jakeinspace

A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.

I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.

Probably the worst part

Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.

Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.

Kind of feels like we're in a similar place with AI programming as we are with self driving vehicles. Good enough for the typical case, maybe even better than most humans, but bad when dealing with novel situations or situations which require a really cohesive model of the system (code, business requirements, physical world, whatever).

^

China hasn't invaded another country this century.

Well, sure they make reference. Borrow checkers and memory ownership concepts, like in Rust, are pretty good at giving a very low overhead improvement over bare C pointers. But they're not as flexible. Shared memory complicates ownership rules. And invariably, any Rust program that involves real hardware will require dropping down into unsafe at some points. A safer program with an unsafe kernel is an improvement, don't get me wrong.

I'm not sure how a type system would "solve" arithmetic overflow / bounds dynamically, without expensive overhead (boxed types).

Can't really have it all. If you want runtime assertions on your data/state, that has a cost. Nothing is stopping you from writing that logic out and having all your inputs and outputs sanitized for "semantic invariance". But if you want the language to implicitly do that, you're gonna have overheads. Pick a different systems language in that case, and deal with the tradeoff.

I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay.

Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.

The police aren't your friends

Every quantifiable science has some amount of math, but it's by definition applied math. I think this was more of a debate between applied and more abstract math.

Apple has all the money in the world to take this to court, I don't see why they'd accept a settlement. The discovery process alone could honestly destroy OpenAI by making investors and employees nervous enough to look elsewhere. Would be especially interesting if this crosses into criminal territory, especially if there's solid proof of upper management or executives being aware.

My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.

Marx wrote about the concept of alienation in the context of work, the process by which capitalism would destroy the emotional attachment between laborer and their output in the name of efficiency. Prior to factories and division of labor, while life was still very hard, artisans and craftspeople were more in charge of their work and output.

Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.

This sucks

This is great

Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.

China is installing something like 500 GW of wind and solar per year now. Even if they're only able to build and otherwise access chips that have half the SoTA performance per watt, they will win.

That's not really true in any country these days.

True, but BFS was mainly done in-house. Source: my best friend and I worked on some parts of it.

Aside from merges that combine commits from many authors onto a production branch or release tag. I would personally not leave an agent to do that sort of work.

I'll never be as cool as them.

I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.

If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.

I wish there was a good solution.

Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.

Please type things yourself. Or at least prompt your LLM of choice to sound less canned.

Location: Montreal, Canada

Remote: Preferable

Willing to relocate: To Ontario, or possibly US East Coast

Technologies: C/C++, Python, Linux kernel (yocto, kernel space dev), board bring-up, FPGAs (Xilinx), video, fault tolerance

Github: https://github.com/jmacneal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakemacneal/

Email: jake [dot] macneal [at] gmail.com

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XBxf012ceSOb74_x7tzHvbxiNXo...

Embedded Software engineer with over 6 years of experience building software systems in the aerospace sector. Contributed to multiple spacecraft, including NASA Orion and Gateway (Artemis Program), Chorus Constellation (2026 launch), and EarthDaily Constellation (in- orbit). Built open-source flight software frameworks, application software, Linux kernel drivers, bootloaders, and test infrastructure. Comfortable designing and implementing safety-critical embedded software systems with fault tolerance in mind.

Interested in: Embedded/Firmware roles in aerospace, medical, robotics, semiconductors, and other fields. Especially interested in roles involving edge AI inference.

I have an undergrad computer engineering degree from McGill University, and a CS Master's from UT Austin.

I am a US citizen.

Regards,

Jacob Macneal

People need to be tried/court martialed for this.

Is this missing interceptors? My understanding is those probably dominate total costs at the moment, especially if you include the costs of allied Gulf State and Israeli interceptors. Thousands have been expended already on ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Those range from hundred of thousands to multiple millions per shot.

I was hoping our eventual Skynet would at least be cool. Now we're just gonna have killer robots yelling slurs at us, talking about race realism and the downfall of the West.

Embedded, a mix of Linux (yocto), boot loaders (mostly C), some bare metal C/assembly. Have worked in aerospace for 6 years but am currently looking to hop over to another industry, ideally AI accelerators/semiconductors or medical devices. I enjoy it, for the most part.