bcrl

54 ms·

871.
by bcrl 5y ago
This is similar to the problem of hiring new employees. Personally, I've learned that it's more important to hire some and see how they work out, as you really can't predict actual job performance and fit from most interview
872.
by bcrl 5y ago
Part of the challenge is that transformers for individual homes are at risk. Throw a significant DC voltage across a transformer designed to handle 60 Hz AC, and the results are not going to be pretty.
873.
by bcrl 5y ago
The 1998 ice storm was something that had not happened before. Montreal was in particularly bad shape because numerous towers for something like 2 of the 3 transmission lines going into the city collapsed under the weight of the ice (pleas
874.
by bcrl 5y ago
Solar flares should be a lot lower on the list, as the bulk of the risk can actually be mitigated in the electric grid. Every few years the IEEE publishes an article on the risk solar flares pose to the electric grid, and how it can be m
875.
by bcrl 5y ago
A public "beta" of a self driving car should lean towards failing safe. I would expect it to have sudden braking issues and be overly conservative. The kind of bugs we're seeing where obstacles are blatantly ignored make it
876.
by bcrl 5y ago
Eastern Ontario seems to do fine handling winter temperatures of -28C to -35C every year. Cold isn't the issue driving reliability problems here, wind and ice are.
877.
by bcrl 5y ago
10 days worth of power outages in 20 years is not something to brag about. I lived in Toronto where we had maybe 1 hour of power outages in 5 years (my Linux box had >485 days of uptime on wall power with no UPS until I had to move). W
878.
by bcrl 5y ago
I'll wait until Intel actually gets and then keeps a foundry customer across more than 1 node / product. Intel's track record is not good. Most recently Achronix abandoned Intel as a foundry, and the regularity of FPGAs mak
879.
by bcrl 5y ago
At some point we need a content producer bill of rights to handle this. I guess treating people decently is no longer of value for any of the big tech firms. We're just costs to be minimized.
880.
by bcrl 5y ago
If the automation can't weed out malicious scams and phishing ads that are obvious to a human, perhaps they're not doing what needs to be done "at scale".
881.
by bcrl 5y ago
Finally! I've been wondering how Facebook and Google can get away with running ads that are clearly malicious in nature like https://imgur.com/a/Lk85lST (which my elderly father got a while back). Organizations
882.
by bcrl 5y ago
Mostly an addition to monopoly profits. If their profit margins weren't so ridiculously large, the previous attempts at becoming a foundry may have succeeded, and they would have put more effort into being the fab for Apple's sil
883.
by bcrl 5y ago
There have been demonstrations of using non-rechargeable aluminium-air batteries for that purpose which would have to be returned to a smelter to be "recharged". Sadly, only prototypes.
884.
by bcrl 5y ago
Guess what happens when you reimplement everything from scratch again every few years? Functionality is lost and never regained. Just one more rewrite and it'll all be awesome, right?
885.
by bcrl 5y ago
Now you're starting to understand why some of us don't want to have Gnome anywhere near our Linux desktops when every bit of functionality that we actively use gets deprecated and removed. I loved my Linux desktop back in the ear
886.
by bcrl 5y ago
The older electro-mechanical telephone switches are seriously impressive pieces of technology from a century ago. Have a look at the Connections Museum YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm87i_qG_B-rRv
887.
by bcrl 5y ago
To me this seems like a possible solution for the "last mile" of rail. My imported shipments from overseas end up getting delivered to a city that's 350 km away just because there are no large scale rail depots any closer.
888.
by bcrl 5y ago
This is not just limited to Telsa these days. Virtually all application / operating systems developers have become infected with the "let's change the user interface" disease. A long time ago, it was pretty much bog st
889.
by bcrl 5y ago
Even worse is when Google's own search results include ads that direct to malware sites (like https://imgur.com/a/Lk85lST ). Google, when will you start following the best practices in the advertising industry li
890.
by bcrl 5y ago
When Spectre and Meltdown hit, the Linux kernel was forced down the path of adding mitigations which pessimised the generated code. Performance is no longer the primary driver of generated code. That is a change in technical direction and
891.
by bcrl 5y ago
Do something completely different. I've been having a lot of fun putting fibre up on poles for the last few years. It's rewarding in a way that software isn't. Software is all about worrying about the mistakes I've ma
892.
by bcrl 5y ago
Again, not all optimizations that compiler writers can come up with are Good Ideas. Since the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities came to light back in 2017, many large projects have been forced to switch to prioritizing securit
893.
by bcrl 5y ago
You can't turn off -O2 in some projects. The Linux kernel has plenty of code that requires optimization to be on to build succesfully -- look at things like BUILD_BUG_ON(). And it's projects like the Linux kernel that have had s
894.
by bcrl 5y ago
At least in compilers like gcc, optimization needs to be enabled to get sane warnings emitted by the compiler, so some people are indeed being forced to pass in -O2 to get sane build warnings for projects. I would really like it for the C s
895.
by bcrl 5y ago
I'm shocked that nobody has mentioned Enron in the context of grid collapse and insane spot market prices. Granted, Enron specifically manipulated markets to create scarcity of supply, but the effect was the same: prices skyrocketed w
896.
by bcrl 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220117155151/https://www.nytim...
897.
by bcrl 5y ago
"Ultralow logic state switching energies of 10−17 J are predicted for 20 nm feature size ULTRARAM memories." Which basically means that they have not yet managed to get UltraRAM working on a 20nm process. Intel made great predic
898.
by bcrl 5y ago
When I'm in the zone for building, debugging and testing a new system, it's pretty unlikely that I'll be smiling. Most of the time my thoughts are filled all the mistakes I have already made or are attempting to avoid making
899.
by bcrl 5y ago
I do wonder at what point Intel will no longer be able to function being the sole source of products running through their own fabs. Companies like TSMC can amortize the cost of fab construction and process development over a much larger s
900.
by bcrl 5y ago
And in an ideal world, Google wouldn't benefit from selling ads for phishing websites. Sadly, this is not the world we live in. Edit: for those who do not believe me, here is one case where exactly that happened to my elderly father:

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