doe_eyes

If you're joining a company of 15 people? Probably. If you're joining a company of 50,000? Absolutely not, because they're not going to vastly increase the complexity of their HR or payroll just to close a single hire.

Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.

You can't easily make a high-quality firearm a hobby mill, chiefly because the barrel needs to be made out of good steel and needs to be rifled. But the quirk in the US is that federally, only the receiver is the regulated part, and many types of receivers can be made out of plastic or aluminum. You can certainly use cheap three-axis CNC with some fixturing to make AR-15 receivers, for example, and many people did. Cody Wilson / Defense Distributed had this whole thing where they were selling CNC mills for cranking out guns.

You can also definitely make junk single-use guns using either technology, just like the 3D-printable "Liberator".

Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything.

LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.

I think it's the other way round. You're a respectable individual, you're buying some low-brow ads - and you don't want a newspaper to publish an expose about you, your employees throwing a hissy-fit, or a neighbor getting upset.

No, they used a semi-custom chip known as an uncommitted logic array (ULA). It was basically a bunch of building blocks on a die that were designed once for a variety of possible applications, and then reconfigured by the factory to customer's spec. The idea was that most of the design work only needed to be done once, so cranking out customer-specific ASICs was cheaper than a 100% custom design.

Now we have FPGAs, so this approach is pretty much obsolete.

I think Linus has short temper and there are examples of his remarks that are borderline toxic (or cross the line), but this really isn't one of them.

The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be that Linus is not a fan of what Russia is doing, and is OK with sending a message.

They made a call and were immediately swarmed by people trying to argue geopolitics, law, personal responsibility, transparency, and so on - many of whom aren't regular kernel contributors. Linus responded that he's not going to argue, and I can't blame him: it's a software project, not a discussion club. Sometimes, maintainers make the call and you suck it up, leave, or fork it. This is just that.

I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.

If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.

> It’s a shame that Arduino has effectively truncated kids learning with a full MCU as the “building block” of their learning

Why? I think the vast majority of hobbyists used the 555 as a "black-box" chip. They now have a more intuitive, cheaper, and more power-efficient way of doing the same thing.

Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible. Nowadays, you have the same number of determined and talented hobbyists who eventually master some of the more arcane topics. You also have more people who learn just enough to get their art project done, and it's easier than it used to be... but why is that a bad thing?

There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

Except, it's not an advantage in any practical sense. Programmers cost pennies, toolchains are free and easy to use, and there are ample examples for simple tasks such as "toggle a pin in a particular way". The overall learning curve is almost certainly less steep than the learning curve for all the modes and quirks of the 555.

What matters in production is that a 555-based circuit will use more power, that it's four components to source and install instead of one, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I like the 555, just like I like vacuum tubes, but it's nearly as dead.

In some respects, it's a testament to how much the world of electronics has changed over the past ~25 years. It used to be that 555 was this Swiss-army-knife IC that you had to learn about. Multiple people published entire books about it!

Today, it's essentially obsolete. You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs. Every analog trick you can do with it can be done more cheaply, more reliably, with better power efficiency, and with fewer external components using a modern MCU.

It's not that analog is dead, but it's solving different problems now. Including how to keep ultra-high-speed digital signals usable within the footprint of a PCB - which wasn't that much of a consideration in the golden days of the 555.

But... that's the model of the US space program from the get go. We're just trading one private company for another. Apollo 11 was contracted out to Boeing, Rockwell, and Grumman. The Space Shuttle was the United Space Alliance (Rockwell / Lockheed Martin), the engines were made by Rocketdyne...

The only change right now is that NASA is no longer the only party designing missions, because entities such as SpaceX have enough integrated expertise to run their own show start to finish.

It's also the most successful space program in the world, so what's the benchmark we're comparing it to? The failings of the US space program had relatively little to do with private contractors, and a lot to do with politics and the voting public not liking risk.

This works wonderfully, but is obviously not sustainable. It's not just that you miss out on newer content, but content rot progresses pretty quickly. Old Reddit accounts are deleted or blocked, Flickr users stop paying their subscription fees, etc.

There are so many photobucket.com URLs buried in old forum posts that no longer work...

Of course they will, just like they did in the past with C11, GNU extensions, or some of the individual features that are now rolled into C23. For example, the 0b notation for binary numbers is widely used in the MCU world.

The microcontroller toolchains are generally built on top of GCC, so they get the features for free. There are some proprietary C compilers that are chronically lagging behind, but they are not nearly as important as they used to be two decades ago.