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Kliment

5,833 karma · joined October 29, 2009

my username at 0xfb.com for contacts, Kliment on libera.chat IRC

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.

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Kliment··on Ask HN: Why is the Linux community struggling to implement hibernation?
The memory contents have to go somewhere. They can't stay in RAM as RAM will be powered off. If there's sufficient free swap space they go there. If there isn't, the current swap and memory contents get compressed and it then goes to swap. If there's still not enough space, hibernation will fail. So if your swap is filled with incompressible data to its full capacity, you will not be able to hibernate. This is very unlikely if your swap is enormous, but it can happen.
Kliment··on Ask HN: Why is the Linux community struggling to implement hibernation?
After setting up a swap partition of sufficient size, hibernate worked with no issues whatsoever on my very recent hardware and kubuntu. The main reason it's disabled by default on ubuntu is that the default partition setup isn't compatible with hibernation for most memory sizes. You need a swap configuration that's large enough to fit your entire RAM and also your current swap. I find it works at least as well as on any other OS. I currently have it configured to auto-hibernate on low battery or after some number of hours of sleep. From my point of view the Linux community is doing absolutely great on that front, and I've never had a machine where hibernate didn't work correctly. The main issue here is the defaults on one distribution (ubuntu) make it a massive pain to enable.
Kliment··on Neuroscientists discover molecular mechanism that allows memories to form (2020)
de-paywalled here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0
Kliment··on Neuroscientists discover molecular mechanism that allows memories to form (2020)
Original article here (fuck paywalls) https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0
Kliment··on Sputnik V vaccine-neutralization escape by SARS-CoV-2 Spike variants
This study is not particularly interesting as a measurement of vaccine effectiveness (because of the extremely low sample count of 12 patients). So don't read too much into the particular numbers. Instead, there's two useful and valuable results in it:

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.

Kliment··on The Norway Problem
In my opinion the mathematical concepts and abstractions are not the issue with Haskell. The issue is that it's a pain to use in practice because of:

1. Really annoying to do any kind of i/o

2. Extremely poor interoperability with non-Haskell code

3. (opinion) Unpleasant, inconsistent, hairy syntax

Kliment··on I bought ISO 8601-1:2019 and 8601-2:2019
I suspect it was a temporary throwaway account
Kliment··on Tmux lets you select and copy text with your keyboard
I used JOE for a long time back in the day and I remember it fondly for plastering its documentation right onto the screen so you didn't have to look stuff up, as a beginner. This sounds embarrassing but I suspect others have had the same problem so here goes:

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.

Kliment··on TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
The car industry got their demand planning wrong, so they lied to their vendors that they wouldn't need that inventory. They then turned around and went "hey actually screw that we want the inventory after all", making their previous promise that they wouldn't buy it a lie.
Kliment··on TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots of orders with their vendors, screwing said vendors over. Their vendors could not afford their fab slots because automotive is such a big part of their revenue, so they cancelled their fab slots. Those slots were happily sold on to entertainment and computing customers, who anticipated a jump in demand due to people staying home more. So far so normal.

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.

Kliment··on Fire Destroys 300mm Line of Renesas’ Naka Factory
You read it here: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Chip-st...

Some more details on the NXP texas fuckup: https://outline.com/rfBWzn

Kliment··on EU vaccine rollout severely lags behind
I actually live in the EU and I don't feel the commission has screwed up on this. I love that we have a somewhat equitable distribution model across the union. The core issues have been with producers heavily overpromising supply on the expectation that approval would take months longer, and with national politicians repeating those unrealistic promises verbatim to their populations to improve their popularity, and then blaming the EU when producers failed to deliver on their promises. AZ has been the worst about this, delivering dramatically less than promised, and have been scumbags in general about it, notifying the commission very late, sometimes after deadlines were already missed. Together with their refusal to be open about export movements EU->UK they've managed to create an enormous amount of suspicion.
Kliment··on I’ve made a Cursed USB-C 2.0 device
The spec is still not open, as far as I can tell. The TB4 mode of USB4 appears to still be proprietary.
Kliment··on FreeCAD 0.19
Freecad does this when editing sketches at least. Kicad also does it. It's great, but very confusing for beginners.
Kliment··on AMD Expected to Become TSMC's Second Largest Customer
We have lots and lots of chip factories in the West. A very important one just lost thousands and thousands of wafers because the Texas power grid went tits up, and it set the companies using it back by months. There's foundries being built all over the world. TSMC just happens to be the first to have an extremely expensive, extremely difficult process down to a reliable production setup, so all the orders that absolutely have to be on that process are going to them. They also happen to employ most of the world's expertise in leading-edge lithography tech. But if you look beyond the absolute pinnacle of production processes, and into the >100nm range, there are literally hundreds of foundries around the world, many of them in the US and Germany for example, churning out what was top-of-the-line a decade ago.
Kliment··on Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018
Linux certainly has project management, bug tracking, and lots of infrastructure. What it famously rejected were inadequate centralized systems that break the way kernel developers and maintainers actually work. Before the tools were there there already was a large human-operated distributed management system that ran on top of email. A lot of linux project operations are still a large semi-automated distributed management system that runs on top of email. It's gotten somewhat more centralized now, as a single source of truth is very useful for tracking bugs, but just because there's a single root to the tree of maintainers doesn't mean it's a a project run by Linus alone, and just because it's not using jira or gitlab or whatever the flavour of the day is doesn't mean it has no project infrastructure.
Kliment··on Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser
A 300mW beam is far more than enough to ruin your eyes.
Kliment··on Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser
> (of Microsoft fame)

I believe by now he's more famous for being the world's most damaging patent troll

Kliment··on Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia?
I think you've just been lucky to not encounter it. It doesn't happen to everyone. It's not necessarily even very frequent. But it's much much more frequent than it should be. So consider yourself lucky that you've not been on the receiving end of it (yet). I felt much the same until the first time I witnessed stuff like this happening, and it was eye-opening. Just because it didn't happen to you (yet) doesn't mean it's not a thing. And it's not specific to North America or to computing.
Kliment··on Fusion startup plans reactor with small but powerful superconducting magnets
Here is an even more recent (last month) update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uYNhevRtk

tl;dw: SPARC is on track to Q=9, and there will be a magnet demonstrator in June, this year

Kliment··on The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
robot arm on rover throwing it, and then rolling over to pick it up again
Kliment··on Building an E-Ink Laptop
I think it comes up whenever there's the opportunity because patents are legitimately bad. And I think it's the other way around - if prices were low and volumes were high lots of people would make cool marginal products with them.
Kliment··on Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues
Given the extremely wide evidence basis from existing data (there's millions of worldwide users) I'd argue no more than has been, and that the current data is sufficient to show its lack of effectiveness without any additional effort. But had the obviously-silly hypothesis (adding a tiny bit of something bad can have a good effect) been rejected from the start in a different context we'd never have gotten vaccines (which originate from a similar hypothesis in a different context).

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.

Kliment··on Making Vaccine
Peptide vaccines do work - there's a very similar vaccine currently in limited use (EpiVacCorona, running phase 3 trials in Russia, with emergency use approval granted in two countries at time of writing). The inhalation based delivery mechanism is also not novel, but almost never used because you need a whole lot more spaced doses than intramuscular, and that's a massive pain logistics-wise when you are trying to run a public vaccination campaign. There is no clear reason this wouldn't work. That said, there are many reasons it can fail in practice without a GMP environment - peptide chains are fragile and contamination is a risk - with a contaminated substance inhalation is going to be a much safer mechanism than injection, but unless repeated multiple times it will be less effective. The thermal disinfection stage needs precise temp control to not destroy the peptides and in general there's a lot of handling steps that can go wrong. But that's a matter of process, not of principle - both intranasal delivery and peptide vaccines have individually been shown to work.
Kliment··on Ask HN: Where to start for hobby circuit design
Hey, can you email me? I'm currently writing a resource like this and you are exactly my target audience, and I'd love to show you some of what I'm doing and get some feedback.
Kliment··on Firefox 85
This describes me. I currently have 3467 tabs. Firefox is the only browser that can handle this.
Kliment··on Why webcams aren’t good enough
Then just make the whole thing a bit thicker so it's flat (and put in extra battery). The current solution is phenomenally ugly and annoying.
Kliment··on Review broken products instead of new ones
Engineering things for predictable failure is often necessary when the alternative is a worse, dangerous failure further down the line. The classical example of this is the fuse - it's a device designed to fail first in order to prevent other, more destructive failures. I know that's not the kind of engineered failure point you're thinking of, but it's important to understand that things like this may actually have good reasons.
Kliment··on WhatsApp delays privacy changes following backlash
It's not used for mass market ads, it's being used for analytics and being sold directly, and also for precision targeting (political attack ads shown only to people in a target constituency considered likely to vote for someone, to discourage them from doing so). Companies pay for "tell me what kind of people are looking at my site, in extreme detail". Scammers pay for "people who use/buy a particular item/service" so they can do targeted scams based on that. Political campaigns pay for targeted attack ads. For mass marketing, that kind of targeting is too expensive and the data is too fuzzy, since you basically want to reach everyone and the selection criteria are limited so you get lots of dumb "would you like to buy the thing you just bought".
Kliment··on Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs
This is true of the large scale vaccine trials, yes. However, there have been several small long term monitoring studies that test immunity persistence post infection recovery, and they seem to show that replication is effectively prevented when exposed to blood serum with acquired immunity with a fairly short time delay (this is what motivated the attempt to do serum transfusions from recovered patients as treatment, but I'm not sure what came of that). That said, you're right that my comparison is overstating the confidence we currently have in this.
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