Viewing profile — RetroTechie

(A crash course in how chips get made) That paragraph + illustration is one of the simplest, concise, easy-to-grasp descriptions of IC design process I've come across. Nice! Now th…

Detailed write-up please, or it didn't happen. At least not as described. Really simple ICs with a few counters etc in there might be possible to RE this way. Complex ICs with lots…

CD audio track != mp3. Either CD player would play audio itself (passed over analog audio connector), with the game occasionally changing track #. Zero CPU time. Or a DMA controlle…

> By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change. Supercooled water is a thing: (and I've seen it a few times myself) https://en.…

Pretty obscure piece of kit, nice find! That said: 2KB RAM is tiiight even with application code in a ROM cartridge. No regular keyboard, nor a joystick port.. sound? Not a great t…

> Maybe we just can't detect this Probably this. How would we know what such 'proto-life' (perhaps even just some self-replicating soup of chemicals, no cell wall) would look like?…

> Growth out of decay takes work, but it takes considerably less work than accelerated decay and then trying to start again when there is nothing fertile left to build on. Indeed. …

> people became paranoid and jump to conclusion without any substance Before AI, the only question was who made a particular artwork. Human-created practically a certainty. When AI…

Batteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap ba…

What part of "software needed to control a peripheral" could POSSIBLY be defined as: "software that shows you ads, and/or uploads private data to vendor without even asking for con…

It's archaic, powerful, expressive, compact. I'd describe it as an interactive macro-assembler on steroids. What's not to like? But it's different. Certainly not for everyone (imho…

Mostly missed a proper discussion of grouping batteries (parallel & series). Battery University has this page on the basics: https://www.batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-302-series…

> The best option is the RTC. Buy a DS3231, hook it up to your microcontroller and a button battery, and forget about it for a few years. RTC ICs are for use in bigger systems wher…

Nobody yet mentioned young-learnt habits: school cafeterias & snack machines. When I was young, in lunch breaks you'd head over to the school's cafeteria. And what they had there? …

Dave "EEVblog" Jones did a review of a (then) $0.03 microcontroller (Padauk) a while back (sorry, I don't know the exact episode). Iirc an important caveat was that it was a one-ti…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu... Certainly applies more general imho. Constrained by some resource -> invest resources elsewhere, and/or invest in re…

"Interpreters were conceived of only one year later, in 1958, but the mainstream was catching up in 1995." Minor nitpick: BASIC in early homecomputers (~1980) was usually interpret…

Going by those figures, would mean that AI datacenters built so far, consume enough energy to undo almost a year of solar power buildout. AND growing like crazy. That's running cos…

> I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. And then you'…

Sounds like a good reason to use alternatives like GrapheneOS. It doesn't take a big % of users to let the "using it is suspicious by itself" nonsense wear off.

I dislike current-gen AI for much the same reasons you mentioned: the externalities its development & use are causing. The tech itself is neutral in this respect. It's those extern…

Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff. But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator …

Because some idiot leader s threw diplomacy & international law out the window? So.. back to how things were done in the old days.

Seeing grey bars instead of text on the linked article. Gift link: same. Paywall bypass: unavailable or "Welcome to Nginx!" Am I the only one? I'd prefer people stop posting links …

"The 1971 data (i.e., nominal prices of 75 finished goods) came from the 1971 Sears catalog." Is that online somewhere?