thijson

We used Proakis in grad school. For undergrad we used:

Communication Systems by Simon Haykin

I've watched youtube videos where the farmer is complaining that his million dollar combine has to do a regen cycle. Each hour that machine is running is costing the farm hundreds of dollars in depreciation.

I know that I trust products from Costco being good quality, I'm less likely to regret my purchase decision. I've been burned with stuff I got on Amazon being crappy.

Just got a window air conditioner on the Costco web site, delivered to the home. That was 25% cheaper than in the store.

I used mine in Iceland too. It was one of the cheaper places to eat there. Still expensive though compared to the USA. I heard that the Costco hot dog and a soda is still $1.50 in Hawaii, that's a bargain.

For top if you use the > character it will sort by memory usage. I use that sometimes to figure out why my host is becoming laggy. Also you'll see swapd is taking up CPU.

That would require an energy market with spot prices that incentivize the buildout.

Maybe mix it with cat nip. My Mom used to have to mix medicine in with the pig's feed. They were very good at eating around the medicine. To get around that she would prepare a concoction of beer and molasses and feed and the medicine. They then ate all of it.

One thing I've learned with concrete recently is that the drum mixer is less efficient than the mud mixer. For the drum mixer you prepare batches, the consistency between batches may not be very good. The batch of concrete is pretty heavy too. The mud mixer has a steady dribble of concrete coming out of the tip, you can be doing other things while it comes out. It's not as heavy to reposition either. The consistency of the concrete is better too.

If a concrete truck can reach the spot, that's the easiest.

This video shows a mud mixer in action around the 25 minute mark.

https://youtu.be/CbrZX6n3F-g

I think the Athenians named our current system an oligarchy. Selection by lot would take a lot of the corrupting influence of money out of the system too. There would need to be safeguards though, similar to how juries are protected during a trial.

I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.

Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents.

I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.

For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.

Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.

I wonder if this creates opportunity for spinning up competitors to these PE owned companies. If they are underinvesting in their products in order to extract value eventually their offerings will not be competitive.

I'm not sure it's quite as clean cut as you say. FPGA's have a 10x penalty in area due to the extra routing wires they need.

Also, it seems like the node that Xilinx has been using lately (28 nm) isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.

The issue with Venus and Mars is that there is no magnetosphere. Over geological time periods the hydrogen is slowly lost into space. All that CO2 in the atmosphere could become H20 given enough introduced hydrogen, and photosynthesis.

It is bigger news indeed. I think previously China and Saudi were settling their account deficit with gold, a big airplane load every now and then.

There's an alternative path that removes carbon from the cycle:

electricity + H20 + N2 -> NH3 + O2

Ammonia can be liquified and stored similar to Propane, it does attack copper and brass.

It can be burned in an internal combustion engine, it's about half as energy dense as hydrocarbons though.

There's a danger to humans from it though, it requires sprinkler systems if there is ever a leak.

I think that a large part of the energy budget in a plant is harvesting and concentrating CO2 from the air. N2 is a lot more abundant in the air.

There is work currently on using giant sodium batteries in these large container ships. That might be more cost effective than the above longer term.

Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.

Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.

Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.

I understand that caning leaves lifetime scars, at least the type I heard about. It's not something you can put weight on for a while.

I think that's why people gravitate towards friendly dogs. Dogs have no deception in their intent, and they communicate it physically well before you reach them.

I learned it on QNX too, Burroughs ICON computer with a watcom compiler. Those computers too need to be preserved. If anyone has software for them, please upload to archive.org

It's possible to navigate around the solar system with very little energy input. It just takes a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...

I've read that the chip manufacturers are looking into high bandwidth flash for on package storage of ai models. That would solve some of the cost issue, flash is significantly cheaper than dram.

I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.

I recently heard that a professor said to the class, you can use an ai to solve the assignments. However I'll see if you really understand the material on the final exam.

Maybe the solution is for an AI that acts as an instructor instead of just trying to solve everything itself. I do this with my kids, they ask me how to do something. I will give them hints, but not outright do it all for them. The article writer in the first part mentioned that this is how they would instruct too.

In the 80's the Americans thought that the Russians were backwards to be still using vacuum tubes in their military vehicles. Later they found out that they were being used because they are more tolerant to EMP from a nuclear blast.

I remember my Dad buying a 386 25MHz a few years earlier for a similar amount.

In 1984 he bought a TRS-80 for almost a thousand dollars. 32kB RAM, around 1 MHz 8 bit CPU.

I bought a Pentium 90 in the late 90's for several thousand dollars. It had the FDIV bug in it.

After experiencing a lifetime of high depreciation in electronics, I'm extremely price sensitive when buying it. I feel that if I wait a few years everything will become much cheaper. Maybe that's not the case with the slow down in Moore's law and the AI datacenter build out.

I think there was sometime that drowned that was, Angela Chao, sister of former U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. She backed into the lake or pond with her Tesla and was trapped.

I think that the Scout brand of trucks may also return to everything manual. They are supposed to be targeting cost.

I saw another model where the PE buys a hospital. They sell the land under the hospital, everyone gets a cut, then they spin out the hospital. Now the hospital has to pay rent on the land it sits on.

It seems like almost every decision made is for short term gain, at the cost of long term viability.