I was distracted by the poor typesetting in parts of the page. The meaning of the text is overwhelmed by the distracting spacing used to justify the text:
> . I n o t h e r w o r d s , s i l i c o n - o r g a t e - l evel
I'll second Ubiquiti. I have 15 year old hardware from them that still gets security updates. Pricier than cheap chinese junk, but well architected (on-camera compression and motion analysis.) Their video system is rock solid and nothing goes to the cloud.
I would love to see the US rekindle the domestic manufacture of affordable consumer/prosumer network hardware. The US can already manufacture SoCs, PWBs, and chassis hardware, we just need a business case for putting it all together. Managed well, sustained protection from international competition could provide this business case, and buffer against global shipping disruptions, while the sheer volume of CPE equipment would eventually drive down costs.
Domestic manufacturing is not coming back because there are no guarantees whatsoever that this ban is going to last. Nobody is going to shell out hundreds of millions to setup manufacturing for such a low-margin product when it is much cheaper and risk-free to just sidestep the ban.
It takes a few years, but the Broadcom chips in Pis eventually get mainline support for most peripherals, similar to modern Rockchip SoCs.
The major difference is Raspberry Pi maintains a parallel fork of Linux and keeps it up to date with LTS and new releases, even updating their Pi OS to later kernels faster than the upstream Debian releases.
Also, unlike a lot of other manufacturers who only provide builds of Linux for their own hardware for a couple of years, it seems that even the latest version of the official Raspberry Pi OS supports every Raspberry Pi model all the way back to the first one with the 32-bit version of the OS.
Likewise, the 64-bit version of the OS looks like it supports every Raspberry Pi model that has a 64-bit CPU.
Yeah I was very impressed at being able to download a raspi image last year for my original pi model B, most companies would have just told me to throw it in the bin and buy the new one (at 10x the price lol)
Two questions: under what conditions would you only have 10 seconds to respond? And how would you develop yourself to be effective under this kind of pressure?
What: Interview, Date, Conflict resolution (more like holding back to respond), setting boundaries, negotiating, or when you feel threatened like when you were a kid if you were bullied…
How: Like any other skill practice if you were in that kind of situation and you were stuck and trying to do sudo runs as if it was real and getting the right muscle memory.
When making purchases online I relax my uMatrix policies (so the payment will go through) but I'm blown away by what's trying to load; I see CDNs for pinterest, tiktok, twitter, linkedin, etc, all wanting to run javascript on my checkout page despite having no visible logo or services. I leave these disabled and have never had a payment fail. But I do wonder what mechanism lands them there.
I’ve seen the same thing. You go to pay for something and suddenly half the internet wants to join the checkout process.
Most of it seems to be third-party scripts bundled in by payment providers, analytics, or “marketing” integrations the site owner probably didn’t even realise they enabled. It just accumulates.
The worrying bit is how normal it’s become. If you didn’t have uMatrix, you’d never even know it was happening.
Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.
I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
> notification reliability is always a top support complaint
I know octogenarians who use signal daily. "You called me and it didn't ring" or "messaged and it didn't beep" are definitely the top support complaints I receive. Thanks for being sensitive to this use case.
This week I was wondering how long it would take a pilot light to deplete a tank of LP fuel (the kind people use for grilling.) Several months? A year? For no particular reason, I wondered what the limitations would be on shrinking the pilot light. Could a small tank keep a flame going for 10 years? 100 years? I sense one challenge would be machining a small scale nozzle for laminar flow, and carefully filtering both fuel and air inputs to ensure the tiny nozzle didn't clog, for instance, with a grain of sand, or a piece of pollen. At a small scale, what are the limits of flame?
A pilot light is tricky: in typical designs, it needs to heat a thermocouple enough to produce enough current to drive a solenoid to allow the rest of the flame to ignite. Thermocouples are outrageously inefficient.
The pilot lights I’m familiar with just light the rest of the flame directly since they are burning already - turning on the fuel is all that is required. What systems uses a thermocouple and a solenoid?
Any modern country with safety regulations will require a thermocouple in the loop if there is a pilot light on the appliance. The last non thermocouple appliance I saw was an industrial kitchen stove, but it had been modified for propane, and I suspect that the guy who did it ripped out the safety stuff.
Every factory appliance will gate the full gas flow behind the activation of a the thermocouple.
When you push and hold a dial or button to get a pilot lit, what you are actually doing is bypassing the thermocouple safety until it gets to temperature. If you release the “hold to light” knob too soon your pilot will go out since the thermocouple needs ~10 seconds to get to temp.
The only commercial kitchen stove I interact with on a somewhat regular basis is a miserable piece of crap. It has multiple pilot lights, some of which go out frequently and stink up half the building with unburnt fuel. I suspect that just the pilot lights consume $50-$100/month of natural gas.
Stoves seem to be somehow special in safety regulations. I guess regulators assume that they are never operated unattended, so they tend to have no real built in safety features. Both commercial and residential stoves will happily operate unlit at full power.
I've got a Honeywell digital controller on my hot water heater. It's powered by the thermocouple. It can make troubleshooting a lot easier because it has flashing lights for diagnostics.
It’s extremely common for the mechanism that only allows the fuel to be turned on if the pilot is lit to work by having a thermocouple in the pilot flame. Some of these also power the controls (thermostat, for example) and some don’t.
> . I n o t h e r w o r d s , s i l i c o n - o r g a t e - l evel
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