Notices by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social), page 3

@UkeleleEric @tim they messed up my billing enrolment and didn't charge me for over a year (I didn't notice, as far as I knew it was going out), then demanded several thousand in back payments all in one go. I eventually got them to strike off a lot of the debt because it was their fault, but it took me another 14 months to pay it off and the financial impact has sucked.

I've been logging the rate at which people have been signing the EU initiative today. deeply impressive mobilisation.

the average rate since 12:00 UTC is a little over 6 signatures per second.

srsly, if you're a citizen of any EU country, go sign the thing. it actually matters and we're so very close to the threshold.

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/

just realised you can do this in C#

const int MaxStackAlloc = 1024;
Span<int> indices = count <= MaxStackAlloc ? stackalloc int[count] : new int[count];

so you dynamically get stack or heap allocation depending on the count.

wanted to get some more of the high activity liquid rosin flux I got from a BGA reballing supplies place, but the site disappeared. checked wayback, looks like it was up as recently as just a couple months back. wanted to ask the owner if he could tell me where to get more, so I did some digging to find the registered business name, got his name, found his nickname, looked him up and... well I guess that explains why the site is down. he died two months back.

that "Google made their search results worse on purpose to get more ad impressions" article that's going around is based on an internal email chain from a legal filing, in which an employee mentions this potential approach for increasing engagement metrics... as an example of a bad approach and not something they'd be comfortable doing.

based on my reading, there's nothing in here that says they actually did it. I can't see anything in there that supports that claim.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

cursed idea

aside from the connector itself being kinda large on smaller boards, SATA is a pretty good form factor for this sort of thing. the cables are cheap and shielded, it's got a locking connector with low insertion and removal force, the connectors are rated for plenty of cycles, and there are enough lines for ICSP.

I wonder how hard it would be to sneak in a silkscreen change on a commercial PCB so that it ends up saying

COPYRIGHT (C) 2025 TRANS RIGHTS PRESERVED

would anyone even notice in review, or would their brain gloss over it and read it as "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED"?

really not a fan of the cynical "that's just called tech" responses to my recent post. being a tech doomer just makes you apathetic and resigns you to feeling like there's no way to improve or abolish the systems that uphold the current approaches. there's a fine line between sardonic catharsis and surrender.

has anyone coined the term "fast tech" yet? used in the same sense as "fast fashion" - stuff that's designed to be cheap and disposable, chasing short term fads and tends, built in wasteful quantities in full knowledge that many units will go to landfill without being bought.

@Viss lmao ok I really need to get back to watching this

@Viss yeah I got through the first few episodes but then got distracted by other stuff, I need to go back.

@whitequark yes, a few US states don't prohibit it (e.g. Florida, Delaware, Hawaii, and quite a few others)

thanks, Wikipedia, I'm always getting undead wizards confused with algae.

amazed at the number of people asking "but why am I paying more than the price of the item in import fees if the tariff is 145%?"

I didn't realise that mathematical and financial literacy was quite this poor.

(yes, the tariffs themselves are ludicrous, but that's not my point here)

@azonenberg ah ok. I just got a cheap compressor with my airbrush kit and I've ended up using it to dry stuff off and to blow out dust and crud far more than I have actual painting

used my air compressor to blast out a bunch of crud from my keyboard, took a while, and I started smelling something weird.

turns out it's not all too happy about being run at high duty cycles from max flow rate, and the whole pump assembly was so hot I couldn't touch it for more than a fraction of a second. real toasty.

got a fan on it, gonna let it cool off.

@azonenberg surprised that the cans have fewer contaminants than compressed air - is it because the propellant tends to boil off?