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Comment Coding interviews are a waste. (Score 1) 81

Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.

I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.

The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.

Comment Wrong question. (Score 4, Insightful) 59

It seems likely that the answer to this question is 'yes'; but it seems like a mistake to be distracted by it when we are talking about people who are, busily and intentionally, building 'AI' products against the public.

It's mildly comical when they attempt to emulate humanity; but the important bit isn't the cluelessness; it's the malice.

Comment Re:So in the next few days (Score 1) 112

You're the one who politicized this, not me.
Or did you forget that you asserted ex nihilo that Trump was going to get it from Putin and then throw Zelensky in the conversation?
You just used those names what, coincidentally? Having a seizure?

Precisely what "stupid shit" re Helium is happening today, that's not just in your hate-Trump fevered imagination? Looks like the US designated helium as a critical resource - that's not "stupid shit", that's sensible.

I don't see any point in your post BUT the political, thus my point that if we're picking sides, it was democrat that put us here.

Comment imo more interestingly (Score 3, Interesting) 63

There's growing evidence for a ninth planet.* https://www.skyatnightmagazine... (real stuff at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.172...)

I've seen some vastly speculative bullshit (including still today "what if it's a micro black hole!?!!??!!?" which is fantastically unlikely, but the evidence does seem to be accumulating about a substantial TNO 500-700 au out.

*assuming the IAU doesn't again set up a bullshit scam-vote after nearly everyone left the conference to deprecate this one too.

Comment Re:Oh boy. (Score 1) 65

I suspect that this would be more tedious(and potentially less flattering); but you'd think that the metric you'd really care about for the juche-computer would be component availability.

Going by cost is interesting if you are trying to get the attention of balance-of-trade types and tariffs and dumping hawks; but it's an almost perfectly wrong measure if you are trying to catch any "oops, turns out that only the Chinese vendors so hungry they are considering offshoring to Vietnam still make a random passive or unexciting tolerances switching IC because it's a zero-margin part with no real room for differentiation that everyone who could got out of years ago" type situations.

If it's a real, drop-dead, 'national security' problem some of those are probably less serious, if there's a much fancier TI part that is overkill for the job but could be subbed in for only 3-4 factors of ten more; but if you want to keep economically viable civilian production open or it doesn't have a direct upmarket analog that could get really awkward; even if you've ensured that all the fancy logic ICs, copper, and gold are geopolitically friendly.

That's basically the Nexperia story, slightly simplified. Philips decided to private equity semiconductors generally; NXP decided to shove a bunch of the boring parts out to WingTech; then 'oops' European manufacturers who need diodes and ESD protection parts they thought were cheap jellybean stuff have cars piling up on the line because they can't get them.

Obviously losing a really cutting edge capability isn't preferred; but it's also the sort of thing that people notice because those tend to be pretty valuable; while low and middling capabilities, including ones that are sophisticated enough that you can't just throw money at restoring them fast, are things that are voluntarily surrendered because getting rid of low margin products makes line go up.

Comment Re:It's about time. (Score 1) 112

It's becoming a booming industry in China. They achieved 6N9-grade purity hydrogen from their natural gas fields, which have a content of less than 0.05 percent (other exploited fields have content of 1.0-7 percent), at a commercially viable cost a year ago. That's your "rubbish quality helium". Now there are a dozen companies replicating their work.

Comment Re:They literally sold the last bit two years ago (Score 2) 112

Their track record of determining what actually is "waste", however, is not nearly so great.

The joy of letting lawyers and generals with no real-world experience run a society and an economy they don't understand and have no interest in learning about.

Space Farce (spelling deliberate) budget - $32 billion
NASA budget - $24 billion
2026 Pentagram budget - $780 billion (without the Black Budget, nuclear weapons, 18 intel agencies, or mercenary scum hired by Sec of State)
All NASA budgets combined since foundation - $670 billion (including Apollo, ISS, and *much* R&D for the military)

This is why we can't have nice things.

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