Thimothy

Heavy diesel engines were dominated by the rest of the world in the 50s. Military aviation has no need for efficiency nor actual maintenance cost targets and thus, you have way more manufacturers of military than comertial engines.

My point is more that these domains seem civilizationally Hard. Western companies are very far in the effort/results curve. Will the Chinese get there? I guess at some point, though I doubt there is any incentive for the ICE motors in particular.

China "cheated" with EVs. They never managed to make a combustion engine that could hold a candle against western ones in terms of efficiency and reliability. Electric motors are waaay simpler.

I doubt that the same will happen in commertial aircraft engines. If China catches up it will be through industrial spionage or very slow grinding, that will take many years.

In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

My point is that FPGAs have become very cheap, competing with microcontrollers. I would agree that high end audio manufacturers are about as rational as they costumers.

If FPGAs are not a growing market, how come we have gone from 2 companies (we'll ignore niche space stuff) to ~10 in the last 20 years? Not many IC fields where there is a growth in manufacturers instead of consolidation...

Depends entirely how you define "growth". If you take AI, LLM as your baseline of growth, then yeah, sure. But what else is growing?

FPGAs are getting cheaper with each gen, expanding into low cost, high volume markets that were unthinkable for an FPGA 10 years ago. Lattice has an FPGA family specifically targeted to smartphones, and I've been consulting for a high end audio company that wanted to do some dsp, and a cheap FPGA was the best option in the market for the particular implementation that they wanted to do.

It's not sexy growth, but it's growth. Otherwise, we wouldn't had the explosion of the latest years in low end FPGA companies.

Lack of temperature control is a minus, as that means that there will be some blends that won't taste good, these days most fancy machines have a pid (and if yours doesn't you should install it, or you are missing out).

Kind of related, lack of boiler at 1.5 atm means non-great milk foaming capabilities.

Also, you buy a good 1500$ machine, your grandchildren will be able to inherit it if you take care of it. That delhongi won't last two days further than the minimum required by guarantee.

When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup.

The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.

That's not true for everybody: people have very different mouth chemistry/ecosystem that depends on diet, genetics and god knows what. Some people can live with brushing teeth once in a blue moon, others will get their teeth eaten by cavities no matter what they do. Your advice is probably OK for the median person, but really does not apply to everyone.

For the unaware, Central Europe is a narrow band that comprises Czechs, Slovaks and Polish. Who can get very offended if you even dare to suggest that they belong to Eastern Europe.

And don't forget about the new Starlink flat antennas! The biggest surprise from the tearing videos for many EE I know was that the custom chips doing the DSP magic are made by ST, and not Analog Devices or TI. Undersampling in KU band on cheap silicon is not a trivial undertaking.

Makes you see ST in a new light.

I'm not a climate change denier in any way but, did any of the predictions (the ones with dates and numbers) of Al Gore in "An inconvenient truth" become reality? There has been a non trivial amount of hyperbole going on in this subject.

I keep hearing from friends in Germany that the death numbers reported are completely bollocks. They say the people who die with pre-existing conditions aggravated with the coronavirus are not counted, nor the people who are not tested after deceasing. Whereas in Italy seems everything that dies in the medical system these days is being counted.

Would love to see someone confirming or disproving this...