> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.
i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.
30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.
this is exactly how I intuitively approach filters as an applied engineer. Does it give a ground path to DC (low frequencies) and pass the higher frequencies, or vice versa. If we change the capacitance how does the frequency response of the divider change?
The bring up of seemingly every tube guitar amp i’ve ever built starts with wild oscillation due to negative feedback from the wrong transformer secondary, aka positive feedback. Gets me every time.
I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:
In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.
In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.
I worked at Booking.com for a year or so around 10 years or so, and most of their stack was in Perl. Folks there had mixed feelings about it, I'm not sure what things are like now, but I assume they're working to replace it.
Ah yes, that's it. I had to hack on Bugzilla to customize it for our start-up.. Back in the day BEFORE they added a lot of end-user customization... UGH..
it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.
for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.
Is it though? US and EU telecom companies pulled the plug on Huawei products, which were deeply integrated in all of their setup, as soon as someone said they may be spying or remote disabled by China. It was expensive, sure, but they pulled the plug. I don't recall any concrete evidence of backdoors etc to be found, but trust was gone.
And that's the difference I think; US and Israel have high trust, they are aligned in ideals and strategy and the like.
Fair enough. I guess it's fine to be spied on to make sure US companies have that competitive advantage you mention. As its all in a good cause, I'll take the Samsung phone!
To be fair, us over in Europe have been uncomfortable for a while due to the US surveillance apparatus having total dominion over the underlying systems that run our countries.
So, its a little bit tone deaf to hear these complaints from Americans honestly.
We’re told that we’re uncompetitive (yet when rising startups happen they’re bought out before being too large)- we’re told that we shouldn’t run on anything except US SaaS and US cloud providers.
I’m not saying that you specifically make these arguments, but the zeitgeist on HN definitely centres on this notion.
So, please forgive me for not taking this as seriously as you’d like me to.
I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.
The main problem, even if you would avoid Intel and NVidia, is that during the last decades we confortably let OS and programing languages driven by US companies take over.
So you might go with ARM, RISC V, but still have to make use of an OS and programming stack with strong ties to US based companies, even if open source.
My undergrad email server at University of Rochester was a two node SGI origin 200 cluster, which is where I learned unix and C, and later in my career, through a series of amazing coincidences, had the honor of working at startups with a few of the UofR sysadmins who used to chase my hacker friends and I around their network.
IRIX has an amazing and indelible place in my heart for being the playground that taught computers to me.
After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.
When I think of what's out there I think of cheapy ARMs, maybe STM32 knock offs. Honestly the F103C8T6 is so prolific that's probably a solid chunk of all processors in existence. And then things like ESP32s. So to not see ARM or Tenscillica on there is a bit weird. But maybe I'm reading too much into it and it's more of a thought experiment
Looking at that list, collapse OS seems to cater to 8-bit only. It’s also aimes at “ built from scavenged parts” boards. I’ve often come across Hitachi h8, Blackfin, PIC, avr, the occasional ARM and other controllers in the wild. But they all have one thing in common: the flash is locked and inaccessible without some jtag tools. The only times you’ll see external flash (winbond & co) is with an fpga or a controller who’s had his otp memory configured with a bootloader.
I often re-purpose scavenged board because of their useful layout, but only after swapping the controller for a programmable one. The notion of scavenging the controllers themselves… far less practical as you think.
The iot devices are hacked on the application layer. You have a controller running some linux distro and you work your way in over tty/telnet/eth. That’s an entirely different ballgame than repurposing 8-bit avr or 32-bit STM microcontrollers.
Someone write a novel please. Not sure who will be more appropriate: Stross (more fun?), Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).
> Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).
With the six pages in the middle where he may as well say "Right, I had to learn a lot of algebra for compiler optimisation to make this bit work, so now you get to learn it too"
Agreed on the ridiculous page counts, but I don't find Stephenson's pages a slog. Exhausting, maybe. There's a lot going on. But he makes me laugh. I'd like to meet that guy.
It's not the greatest piece of fiction ever written, but Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards podcast has a pretty easy read[1]. It's also offered as a free audiobook read by him as a series of podcasts.
Might not be what you want if you want more technical & hacking versus dystopian capitalism collapse. But he gets bonus points for Texas getting nuked as a lore point.
If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.
Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.
I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.
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