Citation needed. My guess is the biggest contributor to smartphones becoming e-waste is gravity.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The national debt has to be continually refinanced as parts of it become due. That works when investors are willing to give you money. But if investors think you are no longer a good investment they will continually ask for higher interest rates and then eventually they will stop giving you their money altogether. And if that happens then we're going to be in be trouble because we will have no means to pay what is due and we'll default.

The problem is the interest payment on the debt is starting to become a large fraction of the income of America and we are starting to look like an increasingly bad investment. And that shows in the rates we have to pay. I don't think we're in any immediate danger but spending goes up every year which means we need to borrow more and we move more toward that risky place.

And if history is to be any guide, when you hit the bad spot, everything falls apart fast in a very uncontrolled way.

So IMHO, we should ramp down spending slowly, in a controlled way to avoid having it ramped down for us in a rapid uncontrolled way. Either way, I suspect eventually spending is going to come down whether we like it or not.

Yes, that number is absurd, and data centers will certainly need to make do with less, regardless of actual requirements.

EV on the other hand does have some obvious industrial adversaries.

  I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
  professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

I'm not sure there is such a thing. Maybe a drafting book would be a vendor neutral description of spec'ing a 3D manufacturable object on a 2D surface.

Otherwise the way the software accomplishes the task is kinda the point which will necessarily have methodology specific terms in it.

https://arshon.com/blog/eda-vs-cad-decoding-the-basics-of-de...

And if we're appealing to Wikipedia as an (inconsistent) authority, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation

"Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD),[1] is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards."

And

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCad

"KiCad (/ˈkiːˌkæd/ KEE-kad[7]) is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA)."

But KiCad did put CAD in their own name so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506087

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Established in the 60s so it was kept pretty secret for a long period of time.

It's interesting to think that the government has been using technology to watch us for awhile but now thanks to ubiquitous networks, cheap internet, phone and apps like tinder and strava and a bit of ingenuity, we can watch back. :)

You have to expect business to optimize for their common case and just make sure there is a path for the exceptions. That's what this bank did and it's just the way of the world.

I'm not a big phone person either, and it is inconvenient for sure, but I get benefits from that and the cost is extra friction when dealing with online institutions. Everything has a trade-off

For an example think about how mods are treated on cars. There can be very good reasons for those restrictions, but if your goal is to be able to modify phones in the way you want, that might not be the best way to go about it.

In short, be careful what you wish for because sometimes you get it. :)

Asking AI to solve a problem for you is hugely non-linear. Sometimes I win the AI lottery and its output is a reasonable representation of what I want. But mostly I loose the AI lottery and I get something that is hopeless. Now I have a conundrum.

Do I continue to futz with the prompt and hope if I wiggle the input then maybe I get a better output, or have I hit a limit and AI will never solve this problem? And because of the non linear nature I just never know. So these days I basically throw one dart. If it hits, great. If I miss I give up and do it the old fashioned way.

My work is in c++ primarily on what is basically fancy algorithms on graphs. If it matters.