Aromasin

Note that by leaving them by the front door I don't mean abstain. I relent that it is necessary for communication now we don't use letters or have landlines, but I need to actively walk to the front door if I wish to do that. Notifications are something I check when I leave the house in the morning, or briefly after the gym in the car perhaps, rather than being all I do for the majority of the time I sit in the house. The act of it being at the entrance and allowed no further is enough.

What else am I to do when waiting for my chip simulations to run? Be present with my colleagues? There are limits.

In the same vein as this article, the best thing I've ever done might just be leaving my phone by the front door when I get home, and getting rid of our TV. All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world.

We go stir crazy at home now, a sensation I have forgotten since my childhood, and feel almost obliged to go out to do things lest we go crazy from boredom. It's wonderful, and I can't recommend it enough.

Short term buyer habits don't necessarily track technological progress - they tend to be resistent, then inertia is broken and consumers buy en-mass. Companies need to brunt to cost of innovation until the cost benefit analysis makes sense for consumers. Mobile phones were a passing fad for niche power users until companies threw so much money at them so they weren't, and we became reliant on carrying one. Same can be said for thousands of other products. Nobody used them until suddenly we all were.

We're seeing a moores-law-like improvement in electric cars and their power densities. If the American car manufacturers don't want to be a part of that progress, it's on them, but Asia and Europe will continue to innovate in that area and the US will be playing catch up because they're servicing what consumers want now, not what they will probably want in the future.

The "whistle-to-whistle ban" was always poor legislation. By its own terms it only suppresses TV betting adverts in a defined window and lapses at 9pm, and it never touched the categories that actually make up most of the advertising we see; shirts, hoardings, and structural branding, etc. It was an utterly pointless measure that serves to achieve not a single one of it's initial goals.

The authors report explicitly state that the system's resolution does not match clinical CT or MRI. The elevational resolution is 15–25mm, meaning each slice is effectively a thick 2D section rather than the fine isotropic 3D volume MRI provides. MRI also delivers far richer soft-tissue contrast; this device produces only three contrast types (reflectivity, speed of sound, attenuation), and because it uses a low 1MHz frequency, the reflection images come primarily from tissue boundaries rather than from internal tissue texture.

I could see this being valuable for adipose tissue mapping or fatty-liver monitoring at a large scale, as the machines would be significantly cheaper, but this isn't some revolutionary magic bullet like the Twitter post is insinuating.

For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip.

Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passive, as in MR elastography (most common), where the patient wears a transducer pad, and vibration is actively generated by a driver. You've then got algorithmically-passive, which is more analogue to passive sonar, reconstructing tissue stiffness from ambient broadband vibration without the emitted probing pulse, but that is very much entirely academic. I guess the question would be, why is it worth pursuing when you have something like optical coherence elastography (OCE) for non-invasive profiling. Doing it using noisy ultrasound method becomes redundant. There are other methods, but the outcome is the same.

Generally (this is true for all systems, not just humans) you need to induce energy into it to more effectively measure it's output. Think of it like a bell - if I want to hear the note it produces, it's much easier to hear what this is if I ring it with a hammer. Granted, it will be "passively" resonating to a point where, with a sensitive enough sensor, I could probably pick up the output without the hammer - but that is a pointless problem to solve. I could hit a bell with a soft hammer a million times over without causing damage to it. The lifetime of the person hitting it with a hammer is far shorter than the accumulative damage to the bell before it breaks. The same is true for humans. You could effectively run a very low-energy, 60Hz vibration through a person (which is how the pads work) for multiple lifetimes before it would cause significant damage, so there comes little point in solving that problem. As such, true "passive" imaging is functionally pointless if your outcome is "safely image a patient". You're overengineering your solution to solve a problem that is only relevant if your patient was planning on living for 1000+ years.

I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit.

Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of the Theranos hysteria.

The one thing British people do preen about with regards to technology is cars, but I think that has more to do with the cultural influence of Top Gear than it does the history.

They are pivoting to become a fabless chip company as of last year (the decision happened a few years back): https://www.wired.com/story/chip-design-firm-arm-is-making-i...

I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.

The author is a Dutch journalist with no technology background. I wouldn't jump to get my information from this source. As a person who works in the UK semiconductor industry, I noticed 4 or 5 glaring holes in the article in just the first couple of paragraphs.

While I do disgree with the "state funded media scope" - I'd go as far as saying the BBC has become so fearful to rock the boat in any way that it is at risk of becoming a redundant source - I do think the lack of "competition" for BBC funding leads to a worse journalistic rigour. It's not the centre of excellence for journlism it once was, and is often looked down on when compared to other paid news outlets like the Economist, Atlantic, the FT, et ceterea. Adding an element of competition into the equation could make for better journalism, but equally, that would likely require more funding in the end.

You're implying that Sales, Marketing, and Distribution is not a valuable service by saying 30% is not reasonable. I work in the electronics industry selling components. Suppliers regularly give us 30% margin, far more on some products, despite the upfront cost of making a new microcontroller or FPGA being far in excess of the most expensive video games ever made, with our value add being, to be frank, much less than Steam. 30% margin is about average for distribution, be it food, minerals, cars, or any other industry.

If I didn't have Steam (or equivalent service like GoG), I wouldn't buy new games. That's just reality. I would play the same games I have for decades. Instead, Steam has created a very effective recommendation engine that gives me a great selection. That's more than worth a 30% cut.

I want to make clear to the US folks here that there's about 2 or 3 cafes that still sell traditional eels, and it's explicitly a London food, not wider British cuisine. From the number of videos and articles I see about them though, you'd think the country was covered in Eel cafés. Honestly, covering them at all is tabloid ragebait content at this point.

It's a European issue because we look to the US and now appreciate more than ever the need to introduce barriers to stop temporary fascist governments doing the same permanent damage they have done in the US. Our democratic systems are just as vulnerable to populist leaders taking power. One of those barriers we must erect is the elimination of corporation with unfettered access to institutional data that can be used by fascist governments to maintain or grow their power base.

Wow. I picked up a copy of Hyperion this morning while taking a random stroll through town - something I rarely do during a work day anymore. I popped into a book shop on a complete whim, and picked it up as it had been on my list for a while. The coincidence feels deeply uncanny.

The key part is that there are multiple insurgencies going on simultaneously. There are separatist movements that are looking to create new nations states, while simultaneous there are non-violent protests ongoing, generally looking for regime change and a move away from extremists religious tendencies. Both can be true simultaneously.

We recently had an employee leave our team, posting an extensive essay on LinkedIn, "exposing" the company and claiming a whole host of wrong-doing that went somewhat viral. The reality is, she just wasn't very good at her job and was fired after failing to improve following a performance plan by management. We all knew she was slacking and despite liking her on a personal level, knew that she wasn't right for what is a relatively high-functioning team. It was shocking to see some of the outright lies in that post, that effectively stemmed from bitterness at being let go.

The 'boy (or girl) who cried wolf' isn't just a story. It's a lesson for both the person, and the village who hears them.

It's a British word for someone or something that's ugly, dirty or unpleasant. Generally it was used to be derogatory about women - ie. "she's minging mate". I believe it originally came from the Scots, where the word 'ming' comes from the old Scottish English word for 'bad smell' or 'human excrement'. It was in wide spread use in the South of the UK while I was growing up.

See here for background: https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/...

Long-form news outlets (ie, weekly/monthly/quarterly release) tend to not fall into that scummy, data-mining behaviour the daily news outlets do from my experience. Subscribe to something like the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), the Atlantic, or Delayed Gratification instead. They tend to hire well reasoning journalists that do research with due dilligence.

Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.

The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'

Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.

Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.

Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.

If this were cyclical, I'd be inclined to agree, but this seems to be more of a wave. I also think the push back is more than just one against rented compute. It is tied to a societal ennui that comes from the feeling that we no longer own anything, be it music, housing, movies, land, tools, phones, or cars. Everything is moving to either being rented or on credit. There's a push back against this self-made feudal revival, and that scales all the way from individuals through to corporations; in this case, against the idea that a mega-corporation gets to decide how and when you get to use your compute, and at what variable price.

I know it's ironic to say this about Intel, a notoriously management heavy company, but they did do the dual tracks which I always appreciated. A principal engineer was functionally on par with a senior manager, and a fellow with a VP. This meant that good engineers weren't forced into roles they weren't interested in, and why many stayed there 20+ years.

The issue is, even with two tracks, there's every chance that more people end up taking the management path because it's seen as an easy way to climb the ranks. Your success can be built from your teams success, rather than your own individual contribution.

That is populism in a nutshell. It is anti-rationalism at its heart. There's no real ideology - that's how it applies to both Chávez and Trump, Corbyn and Orbán. People want to believe what feels "instinctively" correct, because the intellectual overhead of modern society leaves the majority of the population unable to deal with the reality that political and economic systems are incredibly difficult to understand without hours of study and thought. That is uncomfortable, so people rebel against intellectualism, because it's easier to be told lies through 30-second videos and feel well informed, rather than sitting through a 20-hour session that one might need to truly understand a niche of a niche. The more they read, the less they understand, so disengage from it altogether and go with their gut (designed for tribes of monkeys) because the cognitive overload is too much to bear.

I jumped mid-career, and there were a few places I started before diving into live hardware projects (which is the only way to go from student to practitioner).

FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/

Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page

Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects

I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem.

In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!

There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.

I think your comment about social acceptance in the UK is slightly off. It's person dependent. I would say my experience aligns closer with the 50% mark. It's a massive variant from person to person. I have friends that will turn up to anything, rain or shine, sickness or in health. Equally, I know people that would flake on a wedding because they stubbed their toe or the latest season of [insert meaningless reality show] came out.