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acheron9383 commented on USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)   overengineer.dev/blog/202... · Posted by u/pabs3
acheron9383 · a month ago
Man that is a lot of computer to put into that product for as little money as possible. I'm not intending to excuse the products with likely bad firmware causing most of these issues, especially Ethernet PHYs. Though, in my professional experience doing embedded device firmware, Ethernet PHYs are always the biggest pain, hands down. The firmware included with them has many many ways to configure it wrong, and the defaults are typically just random settings, not a reasonable configuration. Just getting the drivers even running sometimes involves just knowing a few tricks. Anyways, it doesn't surprise me many have trouble working right, especially when they indicate they are all running OEM firmware essentially.
acheron9383 commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war   insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn
omega3 · 3 months ago
> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.

Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?

acheron9383 · 3 months ago
When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips. As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.
acheron9383 commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war   insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn
analog31 · 3 months ago
>>> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.

Naturally, there must be some scale threshold where this is true, so I don't doubt your experience. And my workplace doesn't make anything as elaborate as a car, or with such stringent reliability specs. But my experience is that hardware is always finished before software.

acheron9383 · 3 months ago
I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.
acheron9383 commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war   insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn
acheron9383 · 3 months ago
As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software. Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A doesn't have the API to your MCU, or it runs some dogshit speed communication system that means you have 500ms lag. The feature is just unworkable, and if the PMs push it anyways you get what happens for the legacy car makers, terrible underpowered infotainment systems with no central design philosophy, stuck in an awkward, bad, middle between a full software stack and all buttons for everything. Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
acheron9383 commented on SpaceX, Rogers to connect mobiles phones to satellites in remote Canadian areas   reuters.com/technology/sp... · Posted by u/dev_tty01
costcofries · 2 years ago
Not sure this is an issue, I'm Canadian. This seems like Rogers customers will have access to reception via SpaceX satellites in remote areas, which is a good thing. If anything, this means a) Rogers has a slightly richer offering than the 2? other cell providers in Canada, b) Rogers is paying SpaceX for this OR Rogers is agreeing to play nice and in fact SpaceX is eating the bill.
acheron9383 · 2 years ago
It is likely that Rogers agrees to pay Starlink a fee when Starlink acts as a roaming provider for one of their customers, where Starlink has slow and limited speeds but universal coverage. The industry has similar arrangements with roaming networks when you leave your country; some cell providers don't operate any towers at all. Starlink gets the fees, plus the right to transmit the LTE signals in a spectrum owned by Rogers, similar to the T-Mobile deal in the US, and Rogers gets to market that they have universal coverage.
acheron9383 commented on SpaceX, Rogers to connect mobiles phones to satellites in remote Canadian areas   reuters.com/technology/sp... · Posted by u/dev_tty01
aendruk · 2 years ago
> connect mobiles phones to satellites

How does this work? Do typical phones already have the hardware for this? The satellites emulate cells? (one big “cell”?)

Edit: Spotted a typo in my comment… but it’s actually a typo in the Reuters headline?

acheron9383 · 2 years ago
The satellite emulates a cell tower, just one that is hundreds of miles away and moving very fast. So some tricks with the timing will need to happen since LTE expects the tower to be close and not moving. How big a cell is depends on how powerful the phased array beam former is on the satellite. The achievable data rates aren't very high so this is more a network of last resort when you are out of range of a tower.
acheron9383 commented on SpaceX, Rogers to connect mobiles phones to satellites in remote Canadian areas   reuters.com/technology/sp... · Posted by u/dev_tty01
throw_nbvc1234 · 2 years ago
Anyone know why SpaceX isn't trying to get deals similar to Amazon's Kuiper?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/26/verizon-partnering-with-amaz...

Why have cell phones communicate with the SAT directly if you can just use the SATs to deploy "normal" cell towers?

acheron9383 · 2 years ago
Starlink already does this today for Indonesia, they provide backhaul for remote cell towers for Telkomsat. https://voi.id/en/technology/178276
acheron9383 commented on Batteries included with Emacs (2020)   karthinks.com/software/ba... · Posted by u/e3bc54b2
fermentation · 4 years ago
I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from the ground up, but with vim keybinds?
acheron9383 · 4 years ago
Honestly, to just get moving, installing Doom emacs and selecting evil mode during setup. The basic keybinds are all Vim then, works great for me with minimal headache.
acheron9383 commented on Clubhouse user IDs, Chatroom IDs are transmitted in plaintext over the internet   twitter.com/stanfordio/st... · Posted by u/amrrs
vmception · 5 years ago
> otherwise why they are using a Shanghai-based startup for their voice backend platform?

Is there a term for this form of argument? Like where someone makes a rhetorical question after seeding the answer? Its like creating a false dilemma, where one intentionally removes non-binary choices for their own agenda, but its not quite a false dilemma yet, except after someone responds about how weak this form of argument is by presenting second, third and fourth reasons that were outside of the boundaries of the question but inside the boundaries of reality.

acheron9383 · 5 years ago
Seems like begging the question, they assume it is a CCP honeypot and then push the false dichotomy with the voice back end? *edit s/video/voice/
acheron9383 commented on Modeling a Wealth Tax   paulgraham.com/wtax.html... · Posted by u/tosh
AnthonyMouse · 5 years ago
The first thing to notice about a wealth tax is how little it fundamentally differs from an income tax on investment income. If you have a billion dollars and you get a 2% return and pay 15% capital gains tax, you paid 0.3% of your wealth in tax. So then what's the difference?

For one, it pushes people towards riskier investments. At a 1% annual return, a 0.3% wealth tax is equivalent to a 30% income tax. At a 5% annual return, it's equivalent to a 6% income tax. This has various consequences, but a big one of note is that it makes it much less desirable to own government debt, which has a low rate of return, which means the government could end up having to pay significantly higher interest on the debt. It could also incentivize excessive risk taking.

Another concern is that it requires investments to be liquidated in order to pay the tax. Generally we defer taxes on investment income until the investment is sold in order to avoid this, because it can be quite problematic, e.g. you own 51% of your company but over time you're forced to become a minority shareholder just in order to pay the tax, or you owned 100% of it and are required to take on external investment over time just to stay in business. This also costs the government money because the government pays lower interest on borrowing than average investment returns, so paying 0.7% to borrow money in the interim while the investor is earning 5% returns on the money you'd have collected as tax means that when the tax is ultimately paid, the government ends up with more additional revenue than they paid in interest in the meantime.

It also increases foreign ownership of domestic resources, because domestic owners are forced to liquidate in order to pay the tax and domestic buyers are in the same boat so the liquidated securities go primarily to foreign buyers.

Another problem is that a lot of forms of wealth are hard to value. If you had a wealth tax and someone owned a piece of art, or some intellectual property, or shares in a privately held company, what are they worth? It's inherently subjective and estimates can very wildly. But then you're creating an opportunity for accountants to do their thing and avoid the tax. Waiting until the property is sold and then taxing the gain solves this neatly because then you have the sale price to go on.

acheron9383 · 5 years ago
It seems like, if you wanted to help stop the wealthy from ducking paying taxes, one should just stop providing a special long term capitol gains tax and tax capitol gains the same as income. It simplifies the tax code, stops punishing workers who receive a wage over those who earn investment income, and doesn't require a bunch of new accounting to implement. My cynicism hat tells me the reason it isn't the policy goal is that it could actually pass in the US, the wealth tax likely never will.

u/acheron9383

KarmaCake day320November 7, 2017View Original