> The company would compensate them well: full wages for the whole time, even when sleeping, and a paid week off after.
Only a week??? I mean, we are all going to be replaced with AI any day now, but were it not the case, I'm fully expecting to see an American company to offer, as a benefit, "we will collect and bring your remains to the workplace if you by accident die outside."
Yes, but you can't replicate a bottle of unscented shampoo ad-infinitum for basically zero additional cost. With books, print-on-demand and digital particularly, you can. Then it all becomes a huge one-off cost with a huge profit potential.
I'm not a fan of breadboards, they tend to be unreliable even for trivial circuits. We need something more affordable and practical for home PCBs[^1]. Why is it that nobody has invented a tin 3D printer, or at least a 2D version of it, i.e. a tin plotter?
[^1]: I'm discouraged from home-etching by the chemicals and the dark-room part of the process.
Just use a fabrication service. You can't readily make plated through holes and vias at home. The services do a much better job than any hobbyist level tinkering can achieve.
For the 2D version, you might not need very much custom. Use a regular pen plotter and use a pen with conductive ink. These both exist today, though personally as a hobbyist PCB designer, I can get 2-layer and 4-layer boards cheap enough from JLCPCB or Oshpark or PCB Unlimited that I don't bother trying to make them myself.
I haven't tried it myself so you might be right, but I was thinking of the silver conductive pens from Chemtronics with a conductivity of 0.02-0.05 ohms/sq/mil.
For attachment, I'd evaluate their conductive epoxy or maybe glue down the underside of the component and then smother the lead with the silver conductive ink. But again, just hypothetical since I have a quickturn shop make cheap prototype PCBs for me and either hand solder or use a stencil, paste, and a hot air gun for my hobbyist projects.
Yes, conductive ink has too high resistance; at least the one that works on a basis of carbon; a "trace" can easily have kilo-Ohms, and the metal ink interface makes things worse.
I remember reading some "Sputnik" magazines from the 1970s where Russian scientists were searching for the holy grail of a good conductor resin. I didn't understand at the time why they found the (concept of the) thing so valuable; but now I've got an inkling...
I worked at a no longer extant networking equipment manufacturer as an intern in college in the late 1990's. My role was to work on software for an in-development 45Gb network switch, and a bunch of the software I wrote ran on prototype boards.
Since fabricating new boards took time and was expensive, a lot of work was done to make in situ modifications that involved an insane amount of wirewrapping. One member of the team did that all day, every day as their full time job, and I was always amazed by their ability to focus consistently at that level for so long.
For $2,500 the Carvera Air makes very nice 2 sided pcbs with solder mask. Though even in raw materials it is hard to match a finished board from China if you can wait a couple of months.
My last job had a desktop CNC called Volterra I think. It would squeeze out conductive ink, bake it, drill holes, and lay down and reflow solder paste.
It was expensive and performed terribly.
I think there really isn't any good way to improve on breadboards. Breadboards, in fact, are the improvement. They're called breadboards because we used to literally drill pieces of wood and do wire-wrap construction on the other side.
Breadboards are good enough for the kind of prototyping they're for. Spring loaded contacts are about the best you can get for removable parts. The signal integrity isn't that bad at modest speeds.
In today's world, the next step up from a breadboard is custom PCBs. You can have a set of five shipped from China for the same price as a set of breadboards. There's no real need or reason for anything in between so long as PCB manufacturing is so disgustingly cheap and fast.
> It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.
It's pretty bad, but at least the AI industry is still run by humans. Wait a decade or two, when the AI lobby is run by AIs, and the repressive apparatus of the day uses autonomous weapons to do what ICE and friends do today but perhaps focused on "alignment" of the ... humans. You know, if they sufficiently worship AIs in the way they express themselves. Forget about Anthropic and OpenAI; we will look back and rue the day mathematics was invented.
I've wondered for a long time if we would have been able to make do without protected mode (or hardware protection in general) if user code was verified/compiled at load, e.g. the way the JVM or .NET do it...Could the shift on transistor budget have been used to offset any performance losses?
Managed code, the properties of their C# derived programming language, static analysis and verification were used rather than hardware exception handling.
"Operating System Principles" (1973) by Per Brinch Hansen. A full microkernel OS (remake of RC-4000 from 1967) written in a concurrent dialect of Pascal, that also manages to make do without hardware protection support.
In TempleOS, everything runs in ring 0, but that's not the same as doing protection in software (which would require disallowing any native code not produced by some trusted translator). It simply means there's no protection at all.
I think the interesting thing about having protection in software is you can do things differently, and possibly better. Computers of yesteryear had protection at the individual object level (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Large_Systems). This was too expensive to do in 1970s hardware and so performance sucked. Maybe it could be done in software better with more modern optimizing compilers and perhaps a few bits of hardware acceleration here and there? There's definitely an interesting research project to be done.
Since we're talking about defining our own processor, that means we need to define one with cheaper traps.
Expanding on what I wrote above about "bits of hardware acceleration", maybe adding a few primitives to the instruction set that make page table walking easier would help.
And with a trusted compiler architecture you don't need to keep the ISA stable between iterations, since it's assumed that all code gets compiled at the last minute for the current ISA.
Taking this to an extreme, the whole idea of a TLB sounds like hardware protection too?
As a thought experiment, imagine an extremely simple ISA and memory interface where you would do address translation or even cache management in software if you needed it... the different cache tiers could just be different NUMA zones that you manage yourself.
You might end up with something that looks more like a GPU or super-ultra-hyper-threading to get throughput masking the latency of software-defined memory addressing and caching?
I looked into that, concluded the spoiler is Specter.
Basically, you have to have out of order/speculative execution if you ultimately want the best performance on general/integer workloads. And once you have that, timing information is going to leak from one process into another, and that timing information can be used to infer the contents of memory. As far as I can see, there is no way to block this in software. No substitute for the CPU knowing 'that page should not be accessible to this process, activate timing leak mitigation'.
OTOH, out of order/speculative execution only amounts to information disclosure. And general purpose OS's (without mandatory access control or multilevel security, which are of mere academic interest) were never designed to protect against that.
A far greater problem is that until very recently, practical memory safety required the use of inefficient GC. Even a largely memory-safe language like Rust actually requires runtime memory protection unless stack depth requirements can be fully determined at compile time (which they generally can't, especially if separately-provided program modules are involved).
Alas, historically speaking, most governments have been tyrannies. In recent decades, some of them have been less so, or slightly more representative or transparent. I think in Switzerland they go to referendums often. Beyond that, once you vote for a party due an issue you deeply care about, they get to do whatever they want day to day, without citizens having a regular recourse to stop them. Yes people can go to the streets and fight the police that defends the government. But there's not a constitutional mechanism which is "citizen can push this button to override the senate and/or veto what the president wants" or "all security forces are subordinated first and foremost to citizen consensus on the area where they operate".
Indeed. In fact, I would go further and say than, more than saving money, one should make preparations for a dignified passing should one's time come early. Living happy, dying before a gruesome disease completely erases that treasure. And, if destiny has it that one gets old enough, and one does so with little more than a camping tent, leaving this world because the night was too cold and one succumbed to hypothermia beats what most people get at the end.
One in four people dies of cancer[^1]. Those are terrible odds as they are, but it gets worse because most people will go through their lives terrified of when it will be their time to enter that Russian roulette of agony, and because everybody will have to see or care for a friend or relative dying that way.
Our therapies and treatments are so pitifully inadequate and yet so damn trying and expensive... We need a true revolution there, a qualitative jump of the kind between calling linear correlation a form of "AI" and calling an LLM a form of "AI".
That's not a solution, but a stopgap measure for the fact we can't do better. A stopgap measure I would prefer for myself though; not arguing the fact that it's the least bad option.
But there's is something I don't understand and I can't ask ChatGPT for fear of them closing my account and reporting me to the police, the health authorities and the Inquisition, but I thought that the repercussions for dying on your own terms came in the form of stigma? Is there anything the law does to your surviving relatives? Also, at least in USA it's legal and relatively simple to own a high caliber weapon, which to me beats all the options legally available in the rest of the world.
In my country, Mexico, the law doesn't recognize euthanasia, just suicide/homicide. Suicide of course is not a crime, because what are they going to do, jail you? Assisting suicide in any way is murder, though.
There are still repercussions for the people you leave behind. I can recall these:
- Any insurance is void
- Inheritance can be complicated if you can argue that the suicide was encouraged. It becomes premeditated murder.
- I think debt, specially if it's considerable, is handled different that natural death, that voids any debt.
> It was unreasonably heavy and made of cheap wood, with a neck like a carved baseball bat.
Guitar necks need to withstand the tension of the strings, and any Russian-educated engineer tasked by the politburo with making a guitar out of fiberboard[^2], will plug tension plus safety margins into the secant formula[^1] and immediately realize that some steel rods from Magnitogorsk for reinforcement are in order, and promptly discover that they only have 1/2'' ones. Oh well.
[^2]: Not that there's anything wrong with fiberboard for guitars; see Danelectro. In fact, if you own a laser cutter and want to make something cool with it, an electric guitar is a great project.
Only a week??? I mean, we are all going to be replaced with AI any day now, but were it not the case, I'm fully expecting to see an American company to offer, as a benefit, "we will collect and bring your remains to the workplace if you by accident die outside."
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