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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 6th, 2023

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  • I’m assuming you’re not super familiar with PCB fabrication? The toner transfer is a way to get small, repeatable, and precise definition of the component pads and traces - at home - without needing the expensive industrial machinery that fab houses have.

    The toner ’print’ is a negative image, placed on a sheet of copper mounted to (usually) fiberglass. Much like masking off areas when painting, the ‘print’ protects the copper surface in select areas you want to keep safe when the whole board goes into the acid bath to dissolve the unprotected copper - leaving copper only where your ‘print’ was, and hopefully no shorts/grounds.

    Definitely cool to have the ability to DIY fine pitch if you’re manually mounting SMT components or want higher board density, beats out the hand drawn permanent marker lines I’ve done in the past 😅




  • Really wishing all the boomers had gone the way of Heinlein. Bobby was no saint and some of his views aged terribly (and others weren’t great even at the time) but a free-love humanist hippy who has a ‘realist’ grounding’? A lot better than the Reaganism, “greed is good”, and culture war pearl clutching we did get.

    I never understood how that generation could be given so much more than those before, grow up with all that opportunity, and become such cantankerous assholes.




  • Correct. Dress it up however you like, but LLM and ML programs are probability gamblers all the way down. We’re building a conversation tool, that doesn’t truly comprehend the language because it’s a calculator at its core - it’s like asking your eyeballs to see in UHF frequencies.

    They’re called “computers” for a reason, and we are deep in the myopic tech tree of further and further complexity. The current wave of AI has solid potential, but not globally for all applications. It is a great at ‘digital assistant’ roles and is already killing it in CCTV monitoring software. Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art. ChatGPT can write, but it’s a terrible author or speechwriter.



  • I had a former workplace like that, it was beautiful 🥹

    We had a hot seat meeting where each department representative wasn’t even in the room until their individual staggered start time kicked in. One out, one in, cycling through each department until the meeting was over. They get to go back to their work and not be ‘meat’ in the room for fifteen minutes or more, we got focused reports from each as they filed in and out.

    Sometimes I miss working for Germans, but “alles in Ordnung” cuts both ways - good luck breaking through the bureaucracy reporting chain and getting quick results








  • “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.“ Matthew 6:5, NIV

    Now, I don’t make a habit of quoting holy books, but it certainly can have some absolute zingers if you know even A LITTLE of its content and can spot hypocrisy.


  • The Arab Spring was kicked off by a Libyan street vendor who was so tired of paying bribes, fees, and ‘fines’ he set himself on fire instead of choosing another day at life. And enough of his countrymen saw that and said “Agreed. There’s no future anymore, let’s burn it all down and get a new government”.

    The US has been in trouble for a long while - you have to wonder how long until the body politic is picked clean by capitalism and people are done with this project we call America. When all the political oxygen is consumed by the loudest fringe voices who achieve nothing of substance, while entrenching their power and prestige. There’s only two ‘viable’ parties, and they want it that way, all while we pretend with the illusion of choice.

    But please, tell me how I need not give up, that all I have to do is get involved more local politics, or ‘play the game’ and throw campaign elections at my problems. Gerrymandering, dark money, DNC/RNC funding choking out 3rd party candidates, etc etc. the fix is in, and you and I aren’t in on it.