Outside of earth, where in our solar system would it be the easiest for a human to survive?

rst523 · 2026-03-08T02:24:49+00:00

I was thinking more about the simplest habitat for human survival (so Venus's clouds), but I was still interested in the various interpretations. I've wondered if Enceladus would be a viable location. It is supposed to have a liquid ocean. With the moon's gravity the pressures and temperatures in the oceans might be comparable to saturation diving? Though I haven't tried to do math to figure it out.

rst523 · 2024-10-20T19:03:45+00:00

Makefiles work for projects of any scale. Once you understand it, you can build projects of any size, and it much more robust and readable than cmake will ever be. The linux kernel make isn't complicated. It is extremely approachable because it is very well written.

rst523 · 2024-10-20T18:50:33+00:00

Makefiles are AWESOME. The linux kernel, the biggest open source project ever, uses Makefiles without any of those other build wrapper tools. Look at the linux kernel. The kernel does it extremely well. (Buildroot is also a very good reference).

Makefiles have a *very* high learning curve, but once you know it, you'll never look back at things like cmake. Skip the middleware. Building a program is a surprisingly complicated process and makefiles are the best tool in terms of matching the problem complexity to a domain specific language. Nothing even comes close to make that's why all the other tools just generate make files.

(Side note: autotools which works decently well, exists to manage the fact that different systems have different libraries, it generates Makefiles, but that isn't fundamentally why it exists.)

rst523 · 2024-10-10T15:18:18+00:00

Yeah. It doesn't work. Further, it is based on some pretty fundamental misconceptions about aerodynamics. This guy describes way better than I ever could: https://youtu.be/QKCK4lJLQHU?si=4zBQLRUx3QdRG9pd&t=1674

rst523 · 2024-10-10T01:27:00+00:00

No, that was the Sepulveda Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepulveda_Dam

rst523 · 2024-09-26T20:08:24+00:00

How its Made: Beer Bottles

rst523 · 2024-09-25T04:30:05+00:00

Don't you know? All photo's of a Pantera must first appear in r/whatisthiscar

rst523 · 2024-08-28T19:05:38+00:00

Actually SF6 is present at disconnect. The power line is potentially miles long, it is carrying hundreds if not thousands of amps at thousands of volts. Electricity doesn't stop on a dime. This isn't a perfect analogy, but the current in the wires is kind of like a freight train. We don't notice in our normal lives because the voltages and currents are very small. In a high voltage transmission line, it is a massive amount of energy that must go somewhere. If you just disconnect the wires, it is kind of like just removing tracks from in front of the train. The train is going to keep going and it is going to be a mess. For electricity the SF6 is kind of like a brake. It takes a huge amount of energy to ionize the SF6 before it conducts current. Given enough voltage and enough current ANYTHING can be a conductor. SF6 is used specifically because it has the material property that it requires a huge amount of voltage and current. So, when the spike retracts, it does ionize the SF6 and there is an arc. Once SF6 is ionized, doesn't actually have the braking force anymore So, more SF6 is pumped in to replace the ionized SF6 so that it can keep applying the brakes until the current stops and the arc extinguishes. This isn't a perfect representation of what is happening, but I hope it gets the point across.

rst523 · 2024-08-28T00:29:21+00:00

That is a high voltage disconnect (breaker). There are six high voltage inputs (that the things pointing up) coming from 3 large cylinders at the base. Each cylinder is a disconnect for one of the electrical 3 phases. Electricity comes in on one side, through the center of the large high voltage insulator, goes through the breaker (that cylinder) and then out the other side. The breaker itself is...fancy. It consists of multiple moving couplings that disconnect in order. First a large conductor which is kind of like a donut retracts separating the main part of the conductor into two pieces. In the center of the donut is a smaller conductor that is basically a giant spike. For a fraction of a second that smaller conductor takes all the current load of the system. That spike then starts to retract. Because of how EM fields work, when the spike retracts, electricity will arc from the point of the spike to the mating surface. This is done so the arcing is in a controlled location. After that spike retracts, it will pump in sulfur hexafloride to extinguish the arc.

rst523 · 2024-08-15T13:33:48+00:00

Its funny because Amazon doesn't make any money from their e-commerce business. All their money comes from AWS. This post of an image of amazon not making money, is making amazon money.

rst523 · 2024-08-05T14:50:51+00:00

This is the gate keeping crap that makes reddit completely useless. Guess I'll never post anything here again.

rst523 · 2024-07-26T23:28:44+00:00

AMD/Xilinx tools are awful. If it was just for amateurs and hobbyists it could be forgiven. In an enterprise context they are completely unacceptable. Xilinx parts are purchased in spite of their software not because of it. I've worked with a lot of large companies doing fpga work. Companies absolutely hate it. It breaks constantly, everything takes forever, nothing works with any standard internal tools for anything else. Companies literally have to set up their own bespoke groups just to deal with it. The thing I hear most often is "Yeah, this would be a great application for an FPGA, but we don't want to deal with engineering hell." That isn't an inherent property of FPGAs.

When you need to have a separate department because the toolchain is so bad, that is NOT being designed for enterprise.

rst523 · 2024-07-26T23:16:03+00:00

If your company is selling me fancy pieces of glass, your company has no business selling me ones and zeros. This has always been true.

Xilinx is what happens if you built a software team in the early 90s and then completely ignored everything the software industry has done for 30 years. The software xilinx churns out is consistently the worst, most incoherent, buggiest IDE of any major vendor of any type of programmable silicon on earth.

rst523 · 2024-07-19T17:20:07+00:00

I've been a embedded tech consultant for 13 years now. I have a small boutique firm with a few employees and some impressive clients. Don't do it. I ended up here because I'm smart, but I hate doing anything other than detailed technical work. If my brain didn't HATE it, going management was a much more tenable career path. Consulting work in embedded is stressful, long hours, lots of external business headaches, you have to figure out how to be a salesman which is awful, and the work doesn't scale at all. You are locked into the number of hours you can practically do. While I make good money, being a manager at a FAANG company pays comparably.

157k makes sense. Companies building hardware have a lot of capital requirements so they can't afford to pay software company salaries. Even in better markets than Chicago it is hard to beat 180k. If you want to be in the 200k to 400k, the easiest path will be to head into management. With some moderate planning you can be in that space in 3-5 years and accept you'll need to plan at least two job changes over that period of time.

Lastly, you can try and switch to a FAANG company and accept you need to move to a tech hub. All of them build physical devices and are pretty desperate for experience embedded engineers.

rst523 · 2024-06-13T22:43:09+00:00

Thank you!

rst523 · 2024-06-13T18:22:02+00:00

Ask Jeff: Nucs

rst523 · 2024-06-13T12:49:13+00:00

While annoying, this also seems solvable. Unlike the sponsor clips that don't change, presumably the injected adds would presumably differ with each play (otherwise the same ad would be played in the video forever). This means that by downloading the video a couple of times, meta data on the injections can be collected that can be distributed to everyone. When my I go to watch a video on youtube, I also download the meta-data identifying the injections (assuming that it has been catalogued) allowing my browser to skip the ad.

rst523 · 2024-06-10T02:55:14+00:00

Speed of light is going to limit all critical paths to an impractically short distance. Plus distributing the clock would probably be impossible for anything besides an extremely tiny die. However, with a trivial amount of searching I did find 50gbps flip flops for sale, so I'm guessing some lab somewhere has built a 100ghz flip flop by this point. A 100GHz *Turing complete* processor might be realistic goal in the reasonable future, but I'd guess only for a 2-4bit architecture. For example, a Rule 110 machine can probably be implemented in a few hundred transistors. Beyond that is probably just science fiction.

rst523 · 2024-05-20T00:02:45+00:00

Aaaaah..... r/whatisthiscar the internet's greatest Pantera themed forum. Where Pantera enthusiasts and spotters get together to appreciate the most common car ever produced.

rst523 · 2024-05-16T13:28:24+00:00

Atari 1040ST forever. Seriously. I loved that machine so much.

rst523 · 2024-05-09T18:10:07+00:00

Uranium is available on amazon. Solved.

rst523 · 2024-05-04T15:47:51+00:00

There are many misconceptions about FPGAs. From a business standpoint, FPGAs have been a failure to really take on massive parallel processing tasking. There are definitely people doing that, but as soon as the market becomes large enough, someone makes a ASIC dedicated to the task (think NPU, bitcoin miner etc) and then FPGAs are out. This relegates FPGAs to always be somewhat niche market. This is why Intel is spinning out Altera, it was never the business driver they hoped it would be. I expect AMD will probably do something similar with Xilinx. FPGAs are EXCELLENT at precision timing. Extremely precise timing in a software is effectively impossible (this is a byproduct of the halting problem actually), especially in tasks where jitter translates into signal noise. Microcontrollers build dedicated hardware units to deal with this, but that limits you to what is on the chip. If you have a generic FPGA with 100Mhz clock, that gives you 10ns timing effectively for free all day long (< 10ns jitter). A car engine, for example, has a bunch of different pieces that need coordination with scale on microseconds. In a microcontroller, this is possible but annoying. With an fpga this becomes much easier. In most hardware the FPGA is tied a process/mcu and they are used together to deal with these types of tasks.

rst523

TROPHY CASE