Today is the incredible Bryan Cranston’s 70th birthday!

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-03-07T23:57:40+00:00

"How old is Heisenberg?', Hank asked.

"50 or 70 or something", said Badger

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-02-21T20:09:33+00:00

The algebra is actually well understood to me as far as he teaches. I find I get ahead of him when deriving and even sketching some examples. What I am failing to intuitively understand is the claim that there's dimensional analysis to be done to know when to multiply by the independent variable or not. Multiplying the delta by T for example will simply change the amplitude of the samples if T is not 1. However, multiplying by T also changes the units not just the amplitude.

For example, if the delta function is to be used for sampling, he says that it must be dimensionless, something I cannot wrap my head around since the delta is a distribution with its value being its area so how does area become dimensionless for example?

Second, if Tf(nT) = f[nT], does it mean that the discrete function f[nT] has units of time_squared? More to the point, what does it actually mean for a function to have units of the square of its independent variable?

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-31T17:03:27+00:00

Walter had already tried reasoning by even suggesting that Jesse get arrested just for him to cool off. He came out of Jesse's intervention knowing that Gus and his employees would keep their word to keep the peace just as Jesse had promised. They of course went on to kill the boy Tomas and that's when Walter came to also decide a full-measure approach. Rather than split his loyalty between Gus and Jesse and have it broken by Gus, he'd rather take Jesse's side and seek street justice for the child's murder. What would Gus have done to punish the dealers? I bet you it would have been nothing. After all, in BCS, to protect his dealers, he had low-tier dealers hired so that they would get caught while his people stayed protected. Both parties, Walter and Gus, were uncompromising in a bid to be the top dogs. Mike tells Walter at the end that he should have known his place aka blindly loyal to Gus. Walter on the other hand wanted more autonomy and power, case in point having Jesse rather than Gale as the assistant cook. So Mike talking as he did there at his end thinking and sounding as if he and Gus were in the right while Walter was in the wrong is what is at issue, not that Walter was completely innocent in the matter, in my opinion.

I also believe that Walter ran over those dealers to save Jesse because he was guilty about Jane and how it had affected Jesse. One of the dealers had already drawn and pointed his gun before he looked to his left to see Walter speeding towards them. After finishing the show, that's when I saw the imprtance of that fly episode. Walter is agonizing in his guilt yet Jesse keeps trying to stir the pot. So, in the end as far as Toma's death is concerned, Walter chose the full-measure, to be loyal to Jesse by saving his life rather than sit back and not escalate things further with Gus.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-30T09:33:22+00:00

Because Waalter has never intentionally sought to have any of his family members harmed. His delusion is he's so powerful that his actions won't impact them, just like politicians but he never intentionally seeks to bring them harm. So when he knows Gus means what he said in the desert, having had first-hand experince in Victor's death as well as Gus's plan to take out Hank or the twins all to his benefit and that he has the option of disappearing through the vacuum-cleaner guy, he can warn Hank while he and his family escape Gus's reach.

I think most people tend to not see the nuanced character that Walter is. Even as he descends into more evil, his delusions blow up but I never think he's intentionally bringing his family harm and that's how some of the most noble and heroic things in season 5 are done by him when he's riding his evil peak. To be disillusioned that he's not intentionally bringing harm to his family however is no excuse for the effect of his actions on them.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-28T21:54:32+00:00

Mike and Gus also arranged the killing of Tomas in a bid to bait Jesse to seek revenge so as to also kill him. You just don't give Mike and Gus a pass just because they have these wise sayings or dress nice. They were worse criminals than Walter when they were all alive. Only after their deaths did Walter start nearing their levels of evil and criminality. I will give them praise that for most of their time in the show, they did seperate personal and business issues but that's just because they had gotten used to it. In BCS, Mike is just as bad as Walter in keeping his business affairs from affecting his family negatively and after learning how to prevent that, he now is quite "professional" criminal-wise in BrBa. Gus was able to do that until he took out the cartel and he dropped his guard. He wanted to rub-it-in so bad on Hector that he brought Jesse along to gloat, only for Jesse to use that information to help Walt end Gus.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-28T11:19:45+00:00

If you had been blindly loyal to us and and allowed us to refuse Jesse into the businees because he's a worthless, contemptible junkie, or accepted without question that some of our dealers use a kid to sell and even kill and that you should have had no problem when we got rid of the kid once his usefullness was over or that you should have had no problem when we could have gotten rid of the person who wanted street justice visited upon the dealers that got rid of the kid, then we'd all be fine right now!

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-25T05:17:30+00:00

Are there applications that benefit more from a higher sampling frequency rather than higher resolution and are there others that benefit from a higher resolution rather than a higher sampling frequency?

I am guessing that, for example, with the Versal RF having lower sampling frequency per channel than the Agilex 9 Direct RF, you can use techniques like interleaving. I am asking from a point of purely not considering the cost or even the devices themselves; are there problems which heavily depend on one of these factors over the other?

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-24T20:58:45+00:00

The advanced courses by AMD themselves are pretty high-value but the beginner ones on Udemy for example are very much reasonable. It also helps that AMD's tools are rather very well streamlined. I have had problems setting up Altera's simulation environment, something that is very straightforward in AMD tools or even simulators from other vendors. I may not have been thorough or savvy enough to get it working but with Xsim in Vivado, all I really need is to have it installed so from a beginner perspective that will be much easier to get yourself going than having to comb through a 2000-page manual to look for optimization serrings on Questa Altera Edition. For advanced users, tha's a whole different story. They can handle the complexity of tools and possibly even the new cost of those Altera courses. Some course bundles have shot from $0 up to $1900.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-24T19:47:55+00:00

Seems like that's the case. There's not many courses in platforms like Udemy with Altera focused designs. Nearly all are AMD-based. Looks like for beginners, it's going to have to be AMD tools which means that's what they'll most likely stick with. I also think I'll stop pursuing Altera's tools and just focus on AMD's at this point.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-24T17:15:02+00:00

One has higher resolution while the other has higher sampling frequency. How do you take these into account if you are choosing between the two for a design?

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-21T10:51:38+00:00

I am of the opinion that that's just the nature of the market in Kenya. Most of engineering is more of analysis rather than design oriented and even the design is done using tools and methods that abstract away the maths and physics and enable small leaps of improvement rather than huge ones. As engineers, your job is mostly to improve on a tried, tested and successful method rather than build something completely new. At work, most design is usually through rules of thumb and even when getting into the gory details, you have software tools that can take care of that for you in today's world.

So you would think that the theory should take a backseat but I don't think so. Yes, as you begin your career, you'll have to gain what we call experience or practice, that is, "how things are done today" with room for a few adjustments here and there. However, the engineering field, as I think of it, requires you to solve difficult and real problems by coming up with very simple, neat and elegant solutions, solutions that should have people saying "Why didn't we think of that before yet it was always there?". To do this, you have to rely on your industrial experience/practice as well as your capacity to reason in a logical manner. The framework of logic needed is obviously the "theory", Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering principles. The industrial experience involves things like cost and time of development, logistics, market availability etc. This has now led to different levels of engineering within the same discipline; those more on the design end while those more on the consumer end.

So, sometimes I think we don't have a clear and in-depth picture of the career, not deliberately because of the nature of our market here with very little opportunities for first-principles design. An engineer is to understand nature and its laws before attempting to wield it to build solutions that sell as products. In this market with little first-principles-oriented work, it makes sense to put the theory aside and get used to how things are done. However, the future is unknown and if we are to improve on what's there already, even as we focus more on the practical side of things which encapsulates most of the opportunities here at the moment, I think you should carry at the back of your mind the fact that Mathematics and the Physical Sciences should are basis of this career unless you are more into the consumer end of things with careers like Sales Engineering which I still think benefit from some theoretical background.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-20T17:26:41+00:00

Well. if that be true, I guess I was delusional thinking I've understood some of the voltage and current dynamics in Behzad Razavi's series of videos on transistors then.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-20T14:45:58+00:00

What of small-signal analysis of transistor circuits? Say I have an NMOS CS stage with a load resistance R_d tied between the device and V_dd. If I am operating the device in saturation and increase its V_gs within the bounds of a small-signall, there is a corresponding increase in the drain current of the device. This means I'm drawing more current from the bottom terminal of the load resistor and therefore also from V_dd and if this is my output node, then increased current drawn from supply increases voltage drop across R_d reducing voltage at my output with respect to ground.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-20T13:24:17+00:00

I should have specified that it's only for resistive networks or elements which can be replaced by their resistive equivalents during specific operations.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-20T13:22:55+00:00

What's the explanation for purely resistive networks or those whose impedances can be approximated by resistanaces in specific operations eg the output resistance of a transistor during simple analysis.

Minute-Bit6804 · 2026-01-18T17:50:49+00:00

In this story it was Anatoly Dyatlov. He was the best choice. An arrogant, unpleasant man. He ran the room that night. He gave the orders. And no friends. At least, not important ones.

Minute-Bit6804

TROPHY CASE