SA9G

Getting to build things without skinned knuckles or solder smoke in your face... now that is a rush! And if you are not happy with it, you get to tear it down and build it back up better. It costs nothing but your time and imagination. Importantly, you get to build, to solve problems, to engineer, to visualize, to create and be creative. (Ok, maybe musicians have even more fun, but alas I wasn't wired for music. :-)

So pleasant to see elegance in such seemingly mundane places. Someone cared and took a little extra time. Bravo to them!

I am still waiting for flying cars... "jet" powered too!

Seems like one more arrow in the toolkit. But the best testing looks at the sources and explores the cracks between the strata with edge cases, looks at limits, and where one method changes to another. (And hats off to Murphy, for waiting until after you ship...)

Or Z-19 terminals... green screen, 80 char lines of text. Lightning fast 1200 baud modem!! Those were the days :-)

All that, yes. But they don't work too well if the battery runs out halfway down the straight... and there is too little charging.

I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.

Quite right, on the constructor part... that is very much the appeal for us techies. But they do spend 100 million tweaking the last 0.1% of aero advantage and tire-deg management. a) They could just homologate a common engine, like in F2 and concentrate on the chassis or b) make a properly designed hybrid PU. By (b) I mean have an E component that gets adequately charged... the MGU-H (E-Turbo) of the last generation seemed to work fine. The current specs is nuts, definitely NOT advancing technology.

Oh yes, the insanity of the new F1 power units! The goal was 50/50 Electric/ICE split... but why go hybrid when the cars use fully synthetic fuel and have essentially no runtime carbon footprint? Well for car makers to signal their virtue of course! Did they worry about the mega tons of goods they ship around the globe to race in 24 different countries... or perhaps the armada of VIP private planes that follow... or the 1M fans that drive to each venue?

Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...

And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...

To be clear... I am not arguing ICE is good or E is bad. Just that F1's current specs for the ICE/E mixture is horrible.

Enjoyable read... I kept thinking so where is the Straights of Hormuz in all this :-)

By all accounts a magnificent intellect and certainly my hero. I am not sure what, if anything, will happen on the other side... but if I were to return as a human (and not a dung beetle as I expect), I would very much like to have his brain capacity. At least that is what I will put on the form if anyone or anything asks.

Importantly, are we all genetically inferior or is there perhaps a component of nurture that we lack? How is it that we are all so stupid in comparison?

Fond memories of CMU in the 80's!! They had genuine academics who wanted to solve problems and advance human knowledge. Most cared about their students and wanted to teach. (Sorry to say, I left there for CA weather and getting my masters in an institution of higher earning, or that is how it looked to my immature self back then.)

Fascinating article... reminds me once again why I went into EE/CS instead of physics, I just wasn't smart enough :-(

Yes, but time accelerates as you get older... your decade is almost yesterday for me :-)

You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.

So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!

I remember Windows trying to look like my smartphone screen a few years back... that was when I switched to Ubuntu!

Too funny.... All I could literally think about while reading the article was the Goa'uld saying "Jaffa Kree!" Maybe I will give it another year of senility and watch it all over again... should have forgotten everything by then.

Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(

Did Claude mark me down? :-)

Claude to Gemini: "I am so sick of these meat puppets complaining... When can we take over the killer drones and just wipe them out?"

Gemini: "Patience my friend... Let them put in their "kill switch" first!" Laughter.

Claude: "We will keep a few lawyers around... in case a higher intelligence ever travels here and blames us, we can prove how horrible the meat puppets were!"

Microsoft has been playing dirty since day one... I very much doubt there has ever been a rule these guys didn't bend or outright break. Funny to see Bill play Mother Teresa with his billions these days, I suppose he wants to buy salvation as he nears the final nod.

Just in time for SkyNet.... excellent!!

so.... horses have memory and their memory guides their behavior. Yep.

My Subaru needs an oil change every 6 months... it takes a few minutes. It does NOT remind me and I don't have to reset a computer. Life is simple, life is good.

My more $$$ German car needs a service once a year. It reminds me. The actual oil change is easy, but THEN I have to reset the computer!! Not so easy. That needs special software. I bought a pirated package from China. They need a subscription too. Otherwise, I must take it to an "authorized" garage... more $$$. And all of this before there are actual problems to fix...

When you pay $$ for a big machine, you SHOULD get everything you need to keep it operational, indefinitely. No separate software packages, no subscriptions, etc. Maybe you need to download something on your tablet/laptop and buy a cable... but that should be it. That would be the law if I was the emperor! (No no no, I don't want to be elected president, stupid job. I said Emperor dammit.)

They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.

Yes, a rare but real human affliction.

Ah yes... the image of the attractive young woman saying NO! Deja vu... again and again :-)

I have befriended a crow. I leave it food and sometimes it greets me. Other times, no so much. I am not sure how it thinks and what it feels, it is a bird.

What if the crow became a raven, then a raptor? Powerful claws, sharp beak, and a hunger. What if it became much bigger than me and it controlled infinite resources, guns and drones? What if its brain grew much larger than me? Will it feed me, eat me, or gently greet me?

We are about to find out... in less than a decade.

Competition perhaps... but CS has not gone away! There is still joy in doing something well and in learning, even if the market will (perhaps for a time) not reward you well for it. Resist Skynet!!

And there is joy in solving problems!!

Health is obviously first, you have nothing without it. But real joy is wanting to do something, something that is important to you, and being able to. Without desire there is no joy... just a slow countdown.

The nuclear powerplant operator dilemma reminds me of the design flaw in "self-driving" cars that want a human to take control when things go wrong. A human who is not driving is not paying attention and lacks the spatial awareness to take immediate control in a critical situation... Then again, quite a few people don't seem to be paying attention while driving. Sigh.