My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.
I feel like this poem isn't really about soldering, but if anyone is actually bothered by it, there are some options.
Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.
If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.
If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.
Anthropomorphizing LLMs is something that happens in the design stage, when they're given human names and trained to emit first-person sentences. If AI companies and developers stop anthropomorphizing them, users won't be misled in the first place.
This reminds me a bit of the ending of In the Beginning Was the Command Line:
> The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.
> What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
Fair enough. I was thinking of local governments unilaterally deciding to impose income taxes. The impression I got was that existing local income taxes are effectively state funding for municipalities collected and distributed by state governments, which doesn't seem like quite the same thing, but perhaps I'm splitting hairs.
Well, local governments (cities and towns) also have expenses -- police, fire departments, trash collection, water and sewage, roads, public works. Schools are partially funded locally. That has to be paid for.
It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, but a lot would need to change -- much more than just changing tax rates. Employers and banks report income to the federal government (and states, I suppose, but I live and work in Texas so I don't know much about that). They would have to report that information to towns and cities too. There's also the problem of granularity -- how does an employer or bank know where someone actually lives? If you have a P.O. box in a town, do you have to pay taxes in that town? If you work in a different municipality (not uncommon!), do you have to pay taxes there too? If you have a home in one town, work in another, but spend most of your free time hanging out in a third, are you completely off the hook for supporting the third town?
You could have the federal government collect all the money and then allocate it to state and local governments, but that's a massive change in how American society works, and I'm not sure it's any less complex in the end. Some of the complexity in the tax code (e.g. different levels of capital gains tax) is a policy choice, but some of it reflects the complexity of the real world.
> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that.
I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of the taxes you mentioned are levied by local governments to fund themselves. The United States has a federal system; it would be a much bigger change to centralize all of the funding.
Just used this to make a couple quick diagrams. It's easy to use and the diagrams export well. A couple suggestions for improvement:
1. When working with small rectangles, I had trouble getting the rectangle to move instead of enlarge. It looks like holding down the mouse button for a second makes moving more reliable. The UI should make it clearer what I'm actually doing.
2. If I open MonoSketch in another tab, I can't make a second diagram at the same time as the first -- there seems to be one shared context between tabs. I would like to be able to make a new diagram separate from my current one.
Some background for those who aren't familiar: "Romanization" refers to converting Japanese sounds into the Latin (Roman) alphabet. In Japanese, these sounds are written with phonetic characters called kana. (There are two types of kana; I'm only going to talk about hiragana here.) Each kana represents either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. For example: あ (a), こ (ko), ね (ne). Aside from a terminating n/m sound (ん), there are no characters for standalone consonants. There are five vowels (a i u e o).
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.
To me, the valuable comments are the ones that share the writer's expertise and experiences (as opposed to opinions and hypothesizing) or the ones that ask interesting questions. LLMs have no experience and no real expertise, and nobody seems to be posting "I asked an LLM for questions and it said...". Thus, LLM-written comments (whether of the form "I asked ChatGPT..." or not) have no value to me.
I'm not sure a full ban is possible, but LLM-written comments should at least be strongly discouraged.
When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.
Tangential question: Does anyone know of a basic large-signal equation for a triode (or any other vacuum tube type) like the simplified Ebers-Moll equation for BJTs or the square law equations for the linear and saturation regions of a MOSFET? It would really help my understanding, but whenever I google it I only see academic papers, like it's a weird thing to search for.
I don't think this holds up. Historically, memory sizes have increased exponentially, but access times have gotten faster, not slower. And since the access time comes from the memory architecture, you can get 8 GB of RAM or 64 GB of RAM with the same access times. The estimated values in the table are not an especially good fit (30-50% off) and get worse if you adjust the memory sizes.
Theoretically, it still doesn't hold up, at least not for the foreseeable future. PCBs and integrated circuits are basically two-dimensional. Access times are limited by things like trace lengths (at the board level) and parasitics (at the IC level), none of which are defined by volume.
