vwoolf

Likewise with chip software tooling; despite it being standard to outsource tooling to large EDA vendors, we got a lot of mileage out using our own custom tools, generally created or maintained by one person, e.g., while I was there, most simulator cycles were run on a custom simulator that was maintained by one person, which saved millions a year in simulator costs (standard pricing for a simulator at the time was a few thousand dollars per license per year and we had a farm of about a thousand simulation machines). You might think that, if a single person can create or maintain a tool that's worth millions of dollars a year to the company, our competitors would do the same thing, just like you might think that if you can ship faster and at a lower cost by hiring a person who knows how to crack a wafer open, our competitors would do that, but they mostly didn't.

Unions are parasites and sources of great evil. Want to control a company? Found one, or buy its shares.

It’s not just a matter of enticing new immigrants but of retaining bright minds already in the country. In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erdal Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers. Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country. As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.

Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to China. It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster 5G mobile internet services. Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies. Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the patents related to Arikan’s solution—10 times more than its nearest competitor. And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. Had the United States been able to retain Arikan—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work—this history might well have been different.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

Lenses appear to have declined by about 66% from 2012 to 2022. Cameras, by a little under 50%.

This decline makes sense to me. I have a Fuji XT4 which I like a lot, but, also, starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. Their automatic exposure in sunlight, for example, is often (not always) great. At the same time, the software quality in pretty much all cameras leaves much to be desired: I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera to phone but would rather not, and people have been ranting about that topic for at least a decade.

There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found herself doing work she hated in a factory at 19, and escaped it via nude camming and then sex work (both of which she likes a lot, relative to alternatives). She's tweeted about how her mom appears to LOVE the trad Christian life, and how Aella and some of her siblings hate it. Who is "right?" Maybe no one: people's personal propensities and desires vary in many ways that appear to be genetic in origin, even if their expressions may change across cultures, and this may also include in matters of sex.

There are lots of pseudo-Freudian theories about how the way one is raised affects one's adolescent and adult sex life but I'm not sure any of those theories are true.

The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.

Costs are currently prohibitive and we're suffering terrible, self-inflicted wounds in the form of costs.

The DoJ should start with an antitrust investigation of Atherton.

We don't need a physician in the middle of every bit of knowledge. We need the knowledge to figure out when we need a physician.

The downside around the "perfect framing" is that focal length will change perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photog... (take a head a shoulders portrait of yourself with a 20mm and then 85mm lens to see). Almost all professional photographers who need to get the shot have moved to zooms for good reason.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) free-speech rankings seem like a good proxy for this: https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/student-survey...

But what about all the “affordable” destination cities? Restrictions there are, in most cases, just as bad. Duplexes and fourplexes are banned in 84 percent of residential neighborhoods in Charlotte. In Salt Lake City, minimum-parking mandates mean that apartments can’t be built without either towering garages or huge lots. In Austin, naysayers have successfully delayed a liberalizing zoning overhaul for a decade. And even in pro-growth states such as Georgia, California-style NIMBYism stands in the way of new housing in most suburbs.

To the extent that these cities were ever affordable, it was because they had undeveloped land on their periphery, where developers could build low-density residential subdivisions—just about the only thing that zoning doesn’t prohibit. But as Dallas is discovering, you eventually run out of vacant land within a reasonable commute of job centers. In Miami, local policy makers are even rolling back flexible-zoning rules in a brazen attempt to block new infill development.

That hasn't been true for years: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...: "The Common Customs Tariff duties are fixed by the Council on proposals of the Commission. The Commission can in this context confirm that the product is part of the coverage of the revised WTO[2] Information Technology Agreement, which has been negotiated by the Commission. This means that the customs duties for camcorder will be removed after the revised agreement enters into force and thus in extension benefit EU consumers."

All camera companies should have removed their artificial recording time limits via firmware.