HN user

pdoege

107 karma
Posts0
Comments55
View on HN
No posts found.

When I was building data enters in populated areas there were regulations for noise, visual signature, power usage, and etc. It looks like a lot of these newer sites are in low regulation areas. Which is great for profit margin, and not so great for neighbors.

A mobile provider enters into marketing sharing agreements with credit card companies. It extracts housing information from local property and tax records. It enters into marketing sharing agreements with retailers, payment processors like ADP. Same with license plate reading companies, loan companies, banks, professional organizations, etc.

It fills its data lakes with the vectorization and down tilt data that it collects every day. It uses federated batched Hadoop tasks to join the above data lakes into one large data lake. Mid-PB in size.

Then it looks for mobile phones that travel to the 400 block at night and stay there, that are buying dentist stuff from Walmart, travel to a dentist office every workday, have an income over $120k, and are a member of the local dentist society. Maybe look for someone with dentist student loans, graduated with a dental degree.

None of those data points can identify an individual. Taken together they can ID just about anybody.

But maybe there is a chance that you ID their wife/husband. So maybe include/exclude people that regularly visit OBGYN offices.

Back in the day we could link cell numbers to credit card purchases in locations to the point of being to identify the name of the person and what they purchased and where it was purchased. For all people in a metro area that were using credit cards and physically visiting stores.

No

"Of the 2024 Medicaid improper payments, 79.11% were the result of insufficient documentation. These payments typically involve situations where a state or provider missed an administrative step and do not necessarily indicate fraud or abuse."

Depending on the year, that means that intentional fraud is around 1.8%, almost all of it over charging by medical companies and physicians.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/fiscal-year-2024-im...

Yeah, that might not be the best example. Normally you’d want a double seal or really tuned compression to reliably hit IP68. And the o-ring adds a manufacturing step. And you have to design the case to properly compress the oring. And case assembly is harder because screwing up that interface will increase chargeback. And you’ll need to modify the audio test fixtures to add a jack. And the audio test has to include a headphone test. Any failures increases rework, so you gotta budget for that too. Probably need to add a cheap earbud to the box, so you gotta add a packaging step and a bigger box. And once you sell the phone, any failure within the contracted return window will increase chargeback.

Seems like a lot of faf. I tell you what, why don’t we wait for a bigger OEM to remove the darned things, and if it doesn’t hurt there bottom line we’ll just quietly scrap the idea?

And that’s how we got here.

Z stack strength and rigidity is a huge driver because it reduces charge back. Margins are super tight for a lot of OEMs and the PMs eliminate any non-profit features.

Off the top of my head, there are savings in: Pick and place Stack Assembly Testing Improved phones/hour and therefore shorter/cheaper factory runs Packaging, especially if you eliminate the shitty wired earpieces in the box Less weight/volume and cheaper shipping Reduced warranty / chargeback because things that don’t exist can’t fail

All of these savings are small. But remember that the goal is to make/sell 500K+ units. And, this is an industry where the bean counters will kill their mothers to shave a penny off of the BOM.

So, yeah, for the OEM eliminating headphone jacks is a complete no brainer.

Can confirm. Dmitry saved the Fire tablet by finding an error in TI’s BSP while J.S. documented the repro steps, and gave me the info to get it fixed. This was during manufacture, 3 days before public release iirc.

He also rescued the Bowser pinmux that I had screwed up. And stepped in when the display IP didn’t work. And a ton of other heroic engineering.

The early Fire Phone engineering team was really talented and Dmitry was the best.

I used to do fast descents of Bonny Doon and similar. Think 60Mph / 100kmhr at the base. With my fat butt and damp brakes I would run through the stop signs at the bottom using rim brakes.

I’ll never go back to rim brakes now that I’ve had discs. I still use my rim brake bikes for clear weather around town. For real work it is discs every single time.

The author seems to have only used bicycles in optimal conditions.

I think it is even worse. NAVAIR had the 14 with its massive capabilities and instead spent a ton of money improving the A6, A7, a bunch of canceled projects, picked the effing LOSER of the LWF program, and then effed the 2 stealth projects and got out of the 2010s with extremely limited capability.

Even worse, the money that could have been spent building ships that would be useful in a conflict with CN was spent on effing GUN Cruisers (!!!) and littoral ships that didn’t even work.

Imagine instead if the USN had 8 additional Burkes, upgraded/refurbed 47s, Aegis/VLS across the fleet, and a hi/lo of updated, maintainable 14s and 16s.

The US taxpayer spent billions and billions and got nothing. It’s been huge scandal for 30+ years

The desktop user experience has been quite good

Virtualization Framework’s VLAN support is not mature and getting more than 100 machines per rack has proven difficult. The need for additional switches, patch panels, uplinks and cooling makes multi-thousand machine installations slow due to the recent logistics unpleasantness.

Using Studios is hard because of massive delays to orders. Especially the ‘big’ machines in 1,000 unit quantities.

x86 and x86/GPU still seems to be the best approach for prod datacenter use.

Otherwise I am a fan

No, it's because Apple phones have margin. They make money. Their competitors desperately want to make money.

They make their money selling phones wholesale into retailing supply chains. One of the rules of those supply chains is that the OEM eats the costs of early returns.

So they removed every widget that they possibly could and then glued everything down so that it could not possibly come loose, be dropped, wedged etc. during the warranty period.

Battery doors, headphone jacks, you name it. All gone.

End customers don't seem to care. Phones with swappable batteries, headphone jacks, etc. exist. They don't sell well in high margin markets.

Yeah, Spinlaunch is going to dump a lot of energy into the lower atmosphere, shed its glowing white hot shell, and then need get enough deltaV to put up a payload.

Anyway, the earliest patent I could find was a steam centripetal launcher in 1918. It never went anywhere and it has been followed by a number of improbable reinventions that all faded away.

NASA and the US Army tried again in 1982 and thought they could put a 60g projectile down range at 3 km/s. Mach 8. Guns and rockets could perform as well or better with simpler systems and the idea was shelved.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US1332992 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982ITM....18..209F/abstra...

NAVSEA had no idea what they are doing with regards to C&C on subs. NAWCTSD used to have good ideas.

I remember that the NAVSEA rules were that you had to recover from a crash in less than 30 secs. The NAWCTSD rules under Ahlers were that you were not allowed to crash.

Big contractors with big budgets ruled the roost and delivered poor results. I wish that the NAWCTSD "More with less" ideas had lasted.

No.

Carriers routinely back haul GPS data and angle data to geo locate users. At the time this information was batched nightly against transaction data provided by credit card (and other) partners in order to build customer profiles that can be marketed to advertisers.

Carriers in the USA provide this data to law enforcement for fees. This is a profit center at the carriers that I've worked for.

Some countries limit the commercial exploitation of this data, some require judicial involvement. I don't know of any country that does not avail themselves to this data.

Yeah, I suffered through this. "We all have aches and pains", "Don't catastrophize", etc.

Turns out I had a chunk of spinal disc the size of my little finger impinging on my spinal column.

I think that this "mind-body" stuff is woo. Drugs work. Physical therapy works. Woo doesn't.

However, woo is really cheap. And it offloads the blame onto the victim.

I don't think it is true that bombs damage an area. For example, when I worked on ADF nukes we were interested in the volumes necessary to destroy targets located in 3D airspace.

Similarly underwater explosions caused spherical and columnar affects depending on yield and depth.

For coal in the USA the stated cost for MWh in 2010 was $41. The external cost was $58.

This does not include for implicit and explicit subsidies. Including those would make the external costs higher.

The numbers change by country, time, energy source, and etc. so asking for a quotation is a bit of a fishing expedition. See Tables 1 and 2 at: https://www.climateadvisers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2...

If you have the spare time to read 507 pages of support, please see: https://www.nap.edu/download/12794