Posts by gecho 152 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2013
Musk must be really desperate resorting to taking SpaceX public after all the SEC regulatory trouble he's gotten in over the years with Tesla making careless promises and statements. With SpaceX being private he could make all sorts of grandiose pronouncements. Now that it's going public he has to jettison all his Mars BS as there will be regulatory ramifications.
Nothing would get my anxiety up at work when a complex assignment was given to someone who didn't know what they were doing, then I would be responsible for fixing it without knowing what they did. Due to the nature of the real time database we worked with it often involved irreversible data loss from process equipment that streams data without logging it. But the client was a disaster themselves and never seemed to notice or care.
I'm curious what the backstory is. Are they just a particularly badly managed company or is the US courting disaster onshoring semiconductor manufacturing? Wolfspeed is in a particularly hot sector of the semiconductor industry making components for high power EV inverters, compact electronically scanned radar, and communications.
This story reminded me to give LibreOffice a try after using OnlyOffice for a few months. OnlyOffice annoyingly wouldn't save the scroll position in spreadsheets if the page had frozen panes. Since the spreadsheet I use most is a daily cycling log with a frozen summary at the top I was having to scroll further and further with each passing day to get to the current date. That behavior has gone unfixed despite being on their support forum a year and a half ago.
LibreOffice Calc handles it just fine, and I prefer the default fonts.
Every cent from the DOGE massacre and tariffs will go to tax cuts for the rich. As the plan currently stands, those tax cuts will add 4 trillion to the national debt. The US needs to ramp up chip production as they'll be cut off from the leading edge once China invades Taiwan possibly leading to TSMC destroying their EUV machines.
I got a newer computer last week and decided to install Ubuntu. Pretty much everything I was using on Windows works on Linux. Switched my copy of Office 2007 for OnlyOffice which looks pretty similar. Struggled a bit on the weekend converting my windows batch files to bash scripts, but its all good now. So I've got my bicycle gps trace Spatialite database and batch gpx file import running with QGIS front end. And my mkgmap scripts to generate custom Garmin maps for my bike GPS. JOSM OpenStreetMap editor. Kdenlive video editor. I finished setting up GIMP yesterday because unlike the Windows version the batch plugin needs to be compiled separately.
I also installed digiKam for managing my photos. Since most of my photos were taken while cycling I was able to a utility called Geotagging to update all the photos with gps coordinates where they were taking. Unfortunately that required a lot of manual intervention over 2 days. My camera loses about a minute a month requiring constant tweaking of the offset between gps time and camera time. And there was half a year where the camera date was off by a month. By the time I got to the latest images the camera time was off by 53 minutes.
As a compromise to keyboard muscle memory I mapped Windows Key + E to open the Ubuntu file browser.
One piece of advice from an Ubuntu noob, is that when setting up your applications you may want to install Debian packages instead of using the App Center to install Snap packages. With Snap packages being read only I couldn't modify the default document templates for OnlyOffice. And in another instance I couldn't get the current version of an app.
I might actually do that as I've used Linux before and most of the few apps I use have Linux versions. The only Windows specific app I use regularly is Office 2007 to open a spreadsheet with a bunch of formulas and a few charts. I've also got a few batch files that I'd need to convert to shell scripts.
With Windows 10 entering the final stretch I finally decided to retire my first generation Core i5 750 and get an off lease Core i5 10500. I'm moving up from a 16 year old computer to a 5 year old one. I recently got a drone and 4K h.264 encoding is painful, and it can't handle h.265 encoding at all. Also the USB has been getting flakey dropping devices during large file transfers. Getting videos off my drone I've started using robocopy for the resume feature.
In Canada the import threshold for taxes is $40, and $150 for duty, usually accompanied with a minimum $10 processing fee. Duty can be a surprisingly big hit, like 25% for clothing and they charge consumers on the retail value declared which is probably double / triple what a wholesale importer pays.
Everything that comes out of Musk's mouth is a shameless stock pump. I'm surprised he hasn't run afoul of the SEC again. Of course he's supporting Trump in the hope Trump will eliminate the SEC among other federal agencies in return. Oh and subsidize every Musk company with public government debt.
I think the industry jumped the gun on full BEVs at scale gambling that bypassing hybrids was worth the risk. Though given product development timelines it was unlikely they'd manage to time it just right. This backward step will likely only last a few model years before batteries make BEVs better in terms of cost and performance.
If you ever listen to the way some people order, particularly the elderly it often comes across as complete nonsense and confusion. They'll ask for non-existent products, or describe them in bizarre ways and a human will somehow steer them to a valid choice. Often they'll refer to a deal they heard about that might have been for a totally different company. Countless times I've heard people order a sausage mcmuffin from a fast food chain that isn't mcdonalds, but the cahier does the conversion.
The local right wing government in my province has embraced SMRs as an alternative to doing anything to reduce reliance on gas / coal. Toss in some token research dollars and sign onto a coalition, and they get to kick the can down the road 15-20 years when it will be someone else's problem. The magical promises of SMRs has surprisingly broad support across the political spectrum.
I loved buying from Wiggle to ship to Canada until Shimano banned them from selling stuff to North America combined with them changing their shipping options which lead to more fees. I could get bike stuff for less than local bike shop's wholesale price. I could get 3 tires for the price of one locally. Also stuff from the UK would rarely get taxed, while stuff I ordered from the US got taxed nearly 100% of the time. Though Wiggle did some kind of shady shit. They had their own brand of bikes, but would order vastly more bike components than bike they sold, then re-sold the OEM components cheap. Order a set of pedals and they'd come in a bag instead of retail packaging.
The bike market in Canada is fucked up, there is a duopoly at the wholesale distribution level resulting in massive markups. It effectively eliminates many brands from being available here at all. Trek / Specialized sell directly to bike shops and provide smoking credit deals, so they've got most of the market share as shops are highly incentivized to just carry those brands.
>This launch was set to be the 100th flight of the Atlas V rocket, and notably the first carrying humans.
The Atlas V is no longer being produced. Boeing purchased enough to fulfill the NASA crew contract. So far Vulcan has only launched once, and it sounds like ULA is waiting for someone to foot the bill before they human rate it.
Sandy Munro went on an unhinged Youtube rant yesterday. Going full conspiracy nut railing against Wall Street, the FED, and the fake news media. He's done this numerous times in the past, probably when his wife asked how his Tesla stock is doing. I think he bought a large amount just before the Twitter thing cut the stock in half.
Once solid state batteries hit the market in volume around 2027-28 I think most vehicles with liquid electrolyte batteries are going to take a huge value hit. On the plus side those batteries will be much smaller and cheaper, so it might be possible to put one in an older vehicle, while at the same time significantly reducing the vehicle weight. Vehicles like some of the newer Teslas with structural battery packs would be problematic. Structural battery packs probably should have waited until the batteries were good enough to last the life of a vehicle.
The Win95 testing story came up in an interview with Dave Plummer, along with the USB cart of death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vJQv4rgHYE
He also told a story about how Pinball had no frame limiter so it would internally redraw as fast as it could, pinning a core on any CPU not matter how powerful. He also mentioned that he likes to keep 6 months of blog posts queued.
