278 karma · joined February 8, 2024
I personally know people in Minneapolis (where I live) who's constitutional rights have been trampled on by ICE. ICE is the enemy, all who support them have blood on their hands.
Speaking of interesting building design, the chemistry building on the same campus was designed to channel any lab explosions upward. Apparently the roof will blow off but the building won't blow out and damage other buildings around it. Inside the building you die, outside you keep walking to class.
To solve for the vibration issue the STM lab was in the basement of the building and the STM equipment sat on a multi-ton granite block that was suspended from the ceiling of the building. The building sits in the center of the U of MN campus right next to a major roadway so there were lots of opportunities for vibrations to enter into the structure.
One of the coolest feelings was the day that I successfully imaged HOPG at the molecular level. To point at the image on screen and be able to say "That's a carbon atom!" is insanely cool. I didn't end up staying in chem-e but the experience of working in a real research lab with highly intelligent and creative people has impacted my life in numerous ways.
My child has had an old iPhone se since 4yo. It has no network connection. I load music on it. It only has music, camera, and voice recorder apps. Like most toys it gets intense periods of play and then goes back in the toy box with a dead battery for weeks.
It's my assertion that the problem with tablets/phones as toys for kids is the endless stream of new content. It's addictive and never gets old. If you find a way to cut off the firehouse of new (and keep the addictive apps off) then they eventually become just another boring toy. Us adults could learn from this too.
https://www.pricing-evolution.com/p/surprising-trends-in-leg...
The data in the graph from this next post shows an inflation adjusted per brick price of .40 USD in 1980 vs a little above $.10 now. Perhaps more interesting is the cost per gram analysis which also shows a large drop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15flwte/is...
I think people tend to romanticize the past and underestimate the effect of inflation across decades. One thing that may contribute to the idea that Lego is now too expensive is that the average sets seem to be larger and more complex now. Even if the bricks are cheaper the sheer quantity of them will inherently raise the set price. That may explain why the data in the Reddit post shows average median set cost having risen even while per brick cost has decreased.
That said, I still think Lego runs the board. My 40yo Lego is still in use, I still get pleasure out of it and my kid gets even more. My kid and I just finished team building the UCS millennium falcon and now we're having a blast playing with it. Soon it'll start being scavenged for other projects. I've never seen another toy equal Lego in replayability or in the vast array of ways it can be used. As a crusty old coot I complain about the seemingly single use pieces in new Lego sets and then watch as my kid uses them in new and creative ways in MOCs. No other toy we have has the same staying power and much to my wife's chagrin it's the yardstick by which I measure every other toy.
The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
Overview of the KX45ED1 / PVM-4300 (Worlds Largest CRT) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259
Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
Years ago I worked on contract for a large blue 3 letter company doing outsourced server management for the fancy credit card company. The incident in question happened before my time on the team but I heard about it first hand from the server admin (let's call him Ben) who had been at the center of it.
The data center in question was (IIRC) 160K sqft of raised floor spread across multiple floors in a major metropolitan downtown area. It isn't there anymore. Windows, Unix, Linux, mainframe, San, all the associated fun stuff.
Ben was working the day after thanksgiving decommissioning a system. Full software and physical decommission. Approved through all the proper change management procedures.
As part of the decommission Ben removed the network cables from under raised floor. Standard snip the connector off and pull it back. Easy. Little did he know that network cable was ever so slightly entangled with another cable. Not enough to give him pause when pulling it though. It wouldn't have been an issue if the other cable had been properly latched in its ports. It wasn't. That little pull ended up pulling the network connection out of a completely unrelated system. A system managed by a completely different group. A system responsible for credit card processing. On USA Black Friday.
Oops. CC processing went down. It took far too long to resolve. Amazingly Ben didnt loose his job. After all he followed all the processes and procedures. Kudos to the management team who kept him protected.
Change management and change freezes were far more stringent by the time I joined the team. There was also now a raised floor infrastructure group and no one pulled a tile without their involvement.
Be careful what you tug on!
I am curious how the pictured A2B board interfaces with the X/M32 board. If that's an AES50 implementation then maybe there's the possibility someone could roll up an AES50 router. That could be cool.
You must have missed all of professional sports, pay per view, etc.
That aside though, I did mention a number of issues with the write up. Anyone interested is welcome to dig into them and come back with questions if they desire. This is not however an introductory level topic and I elected to not try to thumb tap out a distillation of a very advanced and multi-faceted topic here.
I would not expect someone with graduate level qualifications and years of experience in software development to try to distill their work down to my level either.