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bgnn

992 karma · joined December 7, 2023

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bgnn··on Miscellanea: The War in Iran
That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.
bgnn··on Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water
[flagged]
bgnn··on Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft
Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.
bgnn··on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.
bgnn··on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.
bgnn··on US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].

AI has a great potential like this too..

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

bgnn··on Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments
It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.
bgnn··on Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth.

Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best

bgnn··on Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
In HPC, like physics simulation, they are preferred. There's almost no benefit of HT. What's also preferred is high cluck frequencies. These high core count CPUs nerd their clixk frequencies though.
bgnn··on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
Good to see this is getting more common!

Changing the time every year cause a lot of accidents involving wildlife. Wild animals learn human activity patterns and avoid the roads during our active hours. When we shift the time we start they get caught off guard and a lot of accidents happen. It takes roughly 2 weeks of adjustment apparently.

bgnn··on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.

You can use your debit card though.

bgnn··on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
That's not the star of David.
bgnn··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
Ebikes cannot go faster than 25 kph in the Netherlands, where the author lives. Also they cannot provide power assist without pedalling.
bgnn··on Reading English from 1000 AD
If you find this interesting, try Nedersaksissk (low-Saxon) Wikipedia: https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk

It's fun for modern Dutch/Frisian speakers, most likely the same for German speakers. I think English won't be enough though.

bgnn··on Reading English from 1000 AD
It survives in modern Dutch too: in bedstede, steevast etc. Steevast mostly means always, but sometimes means firmly similar to modern English steadfast.
bgnn··on Reading English from 1000 AD
I don't know the German speakers, but knowing both Dutch and English this text is more readable to me than using only modern English knowledge.
bgnn··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
Isn't the solution to this to implement bus lanes + express busses on rush hour instead of removing half of the bus stops. Every bus stop is amazingly valuable as it's the gateway to the public transit system. This doesn't mean every bus needs to stop at every stop along its route. This is not a magical European invention even, any busy Asian city will have sth like this.

Bus lanes are much more effective than the express busses to increase ridership by the way. Busses avoiding the traffic jams while the cars getting stuck in them changes the mind of even the most hardcore petrolhead.

bgnn··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities.

I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.

bgnn··on I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
What is CFAA? I couldn't find anything about it in EU or Malta. Is it something in India or China? Or Japan? Hmm, maybe I'm missing another country.. Australia?
bgnn··on Jony Ive Designed Ferrari Luce EV Interior
This is just so sad. One would have hoped Ferrari aa a car brand care about their design language enough to not look like any other car in 2026. That iPad in the middle looks just a bit more refined than the middle console tablet glued to a Dacia Sandero.

Why do they go for OLED fake analog gauges? You don't need to switch between a million different faces for gauges. A Ferrari is supposed to be about the driving experience, not the gimmicks.

bgnn··on xAI joins SpaceX
The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
bgnn··on Parking lots as economic drains
My city, Utrecht, in the Netherlands is quite close this. No cars in the city center, no diesel vans for delivery, only busses and taxis can drive in certain roads in the center, bikes have priority on most roads cars can drive outside the center, mow they are reducing the speed limit to 30km/h everywhere in the city (following Amsterdam on this), and they are building a new car-free neighborhood for 40k people with no parking spaces and car roads.
bgnn··on Parking lots as economic drains
Some European cities have car-free city centers. I live in one, which serves as the shopping center of roughly 1 million people living in the suburbs. If you want to shop in the city you need to park in one of the big underground parking lots and pay sth like more than 10 Euros/hour. Alternatively you can park just outside the city at a park & ride spot for 10 Euros/day and take the public transport included in the parking price.

It's inconvenient for people, yes. It was inconvenient to drive and park in the narrow streets of a medieval city too. This is unfortunately not easy to implement in North America, as the cities are relatively new. What we have feels very privileged.

bgnn··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Let me start with saying I'm all for the European social model, which is sadly regressing. However, this model/system is often a hurdle for start-ups, or any small company for that matter. The rules are designed to regulate big companies also apply to start-ups, adding up a bug overhead in the initial years. I think agriculture specifically is outside most of these regulations, because European countries love their agriculture, i.e. rural votes coming from the farmers.

Talent pool in EU is large but not concentrated like in US. Combine this with every EU country having different rules, and not being able to hire across EU without incirporating in every country you want to hire, it's also challenging to access to the large talent pool.

bgnn··on Direct Current Data Centers
Except none of that data center grade chips can work in the space. No GPUs, no memory, no SSD. They are not radiation-hardened (rad-hard). Rad-hard chips generally cost an oder of magnitude or more compared to normal commercial chips, and they are in general an order of magnitude less complex, plus they operate much lower frequencies. Data centers in space is straight up stupid.
bgnn··on Direct Current Data Centers
Fiber is much much less of a cost and technical challenge compared to transfering GWs of power. Unless the customer cannot handle up to 100ms latency, it's totally logical to place the data centers close to the power source, or vice versa (power source close to the data center).
bgnn··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
> The Netherlands does not want entrepreneurs, they want everybody cozy at their jobs at some big company.

Totally agreed. Those big companies in return get a lot of benefits from the government. Most investment in semiconductors for example are going into the already big, and let's be honest, not do competitive companies to keep the alive.

We're in the Randstad. Nijmegen is nice but together with old Philips its semiconductor ecosystem has declined quite a bit.

bgnn··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Individuals pay like 25-30 Euronth contribution, which is tax deductible. Employers can pay a lot, like 10% or more, which is often going to a social security fund.
bgnn··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Yeah our case was strange because we develop chips and design software related to it. Belastingdienst categorized us wrongly as metalelektro, and we got this guys (Cometec) within two weeks of that. In the meantime we have applied this sector assignment to be corrected, which eventually happened while we were getting threatened into bankruptcy by these guys.

What I don't understand is, we got a lot of help from RVO, Belastingdienst etc before and during incorporation. Nobody talked about this! We got sone numbers from Belastingdienst about social security contributions per sector, but like 15% cut per employee wasn't mentioned once. To this date I don't know what legal basis do they have to ask for this amount of contribution. Nobody mentioned any law, or a decision by ministery of social affairs. Very strange to deal with this, because it's literally someone showing up and asking for money without telling even based on what.. It gave very strong gang vibes, which was surprising for me as I was always a member of a trade union.

bgnn··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
This here is the problem for most of EU countries.

We Dutch are proud how easy it is to do business here. Maybe, compared to some other countries. But starting a BV here and 1 month later finding a representative of a trade union (metal sector, which somehow semiconductors fall under together with car garages, petrol stations, steel factories..) and asking me to come to their office in person to explain what we do, and calculate how much their cut will be was weird at first. Of course being extremely busy with actual business, I forgot, and got a letter with an 100k Euros invoice attached. Apparently they assumed 15 employees with 45k gross salary, and thought this is a fair trade union contribution! When I didn't respond to that, while discussing it with our lawyers, they sent a fine over this invoice which made it 140k. This is all within 3-4 months of registering mind you! At the end the lawyers handled that, but yeah, what the hell..

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