blackguardx

I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lower altitude rock climbing) but I should probably check out The Climb to get both sides.

To drain the Salton Sea or replenish it? The Salton Sea was created in its present form from a man-made environmental disaster.

Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).

The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.

Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.

NORAD relies on radar stations in Canada.

It is probably a good idea to review some instructions before jump starting a car because even though it is simple, if you do it wrong (connect the battery terminal last) you can blow up your battery from the ignition of hydrogen gas.

The iPhone 4 was easily disassembled with screwdrivers...

You don't need rivers for nuclear reactor cooling, they are just very convenient.

It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.

555 timers were everywhere back in the day. It was one of the most mass produced chips at the time with over 1 billion made per year.

Altium isn't great, but you must not have tried the others...

My minivan has more 50% weight capacity than a Toyota Tacoma. I can haul more construction debris and load/unload them easier because my tailgate is lower. I wouldn't want to try to haul mulch or manure though. That being said, most of my friends with trucks have caps on the back and can't haul mulch any easier than me.

Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elements.

mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.

Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.

VHDL is based on Ada, so it also inherits from sequential programming models.

I think this can just be summarized to "write any HDL like you are modeling real hardware." Both VHDL and Systemverilog were primarily intended for validation and synthesis is a second class citizen.

You can pretty much do everything in Vivado from the command line as long as you know Tcl...

Also, modern Verilog (AKA Systemverilog) fixes a bunch of the issues you might have had. There isn't much advantage to VHDL these days unless perhaps you are in Europe or work in certain US defense companies.

I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them with these giant walls that look like a post-apocalyptic fort. On top of that, because they don't disclose their fracking fluids you always kind of have ground water contamination near your home on the back of your mind.

I'm not even against fracking but the alternatives to wind and solar are more a public nuisance to live around.

They have plenty of mines for iron amd otber metals in western countries as well. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

TouchID doesn't really for me on my Macbook or iPad. It has about a 25% success rate. I think one issue is that I work with my hands a lot.

Who was president when Microsoft introduced D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives in 2019? AFAIK, they never called it DEI internally.

You say smaller political entity, but the city of Washington D.C has 100k more people than the entire state of Wyoming...

We'll probably end up with the doors from Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge you money to open and threaten to sue you if you try to force it open without paying.

Caltrain stations' automated machines used to famously give $1 coins as change when buying tickets as well. Getting like 10 $1 coins as change for a $20 bill really weighed your pants down.

Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?

It is not cool or sexy, but a surface tablet makes a great travel device because it is a full computer that is also a tablet. You can also use it during takeoff and landing when laptops are not allowed.

My US-based company has the same policy for all international travel now to avoid any incidents coming back into the US.

I worked at Microsoft pre and post-pandemic. Microsoft has an extensive shuttle network, but the public transit (Sound Transit) to the office was nicer in many ways. It ran more frequently and the seats reclined!

The purpose of de minimus is to streamline small shipments, commercial or not. It can't really be abused unless the declared value is false and it is really over $800.

If you are taking issue with Temu-like shipments, that is more of a postal treaty issue.