In well-designed microelectronics, they will.

The standard circuit involves a fuse, a fast Zener clamp, and sometimes a small resistor (e.g. 1 ohm) and/or capacitor. The design parameter is that, with the current limit from the resistor, the Zener should not blow out before the fuse.

The resistor needs to be small enough to not lose a lot of voltage under normal operations, but to still protect the Zener during the short surge during which the fuse blows. For most microelectronics, that's not hard. A 0.5W USB device might have 100mA of current max, which across 1 ohm is 100mV, so negligible for most purposes.

With high-power devices, it gets more complex.

Of course, consumer devices (a) will never be fixed (b) don't sell on this (c) every penny counts, so there's no market pressure to do things right.

But that's how we used to do it, and how it's still done many places where things count. If I'm building a one-off or few-off, it definitely will have proper protection.

See everything from ancient Egypt to Soviet-style Communism. Periods of time in Ancient Rome would fit in too. The problem with those -- except for a repressive political system -- was that we could not produce enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs.

Today, we can.

Much of the US-style growth is driven precisely by instability. The system feeds on debt. That forces stress. That forces growth. That also means one cannot be "better stewards of one’s self, family, friends."

And so far, no one has explained how "we don’t foolishly bully human nature with policy." Legal and economic frameworks guide what humans do; that's either something we think through and engineer, or it gets engineered for us by market forces, but it's there anyway.

The most freedom-preserving policy isn't a command system, but it's not a pure market system either. And for stability, we can contrast stable economies to boom-and-bust cycles and successful democracies to the very many failed market-economy democracies across e.g. Africa and South America.

We've had a lot of change in the past hundred years, and we've reached a point where we can clothe, feed, and house everyone in the world. Once that's done, moving forward more thoughtfully makes a lot of sense.

Who cares if we reach Mars in 2100 or 2200?

On the other hand, I care a lot about avoiding the nuclear / bio / chemical / environmental / and now AI apocalypse.

https://abovethelaw.com/2016/02/criminally-yours-indicting-a...

You can be arrested, indicted, and held in jail on pretrial, and there is literally no recourse. There are many other ways jail can happen without due process. Where I live:

* Civil contempt. Absolutely immunity. No due process. Record is about 16 years. Having a bad day? Judge can toss you in jail.

* "Dangerous." Half a year. No due process. He-said she-said.

* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.

Absolutely no recourse. You come out with a gap in income, employment, and, if you missed rent/mortgage, no home. Landlords will simply throw your stuff away too.

You're also basically damned if things do move forward, since from jail, you have no access to evidence, to internet (for legal research), and no reasonable way to recruit a lawyer (and, for most people, pay for one).

Can happen to anyone. Less common if you're rich and can afford a good lawyer, but far from uncommon.

This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:

Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia

Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.

The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.

When did this come up?

I know tons of people who run Windows unactivated. The key difference is there's a watermark. Otherwise, it seems to work fine.

Environments might mean the difference between e.g. 16GB and 24GB, but not 16GB and 160GB.

It's not clear from the blog post, the git page, and most other places if this will run on, even in big-O:

* CPU

* 16GB GPU

* 240GB server (of the type most business can afford)

* Meta/Google/Open AI/Anthropic-style data center

AVR was super-developer-friendly well before the Arduino. It replaced the PIC for a lot of hobbyist projects.

To the points in the thread, on major product development, these things don't matter. On the long tail of smaller products, as well as on unexpected successes, they do.

Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.

Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.

Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.

And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.

Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.

Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.

That doesn't make it reasonable or convenient to do so, though.

NiCd batteries could also sit on a shelf forever, holding their charge. They had virtually no self-discharge, which was super-convenient.

They came in standard form factors (AA, AAA, 9V, etc.).

I really liked NiCd batteries.

But realistically, you couldn't sell a phone or laptop in 2025 which ran on them.

I remember having great fun in QuickBASIC. And my son enjoys Scratch.

Django code is much more fun to work with than Node, but I can't imagine developing something competitive in it in 2025 to what I'm developing in Node. Node is a pain in the butt, but at the end of the day, competitiveness is about what you deliver to the user, not how much fun you have along the way.

* I think the most fundamental problems are developer-base/libraries and being able to use the same code client-side and server-side.

* Django was also written around the concept of views and templates and similar, rather than client-side web apps, and the structure reflects that.

* While it supports async and web sockets, those aren't as deep in the DNA as for most Node (or even aiohttp) apps.

* Everything I do now is reactive. That's just a better way to work than compiling a page with templates.

I won't even mention mobile. But how you add that is a big difference too.

It's very battery-included, but many of the batteries (e.g. server-side templating language) are 2005-era nickel cadmium rather than 2025-era lithium ion.

I would love to see a modern Node framework as pleasant to work with, thought-out, engineered, documented, supported, designed, etc. as well as Django, but we're nowhere close to there yet.

I doubt it ever will. Trust takes a long time to earn, and a little bit of time to break. I had four or five incidents on Amazon, cancelled Prime, and I doubt it will ever make business sense for Amazon to get me back.

I do think there's a place for a competitor to Amazon right now which looks more like the old Amazon.

Starting one would be super-capital-intensive. It's not a lean startup. There's only a handful of organizations with the capital to do that, and I doubt any of them will, in fact, do it.

Amazon shouldn't sell returned products as "new," but as "open box."

The other way it happens is co-mingling. Some vendor sends an "open box" product to Amazon as new, or a fake product, and Amazon ships it out when sold by Amazon since it considers goods to be fungible.

I stopped buying anything which goes in my body from eBay, Amazon, and similar after receiving a premium food product with very clearly fake packaging.

Similar thing happened with music, only rather than piracy, it landed on legal / free (e.g. Youtube). Youtube is just starting to do the consumer-unfriendly thing (but it's got a long ways to go before piracy comes out competitive).

Similar in books.

I'll mention: A lot of these are consumer-unfriendly in some ways (e.g. Netflix DRM), but friendly in others. $20/month for all the movies you can watch beats piracy.

Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...

Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.

Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.

Rinse, repeat.

For me (not quite at the A1000 level, but just above -- still in the prosumer price range), a major one is ECC.

Thermals and size are a bit better too, but I don't see that as $500 better. I actually don't see (m)any meaningful reasons to step up to an Ax000 series if you don't need ECC, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

The biggest Deepseek V2 models would just fit, as would some of the giant Meta open source models. Those have rather pleasant performance.

In theory, how feasible is that?

I feel like the software stack might be like a Jenga tower. And PCIe limitations might hit pretty hard.