analog31

How did you go about finding a Chinese test lab? Asking for a friend. ;-)

I make a physical product, akin to a guitar pedal. Possibly the most scary threshold would be if I'm successful enough that I need to quit my day job, but not successful enough for the business to support my family. That's kind of a no mans land where I don't want to be.

Another similar threshold would be having to hire people, which changes the complexity of the business in a variety of ways.

Yes exactly this. The parking lot of a typical American urban workplace will be filled with a disproportionate number of pickup trucks.

Our culture ties our cars to our identities.

Suburban Americans are temporarily embarrassed farmers and outdoorsmen.

Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use.

At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options.

For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought.

Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.

How people use the vehicles that they buy is pretty well understood from the market research done by the car industry. In the US, the widespread use of pickup trucks a passenger vehicles is a known fact.

An odd thing is that my family visited a rural part of England last year, and we saw very few pickup trucks on the roads and in the towns. On a walking tour, you see a lot of farms up close because the paths go through farms and along fence lines. The farms had utility vehicles including light trucks, but they also had regular passenger cars.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and when I went back to visit the family home a few years ago, every street was parked up on both sides with giant vehicles. It was a sight to behold.

They weren't all the most expensive trucks, and many were noticeably older. Things in our town went up and down with the cycle of the car industry.

Another reason is to avoid letting the inside of the bed get scratched. I lived in Texas for a while, and people were that fussy about their trucks.

The interesting thing in the US is that a lot of pickups, possibly most of them, are purchased for regular daily driving. None of the people I know with pickups have trailers.

They can, by not having any connectors. ;-)

When I was a teenager ca. 1980, my local Radio Shack had a shelf of books, and I worked my way through them as my funds allowed. Since the TRS-80 used a Z80, they had Barden's book on the Z80, published by Howard Sams. I already understood programming a bit thanks to learning BASIC, and my curiosity about micro's was piqued by my mom's subscription to Byte Magazine.

Maybe it's because it was so clearly written that a kid could understand it, but it was a revelation, and I read it cover to cover. I never actually touched a real Z80, but it was a good enough introduction that I had no problem understanding other micro's including the 6502 and early microcontrollers such as 8051 and PIC.

Even today, I suspect that I "understand" modern micros by falling back on the Z80, and I recommend learning an 8-bit micro because they're simple enough for mere mortals to comprehend.

It's something like "My Buttons." You create buttons within PP, and it gives you a chunk of HTML that you paste into your web page.

For better or worse, PayPal is the only service that works for my business, and it has worked flawlessly for upwards of 2 decades. I casually look for alternatives to PP once every couple of years.

My business ships a physical product, and has a completely passive web page. It's about as bland as boring as it gets. My page has a "buy" button with a link to PayPal. Then you complete your transaction within PP's site. That way, I don't need to maintain a server anywhere, write any code, or be responsible for handling your private information.

Amusingly, I just noticed that alt-spacebar-n doesn't hide a window in Ubuntu.

Also, pedestrians and cyclists choose lesser traveled roads for safety. Granted you're talking huge roads but on a smaller scale, filling up neighborhood streets with commuter traffic is likely to provoke a backlash.

There's probably enough people taking wrong terms (such as me) to provide enough data. ;-)

From my point of view, nerds getting into the spotlight is great. Public recognition of good work is fine by me. It doesn't have to stem from sinister motivations or "incentives."

But a generalization that science work is motivated by fame and fortune just doesn't make sense.

Do LLMs have Qualia?

Oddly enough my experience is the opposite. I live in an academic town, and many of my neighbors are scientists. They view the "fame and glory" as something that maybe someone else has a chance of achieving, but not a realistic pursuit for themselves. Pursuit of funding (which now includes suing the Federal Government) is at best stressful drudgework for them.

I work in industry. In that case, nobody who meets me would ever know that I have patents. I would consider them to be a useful add-on for my resume should I ever need one, but it doesn't define me. And what my employer chooses to fund is a matter between consenting adults.

Do you know any scientists?

Disclosure: Physicist.

Perhaps related, I've read that Al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra [0] contained no equations or even any numerals. It was apparently a wall of text.

My take is that you pretty much had to be a philosopher to make your way through a text like that. Al-Khwarizmi wrote down a general solution to the quadratic equation, which had eluded humanity since the ancient Greeks. Today, the solution and its proof are taught to schoolchildren.

One thing that's happened is that notation has been improved. For instance we now have equations and we use numerals to write numbers.

Similar deal with Newton and Leibnitz. The notation that we use for teaching calculus resembles theirs but has been improved. Perhaps moreso for Newton's mechanics. Philosophers debated about Newton, now we teach his ideas to schoolchildren.

Likewise Clerk Maxwell. What I've read is that his theory was also unreadable by most of us, but his successor, Heaviside, came up with the notation that we teach to slightly older schoolchildren.

This seems to be a recurring story. Maybe someday there will be a notation that makes string theory seem obvious... to schoolchildren. ;-)

[0] The origin of both words "algorithm" and "algebra"

We don't know literally nothing. For instance we know which college majors are favored politically, and which ones are popular. /s Or we can survey high school students. They are probably closer to the reality of the job market than the economic planners.

Anecdote: My kids were in the regional youth orchestra, and every year at the last concert of the season, the program included a bio of every graduating senior, including their future plans. The hottest major was computer science, followed by biochemistry and engineering. These kids knew exactly which majors the economic planners would have chosen for them.

But I agree. Student loans were a band-aid on a system that could have just as effectively subsidized college education directly.

So the jobs of the past will determine the funding of the future. This must be some new kind of economic planning.

Wait, no it's not. It's how economic planning always worked. It's summed up by the saying "The generals are always preparing to fight the last war." The university near my house is just putting the finishing touches on a building to house the new Data Science program, that was started a few years ago.

Sure, and today, it's like if you can buy a house at all.

Probably what makes the house less cluttered is that the elite class can afford to throw things away.

Indeed, I'm a musician and the acoustics of most modern commercial environments suck.

Here's the story that made sense to me: In the pre industrial age, visible ornamentation was symbolic of a craftsman's skill and attention to detail, when you couldn't inspect the invisible aspects of a product. For instance a violin has an ornately carved scroll, and features such as the "bees sting," whereas you can't take it apart to see if the neck mortise is precisely fitted. It is one of the few pre-industrial-age products whose aesthetics have not changed much.

Today, those features are no longer necessary, and we look for other measures of quality in products -- for better or worse.

I grew up in a "midcentury modern" house, and my family lives in one today. I find the modern decor to be comforting because in my case it reminds me of home. My mom claimed that the sparse decor was easier to maintain, for instance: "There are no knick-knacks to dust around." Truth be told, the house also happened to be available during a very frothy market, and my spouse would have chosen something more traditional.

It's also claimed that the simpler decor works in smaller houses.

We were not rich. The MCM houses in my 'hood, including ours, are certainly not clutter free, yet still feel pleasant and comfortable.

Maybe that's why Trump wants to take Greenland, and Canada, and looks up to Russia.

Imagine foreign policy being distorted by the Mercator projection.

It missed the Toledo War:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War

But to be fair, this is really cool.

Maybe there should be a saying for national economies: Amateurs talk about finance and IT, and professionals talk about resources and manufacturing.

In the US, professional licensure is left to the states, and most states have some form of licensing for engineers along with reciprocity for transferring a license from one state to another. Commonly, engineers have an "industrial exemption" if they work for a company that makes a product rather than offering engineering services directly to the public (such as a civil or structural engineer might do).

I've held an "engineer" title at my day job from time to time, though I'm not an engineer and have no engineering degree. Only a couple of engineers at my work site have licenses. On the other hand, my brother in law was a nuclear engineer, and all of the engineers at the power plant were licensed.

One thing you'll notice is that small companies that do contract or consulting work will call themselves "research" or "technology" rather than using the E word on their web page.