That likely depends on how that "something" was publicly marketed to both parents and children based on the company's available information. Our laws historically regulate substances (and their delivery mechanisms) which may lead to addition or are very easy to misuse in a way which leads to permanent harm (see: virtually all mind-altering substances); even nicotine gum is age-restricted like tobacco products. Because nicotine is generally considered an addictive substance, it's regulated, but few reasonable people would argue that parents should be allowed to buy their children nicotine gum so their kids calm down.

Consider how, decades ago, the tobacco companies were implicated in suppressing research demonstrating that tobacco products are harmful to human health. The key here will be if ByteDance has done the same thing.

Also, to play off your point on cheeseburgers: remember the nutritional quality of one cheeseburger versus another will vary. If made with top-quality ingredients (minimally-processed ingredients, organic vegetables, grass-fed beef, etc.), a cheeseburger is actually quite nutritious. However, in a hypothetical situation where a fast-food chain was making false public claims about the composition of their cheeseburgers (e.g., lying about gluten-free buns or organic ingredient status), and someone is harmed as a consequence, the victim might have standing to sue the fast food chain.

Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.

Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.

Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.

Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.

The bigger question is if magnetic confinement fusion will lead to the best energy producing devices. Competitors include inertial confinement, pinches, or some other exotic method. If a magnetic confinement fusion device produces net power, it's going to be a stellarator.

Sources:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigeneity

Semi-accurate. For example, PCIe remains dominant in computing. PCIe is technically a serial protocol, as new versions of PCIe (7.0 is releasing soon) increase the serial transmission rate. However, PCIe is also parallel-wise scalable based on performance needs through "lanes", where one lane is a total of four wires, arranged as two differential pairs, with one pair for receiving (RX) and one for transmitting (TX).

PCIe scales up to 16 lanes, so a PCIe x16 interface will have 64 wires forming 32 differential pairs. When routing PCIe traces, the length of all differential pairs must be within <100 mils of each other (I believe; it's been about 10 years since I last read the spec). That's to address the "timing skew between lanes" you mention, and DRCs in the PCB design software will ensure the trace length skew requirement is respected.

>how can this be addressed in this massive parallel optical parallel interface?

From a hardware perspective, reserve a few "pixels" of the story's MicroLED transmitter array for link control, not for data transfer. Examples might be a clock or a data frame synchronization signal. From the software side, design a communication protocol which negotiates a stable connection between the endpoints and incorporates checksums.

Abstractly, the serial vs. parallel dynamic shifts as technology advances. Raising clock rates to shove more data down the line faster (serial improvement) works to a point, but you'll eventually hit the limits of your current technology. Still need more bandwidth? Just add more lines to meet your needs (parallel improvement). Eventually the technology improves, and the dynamic continues. A perfect example of that is PCIe.

I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.

>Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.

I really don't like differential privacy.

Fast forward to sixty years after the fighting just stopped one day. How would you view those two political entities? Are they equal? Does the existence of the CSA mean the USA doesn't exist as a country? What if the CSA implements trade policies which dissuade you from recognizing the USA as an independent nation? Does the USA still exist in your eyes? Is the USA or the CSA the "true" country?

The answer at this point in time is quite simple: the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) is clearly an independent country. However, the People's Republic of China (aka China) holds such economic power, they bully the rest of the world (though trade policies, etc.) into not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country. Also, the combination of geography and maritime law means that if Taiwan is an independent country, China has very little direct access to the open seas. They want freedom of navigation, so there's a geopolitical angle as well. Look into the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea to advance the Nine Dashed Line policy.

You also need to remember that Chinese civilization is extremely old. The PRC claims to hold something called the Mandate of Heaven, which is a fairly important concept in Chinese history, as it is divine authority to rule over the Chinese people. Frankly, based on how the PRC acts, the RC clearly holds the Mandate of Heaven these days.

The Articles of Incorporation are going to be the key legal document. Still, the Founding Agreement is important to demonstrate the original intentions and motivations of the parties. That builds the foundation for the case that something definitively caused Altman to steer the company in a different direction. I don't believe it's unfair to say Altman is steering; it seems like the Altman firing was a strategy to draw out the anti-Microsoft board members, who, once identified, were easily removed once Altman was reinstated. If Altman wasn't steering, then there's no reason he would have been rehired after he was fired.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39383946

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Looking at your demo video, it seems that atopile is less a "tool to build electronic circuit boards with code" and more a tool to perform schematic capture in code. Do you agree with that characterization?

I ask that question because you're clearly relying on the KiCad toolchain for PCB layout, which is a crucial part of the overall PCB design process but is not "PCB design" itself. Right now, KiCad is a tool for PCB design, and you are providing an alternative method of schematic capture. I think you should make sure that the description of your creation accurately reflects its capabilities.

Is anything preventing you from taking output from the existing KiCad schematic representation system and transpiling it into ato? What about transpiling from ato into the KiCad schematic representation system?

Does ato provide any focus on routing? It could be nice to state in software that I want a component or trace constrained to a specific layer on the PCB (or in the PCB, if there's internal layers). I'm assuming no, since ato appears to be purely focused on schematic capture, but I'm curious of your thoughts on this.

It could also be nice to include placement constraints in software. For example, say I have a handful of resistors which I want placed in the same relative area of a board and in an orderly row. Do you provide functionality to allow this? The general aesthetics of PCB layout might be programmatically defined with ato.

Just like Arduino took the nitty-gritty away from microcontroller programming, think about how you can take the nitty-gritty away from schematic capture. One way this could work is with a hierarchical schematic templating system. You'd need to build significant documentation to teach people how to use it, but it could vastly simplify the schematic capture process to a few lines of code by importing a template schematic class and instantiating multiple schematic objects into a project and wiring them together.

It makes sense to me that an "interface" as you define it can be imported for a given project. For example, "Bob's Interface" is the set of a +12V barrel-type power input, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 10-pin GPIO header. Any project using "Bob's Interface" has a known set of input and output capabilities. The term "input/output complex" also gets at this idea. Is that how you think of an interface?

That's all for now. :)

You pay an admission fee and get to play unlimited pinball from machines across the ages, even the old wooden units.

An ISP usually has a neighborhood hub where local lines connect and feed into the broader infrastructure. I'm betting that ISPs have a pricing model using a "neighborhood utilization ratio" factor, calculated as houses-served-in-neighborhood over total-number-of-houses-in-neighborhood. To cover known network infrastructure expenses (equipment replacement, technician labor costs, etc.), the pricing needs to work out, but low service demand in a given service area for the same infrastructure requires those fixed costs be borne by the few people using the service.

Many infrastructure services typically are more expensive in a rural area, presumably due to this effect but spread over a larger geographic area because population density is lower.

Does that seem contradictory? Consider that their innovations, what they're known for, lies in robotic morphology. iRobot's Cool Stuff Museum in their HQ has some groundbreaking robots which still are awesome (like a ocean buoy robot powered by the waves). They cut their teeth doing research grants and developing military robots. Their ethos was rooted in service; when 9/11 happened, they packed up a prototype robot and drove to Ground Zero to use that robot to search for survivors in the rubble. Still, their military robots were controlled by humans, and the original Roombas turned at random angles to fully clean a room.

Around 8 years ago, iRobot spun off their military and commercial robot divisions into independent companies (Endeavor Robotics and Ava Robotics, respectively; Endeavor was eventually acquired by FLIR) to focus exclusively on the consumer market. The consumer robotics industry was shifting, so iRobot needed to change. They bought Evolution Robotics to acquire computer vision IP and started doing research in that area. Advanced software capabilities were now important, so they shipped vSLAM (monocular SLAM representing state using pose graphs; they've published quite a few papers on this), persistent mapping, automatic room segmentation, and much more. They kept researching new consumer robots, including a home security robot which didn't make it out of the lab.

The thing is, consumer robots will ALWAYS be a luxury item. Nobody NEEDS a Roomba, and the iRobot folks understood that reality. So, iRobot leaned into that and worked to make the Roomba the premium option: a refined industrial design language with their main products appealed better to the high-end market, and they released an autoevac Roomba. I'm guessing that their primary market segment saturated, so they figured they'd release new physical products, but that puts them in direct competition with Dyson (who utterly failed to produce a good robot vacuum cleaner, mind you), so good luck there. I don't believe iRobot ever resorted to selling their customer data, which I'm sure Chinese robotics companies regularly do to increase revenue.

I also think iRobot's failure to launch their robot lawnmower really hurt them, probably hurting morale than anything else. Tons of people worked on that project, and the technology stack was genuinely impressive for seven years ago (using UWB beacons placed in the yard for localization and mapping). UWB was still an emerging technology in 2017 (still a few years before AirTags released). It makes me sad they couldn't ship it in the US, since the technology was better than virtually all other robot lawnmowers on the market.

iRobot manufactures their robots in China, but if I remember correctly, that's exclusively because the Chinese restrict exports on key electrical components like resistors. There was a desire to onshore manufacturing, but because the Chinese cornered the market, it was basically impossible to make the costs work out.

The bottom line is, the robot vacuum market is basically a solved problem, and there's a very good reason that floor cleaning robots continue to be the only viable consumer robot product.

I have fond memories of those good and kind iRoboteers. I wish iRobot all the best as they move forward and try to find a well-constrained everyday problem which can be solved by a low-cost robot.