• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Vias are necessary for literally every part of electronics design beyond the basic I take a premade module and hook it up to these other 2 premade modules (which all have many vias on them), not just small packages.

    Most PCBs nowadays are ≥4 layers. You need vias to use the center layers. Vias are necessary for ground return paths, stitching, shielding, RF plane coupling, signal integrity, and much much more. Single layer designing simply does not work if one is actually designing electronics and not just quick and dirty throwing 2 data busses together for a proof of concept.

    BGAs don’t need vias, they are so small (0.5mm pitch and smaller) they usually need microvias (0.15mm/0.3mm ID/AR or smaller, which brings PCB prices from 15€ to 300€ for a set). Then the vias generally have to be filled at least and capped, optimally to not suck the solder through the vias from the balls. That is a whole other ballgame.


  • It is funny because electric motors have nearly unlimited* torque depending on the kind. If you have thick enough power cables and winding conductors, you can just keep pushing it harder to get more torque.

    It is like the thing they are very good at, besides sound levels, double or triple the efficiency, low/no maintenance, simpler with less parts, no emissions, etc…

    Literally the only good thing about combustion engines are their fuel source energy density.

    I think the problem is that motorheads see the enshittification of the auto industry as a whole and just say it’s because of electric motors because it happened right about the same time as EVs started coming out and try to push back on the wrong thing.


  • Isn’t this kind of the opposite? The effectiveness of protests diminishing? Like people are doing shit and trying their best with the limited time and resources they have and people are actively getting involved resulting is the largest protests in american history.

    And yet the needle doesn’t even twitch. People are also doing their best to non-violently show that they are completely against the actions of the government, and yet the government doesn’t even care enough about the will of the people to acknowledge them or their concerns outside of an AI generated meme…

    There are only so many non-violent steps you can take with those in power completely ignoring you. Haven’t we gone through this already throughout history?


  • Yep. I have posted on stack overflow exactly 3 times. One time it was marked as duplicate and referenced to something that was not even the same topic. One time I had too much detail and debugging done for the classic knowitalls to come make a smartass remark and was completely ignored. The final time I got one comment, addressed it, and that person was never heard from again lol.



  • Yes, but I am also of the opinion that not one single acronym should be used without at least once in the section saying what the acronym is. Many many programing docs with say what am acronym is exactly once, somewhere in the docs, and then never again.

    Also, if there are more complex concepts that they use that they don’t explain, a link to a good explanation of what it is (so one doesn’t have to sift through mountains of crap to find out what the hell it does). Archwiki docs do this very well. Every page is literally full of links so you can almost always brush up on the concepts if you are unfamiliar.

    There seem to be 10 extremely low quality, badly written, low effort docs for every 1 good documentation center out there. It is hard to RTFM when the manual skips 90% of the library and gives an auto-generated api reference with no or cryptic explanations on parameters, for example.


  • While the lack of laughter can be from depression or stress (the podcasts I used to die laughing from only get an actual laugh out loud moment every once in a while now), I feel like most story-based video games that do humor try too hard nowadays and it doesn’t land (like outer worlds)

    Most of my laughter in video games, personally has been from interacting with other people. Valheim, Helldivers 2, REPO, overcooked, stardew valley, etc…

    Probably the last single player game I laughed with was A Hat in Time or something.


  • But on this threat model? Why would it not be good?

    It has to physically accessed on the PCB itself from what I gather.

    There are 2 “threats” from what I see:

    • someone at the distribution facility pops it open and has the know how to install malware on it (very very unlikely)

    • someone breaks into your home unnoticed and has the time to carefully take apart your vacuum and upload pre-prepared malware instead of just sticking an IP camera somewhere. If this actually happens, the owner has much much bigger problems and the vacuum is the least of their worries.

    The homeowner is the other person that can access it and it is a big feature in that case.






  • I am still relatively inexperienced and only embedded. (Electronics by trade) I am working on an embedded project with Zephyr now.

    If I run into a problem I kind of do this method (e.g. trying to figure out when to use mutexes vs semaphores vs library header file booleans for checking ):

    • first look in the zephyr docs at mutexes and see if that clears it up

    • second search ecosia/ddg for things like “Zephyr when to use global boolean vs mutex in thread syncing”

    • if none of those work, I will ask AI, and then it often gives enough context that I can see if it is logical or not (in this case, it was better to use a semi-global boolean to check if a specific thread had seen the next message in the queue, and protect the boolean with a mutex to know if that thread was currently busy processing the data), but then it also gave options like using a gate check instead of a mutex, which is dumb because it doesn’t exist in zephyr.

    For new topics if I can’t find a video or application note that doesn’t assume too much knowledge or use jargon I am not yet familiar with, I will use AI to become familiar with the basic concept in the terms so that I can then go on to other, better resources.

    In engineering and programming, jargon is constant and makes topic introduction quite difficult if they don’t explain it in the beginning.

    I never use it for code with the exception of codebases that are ingested but with no documentation on all of the keys available, or like in zephyr where macro magic is very difficult to navigate to what it actually does and isn’t often documented at all.



  • I started using activities instead of virtual desktops with 2 desktops each.

    Separate wallpapers, separate start menu favorites, separate panel pins, etc… Plus you can hide activities not in use to keep it tidy. I used to use virtual desktops more, but I think of it now as a 2D grid. Vertically activities very organized and for each you can switch horizontally where organization doesn’t matter as much.

    Activities are great except there is a bug where the little wallpaper previews won’t show with the default, batch resized and renamed wallpapers.