Saturday, August 28, 2021

Everyone's car sugar was REALLY low.

 

Luckily I went super early because it's going to be a millionty degrees today. I'm not sure I've ever seen this show so busy. Just the line getting in, as I was leaving, was pretty crazy.

















12 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeMonday, August 30, 2021 12:08:00 PM

    Car culture is different here, and I think I like it more.

    It's less about the looks of the vehicles and more about driving them.

    So you're on a mountain road with your new roadster and you keep passing and being passed by the same guys in vehicles you'd once considered buying yourself.

    Eventually you come down to a turnout and talk with them about your cars, then go get some drinks or food to talk about cars and stuff some more.

    Sometimes it's just the guys doing this, sometimes you find that there are their wives out in other vehicles and they're racing around mountain passes.

    I don't expect this will be done as much in the winter snow, but it's fun while it lasts, and it's a nice break from being in the city.

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  2. Isn't that a little like saying - I don't care about looking at boobs anymore. I only care about `feeling` them.

    If a nice set of boobs comes along, you are going to look. But I understand the car culture there is different. Almost no one drives expensive cars, so they focus on other things. I'm glad it's working for you though.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, August 31, 2021 12:16:00 PM

    It's like saying I prefer to feel up my girlfriend's boobs than merely settle for looking at someone else's.

    Which is actually true. :-)

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  4. BTW, is there anything Softbank doesn't eventually fuck up?

    Semi Analysis at Substack -- "The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D"

    This was something I'd suspected was going on, plus ARM chips had some super-awful latency in Linux compared to Intel/AMD that made a prototype board behave like unsupportable crap, so we gave up on going that route.

    It'd be more likely that we'd go with proprietary non-ARM SoCs and a fuckload of DSPs acting like I/O controllers if we wound up long-term short of CPUs.

    Since Softbank fucks up everything it touches, how is it not just a designated money bag man for some shadowy financial scheme?

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  5. Oh, and this IP transfer of ARM's tech to China is deliberate.

    Just like leaving the Taliban with all of that military hardware was deliberate.

    Never attribute to malice or incompetence what is best attributed to destructive competence.

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  6. "It's like saying I prefer to feel up my girlfriend's boobs than merely settle for looking at someone else's."

    Oh Pishaw! You will do both. As someone who has gotten more than their fair share of unwanted attention, I feel like you are pandering to the ladies. We see you side eyeing us. It's like saying "I only read the articles now".

    Interesting ARM article though. I've only skimmed, but will have to go back. I have to admit, I always thought it really strange that Huawei was literally a few hundred feet from Nvidia. But Nvidia needs Arm because it takes a LONG time to develop a new chip.

    I personally feel like we are fighting a silent Cold War with China. It's only silent because people don't recognize it. Some of the chip shortage is due to Corona hotspots. But I don't think all of it is. This is just ye another way to exert pressure.

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    Replies
    1. Hmmm, I look, almost can't help it.
      It's one of those things...-shrug-

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  7. China... I think they have some long term plans, our "long term" is next quarter.

    Anytime I get thinking about China these days I let some numbers run thru my head.. China has 1.4 BILLION people, we have 0.3 Billion.

    India has 1.3 Billion, I've heard that India has a middle class bigger than our whole population. Just needed to mention that.

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  8. It's okay. It's natural. And as long as it's respectful it should be taken as a compliment. Some day guys won't look at you anymore.

    re: China. The only thing left after nuclear war will be cockroaches and China. ~Mostly~ said sarcastically. They do have an intense perseverance.

    I didn't know that about India, but you could see it coming. And thank goodness. But Americans are lazily let the world eat their lunch. We celebrate stupidity and gender studies while they celebrate math.

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  9. Keep in mind that when I said that we don't want to deal with the US or China, there was something else behind the scenes.

    The US wants to act like you're only OK if you respect all of its cultural baggage, including the dysfunctional politics.

    That's a great laugh for the Swiss, seeing that the form of government Switzerland has predates the sailing of Christopher Columbus.

    We also don't want to deal with China because they can't be trusted when it comes to any IP deal.

    So how did they not steal ours?

    They did, but they didn't have complete access to what they were really manufacturing.

    And so they turned out a bunch of mostly loaded PCBs with squirrelly-looking engineering changes for what looked like consumer product accessory boards.

    We would then reassemble the products by removing certain parts from them that made them usable for consumer products, after which we'd solder on some additional connectors to attach the accessory boards, using local assembly with our finest electronics squirrels.

    That made it possible to claim the products were Made in USA before they were made elsewhere.

    We had firmware that would completely hide the true purpose of all of these components as potentially part of a much bigger picture, which of course we'd remove by desoldering the lower capacity flash chips, installing higher capacity flash chips that would fit the extra pads, and proceed with a JTAG reflash.

    This also included hiding the true supply chain as well as making some of these consumer product accessory boards available for consumer products.

    And that is how much I didn't trust China when it came to products and large assemblies.

    I'll accept their products to an extent when they're low-level parts, just as long as I'm not in for another ride like the Thieves of Rubycon put everyone through with low ESR electrolytic capacitors.

    US and UK firms getting cheated by the Chinese is not quite so great a laugh for the Swiss.

    It's really not very funny for Swiss pharma.

    But many years ago I decided to go this way after hearing some horror stories about how China would steal IP well before this, and it wasn't until I was dining in a KFC thinking about secret recipes for herbs and spices that I thought this might work.

    Manufacturing in Europe may not be entirely trust-worthy, but it's a lot better than having your IP stolen with little to no recourse, and so we've been able to design a lot of this out now.

    We also don't return parts to the vendors.

    Instead, they're recycled locally, so having a jurisdiction that doesn't give us crap about lead solder works as well during the end of the product life cycle.

    The more the US fucks up basic competence and China fucks up basic trust, the better places that can behave like true neutrals tend to look.

    Singapore would look pretty good if they didn't go full totalitarian with their over-concern for health.

    But Denmark's starting to look better.

    Seems they're like the Swiss police who refuse to put up with being ordered around.

    Good. :-)

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