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A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology. The request is facially […]
a year ago

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More from bunnie's blog

Name that Ware, April 2025

The Ware for this month is shown below: It’s a tiny portion of a much larger ware, but for various reasons I think this is sufficient for someone to guess at least the type of ware this came from, if not the exact make/model. There’s a particularly interesting bit about this ware, which you can […]

2 months ago 15 votes
Winner, Name that Ware March 2025

The Ware for March 2025 is part of a Wekome WP-U157 “67 watt” GAN power supply. This particular unit had overheated and let out the magic smoke, so I decided to take it apart to understand what was going on. There were a number of engineering issues with the design; the most prominent of which […]

2 months ago 17 votes
Name that Ware, March 2025

The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]

3 months ago 30 votes
Winner, Name that Ware February 2025

The Ware from last month is the main board from a Lego Duplo Steam Train. As predicted, this was a much easier one to guess. Congrats to MJS for naming it (with a margin of just half an hour ahead of Will), email me for your prize! And again, thanks to spida for contributing yet […]

3 months ago 34 votes
Name that Ware, February 2025

Here’s the Ware for February 2025: Thanks again to spida for contributing yet another guest ware! Hopefully this one is a smidge easier to guess compared to last month’s.

4 months ago 33 votes

More in programming

The 6 Hours of Lex

When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance training has clearly paid off! But the magic of a good conversation, like the magic of driving at Le Mans, is that time flies by. Those six hours felt more like sixty minutes. This is what flow does: it compresses the moment. Besides, we had plenty to talk about. Lex prepares like no other podcast I've ever been on. Pages and pages of notes. Deep questions, endless attention for tangents. We covered the beauty of Ruby for half an hour alone! But also the future of AI, small teams, why we left the cloud, Elon Musk, fatherhood, money and happiness, and a million other topics (which Lex mercifully timestamps, so listeners without six hours to spare can hop around). It was a privilege to appear. If you're interested, the conversation is on YouTube, on Spotify, on X, and as a regular podcast.

2 hours ago 2 votes
Measurement and Numbers

Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers: People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two He says he used to get mad at how often people around him focused on the numbers of the work over other attributes of the work. But after giving it more thought, he now has a more generous interpretation of why we do this: because we want relate to each other, understand each other, and be inclusive of one another. There are many things we can’t agree on, but it’s likely we can agree that six is bigger than two. And so in this capacity, numbers become a tool for communicating with each other, albeit a kind of least common denominator — e.g. “I don’t agree with you at all, but I can’t argue that 134 is bigger than 87.” This is conducive to a culture where we spend all our time talking about attributes we can easily measure (because then we can easily communicate and work together) and results in a belief that the only things that matter are those which can be measured. People will give lip service to that not being the case, e.g. “We know there are things that can’t be measured that are important.” But the reality ends up being: only that which can be assigned a number gets managed, and that which gets managed is imbued with importance because it is allotted our time, attention, and care. This reminds me of the story of the judgement of King Solomon, an archetypal story found in cultures around the world. Here’s the story as summarized on Wikipedia: Solomon ruled between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby be cut in half, with each woman to receive one half. The first woman accepted the compromise as fair, but the second begged Solomon to give the baby to her rival, preferring the baby to live, even without her. Solomon ordered the baby given to the second woman, as her love was selfless, as opposed to the first woman's selfish disregard for the baby's actual well-being In an attempt to resolve the friction between two individuals, an appeal was made to numbers as an arbiter. We can’t agree on who the mother is, so let’s make it a numbers problem. Reduce the baby to a number and we can agree! But that doesn’t work very well, does it? I think there is a level of existence where measurement and numbers are a sound guide, where two and two make four and two halves make a whole. But, as humans, there is another level of existence where mathematical propositions don’t translate. A baby is not a quantity. A baby is an entity. Take a whole baby and divide it up by a sword and you do not half two halves of a baby. I am not a number. I’m an individual. Indivisible. What does this all have to do with software? Software is for us as humans, as individuals, and because of that I believe there is an aspect of its nature where metrics can’t take you.cIn fact, not only will numbers not guide you, they may actually misguide you. I think Robin Rendle articulated this well in his piece “Trust the vibes”: [numbers] are not representative of human experience or human behavior and can’t tell you anything about beauty or harmony or how to be funny or what to do next and then how to do it. Wisdom is knowing when to use numbers and when to use something else. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

an hour ago 1 votes
New Edna feature: multiple notes

I started working on Edna several months ago and I’ve implemented lots of functionality. Edna is a note taking application with super powers. I figured I’ll make a series of posts about all the features I’ve added in last few months. The first is multiple notes. By default we start with 3 notes: scratch inbox daily journal Here’s a note switcher (Ctrl + K): From note switcher you can: quickly find a note by partial name open selected note with Enter or mouse click create new note: enter fully unique note name and Enter or Ctrl + Enter if it partially matches existing note. I learned this trick from Notational Velocity delete note with Ctrl + Delete archive notes with icon on the right star / un-star (add to favorites, remove from favorites) by clicking star icon on the left assign quick access shortcut Alt + <n> You can also rename notes: context menu (right click mouse) and This note / Rename Rename current note in command palette (Ctrl + Shift + K) Use context menu This note sub-menu for note-related commands. Note: I use Windows keyboard bindings. For Mac equivalent, visit https://edna.arslexis.io/help#keyboard-shortcuts

4 days ago 8 votes