Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.

You can also definitely make junk single-use guns using either technology, just like the 3D-printable "Liberator".

LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.

Now we have FPGAs, so this approach is pretty much obsolete.

The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be that Linus is not a fan of what Russia is doing, and is OK with sending a message.

They made a call and were immediately swarmed by people trying to argue geopolitics, law, personal responsibility, transparency, and so on - many of whom aren't regular kernel contributors. Linus responded that he's not going to argue, and I can't blame him: it's a software project, not a discussion club. Sometimes, maintainers make the call and you suck it up, leave, or fork it. This is just that.

If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.

Why? I think the vast majority of hobbyists used the 555 as a "black-box" chip. They now have a more intuitive, cheaper, and more power-efficient way of doing the same thing.

Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible. Nowadays, you have the same number of determined and talented hobbyists who eventually master some of the more arcane topics. You also have more people who learn just enough to get their art project done, and it's easier than it used to be... but why is that a bad thing?

There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

What matters in production is that a 555-based circuit will use more power, that it's four components to source and install instead of one, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I like the 555, just like I like vacuum tubes, but it's nearly as dead.

Today, it's essentially obsolete. You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs. Every analog trick you can do with it can be done more cheaply, more reliably, with better power efficiency, and with fewer external components using a modern MCU.

It's not that analog is dead, but it's solving different problems now. Including how to keep ultra-high-speed digital signals usable within the footprint of a PCB - which wasn't that much of a consideration in the golden days of the 555.

https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-NRMO7YW6A-Countertop-Microw...

The problem in that segment is that it's basically the same disposable, non-repairable tech that's destined to the dumpster in a couple of years. The company is selling the appearance of having a different design philosophy, and it works because the consumer has no way of telling.

So, if you want to do anything more profound in that space, it's going to be hard to compete.

The only change right now is that NASA is no longer the only party designing missions, because entities such as SpaceX have enough integrated expertise to run their own show start to finish.

It's also the most successful space program in the world, so what's the benchmark we're comparing it to? The failings of the US space program had relatively little to do with private contractors, and a lot to do with politics and the voting public not liking risk.

Data point: Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing - https://fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-vance-5000-child-tax-credi...

There are so many photobucket.com URLs buried in old forum posts that no longer work...

The microcontroller toolchains are generally built on top of GCC, so they get the features for free. There are some proprietary C compilers that are chronically lagging behind, but they are not nearly as important as they used to be two decades ago.

The gotcha is market risk. If there's another crash akin to the housing crisis - and there will be - the bank will liquidate your holdings and possibly leave you on the hook for more. The difference is that Elon may be diversified enough to survive, while less savvy margin-surfers might not.

It's really pretty universal.

The way to make MDMA is easy to look up on the web. The government is not trying to keep a lid on it; instead, they're restricting access to key feedstock materials. In this case, safrole and isosafrole are on DEA List I, so no one is gonna sell it to you. If you ask an LLM for more novel and dangerous chemistry, you get plausibly-sounding nonsense, not superhuman AI.

Now, the hacks will become useful once models are given more agency, for example when fully automating customer support. But the existence of trivial bypasses is precisely what's holding these uses back.

Routine wisdom teeth removal is not a thing in most of Europe. Another random example are colonoscopies and routine flu vaccines (except for the elderly).

It's not controversial for that reason. It's actually a fantastic origin story for the prize, especially since he arranged for it on his deathbed.

> OK, I get that you don't like Bezos-Gates-Zuck-Musk.

Huh?