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Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.

I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.


> botched crimps

On a tangent, I’m amazed at how bad most random crimps I see on the internet are. Also, the number of people who debate the use of solder on crimps without discussing potential issues with said solder is too high.


> PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable

We had a problem trying to bring up a couple of Pi 5, hoping they'd represent something reproducable we could deploy on multiple sites as an isolation stage for remote firmware programming. Everything looked great, until we brought one somewhere and untethered it from ethernet, and we started getting bizarre hangs. Turned out the wifi was close enough to the PCIe ribbon cable that bursts of wifi broadcasts were enough to disrupt the signal to the SSD, and essentially unmount it (taking root with it). Luckily we were able to find better shielded cables, but it's not something we were expecting to have to deal with.


Raising taxes should never be seen as a way to raise revenue. Even if the Laffer curve has come under attack, there is still some profit maximizing rate which I’m positive most modern countries are beyond both at a static rate and at a growth and future revenue maximizing rate. No we don’t tax at this point to increase tax revenue. We do tax to shape what society looks like.

Right now society doesn’t look very good to so many people in the US it’s almost hard to talk about. Job growth is literally people saying, “hey, tomorrow, I can see it look better. We can spend time and resources to create something we all want more than today.” When job growth is low, that vision must also be low.

Taxation can turn that around in an industry. It can turn that around in aggregate. It does thay by both signaling to players, and by changing the game tree payout structure.

I think much of the taxation conversation right now is unfortunate because it keeps getting couched in terms of tax brackets, and that is almost a strawman at this point (even if many people think it’s important). I would say we need to tax the 1% differently. For instance, stock buy backs are currently a hugely distorting effect on the world economy. You can start by greatly taxing that.

The real thing people are talking about when talking about taxing the 1% isn’t just about tax brackets, it’s more about how taxes don’t materially effect people once they reach certain thresholds. It’s the same fundamental problem with traffic tickets. They are not proportional to general wealth so that means it’s a set of laws that apply less and less as one gains wealth which not only feels unfair, it is arguably a corrupting influence undermining the rule of law.


I am choosing not to get involved in a discussion about tax policy miniutiae as I am not an expert in any related way; instead, I wanted to provide factual context to the oft-repeated 'America was better in the 1950s due to the tax rate on the rich,' claim so folks might be able to better understand what they're attempting to say.


It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.


I didn’t run any scripts or utilities. When I encountered something I didn’t like I just found the setting to turn it off.

I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac.


You seem like a reasonable person. Good job.


I finally updated a couple of months ago after putting it off forever and it's been fine for me too. I'm on Pro version and I just used this as the first step after upgrading: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

No issues so far, no ads, none of the complaints others are seeing. I'm a power user too: I do gaming, programming, music production, video editing, etc. All of those things are fine.

My only real problem was not being able to have two rows on the taskbar, which I solved with Windhawk's "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod. Done and done.


The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are.

I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.

I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.

I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.

Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60


I was answering with the idea in mind that this is "HackerNews" and most here are not "average" home users, but I see your point.

Does the average home user care about any of these complaints though? In my experience, they don't really, and I'm not even sure how many use desktop operating systems these days considering everything has shifted towards mobile.

I'm not "pro" windows by the way. In fact if you look through my history, you'll see I resisted the change to Windows 10 and have tried migrating to Linux without luck. I would love to move away from Microsoft when given a realistic opportunity to do so. I loathe Microsoft trying to take up real estate within the private boundaries of my life. I just think some of these reported issues are widely exaggerated is all.


Ah ok I see, yeah for the hackernews crowd probably not an issue.

Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.

As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.


If you could afford an amiga around this time, you most likely weren't impressed with any of the consoles. Even if you had a commodore 64, you may not have been interested with the NES, my experience was that the games on the commodore was that many of the games were closer to the arcade than what you got with the early NES cartridges could do. Later cartridges outstripped the commodore since they added extra processing in the cartridges themselves. By the end of the NES life, the games had gotten really good, some games could almost compete with the early SNES titles.

I had a similar feeling towards the N64 some years later. I had a 486 that could do much better 3D and with more interesting games, and there was nothing in the nintendo catalogue that could compete with what I basically had free access to due to the internet.


BTW, if you don't know Benn Jordan, his YouTube content is fire. I happen to be in the intersection of things that he likes to think about, but every video I've seen of his lately deserves front page HN treatment. It is that good.

This one was particularly good, given the technical difficulties of recording low frequency sounds. I can't vouch for his conclusions, but the effort he goes to to record these sounds is crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTvr8L5v8u8


I realized just how much of a geek and obsessive he is when I watched a video about his analysis and evaluation of reverb effects.


Benn Jordan holds a special place in my Youtube viewing habits, in that he was the influence that ultimately broke my Youtube addiction. I no longer engage with their recommendation algorithm in any way.

You have to respect the integrity needed to use such a hard-won platform to de-platform yourself, in the interests of your audience.


Was there a video in particular? I admire Benn but haven’t seen any of his videos on the YouTube algorithm in particular.


Brief aside.

> “…his YouTube content is fire.”

I’ve been living under a rock and am thrilled to read an unironic example of our living language.

My context: https://youtu.be/ID1jre5kmUI?si=xb8I818WNPp8fUiJ&t=75


sighs in "tired of my culture being coopted and watered down" :/


Indeed! His content is really good. Unfortunately, I can't find the video right now, but there's one of him recording natural reverb in a tunnel that was really good. A 20 mile bike ride in the dark makes the video very dream like and pleasant.


He’s also The Flashbulb. Probably some other aliases, too, idk. But The Flashbulb is good shit.


Acidwolf, Human Action Network, FlexE and his wiki lists some more and might want to check here[0].

I don't remember what website it was (it's probably redacted anyways, but I'm sure he does and others do now) but I remember him once getting joking that someone uploaded his album before he could.

  > The Flashbulb is good shit
For those interested, he has a wide range so it can change dramatically between handles and even within albums. For example look at the difference between Lawn Wake I, If Trees Could Speak, and Lucid Base II on Red Extensions of Me. His earlier work tends to be more glitch. (Acidwolf is less glitch but still trippy) But then gets more melodic like in Arboreal and Opus at the End of Everything. I'm pretty sure I've heard Tomorrow Untrodden (from Aboreal) in a car commercial some years ago (was it Undiscovered Colors?).

I'd recommend trying these. I doubt people will like all but I think these are all approachable and have good coverage.

  - Terra Firma, on Terra Firma
  - If Trees Could Speak, on Red Extensions
  - Passage D, on Kirlian Selections
    - Piano variant on Old Trees (Not on Spotify [1])
  - Precipice, on Piety of Ashes
  - Undiscovered Colors, on Arboreal
  - Three Hundred CC, on Hardscrabble
  - Dishevel, on Krilian Selections
  - Coinage, is this even in an album?[2] Dude makes a fucking song out of dropping coins.
    - Or watch what he does with a fucking straw...[3]
I've been listening to the guy for over a decade now and he keeps producing great stuff. I also suggest listening to full albums rather than on random.

Side note: he isn't anti-AI. As a ML researcher myself I actually generally like his takes. Use AI to better us, not replace us, not further harm (like Flock), and to make it an extension of us rather than to offload. There's a fuck ton of cool stuff that ML/AI can do and I'm really not sure why we're so hyper-fixated on having it create slop. But hey, I don't get the fixation with human generated slop either. There's two paths we can go with this technology. Either we can use it to drive costs down and produce lower quality stuff quicker or we can use it to make higher quality stuff at the same rate (there's a spectrum of course). I'm already frustrated by the low and declining quality of things, maybe we shouldn't just strap a jet engine to the train already moving that direction...

[0] https://www.discogs.com/artist/67855-The-Flashbulb

[1] https://bennjordan.bandcamp.com/album/old-trees-1999-2011

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyIu2-dSNyY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZLPCGEbHoDI


Mics have a pretty standard look, and are hard to miss on the board. It would be more insideous if there were cheap film caps leading into a very expensive ADC. I work with with analogue audio, and it’s very important to design around the noise of cheap caps. They are for all intents and purposes microphones and if you were clever about different caps for different frequencies and good digital processing I have no doubt you could build something with comparable fidelity to some of the cheapers MICs in the vocal range.


Why is there a component on the board that isn't used in the product for any official purpose then? Even if you believe it was an accident and an oversight (which it could have been), you should be upset because it's something that could be pretty serious if you used in your home.

Just because you might claim it's not malicious, doesn't make it not negligence.


Cuz it's simply built upon the existing LicheeRV Nano SBC, then it has the same component just as the board.


So usually you would DNP the parts and they wouldn’t populate at the factory. But sometimes you have a bunch of boards already made that for some reason you can’t use for another SKU, and so you put them in another housing, and change the board for the next rev.

Mind you, I’m not saying a mic in a KVM isn’t sus, just that it’s a little obvious, and certainly not stuxnet level espionage.


Worse, is that a lot of these people are acting like Moore's law isn't still in effect. People conflate clock speeds on beefy hardware with moore's law, and act like it's dead, when transistor density rises, and cost per transistor continue to fall at rates similar to what they always have. That means the people racing to build out infrastructure today might just be better off parking that money in a low interest account, and waiting 6 months. That was a valid strategy for animation studios in the late 90s (it was not only cheaper to wait, but also the finished renders happened sooner), and I'd be surprised if it's not a valid strategy today for LLMs. The amount of silicon that is going to be produced that is specialized for this type of processing is going to be mind boggling.


Cost per transistor is increasing. or flat, if you stay on a legacy node. They pretty much squeezed all the cost out of 28nm that can be had, and it’s the cheapest per transistor.

“based on the graph presented by Milind Shah from Google at the industry tradeshow IEDM, the cost of 100 million transistors normalized to 28nm is actually flat or even increasing.”

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/chi...


Yep. Moore's law ended at or shortly before the 28nm era.

That's the main reason people stopped upgrading their PCs. And it's probably one of the main reasons everybody is hyped about Risc-V and the pi 2040. If Moore's law was still in effect, none of that would be happening.

That may also be a large cause of the failure of Intel.


> Moore's law ended at or shortly before the 28nm era.

Moore's law isn't about cost or clock speed, it's about transistor density. While the pace of transistor density increases has slowed, it's still pretty impressive. If we want to be really strict, and say densities absolutely have to double every 2 years, Moore's Law hasn't actually been true since 1983 or so. But it's been close, so 2x/2yr a decent rubric.

The fall-off from the 2x/2yr line started getting decently pronounced in the mid 90s. At the present time, over the past 5-6 years, we're probably at a doubling in density every 4-ish years. Which yes, is half the rate Moore observed, but is still pretty impressive given how mature the technology is at this point.


If you want to be pedantic, the original (and revised) law are definitely about cost. The original formulation was that the number of features (i.e. transistors) on an integrated circuit doubled every two years for the best-priced chips (smallest cost per feature).

https://web.archive.org/web/20220911094433/https://newsroom....

> The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page).

And it is formulated in a section aptly titled "Costs and curves". This law has always been an economic law first, some kind of roadmap for fans to follow. But that roadmap drove almost-exponential investment costs as well.

I concede that density still rises, especially if you count " advanced packaging". But the densest and most recent is not the cheapest anymore.


s/fans/fabs/ (blame autocorrect)


A lot of it is propped by the fact with GPU and modern server CPUs the die area just got bigger


What’s interesting about this, is there are actually game theoretic repercussions to what the author is expressing. By making implicit knowledge explicit it changes entire game trees. You no longer play the i think that he thinks that I think that he thinks… branch, and you are literally changing expected payouts as a result.

Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.


I think I've sort of come to this conclusion which gives myself more inner peace but I haven't exactly gotten better at communicating my thoughts, hence it feels like others often assume I'd "play" as most do, but in fact I'm not but just a bit weird and introverted. Any tips on this?


> By making implicit knowledge explicit ...

I feel like this translation is easier to misunderstand that it is to understand in many cases.

I think the effort is still good, but I also feel like people give up after a few tries. I know I do - after the third re-phrasing or re-framing you have to let things settle.

----

Once someone is "grown up", no one can raise them again.


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