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markemer

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Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.

You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.

Yeah as a New Yorker and someone that's lived in the Boston to Washington megalopolis basically my whole life, a lot of Europe feels very familiar. I felt right at home in Lisbon.

I’ve known companies to give exit packages on firing to avoid a lawsuit since you sign away rights to sue for illegal firing and it’s a nice cheap bribe. Mostly the big lawsuit targets do this. Not usually as good as the layoff package, but something. But not all places do it, of course. I mean even layoff packages are optional, really.

That’s been my thought since the TikTok ban as well. It was meant for people, but this for sure seems to meet the spirit of the prohibition. Does it actually violate it? We’ll have to see once the cases work their way through.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an EE, but I really got into the data modes too. Like did you know how stupid simple old school pagers are to create signals for? You have to make some slight modifications get them into the Ham Bands (or buy a new one, apparently a thing!) but after that it’s just 512 baud FSK.

There isn’t a ton of work being done in ObjC anymore. I’ve interviewed quite a few junior iOS developer candidates that didn’t even know it. There are some holdouts, of course.

As I’ve been doing Mac/iOS programming since the retain release days, ObjC has a place in my heart, but swift is a decade old now (was announced 10 years ago this WWDC) and is pretty much the app language of choice.

Now that the ABI stabilized, even binary library authors are getting in on it.

Newer stuff like SwiftUI and SwiftData you might want to wait on, but Swift is pretty much most of what I’m up to these days.

OpenFPGA 2 years ago

Yeah. Open toolchains have come a long way, but they’re not there yet. The Lattice ICE family are the best supported.

OpenFPGA 2 years ago

Verilog is just a logic implementation. It should be pretty portable. There are some issues, and certainly the bitstreams won’t be compatible, but if C still works, I imagine verilog would too.

OpenFPGA 2 years ago

That’s how I see it too. The FPGA version are knock offs, like would have been done back in the day but with fancy future hardware. A gate level reproduction would be kinda strange aside from pure desire for preservation. (Which is still a decent goal, just not of these projects)