bsder

> People need to hear that startup success is maximal when the founders are older, not younger. VCs chasing youth are statistics deniers.

For building a successful business, older founders are more likely to succeed. They understand the business and see something that everybody else is getting wrong that they can correct and make money on. They will grind at it and have a profitable business for decades.

This is anathema to VCs.

VC's want a short term lottery ticket. They want your business to go big or go home. They would rather see your business fail quickly than grind profitably for a decade. Youth feeds into this in two ways. First, youth can align with the fad of the moment in the hopes of running a cashout while the iron is hot. Second, youth can be bullied into doing stupid things that a more experienced person will flat out tell you are stupid and refuse to do them.

This is the standard misalignment with founders and VCs.

The interesting question is whether experienced people can leverage AI to construct actual new businesses rather than just AI bandwagoning. The fundamental problem is that most successful businesses have to deal with customer service, and AI doesn't do jack to make that better.

> I don’t think they earned it.

1) The people around me who bought a Bambu P1S or P2S weren't swayed by marketing. Some of them even owned Prusa machines. They bought those Bambu printers because they had products they needed printed, and the Bambu got it done while the Prusa failed prints and made them dork around with things.

2) The A1 minis are cheap and look good to consumers; they also work remarkably reliably. Prusa doesn't have anything even remotely in the same class. That is squarely the fault of Prusa.

3) A lot of people who don't know any better can go to Best Buy and buy a Bambu in stock, off the shelf, with a return policy. Again, the fault lies squarely with Prusa.

4) The Bambu printers had fundamentally better components like linear slides and servo motors, for example. Again, fault to Prusa.

Prusa got caught with their pants down and refused to adjust for far too long. Bambu did genuine engineering while Prusa rested on its laurels.

> my eyes are on Prusa should I want another printer any time soon for any reason.

Have Prusa finally fixed their engineering? Prusa basically sitting inert on the engineering front is what allowed Bambu to leapfrog them.

Bambu made real engineering improvements: linear slides, servomotor for feed, accelerometer tuning, etc. Has Prusa finally decided to compete again? A lot of us are willing to give a company more money for being open source, but the basic product can't be too significantly inferior.

It looks like there is at least one linear slide on the Prusa Core One+ so that's a start...

.100 headers tend to be smaller than most TagConnect/EdgeConnect footprints and you don't have to use expensive custom cables.

The alignment mechanisms on TagConnect/EdgeConnect negate any space advantage.

> The spice core that ngspice is built off is terrible code. It has a long history going back to 1970s era fortran. Starting fresh is probably preferable

That code is also hyper-optimized for performance. I sincerely doubt you are going to match the performance easily with any random rewrite.

Now, if you had a very clear idea of why the code was making assumptions from the 1990s that are no longer valid, then you might stand a chance of producing something that would outperform it. Or, perhaps, if you had particular knowledge of modern high-performance numerical libraries that you could apply to the problem, then you might be able to beat it.

However, circuit simulation is remarkably difficult to get right (stiff systems with multiple time constants are not uncommon) and generally resistant to parallelization (each device can have its own model which are a unique set of linear differential equations).

If, however, the legacy of ngspice bugs you that much, go look at Xyce and see if that is more to your taste.

> As an amateur in the space

Why are you not using this through KiCad? That's what I would expect an amateur to do; especially since they handle the UX that you are complaining about.

And you are complaining about tangled code but that code is almost certainly hyper-optimized since performance actually mattered a LOT to people running spice simulations. ng-spice (and Spice3 and Spice2) were not written for programming ease; they were written to get a real job worth real money done.

In addition, any change you make to that code needs to be run back through numerical regression tests to make sure you didn't break things since this is software that people expect to get correct answers.

However, if the legacy seems to bother you so much, perhaps you should look at Xyce from Sandia?

> They cannot be that bad if they are managing to be ductape of the internet.

Oh, it very much can be that bad. Most "security" relies on the Hungry Tiger Theory of Security(tm).

My system doesn't need to be "secure". My system simply needs to be more secure than yours. As long as there is an easier and/or more valuable target somewhere, I'm "secure". I don't need to outrun the hungry tiger; I only need to outrun you outrunning the hungry tiger.

That theory, of course, doesn't hold anymore when there are enough tigers to simply eat everybody. And that's what AI did; it multiplied the tigers enough that they can just gorge on everything.

Now, people are going to have to put in "actual security" or lose real money over and over and over. And since everybody has outsourced everything, nobody knows how to fix it quickly. The lawyers are going to have a field day.

At the end, however, we'll have real security on our internet facing systems. But man, it's going to be painful for a while.

I don't have much of a problem with the $100K penalties.

I have a lot more issue with a $2.5K limit--that could be just one or two (intentionally or unintentionally) misreported payments. Or a paycheck hiccup. Or a layoff. Or a government error (because we all know how infallible DOGE was). Or a government shutdown. Or ...

We specifically decry the concepts of debtor's prisons and social credit in the US. For good reasons.

This is leaving aside the whole discussion about your passport being an identity document that isn't subject to control of a single US state government like your driver's license.

You gave an ad hominem attack with no substantive response. I can do that too: "Your account is less than a year old and is AI slop farming."

Mailing lists are old, boring, boomer tech. Ayup. They are. And they work.

However, Zoomer, if you must have Teh Sh1ny(tm), then explain to me why a Discourse isn't a better choice?

Discord is the anti-Pangloss; it is the "Worst of All Possible Worlds".

I really don't understand the folks fleeing to Discord. A mailing list does 99% of the same thing for most of the communities.

Sure, if you want to chat while gaming, that's the whole point of Discord. Ganbatte.

But, for everything else, Discord is such a horrible misfit that I don't understand why it's the default.

> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here

We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.

The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.

I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.

> Nobody wants to even show up for ROCM

I hear this over and over yet AMD's AI revenue dwarfs its consumer revenue.

Somebody is buying AMD cards for AI. I would love to know who.

> I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies.

I see exemplars and no counterexamples.

Boeing turned to garbage when it took on McDonnel-Douglas--we were better off with the separate companies. YouTube not being bought by Google means that you don't have a single giant ad juggernaut and the copyright infringement that goes along with it. Apple being busted up means we have a division that actually focuses on computers in their own right rather than being a vestigial graft to the phone services division. Fedex was enough of a monopoly problem that Amazon bought carriers and, very painfully, set up its own delivery system.

> The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them.

So, you prefer that we are two Chinese drone strikes from having a chip economy meltdown?

This is the kind of stuff that absolutely needs diversity. And part of the reason the ASML stuff is so expensive is because it doesn't have enough volume. So, for example, if the US had multiple fab lines that could consume the ASML machines, that would reduce the costs for ASML.

> do they immediately get broken up?

Yes. Always. At all levels. I might provide a limit below which that doesn't happen (like $50 million in revenue), but as soon as you cross that limit, scrutiny should be automatic.

> This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking

There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.

Sure, there are "efficiencies" to be gained by horizontal integration. What we have seen is that the horizontal integration is so strong that the industries are sclerotic in the face of crisis or change (see: toilet paper manufacturers in Covid who couldn't switch gears). It has become repeatedly clear that we need resilience and competition more than we need efficiency.

> utilities

Should be limited to natural monopolies and strongly controlled by the government. We have seen what happens when you create hybrid-type utilities that try to have some existence in the market (rather than being solidly government regulated) and the result is poor (see: PG&E).

> That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.

Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.

The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.

> Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.

Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?

The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).

I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.

Yours is a common misunderstanding, as well.

Occam's Razor only kicks in when the hypotheses have equal predictive and explanatory power.

The MOND hypothesis does NOT have equal explanatory power with the dark matter hypothesis. As such, Occam's Razor is not relevant.

Abandoning aether was NOT a "simple" answer. One you abandon aether, all manner of weirdness suddenly pops in.

Light being the same speed irrespective of observer is weird. Velocity dilating length and time is weird. Not having a preferential observation point is weird. Not needing a medium for transmission is weird. Not being able to agree on simultaneity is weird. etc.

Aether wasn't just something that a bunch of dullards clung to. You have to abandon some very long held common-sense understanding when you give it up.

> Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

Dark matter is the Occam's Razor theory. It explains almost all of the observations while assuming the least.

Why do you assume we have no evidence just because we don't have direct observations? Black holes were a similar phenomenon that we had no direct evidence for a fairly long time even though we had lots of other indirect phenomenon that really couldn't be explained any other way.

At this point, online fraud control is getting absurd, and AI is just making it untenable. I simply won't use ebay for anything above $50 anymore.

Having physical locations that you have to come to pick up your Thneed protects both buyer and seller. Buyer can verify that what was described is delivered and seller can verify actual pickup with ID.

If they apply a bit of logistics for shipping between stores, Gamestop could crush it.

Fraud is forcing the pendulum to swing from everything-online back to everything-in-person.

And most families only had a single car prior to 1980.

What's your point?

Did airlines get cheaper due to deregulation or because technology and engineering made operating them cheaper?

Zig also differentiates between the wrapping and non-wrapping operators. The for loop example would toss a runtime error when the index underflowed in most compiler modes.

The if statement won't work since Zig would force a cast.

The tricky wrap sucks unless you use a power of 2. Then the Zig type can match (u4, u5, u7, etc.) and you would use wrapping arithmetic operators. And on smaller CPUs you NEED to use a power of 2 because division and mod are expensive.

AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.

For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.

This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.

> This fingerprinting is incredibly sloppy

What part of "vibe coding" is unclear to you?

These are the same people that use React as a TUI and render at 60FPS to your terminal in order to update a spinner.

Please apply this loop to nextpnr for any of the commodity Xilinx, Altera, or Lattice parts. For example, everything about Lattice has been stuck for almost a decade at this point.

It only makes sense to me because I tried to implement a RISC-V on these Gowin FPGAs and banged into the limitations and can distill them down. A junior engineer looks at this post-AI, shrugs, and says "I'm done."

The AI doesn't flag "Hey, my adder sucks. Move to a better FPGA architecture." A junior engineer pre-AI would have to bang on this a while, get frustrated at the critical paths, and eventually ask for help. At which point we would both look at this, identify that the adder was doing a 32-bit ripple carry, both have a "WTF?!" moment, and switch FPGA families.

In addition, the AI also doesn't flag how close to the margin you are. To my eye, almost all the Fmax gains look like PnR (place and route) noise. The DIV/REM obviously isn't and the replay predictor looks real. To top it off, the branch predictor wins look anomalously low to my eye.

This is what a bunch of us are yelling about with AI. AI gets you a thing. AI gets you no insight into that thing. And because the juniors will use the AI, they will never learn the insight.

Side note: The granularity of the CM/MHz numbers look a bit suspicious. Why are there identical entries?

Dude, back off the buzzkill on my vibe code, man. I told Claude what I wanted, and it works fine on my machine.

What kind of Karen are you that you expect me to check if it works for other people? I mean you have Claude, too, so fix it yourself. I've got more code to vibe and vibe to code. Later for you.

Note: this is dark sarcasm just in case somebody thinks I'm serious. The problem is that I'm not really laughing because I have heard very similar to this and had to be the one harshing both their vibes very much.

> The frontier is the verifier.

Um, yes? The big value that AMD had in the x86 market over competitors was their verification model. This has been known for decades.

> 3-seed nextpnr P&R on a Gowin GW2A-LV18 (Tang Nano 20K) — median Fmax × CoreMark iter/cycle = fitness

Every single "improvement" is basically about routing around how absolutely abysmally bad the Gowin FPGAs are. Kudos to that, I guess?

Gowin FPGAs have extraordinarily bad carry chain and block to block routing systems. They are literally so bad that a 32-bit ripple carry is almost as fast as the carry skip version even if you manually route it. Jump prediction is almost all about avoiding arithmetic computation at all (which most other FPGAs would have no problem with).

Memory accesses are super slow and locked to clock edges rather than level sensitive (why ID/RF and WB take entire cycles and nothing optimization could do could change it). The additions are all routing around that (Note the immutability of the ID and WB phases).

To top it off, the 5-stage pipeline is an annoying quirk of the RISC-V architecture having an immediate value offset on its load instruction. If the RISC-V load mandated 0 as the offset, the MEM read phase could overlap the RX phase since no ALU would be necessary (Store doesn't care because the result goes to memory rather than back to the register file so RF writeback isn't an issue). The absolutely horrific add performance of the Gowin FPGAs makes this acute.

Finally, try to put this on a board. I found that anything above about 175MHz out of Nextpnr failed to execute on actual hardware (please correct me if this isn't valid. It's been over a year or more since I tried Nextpnr on the SiPeed Tang Primer 20K). That's simply right around where a 32-bit add plus some routing sits on these FPGAs. There's something a bit off in the timing analysis code for Nextpnr and the AI is almost certainly optimizing into it.

That having been said: I would LOVE somebody to bounce AI off of reversing the architecture and bitstreams for the stupid-ass closed-source FPGAs. Now THAT would be a project worth throwing a couple of grad students and a bunch of subsidized AI tokens at.

The issue isn't the terminal. The issue seems to be that Claude is using React to render to that terminal at 60FPS like a goddamn video game

Vibe coding is soooo awesome!

And people thought that Electron was a resource pig. You ain't seen nothing yet.

> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.

Why not both?

The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".

If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.

And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.

Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.

Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.

Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.