dbcurtis

56 ms·

601.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Gradma’s oxygen concentrator shutting down. Hopefully those folks preemptively went to urgent care just to hang out in the waiting room. EBT terminals shutting down — that caused a riot in New England a couple of years ago.
602.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Um... PG&E was way behind on brush clearing. They still are. Of course, there are people that don’t want PG&E to trim their trees, hopefully those folks have got religion now. The Santa Rosa fire was absolutely started by PG&E e
603.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
So I’m sitting here in 94087 waiting for the lights to go out, but still have electricity here. Depite PG&E’s robo-caller leaving me a warning twice a day. Anyway, my generator is ready to go so that the freezer doesn’t thaw. Otherwise
604.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Memory bandwidth. You can’t make the code run faster without more ability to move data to and from mamory. All questions about modern CPU architecture get down to two questions of first principle: How much memory bandwidth is available? How
605.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Back when I was a CPU logic designer, I worked on two machines that used ECL logic, where the basic building-block gate was a 4-input OR/NOR (the gate produced both phases at output). I recall that on one of these machines, each logic
606.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Absolutely it is effective. Of course, it presupposes consultative decision making as a cultural norm. The idea of a single person owning any decision cuts a lot of crap, blame-shifting, and responsibility-dodging. The idea that you are e
607.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
I could not say. My time at Intel pre-dates Zen. It is safe to say that Intel is well aware of the capabilities of all their competitors, but obviously not their detailed plans. But even so, even with 100% perfect prediction there are num
608.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
During the Grove era, Intel practiced "consultative decision making". The leader of the meeting owned the decision. The leader consulted all the meeting participants. Then the owner of the decision makes the decision (NOT NOT N
609.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Well, I'm not going to argue much with Andy Grove. But my answer to "What do executives do?" is: Work on environmental problems. Problems can be put into three buckets: 1) Can be solved by things 100% under your control. 2)
610.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
-.-. I think some fonts are not great at rendering Morse code :) There may be a dah dit dah dah dah, but I don't know it either. But then again I don't know the less common punctuation, Cyrillic Morse, and I think heard once ther
611.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
On hands-on versus math, how do you approach finding the magic balance? For context: Let's agree that MIT and Olin are both great engineering schools. One former coworker of mine is a senior Mech E who graduated from MIT, who once said
612.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
I think if you ask: “How much money does it take to go from zero to high repute in 5 years?”. There is one data point: Olin College of Engineering, half a billion dollars. I’d be interested in hearing if you looked at the Olin model and wha
613.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
> Aside: Is this weird income share agreement model common in the US at this point? No, rather radical, and a key point of this school. What is common in the US is debilitating levels of student debt upon graduation. edit: typoos
614.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
_.___ . ...
615.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
OK, we are wondering way off topic here, by my pizza & phone number story.... Back in the days of pheasant-under-glass mainframes, I had a part time student job as an operator in the computation center. We had a phone at the operator c
616.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
> * GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season. OK, but unstable hybrids predate GMO by decades. Omitting the last, stabilizing cross for maize seeds has been a thing for, what, 75 years? at le
617.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Because license to interrupt often gets applied unequally WRT gender. Smart women go where their career isn’t impacted by boorish behavior.
618.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Yes, this. Agenda with a “last call” before taking up next topic.
619.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/busi...
620.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
And just hazarding a guess, I suspect women transfer out of the group at the first opportunity.
621.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Yes, I said "producer" not "coder", not "artist", not "tester". Much less brutal in management. [edit: clarification]
622.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Ha Ha! Yes. The gillectomy project collected some interesting data on that a couple of years ago, creating very fine-grained locks and measuring. Not unexpectedly, with a zillion locks performance suffered. The reason though, had much to
623.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
A friend of mine was a video game producer for about 15 years... kinds sounds like his job?? Except he was a dad and not a gym rat, YMMV.
624.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Good article. Basics that everyone can benefit from knowing. Just one nit/warning... breaking coarse locks into fine-grained locks can be taken too far. There is a point of diminishing returns where you end up spending increased ti
625.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
That can work for punctures. The back-country that I go to regularly has granite rocks that can sometimes have a sharp edge. The particular tire I was changing was a 4-steel-ply contractor-grade truck tire, two weeks old, that somehow got
626.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
> Can't be too hard to just mount a wheel carrier in the bed Um... yeah. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a truck.
627.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Oh, sure, absolutely. An Amazon driver just calls service and goes about his business. That is different from the average truck-user case.
628.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
https://www.tfltruck.com/2018/11/rivian-r1t-electric-truck-p... Nice picture there. Also, search Rivian on the TFL Trucks web site for everything they have ever done on the Rivian.
629.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I h
630.
by dbcurtis 7y ago
Stack machines were never very popular outside of Burroughs. Burroughs built several of them implementing a number of elegant ideas. When Algol first came out, they put a grad student summer intern onto the project of writing an Algol compi

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