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For money, anything is possible. That’s the employment contract, trade money for time doing things you would rather not.

Indeed but if the pay needs to be high, you may as well pay someone experienced.

Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?

Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”


The government has reference products that a lot of processes use. https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductList?categoryId=a0l3d0000...

one that gets mentioned occasionally on the internet is the peanut butter: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387


I was more imagining a completely pedestrian sourced sample. Those are likely large aggregate pools to minimize heterogeneity. Looking for something like, “Go to corner store, buy 12 pack canned CokeCola (with aspartame), dilute 1:10, measure”

To go down that rathole, here is Tom Scott talking about the NIST standard reference materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvJzi0BXcGI

Do we count the time some children measured the vitamin C in Ribena for a science fair, and discovered there wasn't any, despite high vitamin C being their main marketing point?

I just looked that up. Great story!

Coincidentally, Guinness had a role to play in the development of modern quality control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset


Some of the most dimensionally accurate thickness aluminium foil you can buy is intended for cooking.


The big providers only want themselves to be able to backup passkeys. I do not want to handover my secrets to Apple/Microsoft/Google.

Apple Keychain syncing is end-to-end encrypted, Apple cannot see the contents of your synced keychain.

That has to be abysmal bandwidth, right? How much data can you practically transfer that way?

Shannon-Hartley says the theoretical maximum data rate for a channel with AWGN is proportional to bandwidth and the log of signal-to-noise ratio. For an off-the-shelf microphone/speaker pair, I think 16 kHz and 80 dB are probably decent guesses. That would give a theoretical maximum data rate of about 425 kb/s. The practical limit is probably much lower.

It may be possible to increase the bandwidth by increasing the sample rate on both ends, but this quickly leaves the realm of consumer audio equipment (and consumer pricing). At some point you'd exceed the reasonable frequency responses for each device, as well as the medium. I imagine that air attenuates ultrasonic frequencies more than lower ones, but that's just a guess.


Honestly better rate than I expected. If they are just looking to export a steady stream of telemetry, that would be sufficient.

Speak for yourself. I can adjust all of my physical climate controls, radio, wipers, and cruise control without taking my eyes off the road. Maybe some fumbling to pick the right blower angle.

Some manufacturers have massively screwed up the cruise control buttons. On Rivians, for example, the car will instruct you to take control of steering if you will soon enter an area where it can’t do assisted steering. Fine, except that the only control that can transition directly from assisted steering to plan enhanced cruise is to jerk the steering wheel, which is distinctly uncool. So you instead cancel cruise entirely and then re-engage it.

To add insult to injury, despite the fact that the speed up and speed down buttons are actual physical buttons, they are so aggressively denounced that there’s a loop: press button, wait, press, read screen to see if you’re making progress, press, etc.

Anyway, the point is that, while physical buttons in predictable locations can make it possible to operate something without looking, it still needs a good design and implementation.


I mean "even" in a Tesla you can adjust volume, next/previous track, wipers, cruise control (among other things) with a physical button, and climate controls are in a fixed location on the screen (and are typically left on auto).

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

I can attest to this one, 6 months ago I had a vintage pc I needed to rehab due to the curse of the proprietary ISA card. Imaged the failing drive to an ssd, sata->IDE adapter. P3 733MHz, 128 mb ram, W98SE, its astonishingly fast and responsive. Boots nearer to my memories of MSDOS 6.22 firing up than anything else.

Acrobat reader still performs like a lead balloon though, even a miracle can't fix that one.


I don't know how I used Windows before I installed Everything.

Deactivate web search via regedit, then it works.

Good advice, but there's still a lot of utility in Everything that is not built into Windows.

A whole installation of Win95 with Office95 is only a few hundred MB and would fit entirely in RAM on a modern system. You can run a VM of it like that to experience the extreme speed. Even a browser these days uses several times that.

The responsiveness of windows 2000 in a vm is insane. It feels like every action happens instantaneously.

Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.


Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.

I'm not sure what they use these days, but 10-15 years ago the MCU in a monitor was likely to be a ~10MHz 8051.


Good news, because part of the original post was that engineers should soon be able to handle a million lines of code a month. So 60 engineers to birth an OS in a month.

  … Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Galen Hunt, who is a top-level Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a now-edited LinkedIn post.…
Maybe he did not say Windows, but it is not a leap to imagine it falls under the umbrella of “largest codebases”

AI exuberance is ridiculous, but even xAI could not pony up enough real money to payout Tesla investors for anything but pennies on the dollar.

Spending money to upgrade from model X-1 to the latest X is the well trodden happy path that big tech will actually make work. Author is describing less common workflows which do not receive the same attention and so become a mixed bag when the financial incentive is not so clear for the manufactures.


Phone camera covers have been available for years.

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