hardolaf

No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.

As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.

No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.

You have absolutely no idea what an ASIC costs compared to a FPGA. A FPGA that can compete with a tinytapeout chip costs a few dollars at most in extremely low quantites. Something high performance would need probably TSMC 12nm or similar at a minimum. At that point, you're talking $1M+ between licensing fees and direct costs to just go on a shuttle. If you want to make your own higher volume run or can't wait for shuttle spot, you're looking easily $5-10M minimum for your first 6 wafers. Comparatively, FPGAs competitive with TSMC 12nm run from a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each. So for low volume, they're very competitive.

But ShotSpotter doesn't actually work (almost every alert is a false positive). So what value would this add?

Both SystemVerilog and VHDL have AMS extensions for simulating analog circuits. They work pretty well but you also pay a pretty penny for the simulator licenses for them.

I use AI for side projects because Google gives me a stupid large number of tokens that refresh every 6-24 hours on my existing $10/mo Google One plan. I see it as my civic duty to help increase their costs by producing slop that I generally throw away anyways because it doesn't actually work after it gets generated.

At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.

In my systems, I just go to an error log that gets posted to a Slack channel then go to the the log file and grep for full message that got dumped to Slack. That then gives me everything that happened before and a state dump after. That state dump can be given to a program to tell us if any state errored and what happened before tells us what the expectation was and what the precise error was. Using a LLM would just be slower and more expensive for this.

I can't get an LLM to properly handle analyzing a single 200K+ line log without making things up so whatever anyone is saying about this "working" is probably a lie.

Heavy rail and light rail costs are very comparable unless you want to bury them. But it doesn't matter which you bury, they still cost about the same.

I also live in Chicago but unlike you, I have musculoskeletal issues that can be minor to the point of not noticing or to the point of it being painful to walk more than 2-3 blocks at a time. So doubling the distance between blocks would be the difference between me being able to use the bus and me needing to drive or use the far more expensive for taxpayers paratransit service.

And beyond that, the 6% of average time savings seen in studies of similar systems would be about the same improvement as adding curb bump outs which would save the bus time by not needing to repeatedly merge back into traffic. And that work is already happening across the city without inconveniencing anyone or causing users with disabilities from being discriminated against by armchair urban planners.

Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.

Cars are the cheap part of auto insurance claims.

Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.

I tried out Netgear Orbi and I don't know who it's actually for. It tried deploying it at my dad's place, but had to return it because it just doesn't work. Dropped in Ubiquiti gear to replace it and I had the entire network up and running within 15 minutes of applying power. And it's had zero of the issues that I had with Netgear's system.

The Ubiquiti 5 port switch is actually better than the Netgear one because it's POE powered whereas I don't think the Netgear one is.

I haven't really seen cheaper overall solutions for medium-sized home deployments than their gear. I need a layer 3 switch with 1 SFP+ 10Gbe port, and at least 5 1/2.5/5/10 Gbe copper ports with POE++ on at least 2 ports. I cannot find a cheaper solution that the USW-Pro-XG-8-PoE from any vendor. If you know one, please let me know.

Sure some of their hardware is overpriced, but they're pushing the limits of what's available in the 10 and 25 Gbe areas at relatively reasonable prices.

The corollary to them just working is that if they don't, they don't just ignore you like Apple. I reported a bug between two pieces of their hardware when talking to a specific 5Gbe NIC via their support without a support contract. They took a week to get back to me with a member of their QA department talking directly with me and having me validate beta firmware with them. After about a week of back-and-forth, they had a fixed version that has been deployed globally to everyone.

Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't fixed bugs that I reported to them between 2012 and 2014 while working for one of the largest universities in North America as a level 2 tech.

I get 1 mile of walking in a day at a minimum just going to and from the train in Chicago. I hit the 6K steps minimum that my watch wants by default every day by around 1-2pm if I take the bus transfer from the train to my office. I usually end around 8-10K steps just doing my commute and walking around the office. Going to the grocery store is another 2K steps roundtrip. Going out to dinner is another 1+ mile of walking minimum unless I get fast food.

When I lived in suburbs, I had to go out of my way to get even 6K steps in a whole day.

Your first source is trying to sell a service, namely lawsuits against your ex. The law in 2022 was the same [0] in regards to the text that I mentioned. And as far as I can tell, that's the original text of the law as it was first passed in 1987.

The 2024 update [1] was basically just fixing typos.

The 2023 update [2] was reaffirming the original text and added safeguards to prevent abuse by police and prosecutors misapplying the law. This update did remove the explicit age mentioned, but if you look at the deleted text, you had to leave a minor unattended for a very long period of time not just "a trip to the store" for the law to have been violated before the change despite what the divorce attorneys were trying to tell people on their misleading website.

Also, I'm not going to go into my rant about IPI intentionally misleading people and lying by omissions and funny ways of presenting "data". If you use them as a source for anything and expect that what you read was the truth, then that's on you. They're a propaganda organization that spreads even more disinformation than the Heritage Foundation.

[0] https://codes.findlaw.com/il/chapter-705-courts/il-st-sect-7...

[1] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0605

[2] https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/103-0233

In Chicago, kids start going to school by themselves between 8 and 13 depending on how comfortable their parents are with them behaving properly on the way to school.

It's not illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended in Illinois. It is however illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended for an unreasonable amount of time in Illinois.

Here's an actual page from the government explaining the law and even providing the text of the law: https://dcfs.illinois.gov/for-families/safety/preparing-your...

If you follow their advice and your child is ready to reasonably able to be left alone unattended, you can leave even 8-9 year olds unattended for long periods of time. It's not odd for children to be home alone after school for 4-8+ hours.

Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

Kids go all over the place in Chicago while under 14 without their parents. It's literally not an issue.

Renewables outside of solar farms where solar is installed at ground level, also have a significantly higher death and serious injury rate than nuclear does per GWH produced even after including the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing in the numbers to make nuclear look worse.

Wow. So you really know nothing about the technology and are just spreading fear. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is mostly safe for people now outside of the fact that Russia is current bombing Ukraine.

The issue with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii is one of money and political will, not one of technology. We've had the ability to clean up nuclear accidents since the 1950s.

Also, the future of power is increasingly looking like LNG plants which pump only slightly less radioactive carbon into the atmosphere than coal plants do.

Sure that makes sense from a support perspective. My FPGA tools also only support a small number of OSes. But they, like ROCm, run fine on pretty much anything as up to date or newer.

I will agree that RHEL has gotten better about upgrading software when they do minor releases but I'm still painfully aware of the pre-9.X days when they would release a new version and the software was already a year out of date.

I personally used Fedora for a long time at the same time as I ran Arch Linux on servers. I honestly couldn't really tell the difference as long as I was updating Fedora every time a version bump came out. The release cadence was fast enough that it never caused problems. I ended up switching to it for my home devices entirely. Though now I run SteamOS and CachyOS because they're Arch without the headaches of Arch.

I'm going to say this in a not nice way: that's a you problem.

You willingly use a distribution which purposely ships out of date software based on some misguided philosophical belief that such a behavior makes the system better or more stable. In reality, it just means that you're running out of date software with security vulnerabilities, bad driver support, and even worse distribution maintainer half-assed patches to fix the aforementioned vulnerabilities.

I'm not saying that you should switch to Arch Linux, but there is a wide gap between RHEL and Debian based distributions and a continuously rolling distribution. There are distributions that update weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.

The FPGA market has been growing in size despite GPGPU taking off. And clock speed difference is closer to 4-5x not 20x. Despite that and the lower area efficiency of FPGAs, there have been price and power competitive FPGA accelerators cards released over the last 5 years. Sure, you're not going to get an A100's performance, but you can get deterministic latency below 5us for something that the A100 would take a minimum of 50us to process. GPGPU isn't ideal for its current use case either so FPGA based designs have a lot of room to work in to get better, application specific accelerators.

SV requires a linter for literally every single line change that you do because the language is rotten to the core by being based on Verilog. Heck, it has an entire chapter of it's LRM dedicated to the non-deterministic behavior inherent to its description of the hardware. VHDL has no such section because it is deterministic.

Both languages suck for different reasons but no one has figured out how to make a better language and output a netlist from it (yes, there is an open interchange standard that almost every proprietary tool supports).

You're conflating open source IP cores such as LiteX with open source FPGA tooling to try to make the latter look better by using the former. Everyone knows that vendor IP is pretty terrible if you don't use it in the very narrow window in which it's validated and tested. That's why big defense contractors all use either the Northwest Logic or Rambus PCI-e cores on everything prior to Versal.

But at the same time, those cores are big and powerful, and optimize horribly because the customers who actually use them need all of those features. Those customers aren't really concerned with area but rather with meeting performance requirements. Using the Xilinx provided QDMA core, I've been able to achieve line rate performance on PCI-e 4.0 x16 for large DMA transactions with a setup time of about 3 total days of work. I'd like to see an open source solution that could even do that with just ACKing raw TLPs because I haven't found one yet.

As for pricing, AMD/Xilinx and Altera don't want you as a customer. They want to sign $10M+/yr accounts or accounts which push the envelope of what's possible in terms of frequency (HFT). And they price their products accordingly for the public. If you actually end up as a direct customer, the prices are significantly cheaper to the point where those cheaper Chinese vendors don't make sense to use.

I'm in the USA with nominally a 1.25 Gb/s down, 50 Mb/s connection from my cable ISP. And you'd think that it would be fast, low latency, and reliable. Well that would be true except my ISP is Xfinity (Comcast). At least 4 times per week, I experience frequent packet loss that works with older web servers but makes most newer TCP based technology just fail. And the connection will randomly fail for 10 minutes to 2 days at a time and sure they give me a credit for it.

So anyways, I bring this up with my local government in Chicago and they recommend that I switch to AT&T Fiber because it's listed as available at my address in the FCC's database. Well, I would love to do that except that

1. The FCC's database was wrong and rejected my corrections multiple times before AT&T finally ran fiber to my building this year (only 7 years after they claimed that it was available in the database despite refusing to connect to the building whenever we tried).

2. Now that it is in the building, their Fiber ISP service can't figure out that my address exists and has existing copper telephone lines run to it by AT&T themselves so their system cannot sell me the service. I've been arguing with them for 3 months on this and have even sent them pictures of their own demarc and the existing copper lines to my unit.

3. Even if they fixed the 1st issue, they coded my address as being on a different street than its mailing address and can't figure out how to sell me a consumer internet plan with this mismatch. They could sell me a business internet plan at 5x the price though.

And that's just my personal issues. And I haven't even touched on how not every cell phone is equally reliable, how the switch to 5G has made many cell phones less reliable compared to 3G and 4G networks, how some people live next to live event venues where they can have great mobile connections 70% of the time but the other 30% of the time it becomes borderline unusable, etc.