Certified

This would force everyone using a VPN to submit ID verification in one fell swoop

I contend that is impossible to make an unbiased AI. I did an AI image recognition project several years ago. It used yolo to categorize rust into grade 1, 2, and 3 for offshore platforms. When creating our training dataset, we had different rust inspectors from different parts of the world drawing different lines in the sand between what was category 1, 2, and 3. We had to eventually pick which bias we wanted to roll out worldwide. The advantage for a giant corporation was that now the same consistent bias was being used worldwide and fewer people had to be safety trained to go on the offshore platforms. If that incredibly dull and basic application can’t be unbiased, I don’t think it is possible to avoid bias in anything produced with a training dataset. The very word “training” implies it. Someone somewhere decides A is in the training and B is not, and a bias is born, intentionally or not.

So the task is really to find the AI with the bias that works best for your application, not to try and remove bias.

Apple A series CPUs and now M series CPUs have consistently been top of the benchmarks in single core performance for most of the last decade. This even holds true when pitted against desktop Intel and AMD chips. For someone who works with workloads that struggle to be very multithreaded, I do watch this. I must be that 0.1% of the audience

Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day.

They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.

They are probably referring to the much larger driver facing curved touchscreens for carplay/android auto that merges with the screen used for the instrument gauge. Also, the driver assist tech on the newer kia/hyundais is very good, especially for highway traffic, needing very little driver intervention.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Microsoft knew they would never get significant market share unless they offered open source alternatives that let you circumvent the telemetry in the early days of VScode. Embrace. The acquisition of github was part of this strategy. They made an ecosystem that sucked a lot of plugin developer talent into their ecosystem. Extend. Now the market share is firmly in their grasp and competitors have become weaker. Extinguish.

GPT 4.5 seems to get it right, but then repeat the 700 pounds

"A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

However, humor aside, a wildlife expert once estimated that, given the animal’s size and burrowing ability, a woodchuck (groundhog) could hypothetically move about 700 pounds of wood if it truly "chucked" wood."

https://chatgpt.com/share/680a75c6-cec8-8012-a573-798d2d8f6b...

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought it was some sort of variation on an E-ink display because of the black and white limitation. Nothing about transflective tech limits it from full color other than price. I guess that leads me to an evolution of my question: Why are no* tablets using full color transflective displays?

*I did find the HannsNote2 [1] does, but it only came out last year, and this tech has been around for donkey's years.

[1] https://www.hannspree.com/product/hannsnote2

Whatever happened to the transflective lcds that were popular in carputers in the 2000s? They seem to be a perfect fit for a tablet and I have been puzzled that no one has jumped on using them in one.

from the transflective wikipedia page [1]

"A transflective liquid-crystal display is a liquid-crystal display (LCD) with an optical layer that reflects and transmits light (transflective is a portmanteau of transmissive and reflective). Under bright illumination (e.g. when exposed to daylight) the display acts mainly as a reflective display with the contrast being constant with illuminance. However, under dim and dark ambient situations the light from a backlight is transmitted through the transflective layer to provide light for the display. The transflective layer is called a transflector. It is typically made from a sheet polymer. It is similar to a one-way mirror but is not specular."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from "The IT Crowd"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12LLJFSBnS4

Thanks for pointing that out. I realized I called out the wrong chip. I was actually trying to call out the Max6818.

It's price is it's biggest drawback, but it is also replacing any electronics used to run the switches at 12 or 24v which gets you above the noise floor if you are operating next to something noisy like a VFD. from the 6818 data sheet: "Robust switch inputs handle ±25V levels and are ±15kV ESD-protected" [1]

[1] https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...

Edit: I meant to call out the MAX6818, not MAX 3218

I guess I should rephrase. It saves all the interrupts except the one triggered at 40ms delay. For every button press without hardware debouncing, you can have 10s - 100s of 1to0 and 0to1 transitions on the microcontroller pin. This is easily verified on a oscope, even with "good" $50+ honeywell limit switches. Every single one of those transitions triggers an interrupt and robs cpu cycles from other things the microprocessor is doing. The code in the interrupt gets more complex because now it has to do flag checks and use timers (bit bashing) every time they are triggered instead of just doing the action the button is supposed to trigger. None of this is to say one way is the "right" or "wrong" way to do it, but putting the hardware debouncing complexity into hardware specifically designed to handling it, and focusing on the problem I am actually trying to solve in firmware is my personal preferred way of doing it.

I'm a big fan of debouncing in hardware with the MAX3218 chip. It will debounce by waiting 40ms for the signal to "settle" before passing it on. This saves your microprocessor interrupts for other things. It also will work with 12 or 24 volt inputs and happily output 3.3 or 5v logic to the microprocessor. It is pricey though at $6-10 each.

In a monkeys in front of a typewriter world, statistically, you are as likely to have a one off event that matches a specific bit pattern in the underlying format as you would the encrypted format. It would not be reproducible though since most encryption uses nonces

I really like all the caveats and the time taken to explain things in the first part of that document, but later it starts to rush and gloss over important details and caveats. On page 151 of that link, when it starts talking about using parallax to measure the distance to nearby stars, it says "However, if one takes measurements six months apart, one gets a distance separation of 2AU." This is obviously incorrect because the whole solar system is orbiting around the galactic core, which itself is moving with respect to the CMB rest frame. I did a quick calc based on the 552.2 km/s galactic velocity value from Milky Way wiki [1] and found that it moves an additional 0.97AU in 6 months. I am assuming that this has been accounted for by scientists, and is being simplified to make it more digestible for the reader, but it hides a rather large dependency for every higher rung on the cosmic distance ladder. A cosmic velocity ladder that seems to be based off of Doppler CMB measurements [2]. If we are indeed using measurements many months apart and under or overestimating our velocity through the universe, even a little bit, every higher rung of the ladder would be affected wouldn't it?

In the process of writing this, I thought "Surely we have launched a satellite pair that can take parallax measurements at similar times in different places!" They could range off of each other with Time of Flight, be positioned much further apart than a few AU, and take parallax star measurements at more or less the same time without atmospheric distortion, but it doesn't seem like we have. Both Hipparcos and Gaia were satellites that were deployed to measure parallax, but not as a pair. My reading suggests they used multi-epoch astrometric observations (speed ladder dependent) to generate their parallax measurements and it seems our current parallax and star catalogues are based on the measurements taken by these two satellites. New Horizons got the most distant parallax measurements by comparing simultaneous* earth observations, but it was limited to Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, far from a full star catalogue.

I would love if someone more knowledgeable can steer me towards a paper or technique that has been used to mitigate the cosmic distance ladder's dependency on this cosmic speed ladder. Regardless of how certain we think we are of our velocity through the universe, it seems to me that sidestepping that dependency through simultaneous* observations would be worthwhile considering how dependency laden the cosmic distance ladder already is.

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

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9312056

* Insert relativity caveat here for the use of "simultaneous". What I mean in this context is more simultaneous than waiting months between measurements.

I wish Supah Valves [1] were still available so I could recommend them. They use a smaller sprinkler valve as a pilot to move a much larger piston based valve _very_ quickly. That lets a lot more of your reservoir pressure get to the barrel before your projectile has shot out the end. The result? More range. More grins.

[1] https://www.spudtech.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_i...

Thank you so much for the quick answer. That makes complete sense. I appreciate anyone putting in efforts in on Node-RED. I use it heavily in interactive museum exhibits and would spend a lot more time on software "plumbing" without it. Dashboard 1 has been very useful, but definitely starts to struggle on things like graphs with 3000+ points. I look forward to trying out this new one!

Impressive, but I can't foresee any project where I would pick this over the vastly more powerful PJRC Teensy 4.0 [1]. It is only slightly larger and only costs $3.85 more.

[1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html

At first I thought this was a new version of the "officially" supported node-red-dashboard [1], but that doesn't seem to be the case. The landing page doesn't seem to indicate it is different, but clicking through Getting Started they differentiate. All the screenshots look very similar to the vanilla dashboard, but looking at the two githubs [2][3] shows it isn't a lazy fork. Could anyone from flowfuse shed light on how their version is different?

[1] https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-dashboard

[2] https://github.com/node-red/node-red-dashboard/tree/master

[3] https://github.com/FlowFuse/node-red-dashboard

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.

Thank you for sharing this. I'm especially impressed by the gorgeous diagrams. My favorites are on pages 67, 87, 142, and 170. At first I thought they were all hand drafted until I reached the diagram on pg 170, which has dithered grey filled table cells. Does anyone know what method or software might have been used for generating diagrams like these? The publishing date is 1970 and AutoCAD didn't get released until 1982.

And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.

Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTk3JNtMlw

Generally you are not compressing water though if dealing with compressed fluids (unless you are trying to simulate deep ocean depths for pressure testing.) You are compressing Hydraulic Fluid which can cause Hydraulic Injection Injury which can lead to loss of limb [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2532970/

Most speakers can operate as a microphone. You just operate them in reverse. Sound waves in a room move the speaker cone which in turn induces a voltage on the speaker coil as it vibrates. In most modern speakers the amplifier circuit gets in the way of making anything of it. "Passive" pc speakers that didn't have an amp used to be more common in the 90s. Usually a cheap set came with a new computer purchase. They didn't have the power/wall wart and ran solely off the power pumped out by your computers 3.5mm audio. My mind was blown when I found out as a young kid that you could plug these into the microphone port and record... from a speaker!

"An annoyance of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is how they don't show you the shipping cost until after transaction is complete."

I use McMaster daily and can see the shipping cost in two places when viewing my cart. The lines above the Place Order button on the top right side of the screen has

Merchandise ####.##

Shipping ##.##

Total $####.##

In the same bar below that is tax and directly below that you can click Delivery Method and it also displays the cost for each delivery speed. Maybe if you are set up with an account that is Net-30 this is hidden, but it certainly shows up for me when set to process the transaction by credit card.

I’m really pleased to get a local rebuttal. The conversation I spoke of happened a little over a decade ago and I’ve been curious ever since if it was a momentary perspective or a longer term trend. Did you see anything around 10 years ago that would agree with my cab driver’s thesis or was he off base then as well?

I had a long talk with a Chicago born cab driver when visiting a few years back. He explained to me that Chicago used to be a conventional city where the businesses were downtown and residential was a donut around that. Traffic was congested into downtown in the mornings and out of downtown in the evenings. As the city grew and commutes into downtown from the suburbs worsened, the businesses started moving out of downtown into the suburbs to be closer to their employees. This left downtown with low occupancy. A few people eventually got wise to the situation and started turning a lot of the unused downtown commercial space into residential space. Fast forward to today and the traffic patterns have reversed, with congestion out of downtown in the morning as people commute out towards the ring of businesses and into downtown in the evening where people now live.

I see this same trend happening in Houston where I live now and I suspect it is happening in other large car-centric cities as well.

Your comment reminds me of paper by Bestsy Sparrow [1] where she hypothesizes that "Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found." [2]

From the papers Abstract:

"No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it."

[1] Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips - https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1207745

[2] https://news.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-memory-works-diff...