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pdoege

108 karma · joined May 20, 2016

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pdoege··on US 10-Year Breaches 5% as Inflation, Supply Worries Mount
Well, Trump was President in 2020. Biden started January 2021.

Both of your examples show the aims and actions of the Republican Party. It isn’t bipartisan.

pdoege··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
The Smoot-Harley Tariff Act of 1930 is usually used as the counter example of this argument. It is believed to have been one of the reasons the Great Depression was so bad. It is credited with reducing USA exports by ~60% if I remember correctly.
pdoege··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
When I was building data enters in populated areas there were regulations for noise, visual signature, power usage, and etc. It looks like a lot of these newer sites are in low regulation areas. Which is great for profit margin, and not so great for neighbors.
pdoege··on Data brokers are selling flight information to CBP and ICE
A mobile provider enters into marketing sharing agreements with credit card companies. It extracts housing information from local property and tax records. It enters into marketing sharing agreements with retailers, payment processors like ADP. Same with license plate reading companies, loan companies, banks, professional organizations, etc.

It fills its data lakes with the vectorization and down tilt data that it collects every day. It uses federated batched Hadoop tasks to join the above data lakes into one large data lake. Mid-PB in size.

Then it looks for mobile phones that travel to the 400 block at night and stay there, that are buying dentist stuff from Walmart, travel to a dentist office every workday, have an income over $120k, and are a member of the local dentist society. Maybe look for someone with dentist student loans, graduated with a dental degree.

None of those data points can identify an individual. Taken together they can ID just about anybody.

But maybe there is a chance that you ID their wife/husband. So maybe include/exclude people that regularly visit OBGYN offices.

Back in the day we could link cell numbers to credit card purchases in locations to the point of being to identify the name of the person and what they purchased and where it was purchased. For all people in a metro area that were using credit cards and physically visiting stores.

pdoege··on Public Lands Sell-Off Is Struck from the GOP Policy Bill
No

"Of the 2024 Medicaid improper payments, 79.11% were the result of insufficient documentation. These payments typically involve situations where a state or provider missed an administrative step and do not necessarily indicate fraud or abuse."

Depending on the year, that means that intentional fraud is around 1.8%, almost all of it over charging by medical companies and physicians.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/fiscal-year-2024-im...

pdoege··on Driverless Semi Trucks Are Here, with Little Regulation and Big Promises
If we had dedicated infrastructure we could make the roadways out of wear resistant material. Maybe a metal or something
pdoege··on California companies wrote their own gig worker law. Now no one is enforcing it
Did you miss quote the OP?
pdoege··on They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket
Yeah, that might not be the best example. Normally you’d want a double seal or really tuned compression to reliably hit IP68. And the o-ring adds a manufacturing step. And you have to design the case to properly compress the oring. And case assembly is harder because screwing up that interface will increase chargeback. And you’ll need to modify the audio test fixtures to add a jack. And the audio test has to include a headphone test. Any failures increases rework, so you gotta budget for that too. Probably need to add a cheap earbud to the box, so you gotta add a packaging step and a bigger box. And once you sell the phone, any failure within the contracted return window will increase chargeback.

Seems like a lot of faf. I tell you what, why don’t we wait for a bigger OEM to remove the darned things, and if it doesn’t hurt there bottom line we’ll just quietly scrap the idea?

And that’s how we got here.

pdoege··on They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket
Z stack strength and rigidity is a huge driver because it reduces charge back. Margins are super tight for a lot of OEMs and the PMs eliminate any non-profit features.

Off the top of my head, there are savings in: Pick and place Stack Assembly Testing Improved phones/hour and therefore shorter/cheaper factory runs Packaging, especially if you eliminate the shitty wired earpieces in the box Less weight/volume and cheaper shipping Reduced warranty / chargeback because things that don’t exist can’t fail

All of these savings are small. But remember that the goal is to make/sell 500K+ units. And, this is an industry where the bean counters will kill their mothers to shave a penny off of the BOM.

So, yeah, for the OEM eliminating headphone jacks is a complete no brainer.

pdoege··on Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk
See my reply below.
pdoege··on Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk
Can confirm. Dmitry saved the Fire tablet by finding an error in TI’s BSP while J.S. documented the repro steps, and gave me the info to get it fixed. This was during manufacture, 3 days before public release iirc.

He also rescued the Bowser pinmux that I had screwed up. And stepped in when the display IP didn’t work. And a ton of other heroic engineering.

The early Fire Phone engineering team was really talented and Dmitry was the best.

pdoege··on Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]
The Amiga had good DTP software and hardware at the time. I used them for large format printing. They were initially faster and much cheaper than the Apple solutions.

Once the Quadra’s came out it was all over.

pdoege··on Project AZORIAN
No, it was scrapped in 2015 at a Chinese shipyard.
pdoege··on Applesauce lead poisoning cases in kids surge amid questions on FDA oversight
Are you sure? A quick review of the budget over time shows that the biggest outlays are on food and drugs, which seems correct? In fact the medical drug industry is what, $300B and food is around $1.2T? The FDA is around $8B or .5% of the industry. Seems lowish for proper oversite of 2 really important parts of our lives.
pdoege··on The father-son struggle that helped ensure IBM's success
‘IBM and the Holocaust’ is a similarly gripping exploration of these men and their business prowess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

pdoege··on Disc Brakes Took over the Cycling World. Here's Why That Was a Mistake
I used to do fast descents of Bonny Doon and similar. Think 60Mph / 100kmhr at the base. With my fat butt and damp brakes I would run through the stop signs at the bottom using rim brakes.

I’ll never go back to rim brakes now that I’ve had discs. I still use my rim brake bikes for clear weather around town. For real work it is discs every single time.

The author seems to have only used bicycles in optimal conditions.

pdoege··on Google: Turn off VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling: severe Exynos modem vulnerabilities
No. The baseband can DMA what it wants, when it wants. The baseband PMIC can power what it wants when wants. The AP is the junior partner.
pdoege··on The Peacekeeper missile’s navigation suite (2019)
USA Boomers use LRG for INS and SLBMs use star shots for mid-course correction. It’s good enough that the D5 was counter force, which is to say it can hit enemy siloes.
pdoege··on Why did the F-14 Tomcat retire decades before its peers? (2021)
I think it is even worse. NAVAIR had the 14 with its massive capabilities and instead spent a ton of money improving the A6, A7, a bunch of canceled projects, picked the effing LOSER of the LWF program, and then effed the 2 stealth projects and got out of the 2010s with extremely limited capability.

Even worse, the money that could have been spent building ships that would be useful in a conflict with CN was spent on effing GUN Cruisers (!!!) and littoral ships that didn’t even work.

Imagine instead if the USN had 8 additional Burkes, upgraded/refurbed 47s, Aegis/VLS across the fleet, and a hi/lo of updated, maintainable 14s and 16s.

The US taxpayer spent billions and billions and got nothing. It’s been huge scandal for 30+ years

pdoege··on The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend
The plan in the 90s was to use 4 high bypass engines and replace the tail. At the time improving the -52 was not favored by the USAF because it would threaten the B-1. I still think it is the correct approach
pdoege··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
The desktop user experience has been quite good

Virtualization Framework’s VLAN support is not mature and getting more than 100 machines per rack has proven difficult. The need for additional switches, patch panels, uplinks and cooling makes multi-thousand machine installations slow due to the recent logistics unpleasantness.

Using Studios is hard because of massive delays to orders. Especially the ‘big’ machines in 1,000 unit quantities.

x86 and x86/GPU still seems to be the best approach for prod datacenter use.

Otherwise I am a fan

pdoege··on Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1.1-Ounce Battery
No, it's because Apple phones have margin. They make money. Their competitors desperately want to make money.

They make their money selling phones wholesale into retailing supply chains. One of the rules of those supply chains is that the OEM eats the costs of early returns.

So they removed every widget that they possibly could and then glued everything down so that it could not possibly come loose, be dropped, wedged etc. during the warranty period.

Battery doors, headphone jacks, you name it. All gone.

End customers don't seem to care. Phones with swappable batteries, headphone jacks, etc. exist. They don't sell well in high margin markets.

pdoege··on Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
No. We would use the baseband PMIC and DMA to move the info out of the AP if they were not integrated.
pdoege··on NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites into orbit
Yeah, Spinlaunch is going to dump a lot of energy into the lower atmosphere, shed its glowing white hot shell, and then need get enough deltaV to put up a payload.

Anyway, the earliest patent I could find was a steam centripetal launcher in 1918. It never went anywhere and it has been followed by a number of improbable reinventions that all faded away.

NASA and the US Army tried again in 1982 and thought they could put a 60g projectile down range at 3 km/s. Mach 8. Guns and rockets could perform as well or better with simpler systems and the idea was shelved.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US1332992 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982ITM....18..209F/abstra...

pdoege··on I Used Linux-Based PinePhone Daily for a Year. Here’s What I Learned
The baseband/PMIC is such a huge threat and it is entirely in the hands of the carriers that desperately want user data. Coupled with very tightly held IP the problem seems to be insurmountable. When I see "removing the Google ecosystem" I have a hard time taking the rest of statement seriously.
pdoege··on A submarine's weakness: its software?
NAVSEA had no idea what they are doing with regards to C&C on subs. NAWCTSD used to have good ideas.

I remember that the NAVSEA rules were that you had to recover from a crash in less than 30 secs. The NAWCTSD rules under Ahlers were that you were not allowed to crash.

Big contractors with big budgets ruled the roost and delivered poor results. I wish that the NAWCTSD "More with less" ideas had lasted.

pdoege··on Omicron: Israel bans all foreigners, uses 'counter-terrorism' phone-tracking
No.

Carriers routinely back haul GPS data and angle data to geo locate users. At the time this information was batched nightly against transaction data provided by credit card (and other) partners in order to build customer profiles that can be marketed to advertisers.

Carriers in the USA provide this data to law enforcement for fees. This is a profit center at the carriers that I've worked for.

Some countries limit the commercial exploitation of this data, some require judicial involvement. I don't know of any country that does not avail themselves to this data.

pdoege··on Novel mind-body program outperforms other treatments for chronic back pain
Yeah, I suffered through this. "We all have aches and pains", "Don't catastrophize", etc.

Turns out I had a chunk of spinal disc the size of my little finger impinging on my spinal column.

I think that this "mind-body" stuff is woo. Drugs work. Physical therapy works. Woo doesn't.

However, woo is really cheap. And it offloads the blame onto the victim.

pdoege··on The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb
I don't think it is true that bombs damage an area. For example, when I worked on ADF nukes we were interested in the volumes necessary to destroy targets located in 3D airspace.

Similarly underwater explosions caused spherical and columnar affects depending on yield and depth.

pdoege··on Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
Yeah, its easy to vote people that you don't know off the mortal coil. Classic case of the tragedy of the commons.

Canada has half the rate of the USA, Netherlands around third, and they have the same "near-absolute" freedoms.

(Canada vs. USA vs. NL rates) https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

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