Posts by Rattus

Soled

This is the one time the tin foil would work. Shield your electronics :-)

Like all execs...

If you assume the OPPOSITE of what they are saying there is a better chance that is true.

/A

You should be ashamed of this article

Someone screwed up with how they merged two datasets, this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the software they were using.

Given this was once again a *manual* data merge with once again little or NO oversite, or verification, then exactly the same fault could have happened regardless the software tools used (and I include in that pen and paper)

Indeed this particular error was down to methodology, and not scaling rankings, the previous error caused by (IIRC a size limit being exceeded)

Both cases appear to have been a function of asking someone who doesn't understand statistics, to merge datasets from multiple sources.

The person in question person dutifully did what was asked of them, but failed either because they didn't understand the data themselves and so couldn't determine that they were getting implausible results. Or they because they were incompetent and didn't even attempt to validate their results.

Either way, nobody appears to have checked the results before using them.

This is plain and simply PBKAC.

Now it could be argued that Excel should tell you if you exceed the maximum number of rows (or columns) in sheet. But in this case if you ask Excel (or for that matter any software) to do some specific maths it can hardly be blamed when the maths the user asked it to do was incorrect?

You then go on to argue that AI will save us from this mess.

How do you expect that to happen? If people can't produce a correct spreadsheet in the first place all you are going to do is train up your AI to make exactly the SAME mistakes, because you are going to give your AI system the same broken spreadsheets to learn from. Worse than that you are then going to sell this flawed system to other people with the claim that it isn't going to make the stupid mistakes that dumb humans do...

FFS stop calling it AutoPilot

Really you are overselling the product to the user.

You call it Autopilot and the user thinks (I struggle to use the word think, but it is the closest analogue I can find for the activity in the user's head) that the car will drive itself. It doesn't help that that is exactly how it is being sold, because nobody reads the fine print....

Calling it a driver assistance package and explain clearly the limitations.... but if you do that then your product is no better than the competitors and now how do you sell a car?

/Rattus

P.S. Yes I know Autopilots in aeroplanes are nothing more than pilot assist and don't do much more than the current car driver assist either. I know that but most people don't.

P.P.S. the car isn't a self driving car until I am not liable in the event of an accident when AutoPilot is engaged. feel free to talk all you want about levels of autonomy, but until I can get into the car drunk as a skunk, and tell it to take me home and it be at least as reliable as the driver of a taxi - forget it.

I am prince Ali of Olympus Mons

I have a wonderful opertunity for you.

If you deposit $all_your monies with me here on mars I will pay you 25% interest after tax.

Please send your account details for further information

Apart from the comments about ww2 German companies the rest of the article is a good read

It is stupid to block commits from Russia, or Russian citizens.

Firstly it is almost impossible to do (ever heard of free email accounts and VPNs/Proxies?)

Secondly for the reasons raised in the article, the only people it hurts is everyone else.

and Finally well just read the licence. Using the code is perfectly fine so preventing contributions is just cutting off your nose to spite your face...

back in the day...

Way back when dial up was still a thing for business, the small company I was working for had invested in a 2mbit leased line for internet access and a colleague and I were tasked with setting it up and making things 'safe'.

Alongside the company website (it never occurred to us that we could pay someone else to host for us), we had been playing with the addition of NAT, cache, proxies and routing rules on this new fanged Linux box that was to become the company internet 'gateway' (firewall was perhaps too new a word) thus enabling us to also access the internet from our small local network. The aforesaid colleague had set up a local site to display each and every jpeg image that passed through the box on a screen in the corner (We didn't really watch it, but knowing that someone might be watching was enough to deter people from browsing the internet instead of doing their jobs).

Our MD was quite proud of the fact that were were self sufficient in IT, and staff could send and receive email, access websites and more importantly that our customers could send us an email to place orders (yep plain text email with credit card details - we were so naive back then). Anyway he would often point at the monitor in the corner when he was giving a potential client the tour of the factory, showing off we had a permanent internet connection and customers could send in orders directly to the factory (we were a small sub contract electronics assembler).

One day doing the usual tour I had to wander over and turn off the monitor because I had just seen the content being lovingly rendered jpeg on top of jpeg just as the boss walked in with his daughter on an afternoon off from school.

He had spotted what I had done, but fortunately, she wasn't looking in the general direction. Coming up-to me after he exclaimed that he wasn't aware that you could access that kind of content on the internet let alone why would anyone want to look at this at work - we were after all in an open plan office with very little chance such browsing wouldn't be noticed.

His statement was almost correct; we were in an open plan office, not so for the Directors.

Needless to say our Finance Director moved job soon after...

Ack.

It is not surprising that ST and other semiconductor "manufactures" have chosen to fulfil their bigger customers first (TBH what we get is the scraps from the table) however;

The good news is that we are now *beginning* to see stock trickle down into the catalogue distributors.

All this talks about a Semi-conductor downturn is utter crap,

Let me get this right

double the number of cores, multiply the TDP by 80% and somehow data centres are unable to supply enough power?

WRONG WRONG WRONG

You get more work for less total power in less space.

That means that you can increase the amount of work done in the same data centre for the same power budget.

Sorry if you don't have the ability to supply more power but that really isn't AMD or Intel's fault now is it?

It also means that if you wanted to get more work done in the same data center using the previous generation of chips you would have needed to build a new data centre because at that point you wouldn't have the available space nor enough power available.

Short term memory problem....

follow my thinking here

(1) world wide pandemic. Production of semiconductors pretty much halts.

(2) supply chain empties: Those who are still able to manufacture end product (Not chips) buy what they can and stock pile it

Semiconductor fabs yield high profits because of inflated prices and limited availability of their product (supply and demand)

(3) Pandemic eases: Production re-starts

Sales begin high as there is demand for the "first off" the production lines as people desperate for previously exhausted parts buy

Semiconductor fabs yield well but not as good as the previous phase (because semiconductors are built in batches, and whilst the initial part of the batch sells the rest goes into re-stocking the supply chain)

(4) "Near Normal" (I can't call it back to normal)

Sales returning to pre-pandemic levels

Sales are down (and by comparison to the boom of the last 2 phases this is true)

Why is this even a story?

/Rattus

Lessons lernt from Apollo programme?

"There's another issue, too: all astronauts traveling in a Dragon spacecraft have to wear tailored SpaceX spacesuits, and the crew that arrived at the space station in the Soyuz don't have that fancy clobber."

Didn't we learn from the Apollo missions (i.e. #13) that having incompatible kit is a very bad idea. OK back then it was different US companies, and not an international programme, but even so, an ISS should have a single standard for all fixtures and fittings, so too for space suites etc.

cue the obligatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/927

WFH vs the Office

I agree that there is a lot to be said for me working from home. I can (and do) get more work done if I have the corporate policy to support me (work insist on RDP over a firewall which just DOES NOT work in a CAD package, now if I could simply checkout the files from git, work on them locally then all would be good)

But I digress...

Me working from home is good for ME. I am a principle engineer, I know MY job and can get on and do it. When I work from home I feel MY productivity goes up. I can even measure it and so can the PM. I hit all of MY tasks on or ahead of time.

But that is MY official tasks, MY allocated work on the project and whilst that is MY stated job it in reality is only part of the role of a principle.

The undocumented soft roles are also (and perhaps more) important.

o Mentoring junior members, by showing them how something is done.

o Being 'interruptible'

o Able to spend 5 min looking over someone's shoulders to spot the mistake they were too close the coal face to be able to see

o Being able to context switch to that bit of hardware we haven't touched for months in order to help a customer right NOW instead of scheduling a time to go into the office so I can get access to the hardware

There are lots of these physically present, not a personal goal, not on the project plan type of tasks that I do all the time. They are never measured, often never documented, but they enable other people to do their jobs more productively. If I am working from home there is a barrier (even if it is only a perceived barrier) to approaching me to ask a question. If team members (and perhaps more importantly non team members) can't stop me in the corridor or stick their head around my office door, then overall productivity is lost even if we as individuals get more of OUR work done.

Think of it like that conference that you go to each year, the first few times it was all about the presentations. But these days they are, for me at least, more about the corridor track, the conversations that you have when you get a group of people together often from very different backgrounds and roles.

That said this only works if you are ALL in on the same days (and NOT just so that you can attend a meeting)

And of cause if you don't need to interact with anyone and nobody else at your work interacts with you - jobs where the worker is a fungible resource - then you may as well sit at home all day. for everything else then the company is better off if you show up to the office on a regular basis. There is still space for working from home some of the time and flexibility of WHEN this should happen helps.

/Andy