kregasaurusrex

I think overzealous copyright quietly killed Vaporwave. It focused on being anti-capitalist & satirical, where Vaporwave as a genre spawned out of this retrofuturistic desire to return to the 80's and 90's era of rosy nostalgia to chill electronic music like the K-Mart store tapes[0] fused with graphics from the era's games like Ecco the Dolphin[1]. The genre stood out because it was a new artform that encouraged stylistic experimentation, where listeners appreciated the nicheness and relative unpopularity.

One of the albums, Floral Shoppe[2], that helped create the movement was taken down on YouTube after receiving tens of millions of views because it directly used modulated (slowed down, reversed, autotuned, etc) samples from songs owned by Sony that fell outside the scope of fair use to the point the artist couldn't claim the album as an original work. This may have doomed it from the start to be a victim of its own relatively small success- as soon as more listeners discovered Vaporwave, it would be co-opted by the mainstream in the form of 'A E S T H E T I C S' and would cease to be the creative & original subgenre it set out to be.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/10/12/448059164/putting-the-k-in-mu...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Person%27s_Eccojams_Vol....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_Shoppe#Lisa_Frank_420/M...

It's a versatile piece of hardware! As long as you're not trying to get granular object detection less than a foot away it's able to see features with a fair amount of detail.

I'd previously got about 3/4ths of the way through filing my taxes using TurboTax, only to find that I wasn't able to deduct student loan interest on the free product. Intuit also regularly deletes threads of people who go on to ask why an expected feature isn't in the free tier, advancing the dark pattern of needing to pay for the feature on both the federal and state level returns. This is likely a systemic problem- the self employed through platforms like GrubHub & freelancers have less simple tax structures and even if they're only making a modest wage; spending $80 just to fill out your own return definitely acts as a regressive tax that disproportionately affects lower-wage groups.

I'm curious as to why it was taken down too- the video, blog post, and Github repo are all gone. Here's a mirror to the original: https://archive.is/JguQH

The creator posted a full write-up here: https://next-hack.com/index.php/2021/06/12/lets-port-doom-to...

There's data released directly by the US Census Bureau for this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Hopefully Google doesn't tell us to collectively throw them into the ocean and recharge the electric eels. [0] While cylindrical 18650's can be opened and unrolled carefully without being shorted, it's difficulty to quickly and reliably do at scale. Many other designs like flat-packs used in phones are too difficult to extract the lithium from, where the rarer metals like cobalt are the target components instead. [1] Extracting lithium isn't cost-effective due to its abundance in the earth.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...

Very cool mixture of software and hardware for your project! I've been wanting to build a Go-playing robot for the longest time, hoping the cost of 6DoF robotic arms comes down in the near future. Do you have future tweaks in mind for improving your score, like increasing the signal of the notes when they're first starting to appear on the screen?

A favorite talk of mine by Jeff Hawkins is 'What the Brain says about Machine Intelligence'[0] - how the brain interprets signals similarly to how a computer chip would, and how these are stored such that they can be later retrieved as memories or limbic system responses.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izO2_mCvFaw

The Microwave Plasma Mystery[0] by NileRed, he later made a followup video about how the experiement likely ruined the structural integrity of several glass beakers used in the video.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0u8Vtf2GoQ

It's useful to browse on a phone if you have limited mobile data, and the text-only English Wikipedia fits onto a modern micro SD card.

An important part of the article mentions bringing down the cost of high-temperature ReBCO tape conductors, where SPARC itself needed more than entire than what existing companies would expect to produce in an entire year. Existing technologies using superconductors like MRI machines, large transformers/motors, and synchronous condensers for power generation have each benefitted from bringing down these costs as the use cases mature.

ITER's estimated timeline having a working reactor by 2025 is ambitious, but is also supply constrained in that they're projecting the need for more Nb-Ti and Nb-Tn exceeding current yearly production amounts as well. For reaching the end goal of affordable hyperscale energy production, it's promising to see demand increase in order for new competitors to invest in related research projects.

His opening statement was released online already, I like how he concludes it with "in short, I like the stock."

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BA/BA00/20210218/111207/HHRG...

Still waiting for Crunchbase[0] to update it with the list of investors, which aren't mentioned in Techcrunch or the Reuters article.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reddit

Having watched the January 15th option chain before last week's monthly opex, you could see a significant number of deep ITM puts both being traded and showing as open interest for lots of different strike prices. It's likely this created a short squeeze on Wednesday which caused these put sellers to take a loss, buy the underlying stock, or roll their contracts to a later date. Most of this price action occured on Wednesday, where there weren't volatile swings in either direction on Thursday or Friday.

There's a decent bit of M&A activity going on in finanacial services lately- SoFi recently announced going public, Simple being dissolved after BBVA merging with PNC, Lending Club merging with Radius Bank, and now Plaid's merger termination with Visa. Lots more demand exists for building fintech tools, since significantly more transactions that would normally take place in-person have moved towards being online due to the pandemic. It makes a lot more sense for the whole ecosystem to move towards being data-driven and API-friendly both for consumers to to have less friction between services, and for businesses to deliver a better customer experience. Having the merger fall through is probably better on all sides such that one corporation doesn't retain too much power and act as monopolistic gatekeeper driving up fee prices.

Also, wanted to say thanks to Zach for doing a Fireside Chat with Lambda School students last month! It's great to hear from your perspective about industry knowledge & experience in order to prepare for a career in tech.

I agree wholeheartedly- found about the Underhanded C Contest through an HN thread and enjoyed reading through the submissions every year. Sadly it seems to have not been run since 2015.

10 cents is likely closer to being the raw cost of the tag itself; the actual costs including tooling and tracking would likely make this closer to 15-20 cents per unit at scale. It's still too high for a low-margin retail environment, where you're competing with services like Amazon Go's camera systems (including the removal of overhead associated with cashiers) which have a fixed upfront cost regardless of unit volume.

Even though cells may exist with the same specs, it's hjighly recommended to create a battery pack from a single supplier and standardize on that. For example when I used to do professional laptop repair, I discovered the '18650' is only a size rather than a catch-all for all 12V cells, and isn't recommended to daisy-chain the various good ones together if they only share the same voltage. There's over a dozen different colors that indicate these batteries were built by various suppliers with use cases such as fast discharge rate, higher peak voltage, greater capacity, or a cost-effective battery that survives fewer discharge cycles. Creating a pack with mismatched batteries could cause the load balancer or device to operate outside of spec- don't cheap out on your power source!

Here's the description for CVE-2020-1472: An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when an attacker establishes a vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connection to a domain controller, using the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC), aka 'Netlogon Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability'.

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/ad...

Scrabble is largely a game of area-based combinatorics, which rewards finding sequences of letters that happen to be words and fit into the board's multiplier spaces. Memorizing the two-letter word list is extraordinarily helpful when playing competitively because it allows for playing a tighter game that doesn't resemble words commonly used in English.

Funnily enough in one of the article's citations, the UK's government has funded SIGINT research for CRT and LCD televisions[0] to see if you're watching the BBC on the flat panel television inside your own home. I've been cold-called by cable companies while in college trying to sell me a cable subscription, and were absolutely baffled when telling them I didn't own a television.

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/temc2013-tv.pdf

Watched the talk at Hot Chips today[0]- 400,000(!) cores on a single wafer is absolutely remarkable! There was a slide not posted in which there were virtual segments of the wafer designated for each step, and the example given by the presenter showed a perfectly in-order workflow execution.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14758/hot-chips-31-live-blogs...

I'd recognized him from Battlebots since his robot Deadblow was a finalist from season 1, the final episode[0] starts with a short intro from Grant that shows his fun perspective brought to the table on Mythbusters. The entire Mythbusters team surely inspired the next generation of scientists and engineers with a can-do mentality.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTDrwWCJqAo

That's true in an analog design, I recently took apart a generic computer power supply that failed and noticed it used NTC thermistors. In a hobbyist kit I purchased that came with with various cheap sensors, the temperature one has a Dallas 18B20 on a board to be interfaced with an Arduino. It's probable that some people would just duplicate exactly what they used on a quick-and-dirty design to be deployed on a small scale.

If this was used in a BMS with a lithium battery, a counterfeit sensor's behavior could result in the total loss of a device. Let's say the device's PCB is designed such that the sensor is connected to a rail that requires parasitic power, and you were unexpectedly shipped the D1 variant that outputs garbage data back to the onboard firmwre instead the proper temperature. Your company would have to recall every device in that manufacturing run at great expense, if it weren't caught early enough by QA.

Trust in hardware supply chains when manufactring a PCB for a product can be quite fragile: when one component operates outside of spec, the entire device could be rendered useless. In the case of the DS18B20, the author states in the 'Warning' section that the primary way of determining counterfeit sensors is to check the ROM output compared to a known format. When counterfeit parts like this are added, it creates vulnerabilities in the entire system due to the ability for a bad actor to leverage this vulnerability and cause one part in an entire system to fail.

For example, the company FTDI snuck in code that was in a series of Windows updates that was able to detect counterfeit FTDI and brick them via software to send back all 0's.[0][1] This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of comapnies can a be a headache for end-users and programmers alike.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2014/10/22/watch-that-windows-update-ft...

[1] https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chip...

Chips have a higher value on a BOM, and as such have more financial incentives to be reverse-engineered and counterfeited. This is a bit more interesting since it's a sensor that has several operating parameters that "sort-of" send expected data back, but depending on the operational characteristics could need to be recalled entirely.

After the 2008 housing recession, the price of homes in suburban Cleveland dropped to some of the lowest levels in the country. You'd likely pay more for a new car than buying an entire house, after incentives like the first-time homebuyer's credit. The locally famous Cleveland Tourism video[0] said that you could buy a house for the price of a VCR and it's not too far off.

[0] https://youtu.be/oZzgAjjuqZM

A similar experience happened to me while I was in school, and opened a bank account through the university which had a partnership with $BANK since there weren't any nearby ATMs in-network with the credit union from my hometown. Thinking that having access to cash would be in my best interest in case of needing to buy things secondhand like from Craigslist; and didn't see a clause in the contract which required a minimum balance for both the signup bonus and until seeing a $15 monthly fee withdrawn from the account which had a small deposit made into. It ended up being a net loss-- missing that work to open a bank account with an unattainable minimum balance meant the entire process ended up costing almost 2 hours worth of pay.

Google Wallet solved this problem while they were still around but the service was canceled likely due to being a loss leader for the company, and have since switched to Simple which has several ATMs available in my area.