politics, sorry, but this is great...

On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:29:44 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 13:59:49 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


  You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'. In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others. The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
 The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be. A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them. \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions. Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important. (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong. (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.) Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so. He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with. I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Bring proof of vax or they won\'t let you in.

Plus booster! Next year we\'ll all have needle tracks like junkies. :(


We spent an hour in San Diego with RS and DR, and it was a highlight
of my career. Putting smart and willing people together can be magic.

Yup. Designing stuff with a few smart people at a white board is the
most fun you can have standing up. (Maybe you prefer skiing, but then
you\'re more coordinated than I am.)

IIRC that occasion involved high-frame-rate youtube videos of a water
balloon cannon that were very illuminating about the dynamics of tin
droplets. ;)

Then I got to thinking about discriminators. The Constant Fraction
Discriminator is superficially appealing and has, I suspect,
brainwashed generations of engineers and scientists.

I could show you what we finally did. Maybe you can explain it to me.

I\'d be interested. You and Joerg helped me out with a problem like that
back in, like, 2006--I needed to trigger stably on a detected laser
pulse from a not-too-stable tunable laser that produced 20-ps pulses.(*)
The energy varied by about 20% pulse-to-pulse when it was perfectly
tuned up, and more like 2:1 when it wasn\'t.

I eventually used a coax stub to differentiate the detected pulse, and
the built-in trigger functions of my 11801C sampling scope to pick the
right zero crossing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The ideal discriminator finds the centroid time of noisy pulses of
varying amplitude and width. And has zero insertion delay of course.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:29:44 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 13:59:49 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


  You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'. In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others. The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
 The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be. A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them. \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions. Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important. (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong. (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.) Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so. He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with. I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Bring proof of vax or they won\'t let you in.

Plus booster! Next year we\'ll all have needle tracks like junkies. :(


We spent an hour in San Diego with RS and DR, and it was a highlight
of my career. Putting smart and willing people together can be magic.

Yup. Designing stuff with a few smart people at a white board is the
most fun you can have standing up. (Maybe you prefer skiing, but then
you\'re more coordinated than I am.)

IIRC that occasion involved high-frame-rate youtube videos of a water
balloon cannon that were very illuminating about the dynamics of tin
droplets. ;)

Then I got to thinking about discriminators. The Constant Fraction
Discriminator is superficially appealing and has, I suspect,
brainwashed generations of engineers and scientists.

I could show you what we finally did. Maybe you can explain it to me.

I\'d be interested. You and Joerg helped me out with a problem like that
back in, like, 2006--I needed to trigger stably on a detected laser
pulse from a not-too-stable tunable laser that produced 20-ps pulses.(*)
The energy varied by about 20% pulse-to-pulse when it was perfectly
tuned up, and more like 2:1 when it wasn\'t.

I eventually used a coax stub to differentiate the detected pulse, and
the built-in trigger functions of my 11801C sampling scope to pick the
right zero crossing.


The ideal discriminator finds the centroid time of noisy pulses of
varying amplitude and width. And has zero insertion delay of course.

And so needs to be clairvoyant to discern the shape of the trailing
edge. Tricky. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
 
On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

<https://imgur.com/a/lQEkqcw>

> The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

There\'s the type of libertarian who\'d be happy to spend hours working on
repairing a neighbor\'s car for free out of the goodness of their own
heart, but would refuse to vote to spend any of their own money on
repairing a publicly-owned roadway, such that the pothole that caused
the neighbor\'s car to require repairs, would have been significantly
less likely to exist to cause the damage that required hours of work to
repair in the first place...

They seemed to forget about the bears, though, who have no knowledge of
politics or governments. Centrally-organized sanitation systems, and
using them as designed, are a pretty great idea:

<https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling>

Local power structures on the scale of hamlets, or home-owners
associations, tend to be a farce. And even libertarian hamlets have a
power structure of some type.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.

Regrettably the type of US libertarian who moves to NH to start their
libertarian society seems to forget even the basics of how societies and
economies work, much less the advanced stuff.
 
On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.
Old-time wisdom about group power and societies from e.g. Hugo Grotius
says a person who is e.g. estranged from their children is unfit to
manage any society larger than a family until they learn how to manage a
family.

But there are very likely many politicians and CEOs who are estranged
from their kids.
 
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:55:53 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

https://imgur.com/a/lQEkqcw

The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

There\'s the type of libertarian who\'d be happy to spend hours working on
repairing a neighbor\'s car for free out of the goodness of their own
heart, but would refuse to vote to spend any of their own money on
repairing a publicly-owned roadway, such that the pothole that caused
the neighbor\'s car to require repairs, would have been significantly
less likely to exist to cause the damage that required hours of work to
repair in the first place...

They seemed to forget about the bears, though, who have no knowledge of
politics or governments. Centrally-organized sanitation systems, and
using them as designed, are a pretty great idea:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling

Local power structures on the scale of hamlets, or home-owners
associations, tend to be a farce. And even libertarian hamlets have a
power structure of some type.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.

Regrettably the type of US libertarian who moves to NH to start their
libertarian society seems to forget even the basics of how societies and
economies work, much less the advanced stuff.

\"libertarian society\" is kind of an oxymoron.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:08:10 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.
Old-time wisdom about group power and societies from e.g. Hugo Grotius
says a person who is e.g. estranged from their children is unfit to
manage any society larger than a family until they learn how to manage a
family.

That\'s a special case of \"nobody is fit to manage a society.\"

People who do it tend to create megadeaths.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On 1/17/2022 5:23 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:55:53 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

https://imgur.com/a/lQEkqcw

The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

There\'s the type of libertarian who\'d be happy to spend hours working on
repairing a neighbor\'s car for free out of the goodness of their own
heart, but would refuse to vote to spend any of their own money on
repairing a publicly-owned roadway, such that the pothole that caused
the neighbor\'s car to require repairs, would have been significantly
less likely to exist to cause the damage that required hours of work to
repair in the first place...

They seemed to forget about the bears, though, who have no knowledge of
politics or governments. Centrally-organized sanitation systems, and
using them as designed, are a pretty great idea:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling

Local power structures on the scale of hamlets, or home-owners
associations, tend to be a farce. And even libertarian hamlets have a
power structure of some type.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.

Regrettably the type of US libertarian who moves to NH to start their
libertarian society seems to forget even the basics of how societies and
economies work, much less the advanced stuff.

\"libertarian society\" is kind of an oxymoron.

If you get jumped by a bear looking for something good to eat your
neighbor carelessly dumped in the woods behind your home instead of
theirs, you live in a society.

A society surrounded by clever bears getting smarter all the time...
 
On 1/17/2022 5:25 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:08:10 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 1/15/2022 6:58 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 22:07:36 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/01/22 20:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:51:40 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:41:39 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
pommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:55:19 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:


https://amac.us/the-science-proves-it-conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals/

Conservatives are better engineers too.

Right whingers are just scaredy-cats. Especially when it comes to AGW
denial.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201812/why-do-ever-fearful-conservatives-ignore-climate-threat

That\'s absurd. Discounting climate change, being optimistic about the
future, is the opposite of being scared.

Kids today are literally afraid of the world being destroyed by
climate change. \"How dare you!\" build what we have.

Some people don\'t want to bring children into a doomed world.
Excellent; we\'ll have some beneficial selective breeding.

Good engineering rule of thumb: don\'t be scared.

Perhaps you\'re just pretending to be a right whinger.

I never claimed to be any winger. I belong to no political parties.
I\'m just interested in human dynamics, especially as it affects
engineering. Which it sure does.

I was stopped at a red light yesterday on Monterey, at the freeway
entrance. A huge flock of black birds, a tight cluster of a few
hundred, was flailing around the sky apparently randomly. They looked
like a giant black water balloon in a tornado. I tried to see if any
bird was in the lead and it sure didn\'t look like it. Just when the
light turned green, they all dived together and disappeared into a
tree.

Made me think of tribes of people. Similar dynamics, group action with
nobody in charge.

Conservatives are particularly prone to that; libertarians more so.

Anarchists Unite!

The only common goal of libertarians is to be left alone.

The problem with coercive group action, passing laws to tax and
control everything, is that very few people understand how societies
and economies really work. Control usually degrades to group power and
self-interest and gross inefficiency.

It\'s better in those situations to allow a zillion random experiments
and allow the successful ones to grow. That\'s the way most things have
been invented.
Old-time wisdom about group power and societies from e.g. Hugo Grotius
says a person who is e.g. estranged from their children is unfit to
manage any society larger than a family until they learn how to manage a
family.

That\'s a special case of \"nobody is fit to manage a society.\"

People who do it tend to create megadeaths.

Hugo Grotius\' thinking on it circa 1620 was:

\"He knows not how to rule a kingdom, that cannot manage a province; nor
can he wield a province, that cannot order a city; nor he order a city,
that knows not how to regulate a village; nor he a village, that cannot
guide a family; nor can that man govern well a family that knows not how
to govern himself; neither can any govern himself unless his reason be
lord, will and appetite her vassals; nor can reason rule unless herself
be ruled by God, and be obedient to Him.\"

Facts & logic, or at least the best facts & logic the most renowned
lawyers of that era could come up with.

These ideas heavily influenced some later guys known as the Founding Fathers
 
On Monday, January 17, 2022 at 2:25:40 PM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:08:10 -0500, bitrex <us...@example.net> wrote:

Old-time wisdom about group power and societies from e.g. Hugo Grotius
says a person who is e.g. estranged from their children is unfit to
manage any society larger than a family until they learn how to manage a
family.

That\'s a special case of \"nobody is fit to manage a society.\"

People who do it tend to create megadeaths.

That\'s a cause/effect inversion. People who create megadeaths often
claim they had a giga-size social improvement in mind. Big ideas can be
very bad ideas.
 
On Tuesday, January 18, 2022 at 1:44:46 AM UTC+11, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
Pom...@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsd...@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.

You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet? The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too. It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot. I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.

I published that point in my 1996 paper

Sloman A.W., Buggs P., Molloy J., and Stewart D. “A microcontroller-based driver to stabilise the temperature of an optical stage to 1mK in the range 4C to 38C, using a Peltier heat pump and a thermistor sensor” Measurement Science and Technology, 7 1653-64 (1996)

It\'s been cited 25 times now (and only twice by me) so it has been public knowledge for more than twenty years. There\'s another motivation, in that the TE cooler gets hotter if the current through it varies much about the mean.The heating within the cooler does depend on the square of the current through it even if the heat transferred is closer to a linear function of the current.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.

Patents and trade secrets do seem to be over-valued. People are willing to sell them for the right price (and they\'d prefer to sell them for more than they are worth).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On 17/01/2022 21:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:48:04 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard

Nobody has insulted you.

\"Those who could do with a better
understanding of reality, such as John Larkin, either cannot or will
not try to understand it.\"

There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will
not understand, then it\'s not an insult - it\'s just a fact, and pointing
it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you
should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much
anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted
view of the world as an insult.

That\'s not very objective discussion. Kid level stuff, to avoid
thinking unwelcome thoughts. Or thinking at all.

We shall let others be the judge of who is most childish - the people
who write counter-arguments to your outlandish claims, or the person who
responds to those counter-arguments with nothing but claims of childish
insults.

(Yes, I am aware there is a hint of hypocrisy in that paragraph - are
/you/ aware of the glaring hypocrisy in your own post?)
 
On 18/01/22 08:36, David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 21:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:48:04 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard

Nobody has insulted you.

\"Those who could do with a better
understanding of reality, such as John Larkin, either cannot or will
not try to understand it.\"


There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will
not understand, then it\'s not an insult - it\'s just a fact, and pointing
it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you
should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much
anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted
view of the world as an insult.

Quite a few of us have noted that.

I\'ve seen it in people that are insecure, or are on the
spectrum, or simply try to use it as something akin to
an intimidation technique, or are trying to push their
own agenda using disreputable techniques. The last is
infamously in the news as Boris Johnson\'s \"throw a
dead cat on the table\" technique!

I doubt Larkin is using the dead cat technique :)
 
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:36:11 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 17/01/2022 21:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:48:04 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard

Nobody has insulted you.

\"Those who could do with a better
understanding of reality, such as John Larkin, either cannot or will
not try to understand it.\"


There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will
not understand, then it\'s not an insult - it\'s just a fact, and pointing
it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you
should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much
anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted
view of the world as an insult.

That\'s not very objective discussion. Kid level stuff, to avoid
thinking unwelcome thoughts. Or thinking at all.


We shall let others be the judge of who is most childish - the people
who write counter-arguments to your outlandish claims, or the person who
responds to those counter-arguments with nothing but claims of childish
insults.

(Yes, I am aware there is a hint of hypocrisy in that paragraph - are
/you/ aware of the glaring hypocrisy in your own post?)

What degrades the group, and drives good people away, is switching to
personel insults instead of addressing the content of an issue.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:10:45 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 19:59, Phil Hobbs wrote:
David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


   You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real
work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'.  In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others.  The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
  The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

 From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be.  A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them.  \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions.  Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important.  (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong.  (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.)  Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)


Sure - I don\'t think the numbers are realistic (even if it were possible
to quantify them). My point is that most of the content of good designs
is not actually particularly new or exciting - a little bit of new idea
can go a long way. (And I don\'t disagree with your suggestion that a
lot of designs are neither good nor innovative!).

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so.  He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with.  I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Maybe you move in more rarefied circles.


I have no reason to suspect that John Larkin is /not/ a good designer.
I simply see no reason to place any weight in his own opinions of
himself or his views on engineering. It is entirely reasonable to
suppose he is very good at a narrow and specialised field while being so
ignorant, biased or confused in so many other topics that turn up in
this newsgroup.

Well, you\'re a software guy, so I guess that settles it. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good point. Consider what electronic designers deal with: basic
physics, a bit of QM, mechanics, electromagnetics, thermo,
signals-and-systems, filtering, control theory, noise, optics,
statistics, nonlinear system behavior, digital system behavior,
metastabity, speed of light effects, corner-case failure mechanisms,
market dynamics, data sheet deceptions, real-world electrical and
thermal behavior of parts and systems, reliability, manufacturing,
costs.

Consider what a programmer deals with: typing some high-level language
with little or no visibility down the abstraction stack. No theory
required. Usually no connection to physical reality. Little or no
math. Reliability is mainly patching the worst bugs that users find.
Essentially no relationship to \"computer science\", whose experts scorn
grunts who write code.


Which profession is more likely to give a person useful instincts and
analysis tools for the dynamic behavior of a tribe or an economy or a
society?

I wonder how many official EEs write decent code, and how many
official programmers design decent electronics.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On 18/01/22 15:08, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:36:11 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 17/01/2022 21:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:48:04 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard

Nobody has insulted you.

\"Those who could do with a better
understanding of reality, such as John Larkin, either cannot or will
not try to understand it.\"


There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will
not understand, then it\'s not an insult - it\'s just a fact, and pointing
it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you
should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much
anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted
view of the world as an insult.

That\'s not very objective discussion. Kid level stuff, to avoid
thinking unwelcome thoughts. Or thinking at all.


We shall let others be the judge of who is most childish - the people
who write counter-arguments to your outlandish claims, or the person who
responds to those counter-arguments with nothing but claims of childish
insults.

(Yes, I am aware there is a hint of hypocrisy in that paragraph - are
/you/ aware of the glaring hypocrisy in your own post?)

What degrades the group, and drives good people away, is switching to
personel insults instead of addressing the content of an issue.

That\'s a little rich coming from someone that usually doesn\'t
address the content of a post, and routinely insults groups by
presuming they are the same as other groups that you don\'t
understand.

People have commented on those tendencies of yours many times.
 
On 18/01/2022 16:08, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:36:11 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 17/01/2022 21:01, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 17:48:04 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard

Nobody has insulted you.

\"Those who could do with a better
understanding of reality, such as John Larkin, either cannot or will
not try to understand it.\"


There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will
not understand, then it\'s not an insult - it\'s just a fact, and pointing
it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you
should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much
anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted
view of the world as an insult.

That\'s not very objective discussion. Kid level stuff, to avoid
thinking unwelcome thoughts. Or thinking at all.


We shall let others be the judge of who is most childish - the people
who write counter-arguments to your outlandish claims, or the person who
responds to those counter-arguments with nothing but claims of childish
insults.

(Yes, I am aware there is a hint of hypocrisy in that paragraph - are
/you/ aware of the glaring hypocrisy in your own post?)

What degrades the group, and drives good people away, is switching to
personel insults instead of addressing the content of an issue.

Have you considered doing that yourself? You start threads with totally
outlandish and unjustified claims made to suggest people who don\'t
subscribe to your political views are tribal, fearful, and poor
engineers. You respond to counter-arguments by calling people
\"childish\". In a group where many of us are engineers of some sort, was
that not intended as a personal insult to many of the readers? Or do
you think it is somehow much better for the group to insult lots of us
at once, and it\'s only when /you/ feel insulted that there is a problem?

Note that I am using the term \"insult\" in the manner you use it - I
don\'t think anyone here is actually going to be particularly bothered
about what you say about them. Nor would anyone expect /you/ to be
particularly bothered - anyone who takes posts too seriously will, I
think, have left this group long ago.

(There are some regulars here who post some seriously crude and
unpleasant things - they certainly degrade the tone of any thread, as do
those who make pointless repetitive posts. But I assume you are not
talking about folks like Phil Allison or John Doe.)
 
On 18/01/2022 16:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:10:45 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 19:59, Phil Hobbs wrote:
David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


   You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real
work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'.  In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others.  The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
  The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

 From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be.  A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them.  \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions.  Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important.  (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong.  (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.)  Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)


Sure - I don\'t think the numbers are realistic (even if it were possible
to quantify them). My point is that most of the content of good designs
is not actually particularly new or exciting - a little bit of new idea
can go a long way. (And I don\'t disagree with your suggestion that a
lot of designs are neither good nor innovative!).

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so.  He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with.  I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Maybe you move in more rarefied circles.


I have no reason to suspect that John Larkin is /not/ a good designer.
I simply see no reason to place any weight in his own opinions of
himself or his views on engineering. It is entirely reasonable to
suppose he is very good at a narrow and specialised field while being so
ignorant, biased or confused in so many other topics that turn up in
this newsgroup.

Well, you\'re a software guy, so I guess that settles it. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good point. Consider what electronic designers deal with: basic
physics, a bit of QM, mechanics, electromagnetics, thermo,
signals-and-systems, filtering, control theory, noise, optics,
statistics, nonlinear system behavior, digital system behavior,
metastabity, speed of light effects, corner-case failure mechanisms,
market dynamics, data sheet deceptions, real-world electrical and
thermal behavior of parts and systems, reliability, manufacturing,
costs.

Consider what a programmer deals with: typing some high-level language
with little or no visibility down the abstraction stack. No theory
required. Usually no connection to physical reality. Little or no
math. Reliability is mainly patching the worst bugs that users find.
Essentially no relationship to \"computer science\", whose experts scorn
grunts who write code.


Which profession is more likely to give a person useful instincts and
analysis tools for the dynamic behavior of a tribe or an economy or a
society?

I wonder how many official EEs write decent code, and how many
official programmers design decent electronics.

Was Phil\'s comment too subtle for you? Did you miss the smiley? Or did
you think that posting that drivel would somehow make it true, or that
it would raise the tone of the thread?

Were you trying to attack me personally by condemning millions of
professionals as incompetent at practically everything in their
profession or outside it? Is it just another aspect of your bigotry,
beating on anyone who is not exactly like you? I really find it hard to
understand what drives someone who is clearly intelligent to write such
wide-ranging, unjustified and unsubstantiated negative posts.
 
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:09:02 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 18/01/2022 16:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:10:45 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 19:59, Phil Hobbs wrote:
David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


   You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real
work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'.  In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others.  The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
  The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

 From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be.  A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them.  \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions.  Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important.  (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong.  (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.)  Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)


Sure - I don\'t think the numbers are realistic (even if it were possible
to quantify them). My point is that most of the content of good designs
is not actually particularly new or exciting - a little bit of new idea
can go a long way. (And I don\'t disagree with your suggestion that a
lot of designs are neither good nor innovative!).

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so.  He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with.  I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Maybe you move in more rarefied circles.


I have no reason to suspect that John Larkin is /not/ a good designer.
I simply see no reason to place any weight in his own opinions of
himself or his views on engineering. It is entirely reasonable to
suppose he is very good at a narrow and specialised field while being so
ignorant, biased or confused in so many other topics that turn up in
this newsgroup.

Well, you\'re a software guy, so I guess that settles it. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good point. Consider what electronic designers deal with: basic
physics, a bit of QM, mechanics, electromagnetics, thermo,
signals-and-systems, filtering, control theory, noise, optics,
statistics, nonlinear system behavior, digital system behavior,
metastabity, speed of light effects, corner-case failure mechanisms,
market dynamics, data sheet deceptions, real-world electrical and
thermal behavior of parts and systems, reliability, manufacturing,
costs.

Consider what a programmer deals with: typing some high-level language
with little or no visibility down the abstraction stack. No theory
required. Usually no connection to physical reality. Little or no
math. Reliability is mainly patching the worst bugs that users find.
Essentially no relationship to \"computer science\", whose experts scorn
grunts who write code.


Which profession is more likely to give a person useful instincts and
analysis tools for the dynamic behavior of a tribe or an economy or a
society?

I wonder how many official EEs write decent code, and how many
official programmers design decent electronics.


Was Phil\'s comment too subtle for you? Did you miss the smiley? Or did
you think that posting that drivel would somehow make it true, or that
it would raise the tone of the thread?

Going personal and emotional again. Can you address the issue?

Were you trying to attack me personally by condemning millions of
professionals as incompetent at practically everything in their
profession or outside it? Is it just another aspect of your bigotry,
beating on anyone who is not exactly like you? I really find it hard to
understand what drives someone who is clearly intelligent to write such
wide-ranging, unjustified and unsubstantiated negative posts.

I thought the concept was reasonable and worth discussing. Systems are
best analyzed by people who are experts at quantitative time-domain
system behavior.

Economists also seem to ignore control theory. They spin big knobs too
much, too late. No rational PID.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:09:02 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 18/01/2022 16:35, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:10:45 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 19:59, Phil Hobbs wrote:
David Brown wrote:
On 17/01/2022 15:44, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:29:12 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 16/01/2022 16:25, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:49:15 +0000, Pomegranate Bastard
PommyB@aol.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:11:26 -0000 (UTC),
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in
news:6nv3ugto7ejcn4lsdte4jrduf6oag2o1ph@4ax.com:

Conservatives are better engineers too.


   You just can\'t stop spouting retarded, divisive stupid shit, eh?
You should have somebody sew that upper anus shut.

Best ignore the gullible old narcissist.

Several of them. They don\'t design electronics anyhow.


You do realise that people who actually /do/ design work - real
work, on
real products - rarely discuss details of proprietary designs with
random strangers on the internet?  The only people here who talk about
their work are amateurs (nothing wrong with that - it is not an insult
of any kind), retirees (again, nothing wrong with that) and people who
boast about how much better they are than everyone else, despite a
complete absence of any kind of evidence or justification.

Precisely. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

Classically narcissistic behaviour.

Dunno--I discuss my proprietary designs here all the time, and put them
in books too.  It helps my business, as well as sometimes generating
useful info for me as well as others.

IME the folks who hold their \'crown jewels\' super close to the vest tend
to overrate said jewels\' actual value by a lot.  I\'ve had people tell me
\"in confidence\" things I\'d known for 20 years, such as that you need to
filter the drive to your TE coolers very carefully to avoid crap getting
into the cold-plate circuitry.


One big difference is whether the designs are your own property, or the
customers\'.  In my work, the majority of what we do is design for
customers - I could not possibly give out information about those
designs to others.  The same would apply to employees of a company.

If you own your company and make your own designs, then you have all the
rights and can discuss them as you want - but I think that would be the
case for only a very small proportion of professional engineers.

That\'s true, but it\'s a very different statement from the preceding.

I do a fair amount of code reading for patent and trade secret lawsuits.
  The legal protections for produced source code are enough to curl your
hair, so you\'d expect that the code would really be something special.

 From the tens of thousands of lines I\'ve seen of such \'crown jewels\',
the quality and the density of good ideas is far lower than on Stack
Overflow, say.


Sometimes that\'s why they want to keep it so secret :)

Could well be.  A lot of it is real genuine crudware--a clever
engineering manager could set his competition back years just by leaking
it to them.  \"Technical debt\", Venezuela style.

Most engineering - electronic or software - is not hugely innovative.
Good engineering is mainly about implementing solid, reliable and
cost-effective solutions.  Revolutionary new ideas are relatively rare,
but of course they can be very important.  (What is that saying?
Invention is 1% innovation, 99% perspiration?)

Edison said that because he was doing it wrong.  (Just ask Nikola Tesla
next time you see him--he\'ll confirm it.)  Edison introduced a very
important engineering metric--the inspiration/perspiration ratio--but
his quoted value of just over 1% shows a lot of room for improvement. ;)


Sure - I don\'t think the numbers are realistic (even if it were possible
to quantify them). My point is that most of the content of good designs
is not actually particularly new or exciting - a little bit of new idea
can go a long way. (And I don\'t disagree with your suggestion that a
lot of designs are neither good nor innovative!).

Larkin will claim his stuff is all new revolutionary ideas, but we all
know the value of his claims.

John and I have collaborated on several projects over the last dozen
years or so.  He\'s one of the two or three best designers I know, and
great fun to design things with.  I\'m hoping to do a bit of that next
week, in fact, when EOI is making a collective visit to Photonics West.

Maybe you move in more rarefied circles.


I have no reason to suspect that John Larkin is /not/ a good designer.
I simply see no reason to place any weight in his own opinions of
himself or his views on engineering. It is entirely reasonable to
suppose he is very good at a narrow and specialised field while being so
ignorant, biased or confused in so many other topics that turn up in
this newsgroup.

Well, you\'re a software guy, so I guess that settles it. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good point. Consider what electronic designers deal with: basic
physics, a bit of QM, mechanics, electromagnetics, thermo,
signals-and-systems, filtering, control theory, noise, optics,
statistics, nonlinear system behavior, digital system behavior,
metastabity, speed of light effects, corner-case failure mechanisms,
market dynamics, data sheet deceptions, real-world electrical and
thermal behavior of parts and systems, reliability, manufacturing,
costs.

Consider what a programmer deals with: typing some high-level language
with little or no visibility down the abstraction stack. No theory
required. Usually no connection to physical reality. Little or no
math. Reliability is mainly patching the worst bugs that users find.
Essentially no relationship to \"computer science\", whose experts scorn
grunts who write code.


Which profession is more likely to give a person useful instincts and
analysis tools for the dynamic behavior of a tribe or an economy or a
society?

I wonder how many official EEs write decent code, and how many
official programmers design decent electronics.


Was Phil\'s comment too subtle for you? Did you miss the smiley? Or did
you think that posting that drivel would somehow make it true, or that
it would raise the tone of the thread?

Were you trying to attack me personally by condemning millions of
professionals as incompetent at practically everything in their
profession or outside it?

I didn\'t do that. I suggested that people who are experts at control
theory are better at understanding dynamic systems than people who are
not. Do you disagree?

> Is it just another aspect of your bigotry,

I confess that in an electronic design group, I have more respect for
the skills and opinions of electronic designers. That\'s not
unreasonable. I don\'t go to programming groups and pretend to
expertise.

beating on anyone who is not exactly like you? I really find it hard to
understand what drives someone who is clearly intelligent to write such
wide-ranging, unjustified and unsubstantiated negative posts.

Let\'s make a deal: I\'ll stay objective to your objective opinions, and
not go personal, if you will do the same.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye
 
On 18/01/2022 17:47, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:09:02 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
Was Phil\'s comment too subtle for you? Did you miss the smiley? Or did
you think that posting that drivel would somehow make it true, or that
it would raise the tone of the thread?

Going personal and emotional again. Can you address the issue?

What issue? Your imaginary straw men? It doesn\'t make sense to try to
\"address\" the kind of monkey-with-a-typewriter stuff you sometimes throw
out. It doesn\'t even have enough content to be called \"wrong\".

Here\'s a thought for you when you post these lists of all the failings
you imagine for some group - programmers, socialists, or whatever group
you associate with someone who disagrees with you. If you were to
replace \"programmers\" with \"black people\", \"women\", \"homosexuals\", or
\"Jews\", and kept the rest of the paragraph saying how they have no
connection to reality, no understanding of maths, are unprofessional,
unreliable, etc., it would clearly be prejudice and bigotry. You
probably claim you\'d never write something like that, and that you are
not a racist, sexist, or any other kind of bigot.

But when you post such an attack on /any/ group - with no justification,
no evidence, no logic, no data, no excuse - it is just as bigoted and
just as despicable as any other kind of prejudice.


If you have a beef with /me/, then feel free to insult me - I\'ll happily
ignore you. But insulting or attacking a range of innocents just to try
to make yourself look good (and believe me, you failed - badly) is
pathetic and indicates a true nature that is not remotely pleasant or
humane.

I\'d like to give you the benefit of the doubt here and hear you say you
didn\'t realise what you were writing, and will think a little more
carefully before posting in the future. I\'m not optimistic, but you
have your chance.
 

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