jmwilson

6 ms·

1.
by jmwilson 8mo ago
The Youtube introduction video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s ) is a great explanation of the tech and the end where he retrofits it into a Panasonic CF RZ is wild.
2.
by jmwilson 1y ago
TrueNAS is just web-based configuration management. As long as you only use the web UI, your system state can be distilled down to the config file it generates. If you do a vanilla FreeBSD+samba+NFS+ZFS setup, you'll need to edit sever
3.
by jmwilson 1y ago
Firefox does do the right thing and seems the most usable browser for private CAs. Chrome and derivatives mostly too, except the problem mentioned about the public suffix list. Mobile clients seem the most broken. I can't get iOS to wo
4.
by jmwilson 1y ago
Another obnoxious behavior is clients enforcing lifetime requirements for domains they have no business imposing their opinion about: .internal and .home.arpa. These are specifically carved out for private use. If I want to roll my own CA w
5.
by jmwilson 1y ago
HyperCard was my introduction to programming and delivered on the vision of personal computing as "bicycle for the mind." RIP
6.
by jmwilson 1y ago
Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at F
7.
by jmwilson 1y ago
The lack of the ohm symbol Ω is also quite a bummer given the technical domain of the font.
8.
ACARS Drama(acarsdrama.com)
218 points by jmwilson 1y ago|103 comments
9.
by jmwilson 2y ago
I use KaTex ( https://katex.org/ ) as part of static site generation, and I get LaTeX quality output (because it duplicates LaTeX's algorithm) using only CSS. Using the eqn and troff suite in 2025 ... I'll just say
10.
by jmwilson 2y ago
I made a test PCB with capacitor footprints repeated at various intervals, with measurement ports for controlled experiments. You can really see the performance difference between two and four layer PCBs, for example: https://jmw
11.
by jmwilson 2y ago
Who works Sunday morning then? The maintenance window will morph into a do-big-risky-changes window, which means everybody in engineering will have to be on-call. Many years ago, when I newly joined a FAANG, I asked, "shouldn't I
12.
by jmwilson 2y ago
Tuning feedback loops is a topic I've found to be fiendishly good fun, perhaps because of how obtuse the final result is. There is no at-a-glance way to see the connection between your high-level goals (closed-loop bandwidth and phas
13.
by jmwilson 2y ago
> they aint ever going to pop a North Korean threat actor bc they simply cant travel at will. True, but the USG has a long memory and holds grudges. Even if they never travel, they have to be confident every future government of the co
14.
by jmwilson 2y ago
> In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and things were changing very rapidly in that time. By the mid-&
15.
by jmwilson 2y ago
> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them. It's a problem if you&#x27
16.
by jmwilson 2y ago
I had this discussion (specifically about the Hippie trail) with a friend before I made a trip to Hong Kong in 2019. The conclusion was it is important to travel while you can. Things can change and not always for the better. I returned fro
17.
by jmwilson 2y ago
https://hnhiring.com/trends Not a true top-line overall number, but the trend is obvious notwithstanding.
18.
by jmwilson 3y ago
Frequency domain analysis is useful when you have a physical quantity (which normally comes down to energy or power, in joules or watts) that you want to understand in terms of frequency. Mere periodicity of events doesn't imply that i
19.
by jmwilson 3y ago
There's different levels of "understanding how things work" and the author makes it clear what kind of understanding he's going for. If you look at the source code to program, you should be able to point to any line of c
20.
by jmwilson 3y ago
(2022) The first time I saw a PCB business card, I thought it was pretty cool. Then I saw a PCBA business card (with components!) and was amazed. But now I just see them as unnecessary e-waste for vanity. Business cards get read, scanned, a
21.
by jmwilson 3y ago
A lot of it is not mass-produced ( https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... ). Even if you used brand-new pieces, for analytical work, you'd still need to clean them according to these pr
22.
by jmwilson 3y ago
Using Alconox (mentioned on the page, and easily found on Amazon) is one my tricks when I absolutely need sparkling clean dishes or containers. Not the best choice for the environment, and too sudsy to use in a dishwasher, but amazingly eff
23.
by jmwilson 3y ago
The amount of written material (work samples, writing samples, free-form essay responses) they request is staggering. There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they w
24.
by jmwilson 3y ago
I ran into this when trying to make a vector version of the Smith chart [1] - which has a lot of circles. It turns out the inaccuracy from a 4-segment Bezier "circle" is significant when you need precisely intersecting arcs at the
25.
by jmwilson 3y ago
Motors, wall warts with line-frequency transformers, or other things that are an inductive load. Magnetic materials designed for 60 Hz may saturate at 50 Hz, though usually things designed for 50 Hz will at least sort of work at 60 Hz.
26.
by jmwilson 3y ago
1 TB is not a lot, so the answer is probably snapshots to an external hard drive. Together with cloud backups, you have 3 copies of the data on different media and in different locations, which is very robust. 10x that amount and maybe you
27.
by jmwilson 3y ago
Last statement makes no sense since AD and Qorvo are in the business of selling silicon. These tools are marketing for their product lines. It's like saying Google and Facebook are at a business (dis)advantage over the merits of Tensor
28.
by jmwilson 3y ago
The touted benefits of QSpsice include better numerical fundamentals, so who knows what happens when you take a tuned model and plug it into a different engine? The way it is described, the improvements to the SPICE engine could be valuable
29.
by jmwilson 3y ago
It's a shame that circuit simulators, especially those derived from SPICE, have tended toward closed-source. It's nice that there are several free-as-in-beer options available, but a good lesson in the consequences of permissive o
30.
by jmwilson 3y ago
Curtailing legacy admissions would push some privileged kids to second tier schools and cause more of this happen, instead of concentrating it at a small handful of top schools. The event where some kid of humble origin connects with a kid

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