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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is big “if we break your old toys, you’ll HAVE to play with the new ones” energy.

    Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don’t see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.


  • If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

    A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

    The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.


  • I sort of wonder if the next generation will still romanticize Japan in quite the same way. We’re past the peak trendy-products era of Weird Sony and the Toyota MR2, anime is no longer a secret exotic thing, and it feels like if you want “15 years ahead of us optimistic techno future”, you could easily slide in Chongqing or Seoul instead of Tokyo.





  • There’s a huge shift in male role models over the past few decades, and it always felt to me like the people who could never fit into the old militaristic, athletic “conqueror”-style mould saying “we’ll invent our own definition of masculinity” than a direct, fully-bought-in progression.

    This will leave people behind-- the ones who can’t find new “appropriate” idols or aren’t impressed by their achievements. The Linus Torvalds version of conquering the world is hardly the Genghis Khan version.

    Maybe we need to find a way to broaden the modern pantheon to figures that can resonate with a traditional audience.




  • I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

    If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.










  • To be honest, I’m amazed it took til Biden before we saw more pressure on TSMC as a flashpoint.

    Even if we’re on nominal good terms because they’re a capitalist democracy, nobody likes single points of failure (earthquakes and industrial disasters happen even without geopolitical tensions)

    But we’ve handled it miserably-- throw some money at Intel who can’t innovate out of their gilded cage anymore, and try to get a few TSMC facilities stateside-- when we should have been trying to completely diversify the supply chains with new players and new geographies.

    In fact, it’s amazing that we lost the concept of second sourcing. That ensured no one vendor held you hostage. Like 8 different firms made 8088s, on up to the 486, but after that it dried up fast. You saw a few IBM badged Cyrix 6x86s, but who else sells a pin-compatible Ryzen?

    I hope once China gets far enough up on the tech curve, they see distributing fab tech as a BRI programme. No reason your next bag of 74LS04s, or the 30-cent MCU in your thermostat, can’t be made on a 28nm fab in Burkina Faso.


  • The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.

    Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.