use in household/utility applications, control circuitry for construction equipment, 3d printing electronics, data acquisition equipment. No project too small. Few projects too large. Deep discounts for open source hardware work.
I would also be happy to come over (anywhere in Europe) and teach any of the above skills to a small group of interested people. I've taught courses in electronic assembly (SMD), 3d printing (building/using printers, iterative 3d model design using programming) and robot design and construction. I've taught courses at several universities, hackspaces, and conferences.
1. It gives us information on the mechanism that the variants are using for vaccine evasion - the E484K substitution which was the suspected mechanism for B.1.351 ("south african variant") was tested on its own and did not evade the vaccine-induced antibodies as effectively as the full B.1.351 mutation set. This tells us that there is some other mechanism in B.1.351 that makes it more successful at evading antibodies. This is important and valuable information.
2. It demonstrates a really fast, safe, and clever method of testing vaccine effectiveness against a new variant - what they did was to take an entirely unrelated virus, graft a modified S protein on it, expose it to blood serum from vaccinated patients, and then try to infect a cell culture with it. By counting infected cells compared to the same count without the serum exposure, you can measure how effective the neutralization is, without having to measure infection counts in a large population. This is awesome and can easily be done with other vaccines and any new variant that shows up, as long as it's sequenced, even if it doesn't have much prevalence in the population. In fact, you can use this method to test hypothetical variants that only exist in animal viruses or not at all, and be able to redeploy vaccines that are particularly effective against those in regions where they happen to emerge. This, to me, is the absolute highlight of this paper, and I suspect it will be extremely useful.
1. Really annoying to do any kind of i/o
2. Extremely poor interoperability with non-Haskell code
3. (opinion) Unpleasant, inconsistent, hairy syntax
Back in the day (in the 90s) I was just starting out with linux, and had to install slackware from floppies I carried to school and to the library, a handful of packages at a time. I didn't have documentation packages installed yet, but I did have some howtos. So I had to edit some files, and I tried the "standard" editors - vi and emacs. I didn't know how to quit vi or emacs. I'd end up trapped in them, and eventually figured out I could Ctrl-Z and kill the process for vi. This didn't work on emacs so I'd end up switching to a second virtual terminal and then kill the emacs process. I had no idea what I was doing, and being unable to get out of a program and get back into a safe known state was quite traumatic to teenage me just getting into unixy stuff. JOE was there for me. It did what I needed it to do, it told me how to operate it, and I never once got stuck in it. Out of gratitude, I used it exclusively for years. It's zero bullshit, it edits files, it doesn't let you down.
However, the car industry got it badly wrong - people, afraid of public transit, started buying more cars rather than less. The car industry, being screwed due to their just-in-time religion of zero stock, was faced with their production lines stopping so they called up all their vendors, and asked for those orders back, and some more on top. The vendors then tried to get their fab slots back, and were told to come back next year. Some of them ended up buying other fabless IC designers out of their slots, causing the problem to spread. Others cancelled their existing orders to other customers, and auctioned off their existing inventory to increasingly desperate car manufacturers at a 6x to 8x premium. Anyone who was not prepared to pay that or didn't act fast enough was screwed. From that point on, a bunch of companies that depend on those lines of microcontrollers had to rapidly redesign their product to use another device, taking even more devices off the market with unplanned demand. The users of those devices then had to move to others, causing even more availability cascades. This is how two nasty moves by the car industry caused global market disruption in a number of industries that depend on electronics. This is not a normal "demand has increased, and industry can't keep up" event, it's elephants dancing and trampling everyone else underneath.
This is further aggravated by the top three automotive semiconductor suppliers (NXP, Renesas, Infineon) having their facilities destroyed in two unrelated disastrous events - a fire at Renesas' wafer processing plant, and Texas freezing over, destroying NXP's and Infineon's fabs through cleanroom contamination and process interruption. Those events took out months' worth of production, and destroyed product that had already been sold before manufacture. This would have been recoverable in a normal market, because distributor stock could hold a couple months, but in this case it was game over for non-automotive customers as all distributor stock was already gone by then.
I see this in my work every day now - customers coming to me for help with redesigning products to use a different microcontroller, or help with sourcing parts from unusual sources because their normal channels are gone. I've been in this industry a long time and never seen anything like this before. This is not a failure of supply chain analysis and projection on the part of the fabless semicon vendors. This is their biggest customers fucking their vendors over not once but twice by lying to them about their own demand.
Some more details on the NXP texas fuckup: https://outline.com/rfBWzn
I believe by now he's more famous for being the world's most damaging patent troll
tl;dw: SPARC is on track to Q=9, and there will be a magnet demonstrator in June, this year
The problem with homeopathy is not that it's a crazy idea. It's that it's been extensively shown not to work and is still being pushed as a good idea.