hardolaf

You're conflating open source IP cores such as LiteX with open source FPGA tooling to try to make the latter look better by using the former. Everyone knows that vendor IP is pretty terrible if you don't use it in the very narrow window in which it's validated and tested. That's why big defense contractors all use either the Northwest Logic or Rambus PCI-e cores on everything prior to Versal.

But at the same time, those cores are big and powerful, and optimize horribly because the customers who actually use them need all of those features. Those customers aren't really concerned with area but rather with meeting performance requirements. Using the Xilinx provided QDMA core, I've been able to achieve line rate performance on PCI-e 4.0 x16 for large DMA transactions with a setup time of about 3 total days of work. I'd like to see an open source solution that could even do that with just ACKing raw TLPs because I haven't found one yet.

As for pricing, AMD/Xilinx and Altera don't want you as a customer. They want to sign $10M+/yr accounts or accounts which push the envelope of what's possible in terms of frequency (HFT). And they price their products accordingly for the public. If you actually end up as a direct customer, the prices are significantly cheaper to the point where those cheaper Chinese vendors don't make sense to use.

I'm in the USA with nominally a 1.25 Gb/s down, 50 Mb/s connection from my cable ISP. And you'd think that it would be fast, low latency, and reliable. Well that would be true except my ISP is Xfinity (Comcast). At least 4 times per week, I experience frequent packet loss that works with older web servers but makes most newer TCP based technology just fail. And the connection will randomly fail for 10 minutes to 2 days at a time and sure they give me a credit for it.

So anyways, I bring this up with my local government in Chicago and they recommend that I switch to AT&T Fiber because it's listed as available at my address in the FCC's database. Well, I would love to do that except that

1. The FCC's database was wrong and rejected my corrections multiple times before AT&T finally ran fiber to my building this year (only 7 years after they claimed that it was available in the database despite refusing to connect to the building whenever we tried).

2. Now that it is in the building, their Fiber ISP service can't figure out that my address exists and has existing copper telephone lines run to it by AT&T themselves so their system cannot sell me the service. I've been arguing with them for 3 months on this and have even sent them pictures of their own demarc and the existing copper lines to my unit.

3. Even if they fixed the 1st issue, they coded my address as being on a different street than its mailing address and can't figure out how to sell me a consumer internet plan with this mismatch. They could sell me a business internet plan at 5x the price though.

And that's just my personal issues. And I haven't even touched on how not every cell phone is equally reliable, how the switch to 5G has made many cell phones less reliable compared to 3G and 4G networks, how some people live next to live event venues where they can have great mobile connections 70% of the time but the other 30% of the time it becomes borderline unusable, etc.

I signed a contract prohibiting doing anything that I'm compensated to do for work outside of work or using information gleaned from my job without permission of the firm. This is a standard contract clause.

> My previous job made it hard to even submit bugs/fixes to open source projects we used internally. Often we just forked b/c bureaucracy (there's a reason it was my previous job)

The process for me to submit a PR to an OSS project at my last firm took so long that by the time it got through legal review and I was authorized to see it through to the end, it had been 1.5 months and I went from having some free time to work on it at work to being swamped with work doing hardware bring-up and leading a massive redesign project.

> since you can't even report bugs to many of them without an account.

I joined my current employer a bit over a month ago at this point and legal still hasn't authorized me to open a GitHub account or authorized me to use my personal account to report issues.

Defense firms do a lot more than just government work. Also, there are definitely discounts in govcloud when Fortune 500 companies that operate 30+ datacenters start talking to govcloud providers about potentially migrating to their services.

Except gas exports are largely being used to retire brown coal burning which is even worse for the environment than LNG. This isn't an all-or-nothing deal even with exports. The richer countries should take on the costs of better efficiency first and we can trickle those technologies down to other nations as they become cheaper than LNG and coal.

Yeah 40% seems like a pipedream. I was at a Fortune 500 defense firm and we couldn't get any cloud provider to even offer us anything close to that discount if we agreed to move to them for 3-4 years minimum. That org ended up not migrating because it was significantly cheaper to buy land and build datacenters from scratch than to rent in the cloud.

Lots of companies, like Grinding Gear Games and Square Enix, just rent whole servers for a tiny fraction of the price compared to what the price gouging cloud providers would charge for the same resources. They get the best of both worlds. They can scale up their infrastructure in hours or even minutes and they can move to any other commodity hardware in any other datacenter at the drop of a hat if they get screwed on pricing. Migrating from one server provider (such as IBM) to another (such as Hetzner) can take an experienced team 1-2 weeks at most. Given that pricing updates are usually given 1-3 quarters ahead at a minimum, they have massive leverage over their providers because they an so easily switch. Meanwhile, if AWS decides to jack up their prices, well you're pretty much screwed in the short-term if you designed around their cloud services.

Most businesses could probably know server needs 6-12 months out. There's a small number of businesses in the world that actually need dynamic scaling.

I was part of a relatively small org that wanted us to move to cloud dev machines. As soon as they saw the size of our existing development docker images that were 99.9% vendor tools in terms of disk space, they ran the numbers and told us that we were staying on-prem. I'm fairly sure just loading the dev images daily or weekly would be more expensive than just buying a server per employee.

The strict "Open Source" wasn't even a definition when I started college.

I'm a design engineer. A lot of my time is also thinking. I can be "working" but actually just reading articles or clearing my mind. And I can be in the middle of a gaming session later that same day and suddenly come up with a solution to a problem. How many hours I work is very subjective based on your definition of "work".

But to make up for this I am also compensated several times the median household income. And the threshold for paying people like me should definitely be set to at least 2x the median household income for the region in which you work or 2x the federal average whichever is more. Currently, that'd be a minimum of $141K/yr. I feel that's a reasonable cutoff for no more overtime pay.

Yup. When I worked in the defense industry, even as an unlicensed engineer, I was bound by threat of prosecution to report a wide category of violations. Per our agreement with the US DoD, even workplace injuries which could impact our readiness fell under this definition. Now that I'm over in the finance space, if I ever notice anything suggesting a financial crime, I am required by law to report it.

What if the maintainers just say no?

> A solar panel produces >100GJ per kg of sand with roughly 10x the silver investment of a NPP or ~50g/kW and traces of B and P.

So are we talking about Power or are we talking about Energy?

I've never had a false alarm from the system on my car. But then, I actually follow the recommended minimum following distances and generally drive safely.

The problem with the CFTC is that they should just be merged with the SEC. The wall between the two is just an odd historical oddity.

I gave up responding to them because they can't even use the right units...

The fluxes used with lead-free solder release about 2.5x as much particulate matter into the air and has been linked in multiple studies to a variety of lung issues. Current recommendations in the USA when working with lead-free solder is to do so in a downward pressure clean room of class 100,000 or better, in a fume hood, or while wearing an appropriate respirator while near the contaminated air. The flux used for leaded solder is a heavy particle that doesn't rise up as much when heated and can be handled safely with only fume extractors.

There's several other issues with lead-free solder that leaded solder does not have such as crystalline growths amongst a variety of other latent defects that can form well after cleaning and examination is completed.

> Why not keep doing the thing that's provably working.

So nuclear then? Plants take on average 1-year longer than natural gas plants and a single nuclear plant produces thousands of hectares worth of solar panels with a tiny fraction of the resource usage. We have viable and in-use grid-scale U-235, Pu-239, and Th-232 reactors. We also have viable and in-use military operated U-233 breeder reactors in multiple nations that are in active production. Converting from a military design to a grid-scale design isn't really that hard as you loosen a ton of the space and thermal management requirements making manufacturing, operation, and maintenance cheaper.

> So a technology that hasn't made it to the test bench

The technology is fully proven in test reactors. The first 5 grid-scale reactors being built in the USA are part of a US Department of Energy program looking to create shovel-ready Th-232 SMR designs. There isn't a shortage of any of the isotopes we'd need for nuclear. Even if we used only U-235 and Pu-239 reactors using existing reserves to replace all current and projected global energy needs, we'd have 79 years to find more fuel or build something else. Meanwhile, with solar and wind, we still haven't figure out how to cheaply and safely store the energy to smooth the power supply curve. We could buy ourselves over 79 years to figure this out by building nuclear with only existing grid-scale technologies starting today.

It doesn't change the per-watt price at all and it might even increase the per-watt price as the average efficiency will likely decrease over its lifespan. It does drop the per-joule price though as it will produce more energy due to having a longer lifespan.

Lead solder is still preferred by many governments as its use is far safer for workers compared to lead-free solders. It's a constant fight between the manufacturing nations trying to protect their workers whereas the EU wants ROHS to make end-of-life recycling easier.

This number is based on existing mines (active and inactive) only. There's a lot more fissile material available than just the 40 Gg of usable fissile material. And that's assuming we only use U-235 and Pu-239. We also have viable LWR designs for Th-232 and are in the process of creating the first 5 Th-232 SMR test reactors at grid-scale right now.

This is exactly what we do at my job. The only time it ever causes issues with some things is when we're ramping up a new project and the PR and ticket titles don't necessarily match the work we've done. But that's more of a problem where we could make everything bite-sized, or we can deliver complete packages in terms of a feature plus all of the miscellaneous changes that we needed to make along the way to make it work. Now, is this the best way to do things? No, you should ideally make those changes separately and push each one separately. But that slows down progress.

It sounds like you should pay more for developers because we don't have an issue retaining top talent over in the financial space.

And it's very easy for an author of an opinion piece such as this to overlook something or over extrapolate something or assume that medieval drawings are accurate. In the case of this article, most of what the author has cited is information about the British Isles and then extrapolated that information to cover all of Europe even though regional differences almost certainly existed and things likely changed over time as well. It's not like the world was just static for 600+ years.

Fun fact, Andrzej Sapkowski only specified a few characters' skin color when it was important to note that they were from the same region as Geralt of Rivia. Otherwise, the only big note is that Zerrikanians have sun-blackened skin (as in deep black like you'd find in many parts of central Africa). Everything else is basically just commentary on hair styles and especially hair dyes. Very little time is spent in his books discussing natural hair colors or skin color with the exception of people very far to the north, Geralt, and the Zerrikanians. In interviews back before the video games were made, (I'm going to paraphrase here), he basically said that the skin colors and hair colors were as diverse if not more diverse than Earth and because of the ease of travel for anyone aided by magic users, you could expect to find tons of diversities in any of the cities and even in large towns. As for the magic users and witchers, they'd be as diverse as the world itself as they were trained from all parts of the world.

They also state that the games are wrong despite many of these games having put in farm more period and location specific research than the author. The author cites a few translations of a few summaries of laws and a bunch of stuff about England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and then extrapolates across the entire medieval period and all of Europe.

I suspect that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has the pigs in their work accurate to what it was at the time and the author is taking sources about specific regions and then extrapolating over all of Europe. Yes, there are inaccuracies in most games, but I suspect that the author is also themselves inaccurate.