I never understood why the piano keyboard isn't regular. It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes.

Like why do I have to remember the shape for C major and D major chords? It should be the same shape just starting at C vs D.

It's not even that hard to fix. There's 12 semitones in an octave. Just make it 6 white 6 black keys.

I've lived in a few dozen cities (most very, very rural) in the US, and The Bay has, by far, the worst electricity out of any of them. We have longer outages as a planned practice than I'd have from ice storms knocking down half the forest or waves partially flooding the town.

As an outside observer, the fact that PG&E can lie to the state and request money for maintenance, subsequently sending that money to shareholders, looks like a likely candidate for many of the problems.

It's especially annoying that it's the lowest quality power while it's working (compared to a pure sine signal), has the highest count of days with some power blip, the highest number of full days without power each year, it's 2.5x more expensive than anywhere else I've lived, and they don't even have snow or ice or the same levels of wind and rain as the other places with better power. Plus they're servicing more people per square mile. It ought to be more efficient.

Maybe CA really is special somehow, but it looks like ordinary corruption.

I can get non-iodized salt, use a septic tank, not wear shoes, and skip vaccines (and home school) if I so choose to. I can't choose to get unfloridated water from the public system. It's a little odd that a public health intervention has been prescribed to everyone en masse.

Yeah the era of "memory can outrun the CPU" was brief and glorious. The approach 80s microcomputers used for graphics required it -- multiplexing the video between the VDP (C64 VIC-II, Atari ST Shifter, etc.) and the CPU on odd bus cycles. Nice and fun.

By the end of the decade the CPU was running 2-3x the speed of the fastest RAM.

Now things are soooo complicated.

Not sure about this alternate reality where Apple's 68000 machines were cheap :-) (I say this as an Atari ST owner).

68000 has kind of aged well despite not being made anymore -- is perhaps now the only "retro" architecture which can be targeted by a full modern compiler. You can compile Rust, C++20, whatever, and have it run on a machine from 1981. That's kinda cool.

It sounds like you are describing gorging yourself at Taco Bell. There must be better restaurants and eateries than that around you.

I didn't expect to read this whole piece but it was completely gripping. Outstanding work and a really great write up.

Maybe someone from Netflix engineering is reading this and passing the idea to someone tied with content production...

Optimistically tagging on here as it's a similar sort of question.

Say one lone developer gets a bit carried away with verilog and ends up with a description for a chip. I know there's an odd lot style of thing where you can get your chip drawn on a wafer along with a load of other chips from other people. There's probably a way of getting someone who knows what they're doing to attach wires to it, wrap it in plastic or whatever else is involved in "packaging".

Where does one get started with that, and what's the ballpark cost? I'm assuming a fair amount of the OP's $100k is SiFive labour, but I don't know how to guess whether a half dozen custom chips in some sort of packaging is of the order of 10s of dollars or 10s of thousands.

(edit: I've done a lot of software near hardware and have a vague idea that uploading the data to tsmc was called "tape out" and involved quite a lot of money, but I also vaguely remember talking to someone at a conference who had chips made as a hobby so there are some pieces missing from my mental model)