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skinwill

182 karma · joined July 24, 2019

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skinwill··on American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died
A buddy of mine is the son of a United Airlines mechanic who was fairly high up in the organization. When his dad passed United gave him a stack of blank wax tickets. His son could write the destination on them and fly for free. Near the end of the stack they were largely ornamental as he could just tell them where he wanted to go and they would print a proper ticket. But still, it was a rather classy way to honor his father.
skinwill··on Don't be a meat proxy
My comment wasn't about the tool, it was how people are treating the new tool. Much as they would when they learn other new tools. They tend to have a preference and apply it where they maybe shouldn't. Do people really need to ask AI everything like simple math problems or what goes best with this dress? Is that really a good use for early generation, water hungry, huge datacenter AI?
skinwill··on Don't be a meat proxy
Woodworkers often will have a preference for their favorite tool. Once they become comfortable with that tool they will sometimes prefer to use it for things it wasn't designed. For me it was the band saw. When I needed to split a board, bandsaw. When I needed to cut a curve, bandsaw. Cut a horse figure? bandsaw!

I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames for paintings, everything. It seemed the next step of every design was accomplished "over at the table saw".

Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. Need a bandsaw? use AI. Need a table saw? Use AI. Need to think of a solution of any kind, better consult AI.

Right before this trend I recall kids wanting to check YouTube first before doing anything. Now they ask AI.

There's an app for that, there's a website for that, there's a magazine for that, there's a phone number you can call, and so on and so on.

As with everything, I say this: do your own thinking and proceed with caution.

This too shall pass.

skinwill··on The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy
Not if my firewall blocks it from accessing the outside world. (But allows HomeAssistant to control it)
skinwill··on Ahoy, DECmate II the little PDP-8 that could
Brominated flame retardant?
skinwill··on Hacker News front page as a site
You need some filler for the space at the bottom. Something like ads from the 1800's for quack medical devices or Radium Therapy. Maybe something wildly misogynistic advertising laudanum.
skinwill··on StarFighter 16-Inch
They use the same image on their mini pc's page. https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/byte
skinwill··on Iowa farmers are leading the fight for repair
The phrase "sufficient test suite" is doing a LOT of work here. You would need to know what the data from every sensor is supposed to be along with how every piece of the machine is supposed to perform. AI isn't going to be able to iterate into those parameters over night.
skinwill··on What an unprocessed photo looks like
This is way over simplifying here but I always understood it as: our eyes can see red with very little power needed. But our eyes can differentiate more detail with green.
skinwill··on Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA
Speaking mostly from personal experience here, if a kid gets a suped-up liver from their dad's smoking habits, cool. But how many kids fathers stopped smoking when the kid was born? My point, the father's smoking habits may have passed down a strong liver but his continued use damaged the child's lungs and possibly more.

These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.

skinwill··on Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System
Better yet, instead of positioning it as an institutional-style research. You should frame it as an information hub for bovine castration techniques.
skinwill··on Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System
"The core-and most-critical component-was left-out." Jesus-h-cluster-fucking-catastra-christ. If one of these data centers ever catches fire I will show up and make smores.
skinwill··on Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System
How deep down the rabbit hole did you go with hardware optimization?

In an ideal world, would it be better to compile this on a processor more RISC-y?

skinwill··on Twelve Days of Shell
Viewing the page with Safari 26.1 the questions stopped showing up after the second challenge. I was left with only Learn and View Solutions, which was not very fun since both showed a form of the answer.

TL;DR: The page stopped loading properly.

skinwill··on Why do some radio towers blink?
Jeff, it's very cool to hear from you as I have enjoyed your videos for some time. I would like to make one request though. Next time you do a project like "How I almost broke MrBeast's Ages 1-100 video" that involves setting up interactive electronics for an event, you should really call me. I managed interactive technology deployments for the automotive marketing industry for over a decade. It's a niche that has unique challenges which you fell face first into. I would be happy to help make things go much smoother should you ever do something similar. Proof: https://imgur.com/a/5z5JrwT I'm also on Reddit, same screen name if you want to dm me there.
skinwill··on Why do some radio towers blink?
I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.
skinwill··on Cheese Crystals (2019)
There is an error on that page. src="https://www.media.snipettemag.com/wp-uploads/2019/09/cheese-..." should be src="https://media.snipettemag.com/wp-uploads/2019/09/cheese-stre..."

There is an extra "www." which breaks the link.

skinwill··on Micro-LEDs boost random number generation
Can someone explain to me how this is different than a simple noise generator based on a PN junction? As in, isn't this just amplifying noise and aren't there less sensational ways of doing nearly the same thing? Does measuring a photon with this method actually get you better randomness? I have some serious gaps in my understanding here and an ELI5 would be neat.
skinwill··on The Therac-25 Incident (2021)
Around here we have Epic. If you want a good scare, look up their corporate Willy Wonka-esq jail/campus and their policy of zero remote work.
skinwill··on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
I did one of those once and quickly found out that any display of personality was interpreted as an incorrect answer. It was made clear by the totally unrelated follow ups. I'd like to see the turn over rates of any company that implements this crap.
skinwill··on Uber will let women drivers and riders request to avoid being paired with men
This will do more harm than good. I guarantee it.
skinwill··on Thnickels
The way Frontpage would vomit in the source code was the OG AI hallucination.
skinwill··on 555 Timer Circuits
The internal diagram appears to be incorrect, https://www.555-timer-circuits.com/inside-the-555.html

The internal resistors should be connected to the upper comparator. Also, that diagram just seems confusing. Something like this makes more sense: https://www.theengineeringknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

skinwill··on Satellites Spotting Aircraft
State-of-the-art for what could survive space. It used 486's for quite a while. You are still very correct, I just think it's funny that the "best" is not always what people think.
skinwill··on Satellites Spotting Aircraft
My father, back in the 80's, told me about satellites in the 70's that could read your license plate. Using imaging tubes before CCD technology no less. The technology limitation is not only the resolution, which was rather good btw, but rather the time. Early spy sats used film that had to be de-orbited and captured for processing. Then they started beaming down what was essentially slow scan television which only improved with time. Now you can get clusters of CCD's beaming down massive amounts of digital signals from wide swaths of area. None of this is secret, really. Just look up the Landsat program. They even used multispectral cameras to count things like tree growth and duck populations. In the 70's!
skinwill··on Satellites Spotting Aircraft
A company called Erim back in the 70's pioneered SAR systems. They had an interesting approach to processing and storage of the data which was all analog back then. They used holography. Erim and their SAR work is documented in wikipedia but their company presidents obsession with holography was detailed in their monthly news letters. I was handed some of these documents from a former (now deceased) worker at Erim. He told me how they were able to fly the massive radar systems and the huge analog computers they used to process the data. It must have been absolutely wild to work there in those days.
skinwill··on Speedcabling (2008)
If the storage process involves "putting in a dryer" I consider the cable trashed. Put the cable away properly and save yourself some time installing. Faced with a rats nest of cable I will purchase a reel of fresh wire and add my own ends.

I have spent way too much time in my youth untangling cable but haven't we all made mistakes when we were in our 20's? Eventually everyone needs to grow up, take the pills they gave you at the clinic, and recognize your time is valuable.

skinwill··on New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN
Normal human here, can someone speculate on potential industrial uses?
skinwill··on 1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play
I have VERY fond memories of that game from 1986. My father who was teaching at a community college in Iowa had a copy of that game running on a VAX11. I recall that to play the game he had to walk to the data center and, inside a cabinet, physically unplug the cable for his terminal and plug it into another port. The connector on the cable looked like a large rectangular multi pin monster. Back at his desk, his green screen terminal was ready to play the game. I was 5, it was very awesome.