aldrich (u/aldrich) - Readit News

aldrich commented on Netherlands returns control of Nexperia to Chinese owner bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/boovic

mainecoder · 4 months ago

Well the Chinese are powerful and without the help of the US the Netherlands can't do much. Additionally, the process of moving discrete semiconductor production to China is already underway. Production in Hamburg will stop sometime in late 2029 and the R&D center in Nijmegen, Delft will close done late 2028. The US should have helped the Netherlands but now it is over the Chinese won this battle and fairly easily they did not need to use much of the leverage that they had. The commentary by EU officials shows that they used a top down approach using the EU to pressure the Dutch.

aldrich · 4 months ago

Are you sure this is right, and if so would you mind sharing a source for this?

According to the Nexperia 2024 annual report [1], they had just committed to _invest_ in the Hamburg site for their WBG/SiC/GaN production lines. Closure of the fab in Nijmegen was actually reported by NXP[2] not Nexperia - different companies.

[1] https://www.nexperia.com/dam/jcr:fc307e7e-e159-482c-b21b-0f9... [2] https://bits-chips.com/article/closure-of-nxps-nijmegen-fab-...

aldrich commented on An appeal to Apple from Anukari anukari.com/blog/devlog/a... · Posted by u/humbledrone

humbledrone · 10 months ago

Thanks for the thought, unfortunately when running as a plugin Anukari is subject to whatever plist.txt the host application uses. I think that I did try that with the standalone binary at one point, but unfortunately I did not appear to take notes! That probably means I did not have success.

aldrich · 10 months ago

Very cool work.. and frustating running into walls imposed by manufacturers, I imagine! I've also been working on GPU-based audio plugins for a long time and have done some public material on the subject.

Just my two cents: have you considered using a server/daemon process that runs separately and therefore more controllably outside a DAW (and therefore a client-server approach for your plugin instances)? It could allow you to have a little bit more OS-based control.

aldrich commented on DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo cnbc.com/2025/05/06/doord... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

bsimpson · 10 months ago

I'll never forget how jealous the Dutch coffee shop owner I met was of Americans.

Dude worked at a bank - respectable white collar job acc. to his Dutch friends and family. He picked up a passion for coffee and wanted to open his own shop. His loved ones all thought he was nuts to leave a stable job for a maybe.

I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the Europeans tend to. Guy felt like his options were keep a job he hates or be disowned by everyone he knows.

aldrich · 10 months ago

Very anecdotal and stereotypical, of course. Doesn't quite paint the whole picture, though I agree there's usually a sentiment of risk aversion in the _conservative_ part of any population, perhaps more so in countries where employment for anything beyond SMEs is more normalized, like Germany and Austria that have adopted a "Rhine capitalism" model that is much more constrained.

Just to give some counter-weight to this, the Netherlands has a self-employment rate that is significantly higher than the EU average [1], one of the higher EU rates of high-growth micro/small enterprises [2], a whole array of tax benefits for the self-employed and SMEs and a relatively fast moving law system that makes it increasingly easier for SMEs to be founded. And let's not forget a bunch of capitalist/financial scoops (first stock market, 1602; first investment banking, 1700s; first investment fund, 1774; etc.) some of which still have a presence today. Needless to say my experience is quite the opposite.

[1] https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/skills-intelligence/s... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

aldrich commented on US debt ceiling: Democrats and Republicans agree deal in principle bbc.com/news/world-us-can... · Posted by u/pg_1234

bluecalm · 3 years ago

I think the debt limit is a good idea as it forces some consensus about spendings. Without it people currently in power can spend as much as they please on their electorate needs and leave the next government in a difficult situation.

It's worse in countries that don't have separation between executive and legislative branch (most EU countries). For example in my country (Poland) you have a party winning an election and then they control both legislative, executive (parliament chooses the prime minister) and mostly judicial branch (not only attorney general is one of the ministers but because terms for supreme/constitutional courts are short they get to put their guys in as well. If they win two times in a row the majority of justice will be theirs.

Once that's done there are 0 check and balances on them. They just spend on social programs and laws benefiting their electorate and screw anyone else. It's a terrible system where winner takes all and is beyond check and balances.

Say what you want about US system but at least it's not free for all the way parliament democracy is. The debt limit is one of those checks - wanna spend money? - talk to the other side about it.

aldrich · 3 years ago

I don't believe its accurate to say that most EU states have no separation between executive and legislative branches.

The split is around 50%-50% with a majority of states actually having a bicameral system where these branches are separated, and this practically includes all major economic states of the EU as well as Poland and the EU itself. [1][2]

In recent legal material, your country (Poland) is a well-known example of an EU state where the governing party has been systematically breaking down this bicameralism and state of law to accomplish exactly what you're describing though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_parliaments_of_the_Eu... [2] https://data.ipu.org/compare?field=country%3A%3Afield_struct...

aldrich commented on 3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous abortretry.fail/p/so-powe... · Posted by u/BirAdam

MontyCarloHall · 3 years ago

>Voodoo Graphics and GLide were the standard in the PC graphics space for a time. 3dfx created an industry that is going strong today, and that industry has affected far more than just gaming. GPUs now power multiple functions in our computers, and they enable AI work as well.

>This tale brings up many “what ifs.”

What if 3dfx had realized early on that GPUs were excellent general purpose linear algebra computers, and had incorporated GPGPU functionality into GLide in the late 90s?

Given its SGI roots, this is not implausible. And given how NVidia still has a near stranglehold on the GPGPU market today, it’s also plausible that this would have kept 3dfx alive.

aldrich · 3 years ago

History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released.

Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably:

- The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr2520...

- The pitch deck: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritec...

- The hardware reference manual: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_... (shows even more internals!)

(As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.)

They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI.

As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses.

It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that reason alone. But who knows!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

aldrich commented on RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD ravynos.com/... · Posted by u/behnamoh

aldrich · 4 years ago

I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based.

Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.

aldrich commented on I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives totallynormalwebsite.ddns... · Posted by u/LarryPage

iasay · 4 years ago

Probably quieter than the DL360 I bought a few months ago and put on eBay after two hours :)

aldrich · 4 years ago

Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..

aldrich commented on I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives totallynormalwebsite.ddns... · Posted by u/LarryPage

kjellsbells · 4 years ago

So rare to see ppl writing about sync.

sync;sync;halt was once a legit way to shut down ;)

aldrich · 4 years ago

Or maybe three times sync;sync;sync just to make sure :)

aldrich commented on DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/07/... · Posted by u/edent

h2odragon · 4 years ago

sendmail.cf is bytecode. At the time it was written, bytes mattered, and it did a magnificent job. Now we have the resources to make things easier on humans.

but there really should be some sort of charity foundation to help the victims of sendmail.cf trauma.

aldrich · 4 years ago

Yeah, though I would say human readable bytecode, and it is interesting to see that in the actual context. For anyone who's interested, there's a git repository containing a historical reconstruction of the original BSDs.

I believe one of the first BSD versions containing sendmail (by Eric Allman) is this one: https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/bd282c88c1b3c2575... (almost 40 years ago!)

Its a little hard to read due to the format, but here's some explanation of the (1983, earliest?) config file that was used back then: https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/bd282c88c1b3c2575...

From what I grasp, it started as an extensive dynamic parser that needed to understand a lot of rules, and I guess with each new RFC and version, the rules needed to be extended too. And the config file could be loaded into a memory image to improve performance.

aldrich commented on Robertson vs. Torx screw drives (2021) pedriana.wordpress.com/20... · Posted by u/nkurz

Jaruzel · 4 years ago

20-ish years ago, Compaq went through this phase also. Every screw in their desktop machines were Torx. It was real pain as Torx drivers weren't commonly available (in the UK).

aldrich · 4 years ago

Compaq were already using Torx for their products in the 80s and 90s, including some Torx variation screw with a slot cut across.

I don't know whether this was for some simple form of tamper resistance (I do not believe they actually used the security Torx), or rather for some reasons related to manufacturing and maintenance, which I find much more likely.

As the article points out, Torx does have superior torque handling, especially in a time where "lesser" screws may have been more common in PCs, and the use of automatic torque-limiting screwdrivers during manufacture and service would've been an advantage.