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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • This has been happening for over a decade in cycling. 10 speed and threaded bottom brackets were the last truly standardized bike era where there was marginal cross compatibility. Really, 8 speed was the last time most FD's worked across brands. Shimano is a patent troll, as are Cannondale Trek and Specialized.

    The US patent and legal system is colonial era imperialistic nonsense that awards protections to any garbage a company tries to weaponize via the legal system. Defending yourself from these trolls will prevent you from any success with real innovations. The USA allows patents for common sense engineering practices of no note and language that is unclear and vague to enable large companies to suppress any real innovations that might threaten their profitable monopolistic stagnation or inferior criminal schemes to steal ownership like Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, etc.

    I honestly hope some group in China realizes that they can leverage open source and standardization to invert their position on the geopolitical world stage. If China officially got behind this kind of standardization, it would benefit them most, but also all of the rest of us by giving us an alternative path out from capitalist exploitation using proprietary garbage. If I could buy a forever-serviceable standard quality Chinese carbon bike of an early 2010’s vintage for under $2k, I would do so and ditch the scam sticker brands all made in one of 4 factories on a single road in Taiwan. Those 4 have colluded to undercut and kill world competition and then instituted a price fixing monopoly. Likewise, I would gladly buy an entirely open and documented RISC-V CPU instead of x86, or a Phone with fully hardware register-level documented SOC/modem over any proprietary garbage with an orphaned kernel using Qualcomm/Broadcom garbage. Making such products in China seems like the ideal geopolitical move and the most world community-ist thing possible. Not to mention it is taking a big step onto the moral high ground.


  • Other than the attempt to obfuscate the TNI and multi-object bodies, what else have they changed in FreeCAD? I haven’t kept up with it, but have seen stuff in passing like Mangojelly’s titles/thumbnails. I like that I learned the proper old skool CAD ways with the TNI, so I kinda lack much motivation to follow the latest nightlys. I’m not trying to gatekeep or anything. It was deeply frustrating to learn the important ins and outs of the topological naming issue and why all proper design revolves around it. If I stayed informed I’d likely be vocal about how people will (likely) fail to learn why things still break in ways they do not understand even though it is entirely their own fault. So I stay a little distant for now and have done so ever since the real thunder drama. Anything new of note?



  • Watching the game, there are many times when it is obvious that a receiver is a few steps ahead from an overhead perspective. Abstracting what I’ve seen when I played in HS, the view from up field obscures the real time separation in this kind of instance. It would be very possible the show an overlay of color that indicates how well each receiver is covered in real time along with the ideal pass to intercept distance and speed tailored to the physiology of the QB, i.e. max pass right line 33 yards 2.5sec 2.4sec 2.3sec… This would not be additional information to process specifically, but more like color overlays like the target location to throw is a green-yellow-red pin in view with all players doing the same and an audible system of alarms to indicate dangers and action required in the pocket. The point in AR here is not to add new independent information, it is to firm up and clarify the information the individual is intuitively processing at the human brain’s very limited frequency. Microcontrollers are time machines that turn seconds into luxuriously long days by comparison of available clock cycles. Accessing those extra days worth of time to do research and assess the situation should prove useful to the limited biological compute system playing the game. We are well beyond the point where all of the surrounding information in the game can be sensed and processed autonomously.


  • IMO that adds to the appeal if there is disparity in the tech. I don’t think the tech would really make a difference other than adding a few layers of interesting broadcasting information that might make the game slightly less dull for someone like myself, although not anywhere near enough to watch a 1 hour game tailored around over 1 hour of obscene ads I find grossly offensive. Americans love their underdog team stories. The idea that limiting funds has anything to do with it is bogus as teams are renowned for buying wins through various means. Such tech would normalize military service and likely have a trickle down effect to lower levels. Standardization would likely reduce cost and could likely get a DARPA like subsidized program as it is directly connected to battle tech. It would also potentially showcase military tech in a strategically advantageous way through both showing a hand at the poker table of geopolitics while not necessarily revealing the true capabilities or extent of actual battle hardware tech.










  • It is basically I/O limitations, and the majority of lights in this area likely have an origin in cycling lights as far as the silicon is concerned. I think that is the original high profit niche that drove a custom asic for the application of a PWM LED controller with integrated charging. Pretty much all other lights are built to a price. The chip likely has additional functionality but the actual designs are all built to a bare minimum price (or max profit margin). From this perspective, you’ll see a lot of the feature set differently. On a bike, one button is convenient as well. They usually fash too bright because of the default clock speed of the chip and a design that does not deviate from the chip’s example implementation.