rebootthesystem

Not my fault if you can't see the difference.

I have competed with multi-billion dollar multinationals from my garage with 0.001% of their budget on hand. Does bad shit happen? Sure.

The topic you seem to want to discuss is valid and should be discussed. Stop trying to make it equivalent to IP theft and cloning from China. Two very different things. If you can understand the differences then there's a conversation to be had.

This is true. I happens here in the US just as well. Yet this is a different issue.

In one case you have a massive number of companies in China stealing IP and copying products while their government looks the other way.

In the other case you have an asymmetric legal situation. Even a small company can bring a mega corp to it's knees due to IP theft. Patents are powerful things when used correctly.

Yet, we are talking about very different things here. China --a nation-- has a massive product cloning and IP theft industry. This is happening at an astounding scale under a government that almost encourages it.

There are plenty of stories of Kickstarter projects that run into clones before their funding completes. This can be devastating for an entrepreneur and their small company. It all points back to China.

Please don't get lost in the weeds and see the hypothetical for what it is: A mechanism through which one can gain understanding of the issue being discussed.

The answer is very, very simple once you've taken a loan out on your family home to finance the development of a product that is then stolen.

Everything is academic and sterile from almost any other perspective.

Government sponsored theft --which is what's happening in China-- is a massive destructive force. It is good in China because it brings in billions of dollars from all around the globe. That's why the Chinese government doesn't do a thing about it. They "sponsor" it do the extent that inaction becomes indistinguishable from sponsorship.

If that is happening it isn't because of intellectual property theft. That's the difference.

I'm sorry, that makes no sense at all.

Go build a company and have your products stolen. Then you'll understand.

Go build a product in a competitive market and then have someone with zero business experience it's overpriced.

Here, I'll help you. You don't even need to make physical products:

Create a website that will host authoritative articles about, I don't know, auto repairs.

You will personally write all the articles.

You devote a whole year to researching and writing them. You also hire a graphic artist to create illustrations for every single article. Let's say each article takes an hour of your time (if you are really good at it) and half an hour of the artist time. In the aggregate each article cost you about $200 to produce, in time and hard costs.

At the end of twelve months you publish your website with 1,000 fresh articles that cost you no less than $200K to produce. You devoted a whole year to this, so one could very well argue there's an opportunity cost associated with the success or failure of this website. I'll place that at $100K. You invested $300K to launch this site. And then someone comes along and tells you it's overpriced.

That aside, as soon as you launch I hire a bunch of people on Fiverr to take your articles and modify them just enough to maintain the value of your research yet look and feel a little different. I pay $10 per article to steal and change your product. I invest a total of $10,000 and can probably get the work done inside of a month.

I now launch a new website to compete with yours. I can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and outrank you with what effectively is your own content. I stole a year of your hard work and investment and made your website irrelevant by throwing money at marketing. Money you don't have because you spent it all researching and developing your product.

That is, in many ways, what is happening with the cloning of products out of China. There's nothing whatsoever good about it no matter how hard someone might want to try and distort reality to put lipstick on that pig.

Risk taking is a necessary part of progress. Without it the very computers we are using to communicate would not exist.

Risk taking doesn't need to be dampened, it needs to be encouraged and protected.

China is getting richer by the day by being thieves. Sure, they do make a lot of legitimate products there. Yet, their theft "cartels" bring in hundreds of billions of dollars into their economy at the detriment of the economies they attack using such techniques.

Exactly. I have, in my mind, this image of a river of money flowing from the US to China for counterfeit goods. They results in the destruction of businesses and jobs as well as taking a significant amount of money out of our economy and into theirs.

I guess you've never seen Lithium cells burn...

Everyone posting comments either defending clones or saying they are not bothered by them (or that they are cool because they foster innovation) has obviously never taken everything they owned, quit their job and even gone as far as mortgaging their family home to develop a product in pursuit of an idea.

Do that. Then come back and tell me how it feels to have some fucker in China clone your product.

I've had the experience of having a company out of Korea do a product that copied 75% of one of ours and introduce it into the US at half the price. Nearly fucking killed my business after investing nearly a million dollars and a year of R&D.

The "D" part is much easier than the "R" part, which is where reverse engineering has a huge advantage. You do all the "R" and then they copy and do some "D".

Not only that, you also identified a market opportunity for a product, which is massive. Ideas are worth shit. Opportunities are worth gold.

I owned an original Amiga way back when. In fact, my was from the batch that had the design team signatures injection molded into the inside cover.

It was a fantastic machine at the time. I enjoyed using it. It was a refreshing new take.

Today? Nah. There is no reason to revive almost anything from that era. The only things I have that survive the test of time are my HP-41 calculators and a rugged-as-f--k all metal shop vacuum cleaner that still works as new thirty years after I bought it.

I think "layoff" means "involuntary layoff". No need to dramatize by adding "involuntary". I think that was my point. The word only adds drama. Everyone knows what a layoff is.

What many have described as voluntary layoffs I would probably call "voluntary resignation with incentives".

The company is asking you: Are you willing to quit your job and pretend we let you go?

It is wrapped around a layoff to be nice to the employee because this activates unemployment benefits, etc

What happens if nobody, not one person, volunteers? They layoff as many people as they need to, involuntarily, of course, as the term implies.

I had a case some thirty years ago when I worked at a shitty unionized company where I was asked (muscled by the union really) to choose between resigning or being laid off. The options had some convoluted combinations of benefits and legal implications (union stuff) that were hard for my younger self to decipher. I ended-up opting to resign, on paper. It was then executed as a layoff.

Is it at the point where one can, for example, use PyCharm to develop Python/Django sites residing in the Windowns file system (say, z:/sites/project_099) while hosting from WSL?

Or would it be treated more like a VM that you simply deploy to?

We currently run one or more Ubuntu server VM's per machine as needed for local testing. If needs go beyond that, we have physical (virtualized) servers on our network (for example, web and database servers).

I can see WSL possibly being good for local development if it can somehow integrate seamlessly with the Windows file system and various tools (PyCharm) can be setup to run on Windows yet talk to WSL. I guess this might be equivalent to running a remote interpreter.

Need to think about this a bit. Running a server or two on VMs is pretty clean and painless. On machines with 64 GB of memory you don't even know they are running (from a performance/resource perspective).

> involuntary layoffs

> involuntary reduction

As opposed to what?

"Boss, 231 of us decided to voluntarily be let go, effective immediately. Yeah, we know, it's a bummer. We also decided to take three months severance pay at half salary. Hey, thanks for everything. Have a nice day!"

I sometimes wonder about what might lie behind the twisted language often used by reporters.

Agreed to all your points. I'll add that I have no interest in going drinking.

A number of tech meetups (no necessarily programming) are held at loud venues and involve alcohol. In other words, getting drunk under loud music while yelling at each other 'cause you can't hear and not hearing half of what other people say.

Exactly what I need after a twelve hour day. I never understood how this can be considered "networking". It's shallow, ineffectual and mostly useless.

I know. I know. That's why I called it a nit pick. Judging from the down votes I guess people don't have a sense of humor. It's OK. People gotta chill.

I've been using a small dedicated SSD drive for swap file and other temp file requirements for a few years now. One example of this is Photoshop temp file space. I don't want unnecessary I/O out of system or data drives.

That said, yes, we just got done upgrading all of our workstations to new self-built systems with 64 GB of RAM and I would definitely consider having to go to swap file to be an error.

All of our systems have 5 SSD drives: System, Data, Library, Development, Swap.

They are all 1 TB SSD's with the exception of the 256 GB Swap/Temp drive. The idea is to distribute read/writes and organize things so that no SSD, and, in particular, the system SSD, is abused. Running a large number of FEA thermal simulations or a bunch of FPGA compilation jobs can produce an amazing amount of files.

This approach seems to do a decent job of spreading that out and keeping it off the System drive. That, coupled with local (network) and remote backups has worked well so far.

Good comment, but I'll nit-pick this statement:

> When I picture life arising from nothing

Please don't. Life didn't arise from nothing. That would be like saying "When I picture a supernatural entity creating life".

The rest of your post sounds interesting though. Can't comment on that, not my field.

As with everything that should be trivial this becomes fairly non-trivial upon contact with reality.

At the most fundamental level you need three lookup tables with one entry per sub-pixel. On a 1920 x 1080 display that means a little over two million entries for each, R, G and B. In other words, six million entries.

Pixel period at 60Hz is going to be in the sub-10 ns range. This means you would need lookup table memory that can be randomly indexed and respond within less than 10 ns in order to be able to grab a correction value for each and every subpixel being displayed. Due to latency and other realities of DDR SDRAM this is impossible. DDR SDRAM does far better for burst access of sequential blocks of data within a row. It does not do well for fully random access of single memory locations. DDR4 can't do full random single location access at these data rates.

Wikipedia article on SDRAM basics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-acc...

Other memory technologies (QDR SRAM and RLD RAM) do exist that can accomplish the above requirement. They are extremely expensive and so they are not commonly seen in products such as televisions.

Yes, custom chips or an FPGA would be required in order to manage the process.

Even then, the problem isn't resolved.

The next issue is one of differential quantization. Each subpixel is either going to be driven by an 8 or 10 bit data stream. I'll use 8 bits for this example.

Say a blue sub-pixel is 25% "worn out". Assuming a linear transfer function (it isn't) this means that in order for all other blue sub-pixels on the entire screen need to be limited to a max of 75% output in order to not be brighter than that one blue sub-pixel.

Yet, the problem doesn't end there.

We also need to knock down all red and green pixels to limit them to a maximum of 75% output. Why? Because, in order to make white light you now have to compensate all color channels, otherwise you'd have too much red and green against a weak blue output.

It very quickly becomes a lowest common denominator problem.

Going back to quantization. When we started with a fresh OLED display we had 256 levels from black to white. Now we are down to 192 due to the necessary compensation.

But, that's not all! There's more!

Let's say green sub-pixels on the opposite side of the screen have now "worn out" down to 60% max output. Now the entire screen needs to be brought down to this new limit. And total quantization levels are now down to 153.

The practical result of losing quantization levels is image degradation due to an inability to smoothly map input to output.

On first inspection this might seem to indicate that a high speed three channel lookup table isn't really necessary. If we trim the output of all pixels down to the worst case pixel, well, just adjust the entire display. Except this won't work. If you bring all pixels down to 60% you are also bringing down the bad pixels that could not produce full light output. The end results is that, yes, you do need a high speed lookup table in order to leave bad pixels alone (not quite) and adjust good pixels to match the bad pixels.

And yet, we are not done with this. There's a fundamental issue that hasn't been addressed, even after throwing all that technology at it: Calibration.

In order to be able to populate three lookup tables (red, green and blue) we need to be able to measure wear at the sub-pixel level. This is extremely time consuming and most definitely well outside the realm of consumers. At the factory? Sure. At home? Not likely. I can see gross measurement. For example, manually measure sixteen zones and accept the fact that the image might have visible color differences due to this. Or, maybe, use a high resolution sensor to measure a few hundred zones. And this is when, to reach for the popular saying, you start to find yourself up to your ass in alligators when all you wanted to do was drain the swamp.

Funny how things work.

EDIT: Forgot to add. A lifetime "on" time counter won't work. The degradation of OLED pixels isn't purely a function of time. You can end-up with pixels that have been active for exactly the same time and one is significantly brighter than the other. You have to measure.

The big issue with OLED's is differential aging of subpixels across space and time.

In other words, red, green and blue subpixels "wear out" at different rates over time as well as over the surface of the display.

This means that as time goes by you could have one corner of the display develop a green tint while the other corner goes red.

This might very well be one of those technologies that has all the makings of the greatest improvement in the field yet never gets there because of one nagging issue.

If they don't have any code or project whatsoever they are able to discuss I have zero interest in interviewing them.

I have never said this is a universal formula for all to adopt. This is what I do. And it has worked very well for over thirty years across a range of engineering disciplines. Google and others can't take this approach because they need to hire people by the thousands. Not me.

Another interesting thing is to talk about someone's hobbies and passions outside of work. This is where you can learn so much about a person. People are passionate about one or more things and that is a reflection of their personality.

We do a lot of work in aerospace. There are very obvious legal barriers to disclosure there. Yet, I have always found that most engineers who are truly engaged with their craft have enough interesting things to talk about outside of work that you can really get a sense of who they are and how they will approach work.

An interesting example was when I needed someone to work on some Python code. I brought in people who had zero experience with Python. I could not care less about that. I wanted someone with some of the qualities I have already mentioned. I ended up hiring a programmer with lots of C++ experience and no Python chops at all.

The first three months were dedicated to taking a deep dive into Python while getting up to speed on the project. After that the focus shifted to the project itself. This person has been with me for many years and doing an amazing job with various technologies we didn't even know we would touch when I hired him.

I know this person can pick-up any technology we might need to utilize and do an excellent job of it.

The investment is in the person, not the technologies or the ability to memorize coding puzzles.

That's just funny.

My comment has nothing to do with other forms of racing.

You missed the part where I admitted to being a bigot about NASCAR. :)

I also don't like that twirling ribbon event at the Olympics. Let a guy be grumpy for a moment, will ya? :)

> not everyone is you, not everyone is passionate about technology, and it's not reasonable to expect people to do more of their job outside of work for free

I am not sure how you would twist personal development and remaining up to date with "do more of their job outside of work for free".

Let's get away from technology for a moment.

You need to go to the doctor.

Would you rather go to a doctor who is passionate about their work and constantly devoting personal time to remain up to date on the latest research, drugs, studies, techniques and technology?

Or would you rather go to a doctor who has not devoted a single day in ten years to stay up to date?

I'd pick option #1 every time. Same with engineers.

Look, if you are not interested in remaining current, that's OK. Just don't expect to have access to the same opportunities. It's as simple as that.

> talk to basically any woman with a job and then rethink your sweet nostalgia

Wow. Not sure how you made the jump to harassment there. Gender has nothing to do with it.

F1 is just one type of what is know as "road course" racing in the US. There are plenty of other categories, including off road.

Having driven Nurburgring as well as having spent days training at well known US race courses I can tell you that turning left all day feels just like being on a busy freeway. Take away the crashes and nobody would care.

A road course requires skills not found in the "let's all turn left for 200 laps" courses. Not even close.

The other aspect of road courses is that they require a very different level of concentration and physical endurance. Hard to understand this without spending a few hours driving a race car on a road course.

OK. Yes, I know NASCAR goes to road courses a couple of times a year. Yet, NASCAR, for the most part, is oval-turn-left racing.

Sorry, NASCAR is not racing, it's driving left on an oval "freeway" on cars with horrible real driving performance because, among other things, they can't turn right to save their lives.

But, hey, it satisfies the need to make money by stuffing a bunch of people into a stadium to watch a "race" while they each chips, corn dogs and gulp soda. Easy to broadcast too. Announcers don't need to know a thing.

Yes, I am bigoted about this. I think racing is about road courses, either on or off road.

Let's see a NASCAR "race car" do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEv_uFBnzwI

I think the error in this thinking is in assuming that the market leader will be the source of the next step change in innovation. This is covered very well in the book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Bottom line, this is seldom the case. If the inflection point in battery technology comes from an outfit Tesla does not control they could be in trouble. All other car manufacturers will simply go off and buy these new better batteries while Tesla will have to figure out what to do with a factory that can't produce them and, perhaps, never will because they won't have command of the tech.

Sure it does. A huge problem.

Here's reality: 100% of the technologies I work with today did not exist when I was in school. The only thing that has remained constant, useful and relevant is basic science, math, physics, etc.

What, then, make an engineer a good engineer in any domain? This applies to all aspects of engineering, from software to manufacturing engineering?

If I had to pick one thing I'd say their ability to remain current, learn and apply new unknown technologies through self study. Their flexibility and willingness to do so. Almost their drive to do so.

What I am interested in is someone who has the right approach and attitude for the job, an ability to solve problems creatively and a significant enough desire to learn. I am not looking for a robot that can memorize a hundred coding solutions in a month.

Part of the discrepancy here might lie in a difference in environment and stated goals. I have never worked in Silicon Valley but I have a feeling it is a dog-eat-dog mercenary environment where people are chewed-up and tossed out as quickly as others are hired.

If you are looking for quick hires and you are not looking at the idea of adding a team member for a long term relationship with the company and the goals of the business, yeah, sure, filter them through some quick "can you code this shit fast" puzzles and move on. Great! You are hired. Here's your desk. Here's your ankle chain. Now code away!

If, on the other hand, your industry and approach is such that you view people as a long term investment you really should not care about those skills. Anyone with decent ability can memorize coding problems. And it is worthless. What you are looking for is to bring someone on-board who will become a true asset for the business. I see it as almost short of looking for a partner. I don't care about memorized performance, I care about the ability to problem solve and the creativity, culture and thinking they can bring into the business.

These are two very different views. One is hiring cattle. The other is hiring people.

Not entirely sure how you might have reached that conclusion. Anyone dedicated to their craft will naturally --out of sheer interest-- devote time and effort to getting better at it.

For example, as a young EE I was constantly reading data books (yes, physical data books) and application notes. I had hundreds of data books and probably went through all of them twice and some several times. I could, at the time, talk about almost any chip from any of the major manufacturers and knew where relevant application notes existed for most problems. My employers did not mandate that at all. I was truly interested in what I was doing.

Someone interviewing me at the time would have learned a heck of a lot more about me if they asked me something as simple as "Can you tell me about a few interesting chips and how you would use them?" rather than asking me to design a low pass filter with a given frequency response using a specific op-amp.

The deep dive I am talking about does not require anyone disclosing code done for their existing employer. Nobody wants that.

Frankly, I would also want to know about life outside of work. However, given our laws you have to be very careful about how you might probe for such information. I feel very strongly that our legal system has, to one degree or another, sapped all humanity out of our work life. I've worked in other cultures where it is perfectly normal for people to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek and a hug or pat on the back in the morning. In the US almost any physical contact can land an employer in court and a manager in serious legal trouble. But I digress.

I think you are looking at this wrong. I have zero problems with someone presenting themselves this way and would definitely consider hiring the person.

Here's reality: Someone who knows their stuff is able to dive into details of their work in a way that an impostor can't.

My response to the above would be to have the person bring in some of their work and take an hour or two to take a deep dive into it. I want to see code, documentation, examples of trade-offs and a discussion of the reasoning, challenges, what could be made better, what should not be touched and why, project history, etc.

A conversation with someone who knows what they are doing and is very actively involved in their work is very different from a conversation with someone who might be trying to bullshit you or simply doesn't know enough.

I hate puzzles. All I learn from them as an employer is that someone might have devoted a month to memorizing a whole bunch of them for the interview.

I would imagine that at the scale of a company like Google, resorting to puzzles as a first filter might be an inevitable reality. If you have to interview people en masse you almost have no choice. It's like Stanford having to filter through 40,000 applications a year to accept 2,000 students. You have no choice but to go algorithmic on that problem.