Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
I don't follow. You can source the chips, in large quantities, right now, and have them delivered to any non-embargoed country in a matter of days.

That they're in limited stock at a particular outlet in China means very little, no? And conversely, that STM32 chips happened to be in stock in 2018 meant very little in the following four years.

If you want the chips right now, you can have them. If you want long-term availability, either buy ahead of the time or sign a contract with the manufacturer (and hope it doesn't fall apart due to a geopolitical crisis or whatnot).

Comment · 2 years ago
With a side serving of fake parts, multi-week transit times, and the added benefit of propping up the Chinese regime.
Comment · 2 years ago
I don't understand what you mean. These chips are available in bulk from the manufacturer and from all major distributors worldwide. Why would you want to go through China? These chips aren't even manufactured there. The fab is in Thailand.

If you mean a PCBA shop, Mouser or DigiKey can ship your order directly to your favorite PCBA place.

Comment · 2 years ago
UPDI has robust on-chip debugging capabilities.
Comment · 2 years ago
Very few hobby designs that use more capable chips actually need more capable chips, and the added complexity - hardware and software - often bites hard.

That said, wifi is a major selling point, and you need a beefy 32-bit computer to run the protocol. This is the brilliance of ESP32: you can actually use it just as a wifi dongle for another microcontroller, but since it needs so much computing power, might as well give you some RAM and CPU to do your thing directly on the wifi chipset...

Comment · 2 years ago
What's interesting to me is why this story leaked. I bet it's just Morgan Stanley (the owner of E-Trade) trying to control they narrative. If they just cut him off, he gets to tell his story, MS can't officially discuss the particulars, and the company ends up getting a lot of hate mail.

But if they leak the official justification beforehand, then Roaring Kitty will have a harder time spinning it.

Comment · 2 years ago
Not entirely, but either way, land value is tied to all of that. If the city can't grow due to zoning and conservation rules, and if you can't subdivide existing parcels, you basically have more and more money chasing the same lots.

By "not entirely", I mean that while land value often dominates, lowering it doesn't solve the problem, because even if you somehow acquired a city lot for $50k in the Bay Area, you wouldn't be able to build a house on that lot for $100k. So, solving one problem doesn't make it affordable.

Comment · 2 years ago
New construction is rapidly getting more expensive in many of the markets where it's needed the most. While it'd be cool to point to a single factor, it's a combination of several things. People are expecting more (more square footage, higher-end finish), the government is demanding more (environmental and energy regulations), labor is getting costlier, and yes - there's NIMBYism manifesting through zoning laws and other "conservation" rules.
Comment · 2 years ago
It is a lossy compressed index. It has an approximate knowledge of law, and that approximation can be pretty good - but it doesn't know when it's outputting plausible but made-up claims. As with GitHub Copilot, it's probably going to be a mixed bag until we can overcome that, because spotting subtle but grave errors can be harder than writing something from scratch.

There's already a fair number of stories of LLMs used by an attorney messing up court filings - e.g., inventing fake case law.

Comment · 2 years ago
This, along with several other "meta" objections, is a significant portion of the discussion in the paper.

They basically say two things. First, although the measurement is repeatable at face value, there are several factors that make it less impressive than assumed, and the model performs fairly poorly compared to likely prospective lawyers. Second, there is a number of reasons why the percentile on the test doesn't measure lawyering skills.

One of the other interesting points they bring up is that there is no incentive for humans to seek scores much above passing on the test, because your career outlook doesn't depend on it in any way. This is different from many other placement exams.

Comment · 2 years ago
YouTube runs ads on all my videos, including the ones with fewer than 200 views. I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise. The point I was making is that paying for YouTube does absolutely nothing to support the vast majority of content creators on the platform. All you're doing is paying Google, and a tiny slice of that supports a handful of celebrity content creators like Mr. Beast. Maybe it's a bargain that makes sense to some, but the parent was deriding the grandparent for not willing to pay.
Comment · 2 years ago
They by and large don't. Most creators on YouTube aren't even eligible to monetize, especially if they're making niche educational content.

Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.

There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.

Comment · 2 years ago
How many times in history have we regretted over-building this kind of infrastructure? We have no shortage of good ways to use electric energy. If AI turns out to be a fad, others will benefit.

Pollution is a concern, but I think don't think that anti-growth or anti-consumption sentiments are useful. All this money pouring in is an opportunity to invest in clean energy.

Comment · 2 years ago
The US was historically built on the idea that free enterprise, for all its warts, is less bad than governments meddling in your life. Much of modern Europe is built on the opposite idea: that governments know better and that private enterprise is inherently corrupt.

I don't want to pick sides in that debate, but it amazes me how wonderfully ahistorical it is. The US doesn't have a history of oppressive governments; Europe, on the other hand...

Anyway, the disconnect you allude to isn't a disconnect if you consider it from this angle. GDPR is meant to protect you from private businesses. Chat control is supposed to protect you (and the state) from online predators. It was at no point about protecting you from the government.

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