Hacker News: sleepycat801

New comment by sleepycat801 in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:15:52 +0000

Two different screens (OLED vs LCD), two different results.

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:11:51 +0000

That is something requiring new antenna design, but was a spin off from FMCW radar already used on ships.

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:07:16 +0000

I agree with the author, certainly 5 years ago most things looked like a "solved problem". Huawei gave the telco equipment makers a run for their money with some interesting applications of SDR, but incumbents preferred trade barriers and export restrictions to competition. Even 5G was more of an optimisation of LTE than a revolution. Baseband over fibre is the only major innovation in that period which I can think of.

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:52:50 +0000

On the military front, the US has pressured allies to spend more GDP on weapons. Most countries have realised that as domestic industrial policy, rather than shell out foreign exchange for (cost ineffective) US made equipment.

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:43:57 +0000

You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:32:39 +0000

A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff).

China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".

New comment by sleepycat801 in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

sleepycat801 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:09:16 +0000

I could say the same, ee graduate who majored in telecom/RF but there was no work in it (or rather nobody wanted to hire a graduate). I did get hired into power electronics, but the work they needed was in software. Since then it has been redundancies every few years, through automotive application development, some audio visual, and even dev-ops.

The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.