jaygreco

Love these deep dives. It’s fascinating to see how real, low-level engineering we all take for granted today unfolded. It’s incredible that the rough equivalent of an entire 160lb digital computer was built and baked into silicon.

Also incredible reverse engineering. In a time when seemingly all appreciation for expertise is gone it’s so refreshing to see.

Is it just me or are those chokes a little bit messy? They look…kinda sloppy vs what I would expect.

> switchboard operators

What? 1920 called and wants its electromechanical relays back

Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought this. The post is also missing one obvious thing that I expect in any technical post: code snippets. Let me see the code.

ChatGPT has ruined bullet points for the rest of us…

No offense but writing this blog post couldn’t take more than a few minutes, why spoil it with LLM? Shoot, use one to check grammar and recommend edits even.

Interestingly, it’s also possible to encode _emoji_ inside emoji!

Ah yes, one of my favorite skills learned in school was how to work around arbitrary rules made up by cranky sysadmins! I still use it all the time.

The smart kids (whom I’m sure look like they are learning that precious openssh client) are doing their assignment locally or on a free tier VPS with VS Code and scping the thing over when it’s done.

They’re also smart enough to learn openssh when they need it IRL.

I really like the author’s writing style here. The quips about the tea especially.

I came here to say this. I haven’t worked with the Elite X but the past gen stuff I’ve used (865 mostly) the accelerators - compute DSP and much smaller NPU - required _very_ specific setup, compilation with a bespoke toolchain, and communication via RPC to name a few.

I would hope the NPU on Elite X is easier to get to considering the whole copilot+ thing, but I bring this up mainly to make the point that I doubt it’s just as easy as “run general purpose model, expect it to magically teleport onto the NPU”.

I don’t know the size or structure of your team, but one thing that has worked for me in addition to other strategies mentioned on this thread (specifically, that oncall is oncall, nothing else) is that you appoint one engineer - typically someone who has a more strategic mindset as the “OE Czar”. They are NOT on call, and ideally not even in the rotation, but rather there for two reasons: to support oncalls when they need longer term support, like burning down a longer running task/investigation or keeping continuity between shifts. The other is identifying and planning (or executing on) processes and systems for fixing issues that continually crop up. Our mandate was 20% of this person’s time spent doing Czar tasks vs scheduled work.

I have one! Any idea if the PZT cubes are added using the typical photoresist masking/etching or are they placed on die using some other process?

I spent quite a bit of time a few years ago recovering my old MySpace account only to realize they “messed up” (unclear whether it was incompetence, or purposeful) and deleted basically anything that had been, oh I dunno, actually interesting: pictures, videos, playlists…you can’t even see the profile pictures of people in your friends list.

In the rush to move to whatever the next big social media was, I’d never thought about backing up my stuff because why would it ever be gone and why would I care? Lesson learned.

I was weirdly bummed out about it. Back when the site first launched I spent loads of time learning HTML just to customize my page before I realized site profile generators existed.

I bought a car thing when Spotify was blowing them out, knowing full well they’d kill it. I planned on hacking on it and finding a cool alternate use for it. I have actually enjoyed using it at my desk as a dedicated “now playing” screen but the way it relies on Bluetooth drives me a bit crazy.

My ideal homebrew app is just like the 1p Spotify one, but with the ability to use network over usb or the like so that it doesn’t need to sync the play status via Bluetooth. I guess the imminent shutdown might actually motivate me to do something along those lines.

Very cool! I’ve been to a few shows with these and was pretty enthralled with the level of effects that are possible given the Simplicity of the setup. I brought one wristband home hoping to mess with it but never got around to it.