Readit NewsmmmBacon commented on QNX: The Incredible 1.44M Demo archive.org/details/QNX_i... · Posted by u/sugarpimpdorsey
QNX was well-liked in the embedded world. A friend of mine wrote some river lock control software in Pascal under QNX in the early 1990s.
Back in the 2000’s we built a complete network operating system on top of QNX for OTN based long haul communication systems. In those days we had to sign SLAs on equipment and customers fined us for downtime. QNX was bulletproof despite running on our then PowerPC based custom CPU complex.
mmmBacon commented on Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI frigate.video/... · Posted by u/zakki
This is cool and it amazes me how the “big” home security companies don’t have this. My Ring cameras false detect all the time. The front will detect the flag as a person when it blows in the wind. The rear gets triggered by the pool robot skimmer. As much as I’d love to try this, I don’t have the time. It would be great though if it was built into something I could buy.
mmmBacon commented on A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages nytimes.com/2025/07/31/te... · Posted by u/jrwan
If you think of it, what is Meta going to do with AI? Their business model is ads. Maybe AI can improve ads some. For Meta, how does the billions spent on AI impact their bottom line? The reality is that if AI training requirements keep scaling based on Chinchilla scaling, there is going to be massive consolidation in training due to the scale that’s going to be required. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with Zuck running nuclear reactors. Already AI models are the fastest depreciating assets ever created. Moreover Meta is behind the AI curve so they are desperate to catch up. But desperate for what?
mmmBacon commented on AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
We can speculate. But I bet the fact that the supply chains needed by a US plant stretch across the globe (mostly back to Taiwan, Japan, and Germany) has something to do with that. In Taiwan, supply chains are local. Things like wafers might not be produced in the US yet.
You can hop in a car and visit them. In the US they are across the Pacific and in a very different/inconvenient timezone. It's a 15 hour gap. 9 am in Arizona would be midnight in Taiwan. And there's the anti meridian running through that so it's a day later over there as well. And the business days barely overlap.
I bet all that adds some friction in day to day operations. Lost time, shipping delays, miscommunication, etc. There are solutions to this, of course. But I'm sure that adds complexity to an already complex business. So, limiting that overhead to just 5-20% sounds pretty good to me.
The supply chain is already dispersed, even outside Taiwan. Particularly as we move from single die devices to MCM, many processes are outside of Taiwan. JCET is in Singapore and Amkor is in Arizona and Korea for example. There is some cost to the logistics but it’s kind of in the noise on a per device basis. The cost is in the processes themselves. It is a gigantic pain to manage but it doesn’t not add such a high variable cost.
Semiconductor companies need gross margins of around 65% to grow and be able to invest in development of the next node. So this large additional variable cost really can’t be shrugged off as you suggest. If so, Ms. Su wouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
mmmBacon commented on AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
The article quotes the CEO saying yield is comparable:
>TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.
The overhead cost of a fab is fixed. So hard to understand why that would have such a wide variance. It may be true that the facility hasn’t been fully amortized so in principle it’s more expensive to make chips there. I can understand it being more expensive for many reasons. However I wouldn’t expect the cost difference to have a large variance. 5-20% is a very large range if the yields are comparable.
mmmBacon commented on AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
The article doesn’t say why the chips have a cost difference. The wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations. You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new production site.
mmmBacon commented on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction techcrunch.com/2025/07/16... · Posted by u/boulos
Do you have any evidence or are you just pulling this out of thin air? All sources I can find estimate pre construction costs between 3 and 10% depending on type of infrastructure and where it is (the US according to [1] is on the lower end with 3-5%). To put this in perspective the profit margins on construction projects is 7% according to [2], which also does attribute skilled labour shortages as the main factor behind increasing construction cost.
[1] https://srgexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-cost-of... [2] https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
You need look no further than the poster child of red tape delayed construction projects: California High Speed Rail.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/high-speed-rail-califo...
mmmBacon commented on TSA expected to phase out shoe removal policy at airport security tennessean.com/story/trav... · Posted by u/bookmtn
Pittsburgh barely cares about belts and shoes now. Little Rock is pretty lax too. Honestly, one shoe bomber didn't ever inspire copycats (because it was a dumb plot)
If you think how much of our collective lives the shoebomber wasted making everyone take their shoes off, I’d say that was terrorism enough.
mmmBacon commented on Ship Carrying EVs Abandoned in Pacific After Catching Fire bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/rntn
> a simple search refutes the assertion that EV fires are not more difficult or toxic than a regular car
The assertion is that EV fires are not particularly more difficult than ICE vehicle fires if the battery has not entered thermal runaway.
Most EV fires do not start in the battery (at least for EVs that are not involved in a collision).
And while the battery certainly can enter thermal runaway by an external fire heating it up sufficiently, it's not a given as real-world examples like the Sola fire shows as well as various research. Here are some quotes from a paper about full-scale EV fire tests[1]:
In both cases the fire ignition took place in the rear seats. However, it has to be mentioned that in the case of the BEV, the battery was not involved in the fire for the first 800 s (full voltage in all cells of the battery).
However, the test also showed that although the vehicle had already burned for more than 10 min, the battery was still not involved in the fire and the temperature inside the battery was well below 50 °C
In the tests they forced thermal runaway after a while, by shorting the batteries.
Here's[2] another, smaller study where they tried to initiate a thermal runaway by placing a propane burner under the battery, but failed as they removed it too soon.
The burner was in place for 12 minutes, at which point the rest of the car had caught fire which also contributed to heating the battery. Yet no thermal runaway occurred.
Modern cars, EVs and ICEs alike, have more flammable material in the form of plastics than in their batteries or gas tanks[3]. And those plastics also release a lot of toxic smoke when burning. Sure, if the battery catches fire it will release nasty HF gas, but it's not like fumes from an ICE fire is healthy stuff.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037971122...
[2]: https://www.fireproductsearch.com/full-scale-electric-vehicl...
[3]: https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/wp-content/upload...
For any fire, once the fire gets hot enough, it can be difficult or impossible to extinguish.
The fundamental problem is that battery fires get to be very high temperatures 1200C and cannot be extinguished at that point. I think the distinction you’re making about presence of thermal runaway or not is really rather irrelevant because yes you can put that fire out. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the devices do runaway and when they do it’s very difficult to put them out.
The ship in the original article was abandoned because it the fire could not be extinguished. The battery fire at Moss Landing could not be extinguished for 2 weeks.
Here’s a great video of the MountainView Fire Department talking about the difficulties of putting out EV fires. They explain that they’ve had cars catch on fire again 6 days later. They purchased new specialized equipment but at the time their department was one of the only fire companies that had this in California.