fps-hero

This would introduce a bias towards countries that are large and have extensive motorway networks. They would appear safer than countries that have a smaller portion of motorway miles.

> If we look at the number of deaths per billion miles driven, we see that motorways are roughly four times safer than urban roads, and more than five times safer than rural roads. This is not specific to the UK: among 24 OECD countries, approximately 5% of road deaths occurred on motorways.5 In almost all countries, it was less than 10%.

I think you have a misunderstanding about the Ethernet standard they are discussing. This isn’t copper Ethernet, its fibre Ethernet standard. Copper Ethernet caps out at 25Gb/s with an impractically short 10 meter cable run.

Absolutely. Software encoders are constantly pushing the envelope in terms of quality, and they have tuneable knobs to allow you to pick the speed vs quality trade off.

Hardware encoders are much more restrictive. They will target a maximum resolution and frame rate, realtime encoding a possibly low latency as requirement.

The standards define the bitstream, but is lots of scope for cheating to allow for simpler hardware implementation. You could skip motion prediction and use simple quantisation, it would just contribute to the residual entropy that needs to be encoded. Then, you can use inefficient implementations of the entropy encoders. The end result is something that can be interpreted as a valid bitstream but threw out all the algorithmic tricks to give you high quality compressed video.

I think specifically in terms of YouTube, it’s not a hardware encoding issue but it’s a purposeful optimisation for storage and bandwidth.

Absolutely cringe worthy. The painful thing is it’s just a simple conversation factor but I couldn’t take the article seriously after that.

Speaking of reinventing, the article rediscovered the concept of bakers percentage, which is how bakers always describe recipes! Except baker’s percentage is unit agnostic and not susceptible to variations in volumetric measurement, ingredient density, and non-universal cup sizes.

Unless the virus derived from gain-of-function research, which is one of the likely hypothetical origins.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/

Isn’t it funny that they decided that, of all episodes, was the one that crossed some sort of line decency. The episode was entirely on-brand, but I can see how someone might watch that one episode and be turned off.

The themes and ideas presented presented in later episodes left me far more shocked and moved. “San Junipero” and “Smithereens” were incredibly moving for me personally, while other episodes were absolutely fascinating because they took some aspects of our society and humanity and took them to their logical extreme.

The most shocking part of all is how true to reality most episodes are. What set S01E01 apart was it didn’t rely on sci-fi to tell its story, which is the only way in which it isn’t on brand.

Honestly it’s incredible that sending 12,000 satellites into space to provide internet coverage to multiple continents across the world is as cheaper than installing ground based infrastructure. The cost per satellite is reportedly $500k, so the star link constellation cost only $6 billion.

For comparison the Australian NBN (country wide internet infrastructure upgrade) cost over $50 billion, and it still relies on satellites to cover rural areas.

I bought a fake Nokia back in the day (18 years ago). The thing which gave away it was fake was the atrocious battery life (2ish run time hours), and otherwise clunky software. I can assure you faking a hologram was absolutely not problem.

Touring artist’s absolutely have a say in their ticket prices, after all it directly correlates to how much they will be paid. Once tickets are handed over to promoters and distributors then it becomes out of their control.

Festival appearance rates are agreed on in advance of ticket sales, so tickets prices are the responsibility of festival organisers.

Every action directed at making tickets more affordable will have the opposite effect of making scalping more profitable. Im amazed that a reverse auction style approach hasn’t caught on, when you are capacity limited it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.

If you want to use a car analogy, Prusa is the Toyota of the 3D printing world. No-one is arguably what they offer isn’t high quality, it’s just it’s 5 years too late, and costs too much.

For a company that’s been leading the charge on hobbyist 3D printing, they completely missed the boat on the Voron style printers. If they had simply mass produced a voron style 250x250x250mm printer, right around the time they announced the XL, and actually delivered it, the world would be a different place, and you could talk about Bambu Labs and Prusa in the same sentence.

Prusa is getting destroyed at every price point in every measure of quality. You can get the same quality for cheaper, or better quality for the same price.

Prusa’s ideological purity in reprap style printers has held them back. No significant innovations in hardware, no economies of scale from mass production, using open source firmware but failing to take advantage of community innovations like input shaping. The only place they really had an edge in was the slicer, which turned out to be the most portable part of their ecosystem.

Bambu labs illustrates how glacially slow the 3D printing industry have been innovating. A Prusa MK4 isn’t that far detached from the I3 that came 10 years before it. If the list of improvements amounts to a couple of dot points, that’s a sorry state of affairs.

I can’t believe they just released the Gen 2 AirPods without updating the charge port to USB-C, especially given the iPhone changeover has been telegraphed for over a year. It’s like they learnt nothing from the MacBook USB-C transition.

The USB-C cable supplied with my MacBook does not function as a data cable, charging only.

Isn’t it amusing to be discussing HDR processing artefacts when the subjects have full sun illumination, yet the background is pitch black. Without some measure of artistic license, you’re not going to get an image with any contrast without manipulation.

Early access is a great way to outsource your QA. Triple A QA teams number in the hundreds, but for an independent game to have that many people playing it is a triumph in itself.

If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are scratching an itch that can’t be found elsewhere, and that inspires developers create great games.

Early access does get flack for allowing people to release unfinished, often never finished games, but it’s a wonderful test of product market fit. If people try your game and like it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more people like it, it’s the ultimate positive feedback loop.

Anyone complaining about STCube has never used anything worse.

My nomination for worst code generator would be MPLab Harmony. I was unfortunate enough to be one of the first victims of the PIC32MZ line, which didn’t have a middleware library, or non-harmony code examples. It was autogenerated code, or read the data sheet and figure out every peripheral yourself. The code generator was so broken even the most basic modifications to get example code running on a custom board would result in non-compilable code. The experience was so frustrating I just respun the board with a different micro.

I’ll never touch any MCU that uses MPLabX again. Bonus points to Microchip for destroying atmel studio in favour of MPLab, now I have yet another family of microcontrollers I will not touch.

One thing I can say about STCube is the code it generates works, and you can always use it as a jumping off point for tweaking the generators code for your exact use case.

One genuine complaint is that the catch all interrupt handling is often too slow actually use, so you end up overwriting the default handlers, or becoming very proficient with DMA.

Another very important thing is to never intertwine your code with the autogenerated code. Keep the application code and the hardware code seperate, and have an actual “HAL” layer in your code. It’s an easy way to prevent your code from getting nuked when you reconfigure, and if you’re not happy with the autogenerated code just sub in your own functions. Best of both worlds.

It’s easy to say “PID controllers are audiophile tech for coffee machines”, but the most basic construction for temperature control is a thermostat, and that has been good enough for Italian coffee machines for a very long time. A PID controller is positively space age technology compared to a bi-metal thermostat.

Where PID controllers shine is in well built but small capacity machines. A Silvia has a tiny 300mL boiler. If you’re pulling a double shot (60mL), you’re losing 20% of the heat just from pumping fresh water into the boiler.

Add a PID controller to the mix, the static losses are accounted for by the integral controller, and it will instantly ramp up the heat when you pull a shot via the derivative and proportional action. This would keep the temperature significantly more consistent during a 30 second shot.

A PID controller in this instance is transformative in turning a comparatively cheap machine into a very capable piece of kit.

In a larger machine with a 1L boiler pulling a shot barely causes a ripple in temperature because of the larger boiler capacity and additional heat inertia. They might benefit from a PID controller but it’s difficult to justify over the simplicity of a thermostat, and coffee machines have been around longer than electronics have been cheap.

I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic, but exactly what you describe does exist [1]. They work OK, but they are a little heavy in the hand for fine placement. The vacuum is quite weak, nowhere near as powerful as a basic converted aquarium pump, and that really limits its utility for me. It would only work well if I had just the right tip, and just the right suction cup for larger components.

My aquarium pump setup only needs two tips, one for 0603 sized components, and a slightly larger tip with a small suction cup that handles everything from 0805 to 14x14mm large ICs (when picked on centre of gravity).

[1] https://m.aliexpress.com/i/33005346611.html

One super underrated feature is the analog discovery is the network vector analyser. I know what you’re thinking, but it only has xyz mhz bandwidth? Yeah, but have you ever done stability analysis of a DCDC? You only need 100khz of bandwidth, and I sure don’t know want to risk a $100k instrument on an experiment. For this application, the analog discovery is perfect. I’m drooling over this upgrade.

It seems that EVs are stuck in the range wars, the headline spec for an EV above all else is its kWh and range. It’s ridiculous, no ICE car gets marketed by range, and if they did you’d find that EVs are about on par range wise, they are just less convenient to refuel.

The value proposition of a hybrid makes EVs difficult to stomach, why get one EV when you can get two hybrids for the same price? Toyota will 100% jump on EVs once they become economical, but until then they are still making the car for the masses.

I test drove a Polestar 2, what are these car designers thinking with rear view visibility!

The between the rear headrests and huge slanted C-pillars you had a tiny sheet of paper sized opening to see out. I honestly thought the mirrors were adjusted wrong and were looking at the roof. Couple that with a half-baked 360 reversing camera that turned every obstacle into a trapezoidal blur, reversing parking that car between two other cars at the end of the drive was terrifying experience.

Nice car though.

I’m surprised they accidentally sent you your sales data. Honestly a 50% margin is nothing. We were connected with a FAE who started offering us direct sales in low volumes. Most of those parts had a 80-90% margin on digikey.

The problem is now there is invisible price colluding, you can upload the same BOM to digikey and mouser and the prices are within 5%. If you did that 5 years ago individual parts would have 20% swing. There isn’t any point shopping around any more, everyone is gouging. In our ERP we have prices going back 10 years, some parts have gone up staggering amounts.

Digikey were always the more expensive normally, but in the last year prices have gone up another 20% but they offer a discount to high volume customers. It’s funny the difference between “my price” and the normal list price has been as high as 75%.

For what it’s worth, the last RMA I did with Digikey didn’t go through. It was $5O in spacers that they miscounted, not a deal breaker but I had to put another order in for the missing spacers as it was easier than dealing with support. I didn’t realise ignoring RMAs was an option!

My biggest practical issue with Mouser at the moment is they removed the ability to sort by quality available. Do they even realise the biggest struggle at the moment finding available parts to complete a design?

Wonderful example Cunningham's law, thank you.

To summarise your point about decoupling capacitors. Use physically smallest capacitor you can, but with the largest capacitance (limited by the knee in capacitor price). High frequency response is dominated by parasitics, but you will get lower impedance for the vast majority of the frequency range until you hit the SRF. A lower capacitance will be better high frequency around the SRF, but worse at every other frequency.

Don’t place ferrites down blindly. Ferrites vary wildly, impedance at 100Mhz more or less a useless specification. You need impedance graphs, and you really need to know when a ferrite lossy and not simply inductive, and when it loses effectiveness and becomes a capacitor.

If you are going to put them down blindly use the exact same part number and manufacturer as on the development board.

If you think you might need a ferrite, put a zero ohm down and measure later. Sprinkling ferrites blindly without a spectrum analyser is at best a placebo, doing it incorrectly is almost always worse than not doing it. Examples of what not to do, splitting a plane to add a ferrite, adding impedance to power pins, adding inductance to IO lines or filter network and creating resonance.

As an addendum: Power delivery network, power plane stack up, and component placement matter far the than the precise value of decoupling capacitors. Thinking in terms of current loop area is vital. The PCB is a decoupling component, and the power planes may be your only decoupling at frequencies higher than your capacitors SRF.

I think you’re missing the broader point. The “netbook” form factor was absolutely on to something, but it failed to deliver. The atom processor is what enabled the form factor, and practically set the trajectory for laptops for next 10 years.

Everyone has rose tinted glasses and short memories when it comes to just how far computers have come in the last 15 years. For reference, netbooks predate iPads by 3 years. They came out about the same time as the first iPhone.

The low power long life computing platform has for the longest time been a dream. Netbooks with 4-8 hour battery existed at the same time that a top of the line laptop would get only 3 hours battery life, a normal consumer grade laptop would top out at 1-2 hours, for a 1/4 of the price.

If you squint hard enough, there is no discernible difference between the aspiration of the netbook platform, and a modern chrome book or iPad with a keyboard, but Intel doesn’t make processors for either platform.

It may help to a limited extent with compression, but the window size is so small it is hardly worth it. I imagine a huge part of the speed of the algorithm is how cache friendly it is. Worse is better sometimes.

Imagine if you could simply deploy an army of fuzzers on a piece of code, vs what could be derived from client side probing. Yes, having access to the source is a problem.

An hour later, wow. That podcast is mesmerising. That’s absolutely incredible what they were up to. Thanks for the share, on to part two now.

It’s so frustrating that the entire CSI camera module ecosystem has been completely handicapped by the choice of connector for the camera module.

The V1 camera module (OV5647) only supported two lanes, so it was a fair enough decision then, but they had a chance to change it when they changed connector on the PiZero.

The connector even had the 4 extra pins specifically to support 4 lane CSI, but it was as if it was forgotten about. The V2 camera came out not long after so the combination would have made for a massive upgrade.

I think they ended up back peddling from the new connector due to the horrific combination of a too thin custom flat flex cable with a connector that could barely meet its 10 mating cycle rating.

It didn’t have to be that way, a standard 0.5mm FFC with decent swing down latch connector is 10x more robust.

Forget the USB boards, they all work to the best of the USB / UVC limitations but they aren’t great. You want to hook your camera sensor up to a processor with a CSI input.

Image sensors are really just high speed ADC clocking out data, whether the data is useful or not is up to the viewer. What I’m getting at is forget FPS and think data rates.

So, you need a processor that is that can handle that data rate. The napkin math says 2K@240FPS has the same data rate as 4K@60FPS. All you need is a processor or module that can handle it and you’re golden. There are demos of the RPI pushing 1000fps (at a significant lower resolution) but you get the point.

Off the top of my head, NVIDIA jetson, imx8m mini plus, the latest allwinner V series, and a whole host of unobtainable in less than 10k qty parts all supported this. The rest is up to you.

Also, RPi is out even with 4 lanes because the CSI input doesn’t support the speed required on each lane.

Solar is by far the cheapest form of energy by a significant margin. It is already at the point where it makes sense to put it everywhere, and have concentrated large scale generation.

For solar to win, we need to solve energy storage, or perhaps the energy distribution problem. There is no amount of solar which will give you power 24 hours in a day in a single location.

Energy storage is the best short term solution. If we can capture peak solar generation and move that energy to the peak demand period, we can have a serious discussion about moving away from coal for baseload generation. It won’t be needed during the day, and the demand periods covered by storage.

However, for solar to really win, we need to think bigger with our energy distribution networks. Think of a global scale distribution network, like an internet for electricity.

If you can send an IP packet from your computer across the world, why not energy?

With a sufficiently large interconnected global scale network of renewable generators, energy storage becomes less important. We don’t need gas pipelines, we need longitudinal and latitudinal HV distribution networks.