quailfarmer

I’d amend that to “never buying them a smart phone”. There’s nothing particularly addictive about texting with friends, and while there’s certainly still mischief associated with that, it’s not the kind of brain-fry that’s most worrying to me.

I hear this idea that not having social media will “isolate” kids from their peers, but will it? I’m not sure how you would use TikTok to interact with your classmates, given it’s a global app.

Add to this list: small portable HDMI/VGA monitor for checking on headless machines.

This was a great class when I took it! Hope you’re doing well Dr. Pauly!

It's faster, but a big reason apple silicon is ahead is because the memory is co-packaged on an MCM. This is the direction things are going.

No, arc flash risk is a function of voltage, and these cells aren't all wired in series, the capacity is expanded by building out more capacity in parallel.

My home was burned to the ground by a fire started by a charging electric skateboard. Well engineered battery systems, like an EV or a name-brand phone, are very safe, but these NMC cells are extremely volatile, and large packs cannot be extinguished once in runaway. I'm very glad the OP has this setup in a separate shed.

What's new here? College kids have been doing this since the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Solar_Challenge

The tightness of hardware integration isn't a bug, it's genuinely a feature; In fact, it's the defining feature that makes Apple hardware great. Socketed RAM, CPU, and Storage just weren't worth the tradeoffs, namely size, weight, cost, and performance. Including those modular interfaces just wasn't worth it when the internal interfaces would be obsolete within 5 years, and the average user was replacing sub-components 0 times over the life of the device.

The user being able to swap parts easily is _neat_ but it's just not an required feature, any more than the user of a car being able to easily hot-swap the engine. The right level of integration provides a tradeoff the maximizes reliability, cost, performance, and repair. A professional can still replace almost any component of a modern laptop, with a few thousand $ of specialized tools, and the battery, the only component with a fixed lifetime, can be easily replaced at home.

I really hope Framework can continue to develop hardware with documented repairability, without falling for the myth that tight integration and quality are mutually exclusive.

Yes, this is great! They gave me a similar model under the same deal, and it had a fan that would ramp up and down all day and night.

Yeah I read that thread, it sounds like great progress! Really makes me think about the hardware I put out into the world professionally, and if I could realistically have reversed engineered it with no prior knowledge.

Cryptography is probably the real game changer here, secure boot, attestation, message authentication. Can’t exactly blame automakers for wanting those features, given the stakes, but that would make reverse engineering fairly impossible.

Sorry, a quip in bad faith. Collectively, _we_ (would-be car maintenance people) are not well enough versed in how these types of systems are designed. This is a collective failure, lack of documentation.

They’re not black boxes, you’re just not an electrical engineer. They’re actually way simpler than ICE in a bunch of ways that really improve reliability. We just need to develop a collective understanding of how electric drivetrains work, the kind of understanding that we had developed in previous generations for ICE cars

It can be counterintuitive because the user terminal is shaped like the kind of satellite dish we’re mentally prepared to understand, the kind we’ve had for the last 50 years, but it’s fundamentally different. The “clear view of the sky to the east” is the source of your problems. Starlink satellites move quickly across a the sky, and the dish needs a comparatively massive 100+ degree view angle to ensure continuous contact. If you look around online you can see comical configurations with Starlink mounted on enormous poles to get them above the tree line. This issue is the #1 cause of problems we see with new installs.

Starlink DTC is also very low bandwidth in this generation, it’s is a fundamentally similar RF link budget

They do depreciate, even if the later launches are more valuable, that increase in value is marginal compared to the per-launch capital cost. Airplanes, cars, buildings, everything depreciates.

“Direct to cell”

I disabled all suggested content on my YouTube account. My “home” page shows as totally blank. Only the subscription tab works, or explicitly searching. You still get recommended “related videos” but it helps stay focused on the things you’ve chosen to see.

All modern inverters have control interfaces that allow them to fold back their power output on command, this can be set up to track feed-in rates going negative.

This is cool, and I wish I had a setup like that, but the premise seems a bit hollow. Do they grow all the food they consume? What about the energy needed to produce the electric car, host the Substack? What about when they get sick? Do they stay off-grid, or do they go to a modern hospital, which can only exist because of urban industrial buildup.

It’s cool to live off grid, but solarpunk-libertarianism is a vibe, not a meaningful policy direction for modern society

In 2020 I had a heated debate with a fellow student and course assistant over the appropriate standard of evidence for the academic honesty judicial process of the university. They were adamant that reducing the standard of evidence while also providing less severe penalties for minor offenses would be an improvement. If only I’d had this kafkaesque example to argue my point.

I’m selfishly so glad I dodged this particular bullet in my studies.

If the answer was yes, presumably there’s a tradeoff where that deal would be reasonable.

They have publicly discussed using Linux with RT kernel!

This may be true for high energy particles, but the majority of TID damage is done by higher flux lower energy, for which shielding is often viable!

Yes, you can attenuate TID effects with reasonably thin aluminum shielding

We’ve added digital side bands to “FM” broadcast radio. We’ve fully replaced analog broadcast TV with digital. We can solve this problem, with proper planning.

Develop a digital modulation that captures human voice and degrades gracefully, fund the development of ICs to demodulate it, require AM stations to install a new modulation equipment, and gradually migrating all stations to a hybrid mode with both analog and digital transmission. All new cars must use the new version, which is far more resilient to interference. In 50 years you get to turn the analog transmissions off.

Space Grade? Only in the sense that it’s technology we mastered in the 1950s. Error correction is a feature of radio transceivers that cost pennies.

That’s a great observation, and I think generally correct, but there are private companies where that sort of motivation exists, for basically the same reason

in order to disallow obsessive work?

The published ratings of battery depreciation are per-mile, because there’s not really any other way to straightforwardly measure it, but the chemistry of battery degradation is very complex, and factors like number of high-current heating cycles and depth of discharge definitely matter.

I really like LWIP because it lets you use the same block of memory allocated by the Ethernet MAC DMA for the lifetime of the packet. You can really optimize the memory “pools” for your use case to reduce the number of memcpys.