Time for a pulp countdown now, and today it's my top 10 digital watches of distinction!

After all, why wear a Rolex nowadays?

At #10: the 1973 Seiko 06LC. This was Seiko's first LCD wristwatch: a field-effect liquid crystal display showed six digits of time continuously - you didn't need to press a button to see it either!

At #9: the 1976 Bulova Computron. The side mounted LED display meant you could sneak a peek at how long your meeting was taking without anyone else noticing. Very chic.

At #8: the 1989 Nelsonic Nintendo. This is The Legend Of Zelda version and it's perfect for letting others know you are a master of corporate strategy!

At #7: the 1975 Uranus Calculator watch. This natty number has its keypad on the bezel, which does increase its size. "How big is Uranus?" is a frequent question you'll get if you wear this.

I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb

#RaspberryPiPico silicon teardown time!

Board as received optical + x-ray images

Inspecting package. X-ray shows bond wires easier after removing thermal slug

Thermal slug removed w/ HCl + H2O2

Decapped to show copper bond wires connecting die to package pins. Initially used only nitric acid which destroyed copper bond wires (last image). Fixed by switching to mixed nitric + sulfuric acid

I am grateful to @slatestarcodex for taking the time to respond to my critique of technocracy. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be

productive, which I'll briefly address here. I suspect many fellow travelers (e.g. @audreyt @dsallentess @JohnnieM @MichelleRempel @VitalikButerin @mds49) will find the exchange fairly ironic/revealing. I'll post this as a response on this blog as well.

1. Let me start with concessions. There are many points where @slatestarcodex correctly highlights various areas where my grasp of beliefs and facts are limited or wrong, especially in the depth of my grasp of the views of the rationalist community.

I freely admit that there are serious limits to how much I've been able to research the views of people in this community and I certainly hope they are not as I characterized them, though as I will point out below many elements of @slatestarcodex's response confirm my concerns.

2. Given the last point, I fully acknowledge the danger of throwing stones lest I shatter my own glass house. However, leaving aside any blame, I think to make sense of my piece and @slatestarcodex's response requires a bit of context that clearly he lacked. First, outside

So Sony has this format called Optical Disc Archive, right? It's a high-density storage cartridge, but it turns out it works by cheating.

because if you open it up (which you should never do. trust me on this one)
it turns out... it's blu-ray.

it's a big STACK of blu-ray

And the idea is that Sony built some very complicated drive which you can slot this cartridge into, and it'll open it up and grab out the right disc and just read/write that one

then when you hit the eject button, it shoves the discs back in and closes up the case, and hands you the cartridge.

Tonight we are launching our Net Zero Carbon Roadmap for Leeds, which shows a pathway for how Leeds can get to net-zero emissions by the city’s target date of 2030.

Follow the live tweets @LeedsClimateCom #LeedsClimate #PCANcities
1/

We're looking forward to hearing responses to the roadmap's presentation by members of the Leeds Citizens' Jury, Polly Cook of Leeds City Council, @SimonBowens of Friends of the Earth and Elizabeth Edgington of @BITC

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
2/

Leeds’ carbon footprint has gone down: between 2000-2019 emissions fell by 40% (largely due to national decarbonisation of the grid).

Our share of the global carbon budget in 2020 is 31m tonnes; at ca. 4m tonnes a year, that’s used up by 2029

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
3/

During lockdown #1, emissions were ca. 43% lower – overall, in 2020, they were ca 13% lower than normal. Sounds encouraging, but this only delays the point we eat up our carbon budget by 2 months!
#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
4/

Following science-based targets, Leeds needs to make 70% reductions by 2025 – which means another 25% reduction in emissions in the next 4-5 years.

We need to accelerate significantly!

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
5/

Next up in Privacy Technology at #enigma2021, Kelly Huang from @ethyca speaking about "GONE, BUT NOT "FORGOTTEN"—TECHNICAL & PRACTICAL CHALLENGES IN OPERATIONALIZING MODERN PRIVACY

Just imagine there's a global pandemic forcing everyone to stay home and buy their stuff over the internet. And you've been working on your sanitization-on-demand startup. You've got more users than you can count! ... literally, because your data's all over.

Now you're a multi-national international country with privacy issues because your information is all over the place.

Now a user writes to request you delete their data. Where is it? How do you do that? Who's responsible for privacy in your business.

How do you operationalize privacy rights?

Primary stakeholders:
* Legal
* Business
* Engineering

We spend a lot of time on Twitter analyzing the legal rulings, but it's harder where the "rubber meets the code" 🥁

Positioning in CSS allows you to display your element wherever you want on the screen

But when I was learning it, I found it little bit confusing😅

So in this thread I'll try to explain it in easiest manner with practical implementation. Let's start

THREAD🧵👇

There are 5 values that you can pass in position property

- static
- relative
- absolute
- fixed
- sticky

In this thread we will be focusing on relative and absolute positioning as both are widely used

Let's start with understanding what document flow is?

📌 Elements are displayed on the screen as they written in the HTML document

Consider the following piece of code:

H1, P, H3 and div are displayed on the screen in exact order as they written in the HTML file.

As now you know about document flow, let's start with Relative positioning

📌 Relative Position

- Relative positioning do not take an element out of document flow
- Relative positioning is relative to element's original position which can be changed using offset

🔹 Relative position is relative to itself.

For example: Consider the code and output in the attached image below

As you can see red box is shifted 100px from left because I applied left offset after giving it relative positioning

why are chips often so expensive? how do chip companies determine the prices of their chips? a thread... 🧵

first thing chip companies do is to figure out the COGS - cost of goods sold. this is how much it costs them to produce a chip--not counting profit or anything else.

but before we can calculate that, we need to know The Life of a Chip, start to finish!

it starts as a raw slice of silicon, something like this. (0th step is a raw boule or silicon ingot, grown as a single crystal, that is sawn up like this)

then it gets run through a variety of processing steps. etching, diffusion, implantation, deposition, and others.

The Phantom of Heilbronn (or how for 16 years the German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist)

(Thread, non sweary version here: https://t.co/iDOIhaFgIT)

Between the years of 1993 and 2009, police in Heilbronn, Germany were tracking just about the most elusive serial killer since Ted Cruz.

Known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, or occasionally The Woman Without A Face, she was implicated in so many crimes that the police eventually put out a reward of €300,000 for any information leading to her arrest.

The case that brought her to the media's attention and earned her two ridiculously badass nicknames

(honestly, if you don't want people to do murders you're going to have to come up with less glamorous nicknames - what's wrong with Jack Shitshispants or the Zodiac Cuck)

1/12 @HathorNetwork offers a unique set of features for both builders and users. Some well known ones, others not so much. Let’s look at why you might want to consider Hathor as the layer 1 solution for your project. $HTR @HTRFDT #BuildOnHathor

2/12 Easy tokenization is the obvious one. You create your own token in less than a minute, no coding required.

3/12 As opposed to ERC tokens, your custom Hathor token is a layer 1 token. It inherits the same features and security as the native token, $HTR, effectively giving your token the same level of security as the #Bitcoin $BTC blockchain.

4/12 Hathor Network also passed their security audit by @SlowMist_Team so you can feel safe knowing that your L1 token fulfills the same security requirements as $HTR.

5/12 By configuring built-in nano contracts you will be able to add logic to your token. No coding required. Native nano contracts also mitigate the risk of bugs and security issues that comes with custom smart contracts development on other platforms. $HTR

(1) Since some people laugh at Cardano project and it's peer review aspect, let me share a story from work for all of you
(2) There is company called Databricks and they open sourced recently a technology called: https://t.co/gpZyKKiMVD . This technology is super important

(3) In BigData delta allows one to perform DELETE and MERGE operations contrary to Hadoop + Hive where this is not possible, seeking through many partitions finding customer data to remove and then rewriting it is not only expensive as an operation but also very dangerous

(4) This promising technology is something that many companies, which have big data turn into as they need to be GDPR compliant.
(5) I was always reading and accepting all details from their website as given and the "truth"

(6) There is however an amazing Principal Developer at our company that found some of the claims from their website as dubious, e.g. ACID claims on such a distributed file system
(7) It turns out this is not the first time this company advertises something that is simply not true

(8) on another occasion this company made untrue claims about Cassandra database and this then became source of disputes e.g by dr. @martinkl - my fave expert in distributed systems
(9) All professional developers also know of course famous Jepsen tests ->

man, this tablet project.
so it stopped charging. it was at 23%, I charge it for a couple hours, still 23%
I turn it off and leave it on the charger for 23%, confirm it's charging, and 8 hours later... 21%

so I get on the internet and order a replacement battery.
in the two days it takes it to arrive, the tablet somehow charges to 100%?

it arrives and I'm like "eh, fuck it. I have the battery here, that one is old, I might as well swap 'em.
I try to open up the tablet, following the instructions, and... the digitizer cracks.

it turns out the fact I had to replace the digitizer before meant that the new one wasn't glued in as well as it should be, so when I pried it open, the wrong part came off. Whoops.

that's okay, because of an amazon mix-up long ago, I actually have a spare digitizer on hand for this tablet! I can just replace that after the battery.

The tech scene in Nigeria is shifting towards remote work.

Having worked remotely for 6+ years (3 in Nigeria), here's some things I've learnt.

**Internet**

If you live in Abuja, Lagos etc try and setup fibre optic internet.

They are reliable, not prone to frequent disconnects, ultra low latency, and they're very fast. They usually come bundled with unlimited usage per month.

Although the fibre speeds are not mind blowing gigabit speeds, yet. 200mbps is good enough anywhere.

Your best bet for fibre in Nigeria would be @ipNXTweet. ₦30k setup and internet plans can range from as low as ₦12k - ₦150k monthly.

One dishonourable mention is @explorelegend. They take forever to get setup. Once setup, it's quite good. ₦130k setup, plans range from ₦30k - ₦70k monthly.

Some providers like @Mainoneservice are not worth it for homes, way too expensive. ₦350k for 50mbps a month? Hell no!

Which ever provider you decide to go with, do read the fine print.

The alternative for people without access to fibre optic internet is to get devices like MTN's hynetflex, spectranet and the rest, but good luck with those.

maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with

when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay

I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets

that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM

huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?

People sometimes ask me what my vision of DeFi is. This is a very tough question. DeFi is very messy with thousands of experiments happening. But high level, I think DeFi will go through 2 phases:

During the 1st phase (next 2-5 years), we'll continue to build games, casinos, and speculative products.

This sounds uninspiring. But it has two main important consequences.

1) This will ultimately lead to hundreds of millions of users to install wallets and get uncomfortable with the UX.

2) This will force the tech (especially scaling) to mature.

Once we've achieved these two goals, phase 2 begins. In phase 2, products that serve real economic activities / integrated with the real economy will be built and flourish.

Right now, such products barely exist. @terra_money comes to mind. But this is the kind of products that I really look forward to. They are more economically sustainable, and create more value.