Youtube hearted comments of Scott Franco (@scottfranco1962).

  1. I own both of these cars, a 2017 Bolt and a 2018 Tesla M3. My wife drives the Bolt, I drive the M3. We both had EVs previously, a Leaf and a Spark. What changed principally from day to day is that we don't both rush for the charger every night. My wife likes the hatchback, the fact that the Bolt is slightly smaller, and she appreciates the fact she does not have to worry about range to get anywhere around the city. She rarely if ever charges away from home. I have a long commute, 44 miles round trip, charge about every 3 days, and use chargers away from home only when we take long trips. The biggest difference between the cars is charging away from home. We went from San Fransisco to Los Angeles in both cars. In the Bolt, we were restricted to highway 101, a longer route, because the shortest and most heavily traveled route has no CCS chargers. At all. According to plugshare, it still does not. Trying to charge down the 101 is somewhat hit or miss. There "appear" to be a lot of high power chargers for CCS, but most of them are actually 1/2 power chargepoint 25kW stations that take way longer to charge. On the way down we made it with one charge, but we left fully charged, stopped for 2 hours (!) at a 50kW charger, and barely had any charge when we made it to San Fernando Valley. On the way back we hit three chargers, made worse because the hotel we stayed at had no charger, so we had to hit one on the way out. Note: if you can find a hotel with a charge spot, even only an L2, this is a huge help, since you leave the hotel fully charged. With Tesla we left fully charged, hit the Harris ranch charger even though we could have gone farther, and charged twice in LA before returning on the I5. Another charge at Harris ranch got us home. There really is no comparison between cars when it comes to on the road charging. With CCS charging you are luck if there are two 50kW charging spots, and the chances are good one of them is out of order. When you get there you fiddle with a card, and even having a card does not always help. My EVgo card works only %50 or less of the time, and they have sent me several replacement cards. Thus I waste 10 minutes at each charge calling them and setting up a charge on the account. With Tesla, we go to chargers and there are 10 spots, with some up to 20 (!) spots. You plug the car in and go. The billing is completely automatic, and the prices are reasonable. There is an odd thing going on with the A/B system, if you plug in to A, and another car is on B, or vice versa, you both get slowed down, so you pick an A-B pair that is unoccupied. Coming into a charge station at about 50 miles left (my personal minimum), you get to see the car charge at over 100kW/h for about 2 minutes to reach over 200 miles left, then less after that. Its truly a breathtaking sight to see a car charge that fast, and apparently this is unique to the model 3, which has improvements in charging speed even over the Model S. In short, we are happy with both cars, but the Bolt is clearly a local, city car, and the M3 is for long trips.
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  2. My favorite application for mems is in aviation, since I am a recreational pilot. One of the first and most successful application of mems was accelerometers, which don't need openings in the package to work. Accelerometers can replace gyroscopes as well as enable inertial navigation, since they can be made to sense rotation as well as movement. With the advent of mems, avionics makers looked forward to replacing expensive and maintenance intensive mechanical gyroscopes with mems. A huge incentive was reliability: a gyroscope that fails can bring down an aircraft. The problem was accuracy. Mems accelerometers displayed drift that was worse than the best mechanical gyros. Previous inertial navigation systems used expensive laser gyros that worked by sending light pulses through a spool of fibre optical line and measuring the delay due to rotation. Mems accelerometers didn't get much better, but they are sweeping all of the old mechanical systems into the trash can. So how did this problem get solved? Well, the original technology for GPS satellite location was rather slow, taking up to a minute to form a "fix". But with more powerful CPUs it got much faster. But GPS cannot replace gyros, no matter how fast it can calculate. But the faster calculation enabled something incredible: the GPS calculation could be used to calibrate the mems accelerometers. By carefully calculating the math, a combined GPS/multiaxis accelerometer package can accurately and reliably find a real time position and orientation in space. You can think of it this way: GPS provides position over long periods of time,, but very accurately, and mems accelerometers provide position and orientation over short periods of time, but not so accurately. Together they achieve what neither technology can do on its own. The result has been a revolution in avionics. Now even small aircraft can have highly advanced "glass" panels, that give moving maps, a depiction of the aircraft attitude, and even a synthetic view of of the world outside the aircraft in conjunction with terrain data. It can even tell exactly which way the wind is blowing on the aircraft because this information falls out of the GPS/accelerometer calculation.
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  3. Good overview. I left verification just after the Verilog revolution came to pass. We used hardware simulators at that point, with accelerated simulation. Sea-of-fpga emulation was not yet popular. The bottom line was that the company I worked for (nameless, but huge trust me) was new to hardware chip design. They had lots of money to buy toys, but had the idea that the tool would solve all. Thus the expectation was that the new, more expensive tool would relive them from the need to write test cases. I enjoyed being the one employee who understood the tools, but rapidly realized that it was a falling rock I had volunteered to sit under. I left the company soon after.
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  4. I have taken some heat before when joining projects that were in bad shape and the prevailing opinion was that they wanted to start over. I say, "you'll just make the same mistakes over again". I read a great story about a professor who took a position in a college for the electrical engineering section. The lab for it was in terrible shape, the instruments were all broken. The administrator asked the new professor to make a list of needed equipment and he would see if he could find the money for it. The new professor replied "no, not a problem. We will use what we have". The administrator left, stunned. The new professor started his classes and took the new students out to the lab. Over a course of months, they took apart the broken equipment, got schematics for them, and went over what was wrong with each instrument as a group project. Slowly but surely, they got most of it working again. The students that did this because some of the best engineers the school had seen. The moral of the story is applicable to software rewrites. The team that abandons the software and starts over does not learn anything from the existing software, even if they didn't write it. They create a new big mess to replace the old big mess. Contrast that with a team that is forced to refactor the code. They learn the mistakes of the code, how to fix it, and, perhaps more importantly of all, become experts at refactoring code. In the last 2 years, I instituted a goal for myself that I would track down even "insignificant" problems in my code, and go after the hardest problems first. In that time I have been amazed at how often a "trivial" problem turned out to illustrate a deep and serious error in the code. Similarly, I have been amazed at how solving hard problems first makes the rest of the code go that much easier. I have always been a fan of continuous integration without calling it that. I simply always suspected that the longer it took to remerge a branch in the code, the longer it would take to reintegrate it, vs. small changes and improvements taking a day or so. I can't take credit for this realization. Too many times I have been assigned to merge projects that were complete messes because of the long span of branch development. As the old saw goes, the better you perform such tasks the more of it you will get, especially if others show no competence in it.
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  5. Don't try that in California. Do it once, people think you have an interview in sales, or are weird. Do it consistently and they start to avoid you. No seriously, I have always dressed in Silicon Valley style, jeans and questionably clean tee-shirts. My wife got on my case about not dressing nice, and I should do better. Finally I just went whole hog and wore a suit all days except for casual Fridays. People thought it was hilarious, but after a month the amusment when down. After that I just got an occasional "you in sales" comment. Honestly aside from getting me better looks from women (which I didn't really need, being married) and making me the odd man out (ok, I have always been the odd man out), I didn't really see the difference. The suit thing stopped with the marriage, oh well.
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  6. The original design of the shuttle would have reduced costs. That was the design where the first stage was a much bigger version of the shuttle, which was also piloted and would return to earth as a glider. Nasa tried to reduce costs by introducing solid boosters and ceramic tiles, both of which caused way more trouble than they saved in cost. In particular, spraying the shuttle with ablative material before each launch instead of using tiles (the same thing spacex is proposing) would have reduced costs and been safer to boot. The shuttle was a mismanaged program. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea.
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  7. Great video. Think of it this way: a gas engine combines the functions of making power and using the power to drive the wheels. EVs don't make the power, it is stored in the batteries. Since the motor has way less to do, it can be much smaller and more efficient, as well as do more things (torque vector, anti-slip, traction control, etc.).
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  8. You had me by 4:00. Subscribed.
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  9. Makes no sense no M.2 card. There was plenty of room on the back.
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  10. Christopher seems to be a one man sales operation for RISC-V (right!). I am for that, but the future dominance of RISC-V is far from assured. The development money is going into ARM and the only thing that seems assured is that X86 is slowly going down. Veryyyyyy slowly.
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  11. Dude.... awesome.
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  12. I don't disagree with the premise of the video, but I would say "so what is new"? NASA always relied on subcontractors to design the different parts of its missions. Perhaps the only difference is that now the companies, like spaceX, will deliver whole systems to NASA.
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  13. Yea, if we recognize 1000 year old claims to land, then everyone in the world will have to move. This is not the strongest Israeli argument, and it is the worst excuse for the settlements in the West bank/Judea. The area was a territory of the Ottomans, originally taken by force, and it included modern day Jordan. The correct answer is that a lot of territory got redistributed in the middle east, that there was never a state of Palestine, the Palestinians aren't demanding Jordan "back", and more than half of the Israelis were evicted themselves by force from the middle east. The traditional answer in the past, and that carried out in Jordan, was mass evictions and executions of the native peoples. Obviously the better solution is to come to an agreement. I believe this will happen when the Palestinians lose all other supporting countries that encourage violence over coming to an arrangement. I think Hamas also believes this, which is why they launched an attack on the eve of an accord with Saudi Arabia. That leaves Iran, which has many enemies, but none more powerful than its own people, who will prevail in the end.
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  14. To me the prime example is a compiler, one of which I happen to be working on at the moment. If your compiler does not work, you are seriously scr*wed. Everyone knows this. Thus compilers simply work, and are reliable most of the time. If they are not they die quickly, since nobody uses them. Thus the question becomes, compilers are a large and complex codebase. If we can get those right, why can't other programs be proven correct as well? The answer is that compiler developers simply take it as a given that the testing code for the compiler will be %50 of the total work to develop the compiler as the other half, developing the main compiler code. So this means that for most programs, its not worth it to spend that kind of effort to prove the program is accurate no? There in lies the paradox. A typical program takes %50 of the total development time or more in debugging. Even very optimistic programmers will admit to that. By that same logic, saying you want to write the program, then do the work to debug it into shape means you prefer to fix the program AFTER the fact than BEFORE the fact, which is the net argument against TDD. In a word, you can pay now, or pay later.
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  15. Love that hotel. I stayed there one night, and I don't even remember why, since I live in SJ. The funny story about that is the Embassy suites is a "checkpoint" for arrival for light aircraft to San Jose airport. It helped that the hotel was painted blazing pink. You call out "I am abeam the Embassy suites" to the SJC controller.
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  16. That was an awesome overview of the ASML system, thank you. On to 200k.
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