jimmyswimmy

The iteration cycles are limited necessarily by the time between tapeout and getting chips off the line to a testable state. Maybe there's a little room to get an in-wafer test probe system built at the fab if each die has a standard pad layout, which would speed up the 'testable state' part of that timeline. But if your timeline is weeks (if only!) to months, there's little utility in being able to make incremental changes on a daily basis.

Plus, the only way fab costs become achievable are MPW runs which don't have adequate demand for multiple daily runs. The ones I've used run a few processes each month, rotating between most of them on a bimonthly to quarterly basis. They just don't fill up fast enough. But I'm small time fabless so maybe I'm missing something.

I would love a simpler system. Everything is pointing me back towards using a Windows server eval instance for this, which feels like a pretty heavy way to manage a bunch of alpine containers. FreeIPA, openLDAP and I think the other one I tried was Keycloak - all were more trouble to configure than they were worth. I'm shocked it never occurred to me to just rsync the passwd files, or SCP them using an update service. Would love a nicer way to manage users across a very small network without needing so much complexity as these other services.

What an amazing tool: it loads and displays the kicad native files in a simple web browser, but moreover - you don't have to be the intermediary, cloning some repo and then uploading the individual files to a website.

I wish that existed for more weird binary formats. Altium have 365 but you have to have signins to use it, and they cost named-user seats.

How'd that work out for SawStop? A tech that makes table saws basically safe by stopping the blade immediately on contact with water (simplified description). The inventory tried to license the tech, then tried to get regulatory agencies interested. He never had any luck. I imagine his licensing terms were too much; he ended up making his own line of saws which are substantially more expensive than the unsafe competition.

I'm sure there are tons of other examples. Outside of highly regulated areas, improving safety usually plays second fiddle to lowering price.

Article is very interesting and focuses on the historic faces of DARPA, not really getting too much into the modern state of the agency. Over the past 10+ years DARPA have embraced the OTA - other transaction authority - as a contract vehicle to allow DARPA PMs additional flexibility and speed in letting contracts. This has allowed, perhaps, a return to more of the ideas of the old days in which a performer and PM might seek that "meeting of the minds" mentioned in the article, and issue funding to start work.

A real limitation perhaps that DARPA has is the 3-5 year PM timeline. PMs start with a project and vision for their work, often a multiphase effort. We often joke that the challenges DARPA offers are not all that difficult, only the schedule is. A few years ago I worked on what would have been a wonderful project on a 2 year timeline which was compressed to half that, with the usual shifting sands of requirements consuming the majority of the allocated time.

I can't say that giving PMs a longer timeframe would be a good thing - that 3-5 year PM clock keeps everything moving apace. Perhaps the longer-term programs ought to be given by the office directors to PMs, but then you have the disadvantage (mentioned in the article) of PMs having to execute a project they don't believe in. That hasn't worked well; disengaged PMs, focused on their passion projects, don't give the needed attention to inherited assignments.

The future of the agency is concerning. Given increasing time and funding limitations, coupled with the Heilmeier focus, there's been a tremendous push towards immediate results. Which means simpler targets that don't provide the amazing leaps ahead that DARPA was once known for. Look to their current SBIR topics, which include one on the use of language models for suicide prevention, and another on processing data to generate facility clearances. These are not leaps ahead, but instead incremental, focused improvements. We once lost a DARPA proposal because our plan was too certain to work, they wanted more risk. Quite a change.

DARPA still hires visionary PMs, and they have the tools again to realize these visions. I hope to see a return to the DARPA referenced in the early article. It will be fun to pitch ideas to those guys. I'm tired of talking to the ones who are too focused on today to think about tomorrow.

As a pilot, I love the idea. But as soon as I saw the cockpit I knew the price would be out of my league. I'm still in the single digit gallons per hour world, and this bad boy is running at 50-60 gallons per hour. Nice engine. Would be great to be able to buy JetA.

I was amused that they elected to pay the weight penalty of a stove, until I saw they're carrying around an outboard motor. Love the idea, wish I were rich enough to really consider one of these for myself.

Also - thrusters in the floats? I haven't seen that before. I never did get a seaplane endorsement, which you'd need for one of these. That's a neat idea, even if it isn't theirs. I wonder how much they're needed, and if the added control on the water is worth the weight. I have to imagine they'd be great if they offer enough degrees of freedom (and are easy enough to understand how to use).

The other answer about magnetostriction is technically correct (the best kind) but Misses the actual cause, which is subharmonic oscillation. This occurs when you have not stabilized your control loop properly and is often the result of inadequate phase margin. A simple fix may be to allow the control bandwidth by increasing capacitance at the work amplifier output. But this may also make the response too slow.

For most people designing DCDC converters, this is the most difficult part to understand and correctly tune. If you get the parts selection right and carefully lay out the circuit, this is the one that they can't get right. It takes some understanding of control theory or careful testing and tweaking. And it's what drives a lot of folk to the expensive and relatively inflexible power modules.

Looks like it uses yahoo_finance_api in rust. In theory that supports options, but no idea whether this tool handles that data properly, I didn't feel like searching that hard.

It's gonna take a lot to pry me away from my spreadsheets. They are simple and just work. Ages and ages ago I used MS Money but once they shut down I never migrated to the 'sunset edition,' just switched to excel. I keep trying things, but without local, automatic sync to my accounts, nothing is as simple and effective as a simple spreadsheet, for me.

Website was not pleasant to use on mobile, I couldn't really see much, and the demo was definitely not mobile friendly. At least on a pixel 6.

I like the idea. I take it as an all in one lab notebook for electronics. You might consider adding in timing diagram tools, and an easy way to copy/paste scope shots or similar, but this seems useful.

Being clear about ownership of information posted to the site is pretty important. I'd hate to see my design data shared without permission or used to train your algorithm.

I've been wishing for years for a way to draw circuits as easily as I do on a whiteboard. Schematic capture doesn't have to be as miserable as experience as it is, but I don't have the time to make that till. Maybe you do.

I'll try to remember this for next time I'm at a computer, the Idea is pretty cool.

Interesting that all but two of the listed startups were software companies (FedEx, Tesla). I imagine the costs of fixed investments required to scale a company not based on software can reduce the potential max returns quite substantially. Can a non-software company achieve the kind of returns a software company can?

> try to get by on a two-minute shower once a day

This is pretty typical aboard ship for smaller vessels on long voyages. Not so hard as it sounds: get wet, turn off; lather up, rinse off, turn off. You can do with 20-30 seconds of water and be quite clean, with some practice.

It's not satisfying though. And I can't imagine how those numbers scale if you have long hair, or use conditioner.

Yes, this bothered me too. It's impressive how much energy is required to just melt water much less bring it to temperature. It's 330 kJ/kg, which is 1250 kJ/gallon: 350 Wh. So it costs more energy to defrost one gallon of water than it does to do the rest of the 110F temperature change.

The physics term for this is the "latent heat of fusion," or the energy required to change states from liquid to solid, or vice versa.

A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy. Not practical!

I can't deal with dates unless they include day of week. I wrote a very simple script (basically a regex) to add a letter indicating the day.

Also fun for changing website themes, extracting streams to files, augmenting games. Violentmonkey is my tool of choice for managing and live editing them.

Around early 2019 I set up a raspberry pi 3 running Raspbian. I made the /var/log partition a ramdisk. Haven't touched it since. It goes down for power outages but probably has been out for a couple minutes total over five years (aside from power outages). Most of its job is to translate analog audio to a USB speaker system. Whole house audio for about $150. Anyway, I never touch it, it just works, all the time.