Both Adafruit and Sparkfun manufacturing quality is higher than generic manufacturing from China. I suspect that most of the Chinese alternatives meet their price point by using parts that are out of spec and were purchased at a discount by the chip manufacturer (or just scrounged for free from the reject pile).
The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
I've also learned the hard way that breakout boards from Chinese retailers that look like the real thing but cost less than the price of the component from DigiKey in bulk are a pile of crap.
Whilst it is great that the hardware is open, I have come to the point of not caring that much as it just seems to mean that the market gets flooded with things that look very similar but are terrible. And in the case of that Si chip, it's really just the reference circuit from the manufacturer from what I see.
You can’t write your magnum opus without any practice. Some people write every day, possibly without enjoyment, so that they can create something noteworthy after they have developed their writing skills to be capable of it.
I almost wish Hadley had forked R to make the tidyverse. What I usually see are people that start using tidy functions and coding style, but at some point they realize they don’t know how to do something the tidy way or something hasn’t been implemented in a tidy package yet, so they fall back to base R.
Imho, transitioning from tidy to base R makes your code less readable than just using base R throughout.
If the tidyverse were forked and base R functions weren’t available then people would be forced to come up with a different solution and maybe they would stay committed to being tidy. I realize that probably won’t ever happen, there is too much work to reimplement all the missing base R functions.
Theres more to the R ecosystem than tidyverse packages. There's a whole suite of absolutely amazing R packages in the bioconductor ecosystem that rival tidyverse in speed and ease of use but targeting other data structures.
Some of the tidyverse packages are over kill and contain lots of foot guns.
I've seen code that was clean get butchered because someone had no idea how to do something basic in base R.
There's also another separate ecosystem for doing stats with their own flavors.
I worked in a job a decade back where I was the only tech guy and had a special 128 GB RAM machine. All the 'Big data' for the team was done by me using R tidyverse, data.table and few libraries and they thought of it as magic as there were few tech people there.
Still feel a lot of enterprises and industries looked over its capabilities then.
With LLMs the challenge of R syntax is a little easier for data analysts to climb, especially the new ones.
As a daily R user, hard disagree. With the exception of ggplot (and this is directly related to why I don't use ggplot and instead use base plotting), most of tidyverse is pretty similar to and consistent with most base R functions.
Tidyverse standalone would be borderline useless, as most of what it's best at is manipulating, transorming, and re-arranging your data in various ways. You still need to _do_ something with your data at the end, at which point, the entire rest of the R ecosystem comes into play.
Tidyverse is valuable specifically because it's the best at doing what it does, and what it does makes everything else easier, more legible, and faster.
Forking it would simultaneously make both R and tidyverse worse off.
> most of tidyverse is pretty similar to and consistent with most base R functions
What? The main tidyverse packages are popular because they are different from base R. If the packages duplicated base R functionality and usage was the same then nobody would use them.
> You still need to _do_ something with your data at the end, at which point, the entire rest of the R ecosystem comes into play.
This is exactly my point. You could use tidymodels or any number of packages to keep your code tidy, but people just bail after wrangling their data a little and then their code is disconnected. You might as well have done all your data cleaning with base R if you were going to fit a model outside the tidyverse anyway.
What I meant was that they are syntactically similar. They work the way that default base R functions work. They _look_ like base R functions. They aren't the same as base R functions. They fit smoothly into base R, often filling holes that base R has. One can (and I do) use base R and tidyverse functions with each other all the time
This is as opposed to ggplot. Which legitimately seems like a completely different language. It looks, reads, and acts differently than base R plotting. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and, in my opinion, does not have enough functionality to justify the departure from standard R conventions. Which is why I don't use it.
As to restating your point: Your original comment combined with what you have said here makes me completely confused. The fact that people don't "stay" in the tidyverse is evidence that it is well integrated and _shouldn't_ be forked. You can use it for what it's good for, and then go use other things that are better at what they are doing.
If people regularly did the entire pipeline of import > data manipulation > data analysis and never left the tidyverse, then you would have an argument that it should be forked.
The fact that people dont do this is evidence that it belongs how it is: a package.
I don't really understand your comment about "disconnected". My code doesn't feel disconnected other than that different portions of it are doing different things. But then again, I also think that tidyverse functions don't look that different from base R functions (which, again, is not the same thing as being the same as already existent R functions).
There's a school of thought of using mostly base R, for all its flaws it already had before Hadley, and selectively using some tidyverse packages. Base R has been the de-facto coding standard for academic statisticians for decades, with all the wealth of open source packages that that entails, and some of the tidyverse packages are just a godsend. ggplot2 is probably the most powerful plotting library I've seen, while being fairly accessible. You don't have to subscribe to an entire philosophy for data wrangling or plotting (and may even frown at the syntax overloading) to get a huge amount of utility out of it.
This. They're basically two languages sitting on top of each other. It's fascinating seeing students who have been taught using the tidyverse try to switch gears.
As someone that's been using R for 20 years, I don't necessarily wish that had happened, but I think the trend to teach intro R using the tidyverse is a bad development. People that use the tidyverse don't realize that it's complex. There are no doubt complex and frustrating parts of base R. For the most basic things, base R is natural. The tidyverse has you piping and using advanced concepts from the start.
The point is the original commenter said there’s a risk of these kinds of projects getting shut down. The creator chimed in and claimed there wasn’t much risk, and then someone posted comments from the same creator in the recent past talking about shutting the project down if an upstream change was made, validating the original comment and making the creator sound less valid.
The article is paywalled, but remember that the USA’s business giants during the Cold War were ran quite different than businesses today, especially with the fact that they had major internal R&D labs that did novel research in-house and relied less on transfer coming from research universities. Think about the other stories that you may have heard about Xerox or Bell labs. So Kodak having research abilities is not surprising. They also made the cameras and films for US spy satellites during the Cold War. They were not just a little company that made recreational film. They were a science and chemistry powerhouse.
A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.
Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.
When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.
In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.
It's great to do experimentation because you get to learn a lot, but at the end of the day stick with well-studied designs if you're making a something you want to use. The oscillators mentioned below all have well known strengths and weaknesses:
The author mentions that they consider a center-tapped inductor to be "fancy," but if you consider a regular inductor to be fair game, then the Colpitts oscillator is a good choice. And I suppose you could build a Hartley oscillator with two inductors rather than one center-tapped inductor.
If you consider op-amps to be fair game even though it is made from multiple transistors, then you might consider digital logic to also be fair game and should consider a Pierce oscillator. I'm also assuming that a crystal is also fair game, but those are quite cheap.
Side note- these oscillators are all part of the exam material for the Extra class amateur radio license in the USA. If you find lcamtuf's Substack interesting, then amateur radio might be for you.
This feels like an uninformed opinion. Are you saying teachers aren’t fully occupied during the day? That would be news to me. If you admit to teaching being a full time job, what would you rather see teachers not do so they can spend a few extra hours grading? Just claiming that teachers need to give paper assignments and spend time grading by hand without considering the tradeoffs sounds like a step backward.
Cell phones haven’t magically made students cheat. Students were cheating plenty with paper tests too. Ands if the students are trading answers with cell phones, they will definitely have a way to trade answers to paper tests. Nearly every smartphone has a camera. Instead we should figure out how to regulate cell phone use at school if they are the enabler for cheating.
Teaching is undoubtedly different than it was a few decades ago. There is technology integrated into most schools and classrooms. The requirements of teachers has changed, but I wouldn’t say teachers have gotten lazy.
I’m mainly saying that the shift from short response to multiple choice has nothing to do with academic rigor or assessment but is purely driven by technological convenience and has significant downsides.
Even “fill in the blank” has disappeared yet could be auto-graded in principle.
Another harm from the loss of paper tests is that teachers no longer return graded test papers to students. Sometimes completed tests made available online, often not.
Students will see their numeric grade but not immediately know why and might end up never seeing the completed test if and when it is finally made available.
The whole dynamic of returning the test papers and the students asking the teacher to explain missed questions is totally lost.
technology is integrated into classrooms, and yet, most new high school graduates can only successfully operate a smartphone, a tablet, or a chromebook (lol).
My point is, in regards to education tech is a distraction 95% of the time…and i say this as someone working in tech! Tech makes grading easier. Great. Has instruction improved? Are most kids learning more now? Are most kids _actually_ prepared for a basic office job, if they desire one?
Frankly, going back to basics would benefit all of us. Math is the same as it ever was. Blackboard and paper is all you need. Same with most other classes.
Schools will happily waste thousands on ipads and chrome books that do little for actual education. Yet they are happy to feed crappy lunches to kids because good food is too expensive. Apparently gadgets are more helpful for learning than nutrition? I’m sure Google and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank…at least the teachers and kids get to feel modern.
Step back and reconsider what a high school diploma means. You are not qualified to be a software engineer with a highschool diploma, don't set software engineer-level expectations for them. A high school diploma means you can participate in society at a _minimum_ level. Just about any skilled trade requires additional schooling- not necessarily a bachelor's degree, but an apprenticeship, trade school, associates degree or some kind of certificate program is required. You can't even be a barber without additional training in most places.
Even before computers were ubiquitous, which office jobs would you say a high school graduate was qualified for? I'd say not much other than basic clerk duties, which requires some basic counting skills and record keeping. In today's times, that requires basic computer use skills because we use computers to perform those tasks, which high school graduates are capable of.
So with revised expectations, what about the technology integration in high school is inadequate? High school graduates can be expected to be able to type and use some word processing software and do basic data entry. That sounds like the right level to me. And consider the cost of a chromebook for a few years vs. the cost of feeding a child. More money gets spent on food than the cost of a chromebook, it's just that the food funding comes from multiple sources so you might not have considered the total cost. It's not like they are handing out brand new MacBooks every single year, chromebooks are about the lowest cost option for schools to have guaranteed technology access for students.
i’m specifically unhappy with the technology investment. I don’t see that the kids are more tech savvy, and i see no proof that US high school students are performing better than they were in years past, so why is the tech being pushed? Why not pay teachers better or improve school lunches a little bit? Why?
“guranteeed technology access for students” - that’s great, and was useful during covid remote learning, but that was an exceptional circumstance. I don’t see why a computer lab with 5-10 year old computers isn’t sufficient to learn how to use a word processor? Since we’re setting the tech literacy bar that low…
I skimmed this and want everyone to be aware of the danger in articles like this- it sounds like the author is knowledgeable but there are some real conceptual problems. I’ll list a few so that maybe you won’t read this and think that it’s time to jump into defense contracting. Before I start I’ll state that I’m a statistics professor but also worked in acquisitions for the USAF for 10 years, which is apparently 10 years more experience than the author has. Not to denigrate the author’s service in Vietnam, but it looks like he got out and jumped into Silicon Valley and never actually worked in government acquisitions, all his experience seems to be from the side of the contractor. If you’re looking for a tl;dr (or a BLUF), it’s that nothing has actually changed.
Issue 1: “using fast-track acquisition processes, rather than the cumbersome existing Federal Acquisition Regulations.” This is just plain wrong. The FAR always applies. It has special considerations for buying COTS products, but you’re still required to follow the FAR.
Issue 2: “Instead of buying custom-designed weapons, the DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist” this isn’t something that Hegseth thought up, it has been a priority since at least the late 2000s, it’s in my FAM training material. The issue is that there are no COTS fighter jets or tanks. So we might prioritize COTS but the big ticket items are going to be custom.
Issue 3: (paraphrasing) “We’ve created PAEs, and there so much different than the clunky PEOs!” They actually sound like almost the exact same thing to me. The General Officer, whatever you call him, might notice a few different people showing up to his meetings. He’s still calling the shots. There is a slight difference that we seem to be trimming the number of portfolios, which means that each GO will have a few more programs to be responsible for.
Issue 4: (paraphrasing) “The PAEs will be able to trade cost, schedule, and performance!” This has literally always been the only job of acquisition. This isn’t new.
Issue 5: “Companies selling to the DoW previously had to comply with the impenetrable DFAR and FAR – the Defense and Federal Acquisition Regulations – with over 5,000 pages of complex rules. …
Now the DoW is telling PAEs to toss those and use Non-FAR regulations like OTAs (Other Transaction Authorities).” I researched options for OTAs for my program director during the Biden administration. They are a great way to do research and possibly even get a prototype made with significant participation by a non-traditional contractor. Unfortunately you can’t get anything mass produced under an OTA, so it allows you to speed by without a contract until you actually need to order a production run, and then the FAR applies. So any contractor that hopes to get a big order has to be planning for FAR compliance during development anyway. The profit isn’t in the prototype.
“Weapons Will Be Able to Talk to Each Other” Yup, we’ve had that one since at least the late 2000s. This is just rewording the “Net-ready KPP” that all major systems have to meet. Modular open systems aren’t new. (Okay, a few years ago this was downgraded from a KPP, but literally all modern weapons systems are still networked on common standards).
“To retrain/reeducate contracting and acquisition officers, the “Defense Acquisition University” will become the “Warfighting Acquisition University.” Fine. I’ll start using the word sex instead of gender and I’ll start sprinkling the word “merit” in my reports. It doesn’t change the end product.
“In JCIDS’ place the Secretary of War created three new organizations…” Holy shit, I thought we were streamlining this process! You cut off one dysfunctional organization and three grew in its place! Is this Hegseth or the Hydra?
Anyway, nothing has actually changed until Congress changes the laws that we have to follow. Until then it’s all window dressing.
My primary example is this clock generator breakout: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2045
The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
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