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Thimothy

536 karma · joined August 10, 2014

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Thimothy··on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
Heavy diesel engines were dominated by the rest of the world in the 50s. Military aviation has no need for efficiency nor actual maintenance cost targets and thus, you have way more manufacturers of military than comertial engines.

My point is more that these domains seem civilizationally Hard. Western companies are very far in the effort/results curve. Will the Chinese get there? I guess at some point, though I doubt there is any incentive for the ICE motors in particular.

Thimothy··on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
China "cheated" with EVs. They never managed to make a combustion engine that could hold a candle against western ones in terms of efficiency and reliability. Electric motors are waaay simpler.

I doubt that the same will happen in commertial aircraft engines. If China catches up it will be through industrial spionage or very slow grinding, that will take many years.

Thimothy··on Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off
In places where fish is eaten raw (or lightly pickled) you NEED to freeze it before preparing it. Anisakis is no joke.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis

Thimothy··on Try Switching to Kagi
In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

Thimothy··on Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation
My point is that FPGAs have become very cheap, competing with microcontrollers. I would agree that high end audio manufacturers are about as rational as they costumers.

If FPGAs are not a growing market, how come we have gone from 2 companies (we'll ignore niche space stuff) to ~10 in the last 20 years? Not many IC fields where there is a growth in manufacturers instead of consolidation...

Thimothy··on Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation
Depends entirely how you define "growth". If you take AI, LLM as your baseline of growth, then yeah, sure. But what else is growing?

FPGAs are getting cheaper with each gen, expanding into low cost, high volume markets that were unthinkable for an FPGA 10 years ago. Lattice has an FPGA family specifically targeted to smartphones, and I've been consulting for a high end audio company that wanted to do some dsp, and a cheap FPGA was the best option in the market for the particular implementation that they wanted to do.

It's not sexy growth, but it's growth. Otherwise, we wouldn't had the explosion of the latest years in low end FPGA companies.

Thimothy··on DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine
Lack of temperature control is a minus, as that means that there will be some blends that won't taste good, these days most fancy machines have a pid (and if yours doesn't you should install it, or you are missing out).

Kind of related, lack of boiler at 1.5 atm means non-great milk foaming capabilities.

Also, you buy a good 1500$ machine, your grandchildren will be able to inherit it if you take care of it. That delhongi won't last two days further than the minimum required by guarantee.

Thimothy··on Intel plans spinoff of FPGA unit
When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup.

The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.

Thimothy··on A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth decay
That's not true for everybody: people have very different mouth chemistry/ecosystem that depends on diet, genetics and god knows what. Some people can live with brushing teeth once in a blue moon, others will get their teeth eaten by cavities no matter what they do. Your advice is probably OK for the median person, but really does not apply to everyone.
Thimothy··on EU countries team up for semiconductor push
For the unaware, Central Europe is a narrow band that comprises Czechs, Slovaks and Polish. Who can get very offended if you even dare to suggest that they belong to Eastern Europe.
Thimothy··on EU countries team up for semiconductor push
And don't forget about the new Starlink flat antennas! The biggest surprise from the tearing videos for many EE I know was that the custom chips doing the DSP magic are made by ST, and not Analog Devices or TI. Undersampling in KU band on cheap silicon is not a trivial undertaking.

Makes you see ST in a new light.

Thimothy··on Siberian heatwave of 2020 almost impossible without climate change
I'm not a climate change denier in any way but, did any of the predictions (the ones with dates and numbers) of Al Gore in "An inconvenient truth" become reality? There has been a non trivial amount of hyperbole going on in this subject.
Thimothy··on How Europe sleepwalked into the coronavirus crisis
I keep hearing from friends in Germany that the death numbers reported are completely bollocks. They say the people who die with pre-existing conditions aggravated with the coronavirus are not counted, nor the people who are not tested after deceasing. Whereas in Italy seems everything that dies in the medical system these days is being counted.

Would love to see someone confirming or disproving this...

Thimothy··on Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019
In case someone gets confused searching for it, normally the federal politecnic university at Lausanne is called by its French name, EPFL.

ETH Zürich has better score in international ratings, but the EPFL doesn't lag behind much. It's a really top noch place to learn any technical career.

Thimothy··on "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
Er... Was 2001 the last time you gamed on a computer?

All those issues are solved in modern day pc gaming. Even GOG with its drm free games automatically updates and syncs your games, and even supports beta channels. Also, I don't recall the last time I had a OS related problem more complex than "update your graphic card driver".

On consoles this is even more of a non issue.

Thimothy··on The Greening of Paris Makes Its Mayor More Than a Few Enemies
He. You are in for a disappointment if you think about moving to Madrid for the nice weather. Extremely dry, very hot summers, quite cold winters, Its more continental than Mediterranean.

On the flip side, I keep hearing about some software companies opening development centers in southern Spain, so check out job offers around Malaga, if you are really interested in the Mediterranean thing.

Thimothy··on EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
The genres, though... And saying that the German grammar is simpler is quite a stretch. English barely conjugates verbs!

Would trade putting genres into english if I could also get the German consistency in spelling any day, though.

Thimothy··on EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
The part I like best about your utopia is the irony that it leaves all native english countries out by design.

"Thanks for giving us this tongue that has allowed us to transcend as humans, now GTFO"

Thimothy··on EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
Man, I would vote for life whoever proposed to fix english spelling. The fact I can't use in conversation many words I have learned reading because I have no idea how are spelled is my biggest grudge with the language.
Thimothy··on EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
"can be spoken poorly and still be understood"

That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge.

I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.

Thimothy··on The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max
Those are compulsory... At least in Europe. Are there many cars in the US that don't have warning lights when braking? Jesus.
Thimothy··on MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools
Ok,this blew my mind in thousands pieces. I'm going to try it right away.
Thimothy··on Pizza Dough
He. That's one of the things I love most about seriouseats. They separate in different pages the recipe, as terse as it can be, and the "how it works", that includes all the other fluff, and I read if I'm in the mood.
Thimothy··on Lenovo’s new Yoga Book replaces the keyboard with an E Ink screen
That is awfully wrong, it boots a custom linux-based OS, not Android. You are probably talking about other device (probably the yotaphone).

http://remarkablewiki.com/tech/specs

I use the remarkable for taking notes on online courses, and works wonders.

Thimothy··on Bitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ stress power grids in Central Washington
Well, we know that electricity is subsidized in many ways, see coal, petroleum or solar power for examples.

Furthermore, electricity prices do no include environmental externalities. So when you burn so much electricity for things that many people deem wasteful, those people do have reasons to get pissed and yell at you in the internet. Wellcome to modern society!

Thimothy··on Pornography and the Butterfly Effect
Because they were the ones dating the older guys. Oh, the irony.
Thimothy··on A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
Like, for example, HF.
Thimothy··on Scientists plan huge European AI hub to compete with US
In Italy still teach it in school, and it's not the first time I've heard of mayors (beside linguistics) that have some compulsory Latin thrown in. But that depends a lot on the university.
Thimothy··on Scientists plan huge European AI hub to compete with US
Pst, Python is Dutch. Not retracting from your point though, it was built in English and found adoption in SV.
Thimothy··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
Actually, both Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean are inspired by the same attraction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Island_(series)

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