OldSchool

Family and friends aren't impressed by experiments measuring C either...

10 GS/sec is very impressive as far as I'm concerned! One sample every 20mm or so at typical transmission line speed.

That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.

I am always reminded at a convenience store if I pick up a candy bar that some of my earliest memories include them costing 5 cents in the early 1970s that very quickly became 10 cents and by the late 70s, maybe 25 cents max for a standard size. Today, easily 10x this.

Mine are from 2011, R410a and on the rare occasion that it gets to 22F here in Austin, they are painfully ineffective!

Yep, electricity cost kills its viability in California.

Heat pumps are probably vastly under-installed in the southern part of the US because natural gas has been cheap and plentiful. If you live where natural gas isn't available your fuel option is propane. Propane tracks the price of gasoline, perhaps slightly lower in my experience.

Here in Texas, electricity is only about $0.11/KWH so heat pumps work out like this:

Heat Pump 5.0 COP : $6.50 per MMBtu Natural Gas : $12 - $15 per MMBtu Propane at $3.00 / gallon : $32 per MMBtu

The unfortunate characteristic of heat pumps is that they become less efficient the more you need them, i.e. cold weather, but if weather is generally above freezing, heat pumps are close to their spec range that is based on 47F outdoor temperature.

A buried heat exchanger or a water well makes it a weather-proof geothermal system- this seems like the ideal; if you also need air conditioning it will make your cooling more efficient too.

A very welcome service! Here's a request: I haven't tried the process, so maybe you do, but if you don't offer a variety of PCB materials you will potentially lose opportunity in the mmWave space where antennas are printed on the PCB so the material must be from a subset of those material that are available overall.

Excellent example of a creative effort that even includes the physical satisfaction of building a physical object! Sometimes that makes it way more fun (motivating), and actually probably helps you learn and understand whatever you're doing more completely by involving another sense.

I think in general, there are too few people putting in the deep time that prepares them to be an engineer in their near future. You're practically there already: it will feel the same after perhaps you decide to call yourself a degreed "engineer" but you will have more mental tools, broader knowledge, confidence from having been able to make what you envision, understanding across disciplines. You have a lot to look forward to! As I told my kids: don't let imposter syndrome take hold of you for a moment! You are a rarity in any group.

I'm old, but I get this subjective read: of my friends and even family who had sons, they seemed smaller and less bold than we were 50 years ago.

I worked as consultant at a major west coast-based health insurer in 1993. A family plan, that is, two adults plus any number of children, was $300/month; a figure that wasn't far off from the cost of a studio or 1 BR apartment at that time anywhere but the most expensive coastal cities.

Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.

So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.

Interesting read, in effect, the live room level defined the envelope of the added reverb in the original discovery at least- I was not aware of this detail.

Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.

However... those professions are encouraged to donate basic human needs/rights to those without resources. Yes, even tradespeople donate their time to those in need sometimes, but normally only to those in need.

Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).

This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.

Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?

As an electronics-enthusiast kid in the 70's, just before home computers showed up at all, I wished the 555 was for Time Travel

I will suggest that for sure it was way easier to get an engineering job in the 80's, 90's, even 00's. Offering one resume and getting one interview and one job offer soon after wasn't uncommon.

I was an employer for a decade in the 90s and I didn't think to haze any candidates or demand huge amounts of their time on speculation: I wanted honest people who were great problem solvers; you know them when you meet them. The first clue is they know about a lot of things outside of the field you are working in as well, this shows up as a very visibly and broadly capable person, making them notably self-reliant. Everyone I hired got up to speed and stayed until well after we were acquired.

As for my opinion on Agile: creating a management system to corral people without these skills doesn't magically create these skills for you in the aggregate; it might be more robust to the influence of one individual but that is a side effect of the real goal of hiring from a much broader pool, and ensuring that nobody is overly critical at the cost of headcount and ironically, agility in the business world to quickly follow opportunities.

More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned.

As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly on a plane controlled by AI-designed and AI-tested code, but much of development is busy work, not problem solving or design. AI excels at turning a protocol spec into a parser for example. I'll take that any day. AI excels at finding stuff, particularly non-code, thesis-level ideas for algorithms and also at about the same level, what's been shown not to work when solving a non-deterministic problem.

If we're lucky, AI will fill in after exposing who is only doing busy work and who is creating.

When Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried to bridge them together reasonably.

Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088.

In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!

IF the joules of energy in your EV battery came from gas-fired or coal-powered generation, a similar amount (~60%) was simply dumped somewhere else.

Kind of a stretch to suggest that an internal combustion vehicle requires 3x more "energy" to move it than an equally physics-burdened (weight, friction, etc) electric vehicle...

This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.

Well thank you for your input General Le May but the consensus is still that zero nukes is the best choice for humans in particular.

This is particularly true of a deep psychedelic experience "inside" with IV Ketamine.

Your own internal processing will still determine how you perceive a perspective change, but specific to this idea in particular, you may for example, within, suddenly find it obvious to think of things as being made of something different than in the outside world reality (and this sort of "change of bases" may reveal some kind of truth not otherwise visible.) You may see something as formed of language instead of molecules and atoms, or vice-versa.

Yes. For example, IV Ketamine can yield not only immediate relief in a chemical sense, the treatment itself results in a fully-aware, balls-tripping, metaphor and symbolism-filled, time and space-warping experience in an entirely fictional space. With thoughtful guidance prior-to and after each experience, a series of them can, for example repeat a message until you "get it," or each may deliver a component of a profoundly larger message when they are combined, weeks later. What you do with it all will determine what you get from it.

The way I saw it in 1995 was that Delphi was the fastest way to create a full windows desktop app and do it as single compiled-to-native-code executable at that critical time it was released. The slightly-later 32-bit version was powerful and gave your app some staying power; a Delphi-generated executable file would likely still run today.

"99 red balloons" sounds almost quaint and innocent, even ironically a bit darkly refreshing, with its portrayal of the relatively clear threat of cold war nuclear annihilation.

Compare it to the constant flux of threats we now face, all given similar coverage today, large or small, sometimes plausibly real, but often ultimately fictional: brought on for distraction, by deception, incompetence, poor communication, ego, and/or other unethical agenda.

If there was ever a time when the old Soviet Union could have won the Cold War... Fortunately for us, the window of top-down incompetence came far too late.

Wow in 2026, I got downvoted on Hacker News for liking the viscerally-appealing aspects of a classic Ferrari. Is nothing sacred?

After the 993, Porsche was a different company. Not exactly cheap-ass, but maybe something less than their often aircraft-quality mechanicals and spartan but hand-made quality interior.

I think I would be looking for that very real, confident and perfectly even vibration a Ferrari has at idle; the valve train song, an extra octave in the exhaust.

Well said!

that is certainly a reasonable paraphrase of my own prompt. I was also using 5.2. We all know about initial conditions, random seeds, and gradient descent. I have the transcript of what I quoted. Here's a bit more: --- Is That Still “Objective Science”? No. It is scientific interpretation modified by ethical policy. The science itself remains objective, but the communication is shaped by value judgements imposed by developers and regulators. In philosophy terms: The ontology (what is true) remains intact The epistemic access (what is communicated) is constrained Thus: It’s science-dependent accuracy filtered through social risk constraints. --- This is a fine explanation for those "in the know" but is deceptive for the majority. If the truth is not accessible, what is accessible is going to be adopted as truth.

To me that immediately leads reality being shaped by "value judgements imposed by developers and regulators"