SeasonalEnnui

In the scene after the punch card workflow is shown, we see a modern PC with recent software & bespoke input devices. It seems like this factory is pragmatic in their choices which is certainly something to be celebrated.

The controller indicates poor engineering & safety culture. It simply isn't fit for life critical purpose.

"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World" is a book that makes an excellent attempt to answer this.

Is it possible to do a SIMD version?

I know compute shaders exist, but I have found that with huge datasets and a wide variety of end-user hardware, it tends to end up with many lines of code and brittleness. So I’m curious about high performance CPU-only implementations.

This is excellent, my feedback:

- The numbers are too large, they break the consistency of typography.

- The rotary encoder sticks out too much. Rotate & move to the end of the enclosure, and mostly occlude it, like a mouse scroll wheel?

- I would prefer Page Up/Down and numpad.

Thanks for the link; does anyone notice a lag when selecting pages, particularly 'Menus and Toolbars'?

I'm generally pro-C# and reducing developer effort however it rubs me the wrong way when simple UIs have lag.

Does anyone else find that the text-to-speech on the "Tauri in 100 Seconds" video sounds very unnatural?

Tauri seems like a step in the right direction so will be giving it a go.

I envy your position. I would not be able to participate in meetings without the ability to read lips/faces.

I guess you’re shocked then. Seeing lips is essential for me, even works in poor quality streams.

Agreed, that would be a worthwhile caveat for authors to add.

For any comparison to C# (it being slower or having GC pauses), it probably doesn't take into account the latest advances (.NET 6). That's understandable given there isn't really incentive to gain a mastery in every language during a comparison.

With regards to C#/.NET 6, it is now easy to:

- Have zero-allocation code through the whole stack, making garbage collection zero/near-zero. [Span<T>, Memory<T>]

- Distribute platform specific all-in-one binaries with no unbundling/uncompression or need to install any runtime. [dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true]

- For hot-path optimisation (many available profiling tools), dive into new high-performance APIs such as CPU vector intrinsics, or native memory allocation (aligned or unaligned). [System.Runtime.Intrinsics.X86, System.Runtime.InteropServices.NativeMemory]

- For faster startup times: AOT compilation. (Not necessarily faster at runtime in general; JIT has advantages there with being able to detect hot paths)

These are just the features I've used, there are doubtless many more. In the future .NET 7, it will be possible to disable runtime marshalling so interop calls to C DLLs have no overhead (along with a compile-time analyzer to throw errors if the types you're using are not compatible, aka 'blittable').

Credit to Vale - it appears to be addressing all these things so there's certainly an interesting future ahead.

I enjoy using gov.uk services and it is due to this cohesive clean style. It is not perfect, example: I’ve encountered long questionnaires that show just one question per page so it feels endless and unrelenting, however it is reassuring to know that my parents and other demographics could comfortably access the same services.

Why titanium?

In my experience (and maybe you'll correlate), all materials involve compromise; there doesn't tend to be a case where a material is outstandingly better in all categories.

Comparing titanium vs. the best steels, it's half the weight but also half the modulus of elasticity and half the tensile yield strength. I wouldn't expect there to be much weight advantage when comparing two tubes with roughly equal properties but maybe this is a case of "every little bit helps"?

If I remember rightly, titanium is harder to process also.

From the standpoint of having used 1588, I agree. I assume the greyed out nature of your post means it isn’t popular which is a little baffling given the truth in it.

As a skeptic of radical ideology, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with many of the things you say/do. Thanks for sharing.

You meant 0.3125ns per cycle, the rest of your comment triggered a thought:

It's common in FPGA/microcontroller designs to have 'input synchronizers' on inputs from long digital lines (on any input where you can't guarantee synchronicity) to prevent metastability problems, especially when crossing clock domains. I think that's likely the case here, there are both long lines and different clock domains.

As a counter data point - please do link old reddit. The dark UI patterns on normal reddit are astonishingly hostile for an anonymous user.

I’ve had hearing aids since being a baby, there has been a decent amount of progress since then.

Starting with a processor box the size of a large matchbox mounted to my chest, with wires going to my ears into hard plastic ear moulds. Moving to all the electronics (including the ‘receiver’, the speaker element) going behind my ear with a tube going into an acrylic or silicone ear mould. Finally today, it’s Receiver-in-Canal where the electronics are still behind the ear (but much smaller and direct Bluetooth connectivity) and the receiver moved to inside my ear canal inside a tiny plastic tip, making it nearly invisible (invisibility is both good, and bad. It can be useful for people to know you’re deaf with a quick glance at your ears.)

There has also been a shift from analog to digital along the way. Interestingly there’s a product called Phonak Lyric that uses analog but in a new way (a product that sits right next to your eardrum for months at a time). I’ve heard good things about it for mild hearing loss.

I’m a bit hesitant to post a “what about X?” so read this knowing that I’m fully in support of new open source CAD projects.

It seems to me there are no options for open source CAM, is this something you’re interested in? I can use a variety of CAD but when it comes to producing the tool paths and G code, I have to import into something like F360 which is unfortunate.

I think we simply rejected the point. There are many newcomers thinking they can disrupt the space with terrible designs. Open source shouldn't mean terrible design. There are many better open source CNC already.

Not pragmatic IMO - flexible usually means resonance and vibration which leads to poor finish and deafening the operator/upsetting the neighbors.

If a lighter frame was the design goal (but low cost wasn't!) then carbon fiber has an interesting stiffness/weight ratio and could have viscoelastic damping elements incorporated too. Realistically though, lightness isn't a prioritized design goal though I certainly see the appeal in marketing for home usage where you wouldn't need a crane to move the machine about.

Serious = harder (hence more useful) materials. As it stands I would say only materials that could be cut with a pair of scissors (card, foam) could be used on this safely without frustration.

The risk is that you will only be able to mill materials that are very soft; materials that could be cut with a pair of scissors (card, foam). Anything harder will be an exercise in frustration (friction rubbing instead of cutting, frame flexing, motors stalling, terrible tolerance).

Neat kinematics with a horribly flexible frame that denies any serious usage. That said - it's designed to a low budget that increases the potential audience, and that is something that can only be welcomed. I'm particularly interested in the software as that will be an enabler for future variations that have mechanical rigidity.

Nice website!

After wearing my t-shirts to the point of being thread-bare or irrevocably stained (3-10 years), they become excellent lint-free rags for the electronics workbench & garage/workshop.

The front and back panels of the t-shirt can be easily segmented into the desired size of rag (credit card sized for electronics, hand sized for the garage).

It was interesting to me to hear the concept of "zoom fatigue". In my world perspective as a deaf person; the rapid adoption of video calling in 2020/21 represents a huge leap forward in accessibility where I could now lip-read people and converse much more naturally.

Multiple-decades of hearing aid wearing here. I agree with most of that. I ended up buying the programmer for my aids to do small tweaks (not the prescription/audiogram, just the program configuration where you can edit the level of DSP in various situations).

I would say that this latest generation of hearing aids (Phonak Marvel) is the first generation where I've felt like they've got it right. Direct bluetooth connection that just works, and with a very wide range of volume adjustment (older models that used add-on streamer would not go loud enough). People receiving my voice over bluetooth, using the hearing aid's onboard microphones, report good sound quality. Magic.

I have experience with VHF radio emulation, so I wanted to ask what formula you're using for ranging?

I've found the haversine formula to be a robust compromise between accuracy and computational complexity, where on a typical day, I'm doing 5000-200000 haversine calculations a second.