dragontamer

Counter point: the opening song of Beauty and the Beast starts with "Bonjour".

Basil of Baker Street (Great Mouse Detective) literally saves the Queen of England.

Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone are also similarly very, very British. No one can possibly confuse the issue.

Those Teslas were controller-less SSDs IIRC, common in the cheap embedded world.

Modern proper SSDs for computers do their best to spread out the writes (TRIM, and other features). They still wear out of course, nothing can beat physics. But if you buy a 2TB drive, there's a lot of room to spread out the write cycles that a normal user probably never has to worry about (no normal user is going to hit 500TBs of writes that breaks a modern 2TB SSD write balancing algorithm)

But it probably should be noted that embedded controller-free SSDs have significant write amplification issues. Embedded systems assumed you were trying to save money and/or compute... and also assumed you didn't do too many writes. So they really weren't designed for the write cycles that Teslas logging system did.

What work of Disney (company, not the man per se...) is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?

Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?

The only major "American identity" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).

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The others are correct in that Mark Twain is probably the real answer. But I'm thinking of a modern media (film, comic books, etc. etc).

Maybe Wicked and Wizard of Oz counts as two sides of American culture. A push and counter push.

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Sleeping Beauty? That's French. Beauty and the Beast? Also French.

Great Mouse Detective? British. Alice in Wonderland? British.

Pinocchio? Italian.

Its not like Walt Disney personally wrote or drew all his stuff either. Stan Lee was closer to actually making the story than Walt Disney.

But yeah, Jack Kirby would be closer than the other two.

Stan Lee probably had more influence than Walt Disney in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us.

Walt Disney is overwhelmingly about older stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), and not anything I feel distinctly "American".

The most popular and timeless properties out of Disney (ex: Mickey Mouse) aren't really telling stories or setting cultural trends IMO. Meanwhile, Superman and Spiderman (Okay, I know Stan Lee only partially had influence on Spiderman...) are closer to what people see as distinctly "American".

wait/arrive seems obvious to me. So I'll talk about that... As a synchronization primitive, its very useful for things like:

    parallel_memset(data, 0); // The 1024 threads go off and, in parallel + some efficient manner, initialize the datastructure
    barrier(); // wait for all 1024 threads to reach here before continuing.
    do_stuff(); // This probably relies on all default data being set before starting

Cluster arrive + Cluster wait allow for you to split the barrier into two units. Maybe the first half of a loop must be synchronized, but there's "spare extra work" you can do before calling wait(). This likely makes threading smoother.

    parallel_memset(data, 0); // The 1024 threads go off and, in parallel + some efficient manner, initialize the datastructure
    arrive();
    do_spare_work(); // some extra work before checking for a wait
    wait(); // We ran out of main work + spare work, so now we must fully stop and wait
    do_stuff(); // This probably relies on all default data being set before starting

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As far as the L2 cache thing specifically: I don't know.

GPUs are absurdly SMT. Like 8 threads or 10 threads (or tracked instruction pointers) per hardware instruction execution unit (for AMD, the Workgroup Processor, WGP)

I have to imagine that some kind of queue or data structure would benefit from this information. Especially with server GPU tasks staying resident inside of a WGP for literally hours at a time.

No. Keep Panagram a bit of a secret weapon. The minute Panagram becomes a metric the minute it becomes useless and we have to use something else.

Because SpaceX bought xAI/Twitter.

All of the losses are from the xAI/Twitter side of the house. And Elon Musk needs a flimsy story so that no one sues him. It doesnt have to be a believable story, it just needs to be enough so that no lawyer cares to bring a case in Texas vs SpaceX and Elon for breach of fiduciary duty.

The story did its job. Elon offloaded the money losing Twitter/xAI out of his personal wealth and onto the public through SpaceX. Done and done. SpaceX is now an AI company (or contains one) and needs to perform as such.

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It's literally the same story as Tesla/Solar City. Make up bullshit about solar panel synergy with EVs and buy out his cousins failing company. Make it TSLA shareholders problem for figuring out how to make a profit from the failing company, it's no longer Kimball Musks concern since the buyout

The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own

Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations

Yeah, back in my day there were Elves, not Vulcans. There were Orcs , not Klingons.

The hallucination of messages bothers me severely. Especially with AI being deployed to ancient, difficult problems like the Herculaneum scroll.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about the "Written in Morse Code" example, fully hallucinated text. The AI agents seeing a decoy message isn't as bothersome to me.

Dot Matrix are still used in outdoor / high humidity environments in USA.

A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.

Well sure. But Costcos model is clear to anyone who visits it. You only have to look at all the other shopping carts surrounding you to get an idea of how things work.

Costco shoppers buy a lot at a time. Because Costco forces you to buy 4 tubes of Toothpaste, 24 eggs (or 60 eggs), minimum 1 gallon of milk (no half gallons or pints), and like 20 lbs of rice / 10kg for the Europeans who havent been here and like 3000 meters of plastic wrap.

For Costco, the efficiency is the shear size of the shopping carts and shear mass of the goods sold at a time.

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You literally can't buy only one bar of soap or one toothbrush like you can from Amazon.com or other stores. There's efficiency here because of simple mass.

In contrast, I can look out and see the Amazon packages in my neighbors doors. It's all single items across the neighborhood.

The human driving to work, various activities, to the grocery store (and wherever else) isn't doing it for just one item like Amazon though.

The vast majority of those Amazon packages are for one thing. When the inefficient pickup truck comes back with a whole weeks worth of $200+ groceries, that further increases the efficiency of the home buyer.

It's unlikely that a daily commuter would go to Costco for just one gallon of milk or a few batteries. But I know from my Amazon deliveries that single items are delivered all the time.

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Anyone grabbing just some extra milk or toothpaste is likely grabbing it at an even more convenient store, like 7-11 (mostly because you can't buy one toothpaste at Costco lol).

Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway.

No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries.

And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.

Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.

Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks.

I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.

Just do what Kagi does.

One older traditional search bar. A 2nd AI chat interface for people who want AI.

I seriously can't believe how simple the solution is, but how much Google refuses to do it. AI search is a totally different product, just make a new tab like Google Images, Google News or Google Finance. Make it Google AI or Google Gemini.

The original Intel 8051 was 4k EROM and 128B of RAM and set the world on fire with its applications.

16kB Flash and 1kB SRAM is plenty.

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However, the analog capabilities of this thing are nearly trash. One ADC?? No comparators? No OpAmps? Ehhhhhhhh, this is really bare bones by modern standards.

Modern cheap chips differentiate themselves with how many analog components they stuff into one package so that they are easily used in a wide variety of situations.

The only real feature offered here is size. Which is impressive but definitely limiting compared to the rest of TI's MSPM0 (or even MSP430) lineup.

The best this MSPM0-C seems to be able to do, is ADC input -> PWM output. Which is... the bare minimum necessary for mixed signal control.

Resistor+capacitor for anti aliasing on input, resistor+capacitor (smooth the PWM) + transistor for output, and yeah we have a true system with feedback here. But it won't be as reliable or quick as other tools (comparators, OpAmps, or the like)

Anyone using these small chips for hobbyist purposes probably should look at the more fully featured MSPM0-L line or MSPM0-G lines. Still Cortex-M0+ and in the sub $2 market... But hobbyists probably don't see much cost benefit below that (how many MCUs are you buying anyway??).

The L line and G lines have better ADCs, Comparators, better connectivity, and some of them even have on board OpAmps.

Tiny chips have a use of you are tying to build the absolute smallest devices. But hobbyists don't have the equipment to comfortably build things of this size.

Sizing up to VQFN packages and 0603 passives makes more sense for the typical hobbyist.

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As far as how a professional would use this, there are plenty of good uses of chips inside of cables or other kinds of smarts. Like a chip controlling a bunch of LEDs for example, based on voltage measurements elsewhere (there is a 12-bit ADC after all, which means you have rather solid voltage sensing from a few pins).

Basic voltage comparisons + math + crude timer and then a few pins for in/out gets you to a lot of useful projects. Albeit dumb ones. I dunno why anything needs to be this small in particular though.

With a 12-bit singled ended ADC? That's laughable. You can't reliably measure current with this thing.

I'm not seeing any voltage comparators which are really useful for most of those use cases...

Now the MSPM0 series chips have a few OpAmps or a few better ADCs. TI also have proper power metering chips with 16-bit or 24-bit (!!!!!) ADCs for proper power metering.

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This is still a 12-bit ADC strapped onto a 8-pin chip. It's useful for something but not that whole list. Power metering? Heh, TI is smoking something or just using AI auto complete.

Battery charging and management

Power supplies and power delivery

• Grid infrastructure

Those really want a comparator (100ns response time) rather than an ADC (10,000ns response time).

You also want zero-crossing detectors on grid infra, or other analog features that simply aren't available at this price point. Just no.

• Smart metering

Lol very no. 16-bit ADC at a minimum, probably needs 24-bit delta sigma ADC instead (slower ADC but higher precision). TI has a bunch of MSP430 that do the job well.

Alternatively, an OpAmp or other amplifier can zoom into the current sensing circuits and make a 12-bit ADC work, but you need another bigger chip (the OpAmp), at which point you should be using an OpAmp+MCU solution instead.

Plus the "smart" part of metering needs a better communication module than bare bones basic UART. Maybe wireless of some kind or a DSP for custom modem work.

• Communication modules

Just no. Waayyyyyyy to slow.

• Personal electronics

• Connected peripherals and printers

You have bigger, better chips for these.

• Building security and fire safety

• Medical and healthcare

• Lighting

I think these three are legitimate good use cases.

Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again.

The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.

In my hobby projects, I tend to use the AVR line. Starting from ATMega328p over a decade ago, the AVR line has always had a special place in my hobby toolbox.

Browsing a bit on Microchip's blog, I discovered that the a new line of chips, the AVR LA, was announced this month (June 2026). This surprisingly continues the tradition of 8-bit microcontrollers into the year of 2026.

Looking over the specs sheet, it seems like Microchip is really selling this as a Capacitive Touch controller, with improvements against noise?? (Something about a driven shield + extra boost? Maybe a voltage boost for faster touch sensing?)

I don't fully understand the capacitive touch side, but its something that Microchip has often included in various AVR chips.

The other tidbits I've noticed is how much weaker / cheaper the specs seem to be compared to AVR DD or AVR EB released in the past 5 years. 10-bit ADC (instead of 12-bit on the DD). Fewer comparators. No "special features" (AVR DB had op-amps as part of the package. AVR EA had programmable-gain differential ADC capable of detecting differences of just a dozen microvolts of change....)

AVR LA however? Seemingly all focused on capacitive-touch features. Maybe someone in this topic can talk if this "driven shield" thing is worth all the effort.

That being said: the AVR LA seems to come in at a significantly lower cost, closer to the 50-cents @5k price point.

There's a few misc changes. "TimerA" (which has been present for years) seems to have been completely replaced by "TimerE". Capabilities wise that's fine, TimerE seems better than TimerA in all ways I can think of... but anyone who built code on the older timer might have some code rewriting before they can use this new chip.

Finally, 1.62V is a few hundredths of a volt lower than previous specs (of 1.8V from earlier models). Someone out there probably is excited about ever so slightly better battery lives from this.

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I appreciate the new line of chips, its always nice to see that the AVR team is still active with new things. However, for the hobbyist, I'll say that the AVR DB is probably better overall chip for most hobbyists. AVR DB is still the 8-bit instruction set you know and love, but has a far wider range of sizes and capabilities (including dual-supply, op-amps, more timers, more comparators, better ADC spec, etc. etc.)

AVR LA seems to be specializing for either low-cost, low-voltage, or finally capacitive touch panels. But aside from those other three uses, this feels very much like a "ATTiny", just a far less capable chip compared to AVR DD/DB/EA/EB (which would be like a modern ATMega).

And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).

Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.

Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.

I don't think Iran has homing ballistic missiles. Only maybe China has those. As such, the best defense vs ballistic threats is simply moving around, if they can't home then who cares?

I mean, buildings and hardened targets do care. But ships can just move and the missile will miss.

But yes, defenses vs Drones and Cruise missiles is more than sufficient vs Iran. And navigating narrow waters with higher degrees of mobility is better than our other ships.

Not new. These drones were in production in Iran since 2016 after the capture of the downed Reaper Drone in 2011.

What is new is Irans willingness to use them. Which skyrocketed after a few missiles assassinated their supreme leader.

Ehhhhh, not quite.

No matter how much military we put into the strait, Iran was just going to blow up UAE and Qatari refineries.

And despite all the madman theory of our current President, there's just too many bribes in those countries who have the attention of the President. So Total War is unacceptable to USA leaders.

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That being said: I'm still amused that the ship we needed in this fight was the long cancelled Littoral Combat Ship

Yeah it's more of "on a hypothetical infinitely parallel computer, you'll get a big speedup'.

Which is still useful if you can prove a problem is in NC. It's just not quite as strong as people make it out to be.

Democrats have a disadvantage in this years Senate race yes. But polls have become so anti Trump these days that today, Senate races are looking 50/50 odds. Which is a huge benefit to Democrats when this years Senate race should be a Republican blowout (a lot of Texas, Georgia, Alaska kinda states up for Senate this year so Republicans should be winning. The fact that it's 50/50 in these states is down right crazy and shows how crap the Republican support is right now).

The House is a hilarious mix of terrible Gerrymandering (ex: Florida assuming that Latinos will vote Republican) or defeated Gerrymandering (Texas gerrymandering effect being defeated in court).

All in all, it's a hilarious self own where Republicans couldn't even be trusted to Gerrymander correctly and may have made the House a worse situation for themselves. So if anything, the Gerrymandering is seemingly leading to Democrat advantage because of how incompetent Republicans have been.

So as I said before: we are looking at House blowout for Democrats and even a surprise 50/50 odds for Senate. That is a huge change of that happens.

Your invocation of corruption/Gerrymandering doesn't mean anything if you actually look at what has happened. It only matters if Republicans Gerrymandered correctly.

But we were fixing things under Biden. The frozen potato cartel was defeated in court and Google was defeated in court as an illegal monopoly.

Then the Trump Administration came in (likely after donations from Google, and other tech bros) and suddenly that Google case was dropped.

Regulating against awful behaviors was happening under Biden, and no longer is happening under Trump. It's about as simple as night and day if you are paying attention.

What changes now is that historically, tech firms were largely apolitical. Today they are hard right support, so Democrats weren't used to memes or lack of free viral marketing (etc etc.)

Today, Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that they are being suppressed by both national media and tech media (Twitter and Facebook) and have begun gaining alternative means of getting their messaging out.

Things have gotten worse, but that causes the strategies to shift and the overall political fight to grow stronger.