esmi

Apple is in many states and countries. It’s way simpler to say no then try to manage it on a case by case basis for 1000s of engineers.

> We have lots of mature, debuggable languages to process text...

You mean like sed? Sed was written in the 70s and has been in mission critical stuff for decades on many platforms. What are you recommending that is more mature than that?

Not only that I’m sure programmers are not unique in that regard. Surely musicians do music in their off time. Artist do art. Carpenters build. Mechanics have beaters, etc. etc.

Wouldn’t it be more surprising if Apple wasn’t working on something like this? Even if it is true, basically it sounds like someone leaked out a test build of something. They’re probably prototypes for all kinds of crazy things, some good some bad, just like everywhere.

That exists. If a larger process is ok you can get 10 custom packaged ICs for less than $5K. It doesn’t meet your budget but it’s about the cost of a beater car. Depending on the car. ;)

https://www.planetanalog.com/design-a-custom-analog-ic-in-yo...

I guess I was wondering what make a fab open source. I.e. say you did have a 3D chip printer, but you didn’t know how it worked and you couldn’t look inside, would that be open source? If that printer counts as open source then I would argue fabs like MOSIS are the equivalent.

You can get all the tech files for their older stuff, with no NDA, from FreePDK. It works fine with VLSI layout tools like magic, which one can git clone the source of.

That said, there isn’t really a lot of mystery in the larger technology sizes like 0.18um. Plenty of universities will tell you exactly how they do it if you look into it.

The big problem with DIY fab ideas is chemical disposal. This will have to be addressed first. Parts of Mountain View are still a superfund site because of older fabs. HF is no joke.

Cool paper. Thanks for sharing. I’ve worked with OTFT before and this paragraph from the paper pretty much sums up my experience too.

“The operating frequency of the base-line design for OTFTs is approximately 200 Hz while for silicon it is 800 MHz. The optimized design frequency is approximately 40 Hz and 1.36 GHz respectively for organics and silicon. The modest per- formance of OTFTs can be a decent match for applications that need modest computing such as sensors, RFIDs, toys, remote controllers, etc., as described in Section 2. Many of these embedded processor use cases employ embedded processors in the kHz range [31, 35].”

What’s an open source VLSI fab?

The correct answer is, it’s complicated. (Of course) It depends greatly on the definition of the output, for example, which can vary by application.

Easy answer is, for a fixed load (I.e. a resistor) and frequency, one varies amplitude with power. (perhaps absolute value of area under the curve might be a better description)

For more information see here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Waves/powstr.html This is for a physical string, which I think is easier to wrap your head around. The math is very similar for electrical waves.

That shouldn’t be that case for a well designed battery pack.

An unavoidable issue with all lithium ion batteries is plating during charging. This process increases the output impedance of the battery reducing its ability to deliver power to a load, regardless of how much energy is inside it.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140903105638.h...

Probably only if there is some type of class action law suit. If customers actually lost millions due to robinhood’s negligence then there is almost certainly going to be one.

> How reliable are electronics as a whole?

Given sufficient time, budget and management will very reliable system can be made. The probes have software too, so there’s that...

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

Say you’ve asked an I2C ROM for a block read. After the first byte something, also on the bus, asserts an interrupt via a side band GPIO. I can’t read the something until the block read finishes.

Why? Obviously the satellite can detect the predator.

Or you could prototype the algorithm in matlab then convert to HDL. https://www.mathworks.com/products/hdl-coder.html

Do you think this is true in Google’s European sites too? I have a hunch this is more of a Google thing than a US thing. I can assure you that plenty of engineers in the US grind away too.

I don’t know. If junior = lack of experience implementing circuits in practice then I don’t think they should. After all, in theory you don’t need to bypass. In practice, you might. :)

Are you an analog EE? If so that’s surprising. Did you have any microelectronics classes where you essentially build up your own opamp, one stage at a time? Bypassing is usually covered in this class, or in its lab, especially when discussing PSRR of the system.

Digital systems classes can cover it too, when going over power distribution, but that’s usually a graduate level class.

The digital VLSI or signal processing tracks of EE might not require this stuff anymore.

It’s not obvious that you need them. In modern hw especially, often you don’t. Most people add them because it is (usually) not harmful and it can be helpful and they don’t care if it’s wasteful. https://youtu.be/P8MpZGjwgR0

It’s definitely perfect for that. It’s from this book.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6398634-the-happiness-pr...

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she realized. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

In the US we call this engineering form.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#E-notati...

I misread the question though and now realize it’s not needed.

I suppose this is what happens in a teacher shortage.

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real...

Is the answer to the second question allowed to be in engineering form? :)

What grade level is question 3 considered?

An American company is likely run by American citizens which comes with some protection from the Chinese government. Chinese companies owned by Chinese citizens don’t have that luxury so it’s similar but not the same.

I don't know Go so I am not sure what file.Read does exactly but wc, on my system which uses the same wc.c as Jenner's article, is doing blocking reads in a naive way which I argue makes it somewhat of a paper target.

Maybe the Linux wc version you have is better. I don't know. They do exist and Penner's article gave a link to one. I am not sure as you didn't link to the source of your wc. (Edit: I just noticed you did use the OSX wc, you're just running it on Fedora. Sorry about that.)

But in any case using just wall clock time can be deceptive. Here is what I mean. On my machine, a somewhat old Mac Mini with a spinning disk, user CPU is only ~1/5 of the real time. The rest waiting for the OS or the disk.

  % for ((i=0;i<250;i++)); do cat /usr/share/dict/words >> a; done
  % /usr/bin/time wc -l a                                         
   58971500 a
          1.24 real         0.28 user         0.64 sys

wc seems like a bad example because it’s basically IO bound. The title should read, “Go’s built in bufio reader is faster than raw reads on the file descriptor.” Which it should be because that’s the point of bufio.

> You are implying that an article that is only two years old is too old,

No. I’m stating that policy changed after this article was published, who knows maybe it was in response to this article, so the facts may have changed. The age of the article is not relevant I was just showing the timeline.

> Apple forces recyclers to shred perfectly good hardware indiscriminately

Says the recyclers. Apple says they are not perfectly good hardware, otherwise they would have refurbished it themselves. I also believe Apple maximizes profit which is why I believe if it was reliably repairable, they would have done it. A refurbishment unit has to fetch more than a recycled unit.

The article is from 2017 and references data from 2016 and 2012. In 2018 Apple announced it stepped up its recycling efforts but I don’t know how things have changed and I haven’t read the full environmental report.

Apple forces recyclers to shred because they determined those devices are not fit for resale and they don’t want recyclers reselling them, like they said they would in the article. This happens to 1/3 of trade-ins, see link below.

https://www.apple.com/environment/

You can’t dump a laptop in a blue bin but you can recycle it. You can also resell or get a trade-in credit from Apple.

https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/