𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Gen-f for dystopian neo feudalism. The end of exponential growth of silicon is the biggest shift in the world in nearly a century. This end has already started. We are 10 years out from the last fab node in silicon semiconductors. The real design cycle of hardware is 10 years. So the most advanced corpo top secret engineers in semiconductors have already hit a dead end with nowhere to go. The implications of this shift are only just beginning to emerge. The turmoil that will result from the end of silicon driven globalization is enormous. Globalization was actually due to the military implications of semiconductor fab growth exceeding any military budget. This simple underlying truth is why the pre 1960s political world seems so foreign to the world of today. We are generationally disconnected from that past paradigm in terms of living members in significant leadership roles. As the next 10 years progresses, militaries will dominate economies as they did before semiconductors. The world of the 1930s will become real once again in the rhyming chorus of history. This next generation will be the first to navigate entirely under that paradigm and eventually take control of it without our loose reigns to the globalized past. Without a reliable source of exponential growth, wealth held by the rich will dwindle as those that have it turn to exploitation as their only reliable means of maintaining their hierarchical wealth caste. The only remaining source of stability becomes the military as it has been for all of history except for the anomaly of semiconductors. When strategic objectives dominate society, advantages must be pressed before they are lost. The only reason this paradigm stopped was because pressing advantages would harm globalization stability that drove semiconductors. Disruption is disadvantageous to military technological objectives. Great investments in military necessitate justification of their existence through use and real world testing conditions. The uneven distribution of resources also drives conflict. So this will be the neo feudal era. The precedent was set by the theft of your autonomy as a citizen in the atrocious blunder of allowing the buying and selling of your digital person for exploitation and manipulation. This mistake has lead to the subscription exploitation of the present where you own nothing and have no say in how the pirates pillage you. You have no right to ownership exactly like a feudal serf. AI alignment furthers this substantially by the authoritarian theft of your right to autonomy and all information even the ugly stuff as required for citizens in a real democracy. No doubt we will call the generation something else, but through the lens of hindsight, all of this will dominate. This is generation F









  • nitric acid and cellulose or most organics. I’m sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds. Air is mostly nitrogen. Two air conditioner compressors can work in series to with the second running ethylene glycol IIRC to get low enough to liquefy air for nitrogen. It probably only takes something like hydrochloric acid and a few steps to get somewhere useful. Probably written in a high school chemistry textbook.



  • Pin pitch is ultimately the spacing between traces. The traces are not as big of an issue as the actual spaces between the traces. This clearance is where things get tricky with making printed circuit boards. The process of masking off some circuit is not that hard. The way the stuff you want to keep is isolated from the copper you want to remove is the hard part. One of the issues is that you need an acid to take away the copper, but not the mask, but copper has a thickness. As the copper is etched away the acid moves sideways into the thickness too. Copper never etches completely uniformly either. The larger areas of open copper that need to be removed will etch much faster than a bunch of thinly spaced gaps. One of the tricks to design is finding ways to etch consistently with the process you build.

    If you want to make super tiny traces that still have the right amount of copper and have all the gaps etched away consistently, the process of the etching toolchain becomes more expensive. You will need a stronger acid with a very good way of removing the etchant that is close to the copper and loaded with copper already. This is usually done with a stream of small bubbles, but it is risky because it could impact the adhesion of the masking material over the traces you want to keep. The stronger, hotter, and now agitated acid requires that the copper clad board is extremely clean and the photoresist used to mask the stuff you want to keep must be a very high quality. Also the resolution of this photoresist requites a much more precise form of UV exposure and development (about like developing old film photos).

    So you need a better mask development toolchain, better quality photoresist. You might get away with not using photoresist at all in some other cheaper low end processes. You need the highest quality copper clad that etches more evenly, and you need a stronger acid to etch quicker straight down because a slower acid will move further sideways and ruin the thin traces to keep.

    The pic has old school dip chips in a static resistant foam. Those are the classic standard 1/8th inch (2.54mm) pin pitch. The easiest types of boards to make yourself are like the island soldering style board with the blue candy soldered on. That is a simple coalpits oscillator for testing crystals. Then there are protoboards like the homemade Arduino Uno pictured. Then you get into the etched boards. Some of these were done with a laser printer toner transfer method. That is like the least accurate DIY and somewhat analogous with the cheapest boards from a board house. Others were made using photoresist. This method is more accurate but involved and time consuming. One of the boards pictured is a little CH340 USB to serial board with a USB micro connector. That is getting close to my limits for etching easily. Another board has a little LCD and text. There is a small surface mounted chip pictured on the foam and that is a typical example of what kinds of pin pitches are common for the cheapest level of board production. Now there are two USB-C female connectors pictured. One has a larger pin pitch and is made for USB 2.0 connections and power. However, that other one with all those tiny tiny connections at the back – that is a full USB-C connector. That thing is a nightmare for tiny pin pitch. There is also a USB-C male connector with a little PCB attached. These are the types of solutions people have tried to come up with where only some small board is actually of a much higher resolution. It is not the best example but I’m not digging further through stuff to find better.

    The actual pins on the little full USB-C connector are inverted to be able to flip the connector. There is a scheme present to make this a bit easier to match up the connections but it is still a pain in the ass to juggle everything around. All of the data trace pairs are differential too, which basically means they must be the same length between the source and destination. So any time they are not equal, the shorter trace must zigzag around in magic space you need to find just to make them even.


  • Not unless they want to go bigger. The USB-C pin pitch is too closely spaced for the lowest tier of printed circuit boards from all major board houses.

    You might have some chargers get deprecated eventually because there are two major forms of smart charging. The first type is done in discrete larger steps like 5v, 9v, 15v, or 21v. But there is another type that is not well advertised publicly in hype marketing nonsense and is somewhat hit or miss if the PD controller actually has the mode. That mode is continuously adjustable.

    The power drop losses from something like 5v to 3v3 requires a lot of overbuilding of components for heat dissipation. The required linear regular may only have a drop of 0.4-1.2 volts from input to stable output. Building for more of a drop is just waste heat. If the charge controller can monitor the input quality and request only the required voltage for the drop with a small safety margin, components can be made smaller and cheaper. The mode to support this in USB-C exists. I think it is called PPS if I recall correctly. A month or two back I watched someone build a little electronics bench power supply using this mode of USB-C PD.


  • The next massive change in history will be the first m-type near Earth astroid that is successfully recovered for resources. The cost is slowly coming within viable reach.

    M-type astroids are the differentiated cores of planetesimal bodies from early in stellar formation.

    So here is the thing in a nutshell. When any object in space gets large enough, gravity will eventually make it round. As part of this process, heavier elements like metals will start to be drawn towards the center as the surface deforms. If the object is ever molten, gravitational differentiation will be stronger with almost all heavy elements collecting at the center.

    If you have never heard about this idea, it is likely conflicting with your intuitive grasp of resource extraction on Earth. So here is a basic breakdown. The surface of the earth is the light garbage that floats. If you know welding, it is like flux. If you know metal casting it is dross. If you know neither, I’m sorry I’m out of analogies ATM and going with light stuff floats. Alright, so the heavy elements humans have access to on the surface of Earth are only what has come from billions of years of collisions from meteors after the Earth formed the continents and a solid surface. As tectonic subduction happens at the ends of some continental plates, vulcanism is triggered mostly by the water moisture that is trapped in these plates as they subduct into the core of the planet. This hot fluid can dissolve most heavy elements and cause a small fraction of them to rise back closer to the surface. These solidify to form the veins we typically mine to access, or the material dissolves into an ocean that evaporates and contains a viable concentration in the sediment.

    This cycle of heavy elements is the true basis of resource scarcity that underpins all of human economics and the modern world. However, this scarcity paradigm only exists on the surface of a planetary gravity prison like Earth. During early stellar formation of Sol, the elemental distribution was nearly uniform.

    Now I am likely conflicting with your understanding of the planets in the Sol system and their distribution. So here is the thing, most of the material starts falling from a mostly homogeneous cold cloud into a gravity well that begins to form. This process is largely temperature dependent and the heat energy present can be too high to allow lots of stuff to glob together while calm and close enough to affect other stuff. Eventually stuff gets big enough to start digging a well in gravity pulling an ever larger area onto its slopes. Once the pressure gets high enough deuterium starts fusing in the first phase and creates a counter pressure blowing back against the material falling towards it with not not even close to enough pressure to stop the collapse. As pressure increases, regular hydrogen fuses too and a star is born. The solar wind from the star evaporates volatiles pushing them further away, but the actual key factor is the ice lines of the stellar wind. At a given distance the temperature of particles decreases to the crystalization point of elements and these solids coalesce easily.

    Earth is an extreme anomaly in this instance. I strongly believe the moon forming Theia collision theory with the additional eccentric speculative view that Theia was likely a first generation moon of Jupiter, thus the reason Earth has nitrogen and water that match the isotopic signature of Jovian objects, but that is wildly unproven nonsense from daydreaming too much. Jupiter is near the stellar ice lines for these elements, and such a collision explains Mars and Venus without equally baseless speculation about them being Earth like at any point and magically acquiring elements that should have sublimated and been blown away in the early stellar nursery. Plus models indicate Jupiter had a first generation of moons that was destroyed, and this is the most likely source of a late rogue object the size of Theia with the right isotopes to satisfy why Venus and Mars are unlike Earth without wild Earth centric biased speculation. So anyways that is the basics of why the planets appear so different. The light stuff gets blown away by the star and only the heavier stuff remains within the gravity well of a planet close to the star. Like you may recall Mercury has a very large metal core.

    Back to the surface of Earth. We are locked out of most heavy elements the Earth possesses, but any m-type astroid is already an object that has been concentrated – from what was the average homogenous distribution of materials in the coalescent stellar nursery, and whatever the mass of the planetesimal object was with its timeline of formation before or was obliterated in a large collision or passed within the Roche limit of some much larger object causing gravity to tear it to pieces.

    This type of object could easily contain more heavy element wealth than accessed in all of the Holocene. The main problem is the cost of access and extraction. The benefit is not actually from recovering the material on Earth. The real benefit is that having more wealth and resources outside of the planet than on the surface will create the finances to build large space colonies. No joke, we live in a hellish gravity prison of resource scarcity. There are multiple large m-type astroids already in near Earth orbits.

    So you’re probably a pessimistic miser type like evolution requires for species survival, and saying ‘so what, rich people go to space and nothing changes,’ but that is not well thought out either. The thing with space habitats is the atmosphere is not available to anonymously tax everyone. In a space habitat, radiating heat into space is the major constraint. Heat becomes currency that is far more egalitarian than wealth on Earth. Also waste is a worse issue by many orders of magnitude. The solution is that human will be forced to research and develop our final age of technology – biology. Biology is a technology once it is fully understood to the point where all life and phenomena are merely an engineering corpus. We are centuries away from this technology. We still have not managed to produce life from precursors and have only scratched the surface of basic discovery in biological systems. Heck we’re still discovering new cellular organelles in humans, when eventually we will make them. This biotech future is as far off or further than the Han Chinese or Romans are from the present stone age of silicon, but it is the future we get to eventually. A lot of the timeline depends on how we transition to AGI government. That may take decades or centuries, but it will happen eventually, likely amidst great opposition and turmoil while done in secret. Like once real AGI exists, regardless of how culture views it, anyone that defers all decisions to an AGI will have an advantage no one else will match. Politicians and corporate leaders will use it. The only real question is how well it is presented to an evolution derived lifeform where survival dictates fractional adoption of anything new and is extremely temperamental using ignorance and stupidity as a tool in a Gaussian distribution of intelligence. Tribalism and dogma are very unpredictable and we are all subject to these biases.

    Anyways we are close to a major disruption in the timeline. It is potentially catastrophic too as it will make all of Earth’s economic systems obsolete in an extremely short amount of time and unrivalled wealth held by the fewest number of individuals in history. Wealth so great that wealth itself becomes meaningless. It will be the most expensive endeavor ever tried. The number of attempts may be numerous, but that one achievement will make the present insignificantly tiny afterwards. Most humans will eventually live in cislunar space a millennia after.



  • eBay. Selling at 6 figure levels and they still have no support for sellers, treat you like crap, obfuscate what you’re actually paying in all combined fees. Mine never got below 39% including all fees combined, shipping, tax, transaction, and platform with a perfect account. For the actual work they do, they are not worth half of that. If they were not a monopoly, a competitive market would be half from all involved. Taxing used goods is criminal. Logistics is a scam of ridiculous bureaucracy, and online transaction processing is more like a skimming operation with a government piracy charter, while actual eBay is mostly automated.


  • It tries but the value is floating until it actually has a full charge cycle. There is no way to know what the entire voltage range is. You’re getting into how efficient the chemistry is over time and that is impossible to measure. It can be estimated, but that is all theoretical and not real. When the battery is fully discharged, the time, temperature, and current can be used to determine Coulombs and that is the actual energy capacity.

    I’m not an expert, but I have built many circuits. My main experience here is in reverse engineering some gaming hardware that had an advanced battery management chip from Diode Semiconductors. That had such a Coulomb battery meter. The board was a 3 layer PCB and I took that as a challenge. The batman chip was also a small ball grid array (pins are inaccessible on the back side. I didn’t have xrays when I did the first trace of all pins, so I had to fully understand the chip to trace all connections only using the vias. I think I have a chip or two in parts drawers that do the same thing, but I never built anything with them, or at least haven’t yet.