Nathan

@iamgingertrash Has been my experience as well. I think stems from our differences as a litigious democratic society vs a top-down society. US companies avoid risk and cover their asses. Chinese companies do whatever the customer asks.

Doing business with the Chinese For Truffle ² manufacturing (It’ll have 96G ram) It’s pretty clear to me That the U.S. is foolish to treat them as competitors They are partners, Who do what you cannot > manufacture And you do what they cannot > innovate

@hunterlanier Classic science fiction helps me. Book 1 of the Mars trilogy (Kim Stanley Robinson) has some really cool future building vibes, epic projects, terraforming, the impacts of technology on society and vice versa.

Anybody have reading recommendations for someone having a crisis of engineering purpose? The fear that there is no grand mission, everyone is faking it, nobody is doing anything, and it’s all about money? Asking for a friend

@yacineMTB There are no industry tools that support these kinds of checks. It’s actually silly. Part of the problem is that truly talented software people don’t want to work at Altium or Siemens or insert-goliath. Keep going this is great.

inb4 "you should actually know it" i know a lot of software things. but i still write functional end to end tests and run them every single time i make a change. humans are humans. and having THIS level of lack of checks for something that takes THREE WEEKS is ABSOLUTELY INSANE

learning how electrical engineers live is teaching me a lot. a lot about why their failure rates are so high

@_baldtires Super valid example. Could this fall into their “user-expandable options” ?

even if you had just 10kwh of battery onboard a vehicle (especially at ~500V) there's so much you can do with that. You have fucking power anywhere, why aren't you using it? The Slate doesn't even have a 120V receptacle in the bed.

More I think about the slate truck, the more i think it's going to fail 1. even if it had a gas engine, it's not a very useful small work truck 2. They aren't taking advantage of the fact it's electric, despite the fact that they can't avoid the BOM cost of the drivetrain

@CJHandmer Good point. Star-“token” sats become the demand flywheel for Starship that Starlink was for Falcon 9.

This is a good analysis, it agrees with others that a space token is currently 2-3x more expensive than a ground token. But it misses a broader point. As long as SpaceX can turn a profit on their space tokens, they have effectively unlimited demand for launch and own a parallel lane for customer access to their AI platform.

@CJHandmer @lsparrish @elonmusk But I think the nuance here is: space sourcing for terrestrial consumption Vs Space sourcing for space consumption

@lsparrish @elonmusk It still sucks

Funny story, a few years ago @elonmusk was saying "stab this idea in the heart" about space based solar power. And @CJHandmer was obligingly writing blog posts about how space solar totally sucks. Kudos to them for changing their mind and admitting they were wrong and all that

@BowTiedBroke Bzzzzzzzzz

Husqvarna sent me a stack of chainsaws to give away because a bear stole mine & Internet went wild. I’m adding a 4 day/3 nt stay to my Smoky Mtn cabin. (Side by side tours, meet Jimmy & me, see old moonshine stills, crazy views). To enter (100% free, no purchase necessary): 1) Follow @BowTiedBroke 2) Comment on THIS post with literally anything (tag friends = extra luck with the dartboard later 👀) Contest runs exactly 24 hours —-> closes tomorrow at 10:00 AM EST At close, @grok will instantly pick 20 random commenters with accounts older than 3 months. Then, I put those 20 names on a dartboard, film one throw, and THAT person wins everything. No bots, no BS, fully transparent. Grok posts the 20 here, the dart decides destiny 🎯 Sorry international followers (not that I have that many) U.S. followers only for this one. Cabin is in Tennessee, chainsaws are heavy, and bears don’t do passports. Let’s go! Drop a reply and let’s see who the Chainsaw stealing bear chooses.

What is the first game you think of when you see this?

@melissa Well done!

success it seems like wifi is not a software check, but a hardware one finding no radio signal to speak of, you can't even toggle it on it's now perma grayed out

needless to say, there will be no more smart tvs this leaves scarce choices: –– old tv –– projector (surprisingly hard to find dumb) –– commercial signage display screen (dumb but notably low quality) i picked d/ none of the above i decided to lobotomize a smart tv instead

My cafe/lunch/motorcyclerepair/makerspace/brewery dream

Same question for: - Computing Power - Network Bandwith

What’s the cumulative power generated by the entire Starlink constellation solar panel array today? In 2 years? In 5 years?

Starlink as a data center is like Bitcoin as a Bank - It’s distributed!

What would it look like to quantify the energy-burned-per-bit of a solar-powered Starlink satellite (essentially zero since solar) vs a T1 POP or data center? @JessePeltan Obviously there is launch and manufacturing cost, but is there an energy threshold where Starlink is more efficient for communication vs legacy ground tech?

This seems like a pretty big deal. arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/…

@SciGuySpace A Starlink satellite is already essentially an orbiting blade server with integrated network switch, with both air-air and air-ground connectivity. The orbital planes are the racks.

@_Stocko_ Maybe you’ve already done this, I’d have to inspect L1 copper, L1 paste and L1 SM layers overlaid

Moving all vias out of pads, ensuring their soldermask openings don’t merge, means you can skip Via-an-Pad processing and save $$ and time in fab. With the exception of the large thermal pads - you could leave the vias there and allow solder to wick to the other side of the board. Make sure though that the l4 via sm openings though are isolated so you don’t dump a ton of solder into the other side of the board and starve your thermal pads.

I've taken some of your advice and spent more time refining the board. On layer 1, a small tweak of the fanout on the MPU let me remove a lot of vias and keep a lot more on the signal tracks

@NotBlackMagic1 A good fab partner will also help catch this kind of stuff before they actually start building. Get to know your suppliers!

And this is how it is supposed to look, with the vias properly Tented!

@cremieuxrecueil @ratiolabsdata I suspect these people are less converts of traditional PC/Console gaming and more new consumers that never previously played games. Candy crushers of the world!

This is simply a trend that I cannot relate to at all. I don't play any games on my phone and I don't think I know many people who play mobile games either.

@emh203 Well done! Automating output workflows is a great way to drive consistency especially when you’re working with a team of designers. Some of the enterprise solutions offer similar automation hooks as well.

in the long time / λ limit, KiCad wins because you can use the raw data. In two hours, I made a tool that generates manufacturing docs that Altium still can't do. And if you could get drafts to do it, it would be a day of crashes and not useable for any other projects. Liberation from proprietary cad formats means you generate the things you need, when you need it.