The Official Status Thread
-
My six-year-old wrote a joke:
Q: What number do you eat at Thanksgiving?
A: Pi
-
@carrievs said in The Official Status Thread:
Anyhow. They offered me the extra £1k. Job search over. Thanks for all your advice and support, everyone.
On a holiday? Wow, your folks don't mess around...
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@carrievs said in The Official Status Thread:
Anyhow. They offered me the extra £1k. Job search over. Thanks for all your advice and support, everyone.
On a holiday? Wow, your folks don't mess around...
Perhaps this was an attempt at a joke, but just in case not, you do realize it's not a holiday everywhere, yes?
-
@jaloopa said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: having some fun with /r/ProgrammerHumor
But... why would you replace yourself? That's just inviting a grandfather paradox....
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@carrievs said in The Official Status Thread:
Anyhow. They offered me the extra £1k. Job search over. Thanks for all your advice and support, everyone.
On a holiday? Wow, your folks don't mess around...
Perhaps this was an attempt at a joke, but just in case not, you do realize it's not a holiday everywhere, yes?
-
Status: Contemplating whether to give Steam some money. So far, all of my Steam games were either free, gifts, or purchased with a gift card.
-
Status: My simulation is managing 50ps/s. I may die of old age before I get usable results out of it. Guess I can't simulate the whole thing at this level of detail then.
-
Status: So apparently the AZ state law says my driver's license photo must be no older than 12 years.
I haven't updated it since I got it.
Now they want to charge me $12 and the time it takes to go through the
DMVMVD lines to get it changed. Since I work during their working hours, this is going to mandate time off for me.I hate lose-lose-lose situations.
-
@cursorkeys That's ... impressive. I used to figure about 1µs/s. What level of detail are you simulating at? (Edit: Come to think of it, though, that was on a design with a really slow clock speed, so there wasn't a whole lot happening in a µs.)
-
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@cursorkeys That's ... impressive. I used to figure about 1µs/s. What level of detail are you simulating at?
Full design with parasitics on a Flyback converter. I think the behavioural model for the current-mode controller is causing most of the problem. I've just removed parasitics from all the capacitors and diodes and dropped the current and voltage accuracy. Up to 44us/s now which is fine.
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Oh? Want me to donate some cycles?
Yes please :) (I'll need some new software, the offer is very kind though!)
I need a Xeon, or one of those AMD Threadrippers.
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Oh? Want me to donate some cycles?
Yes please :)
I need a Xeon, or one of those AMD Threadrippers.
Ever since the loss of video surveillance backups, my server has had even less to do more than ever.
But if it's memory-intensive, I'll trade you cycles for an upgrade (it currently has only 24 Gb.
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Oh? Want me to donate some cycles?
Yes please :)
I need a Xeon, or one of those AMD Threadrippers.
Ever since the loss of video surveillance backups, my server has had even less to do more than ever.
But if it's memory-intensive, I'll trade you cycles for an upgrade (it currently has only 24 Gb.
That would go a bit faster than this first-gen I3! I'll have to see what Linux SPICE software is available. Some more memory for cycles would be great.
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
But if it's memory-intensive
Very, I keep running out with 16GB in this machine
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I've just removed parasitics from all the capacitors and diodes and dropped the current and voltage accuracy.
Ah, circuit simulation; I kinda suspected that. I just do pure digital simulations, but of entire chips (sometimes, depending on the project). Much less detail, but much bigger designs.
-
Status: Leaving to go have Thanksgiving with my daughter's boyfriend's parents. I've never met them. I'm just a little nervous.
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Leaving to go have Thanksgiving with my daughter's boyfriend's parents. I've never met them. I'm just a little nervous.
Make sure to paint the tip orange. For some reason it puts people a little more at ease...
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I've just removed parasitics from all the capacitors and diodes and dropped the current and voltage accuracy.
Ah, circuit simulation; I kinda suspected that. I just do pure digital simulations, but of entire chips (sometimes, depending on the project). Much less detail, but much bigger designs.
Ooh, microelectronics, the hard stuff! I got to do a simple design in Uni with a package called MICROWIND. That was a lot of fun, the lecturer said would be able to get our designs (those that had successfully got through simulation and layout) produced all together as one wafer and then packaged separately for us. I was so gutted when that didn't pan out. I wanted my very own IC!
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Leaving to go have Thanksgiving with my daughter's boyfriend's parents. I've never met them. I'm just a little nervous.
Best of luck!
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
That was a lot of fun, the lecturer said would be able to get our designs (those that had successfully got through simulation and layout) produced all together as one wafer and then packaged separately for us. I was so gutted when that didn't pan out. I wanted my very own IC!
That would have been fricken amazing, getting the templates made for the the different layers and then the actual process for a one-off run would have been hella expensive though...
-
@blakeyrat said in The Official Status Thread:
If they won't make the hire for an extra 1k (after spending something like 10k at least just putting you through the hiring process), you're probably going to be entering into some kind of bureaucratic nightmare company that has no concept of "penny-wise, pound-foolish".
... What the hellfuck kind of hiring process costs $10k?
I think WtfCorp hires using whatever we found down the back of the couch.
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
That was a lot of fun, the lecturer said would be able to get our designs (those that had successfully got through simulation and layout) produced all together as one wafer and then packaged separately for us. I was so gutted when that didn't pan out. I wanted my very own IC!
That would have been fricken amazing, getting the templates made for the the different layers and then the actual process for a one-off run would have been hella expensive though...
I'm guessing there was some sort of arrangement with a foundry specifically to allow universities to do it in an affordable way. The enormous process size we were using probably makes it cheaper too maybe.
Google isn't very helpful on the cost but it looks like it could be as low as €3,000 for 10 packaged parts which is far less than I thought. With 9 like minded people that's within spitting distance of sensible hobby expenditure, maybe one day I could get my own ASIC after all.
-
@weng said in The Official Status Thread:
... What the hellfuck kind of hiring process costs $10k?
Well I assume they interviewed, and the people doing the interview got paid. I also assume there was a person (who got paid) preparing the offer, interfacing with the recruiter, etc. Maybe $10 is high, but it's not VERY high if so.
-
@carrievs said in The Official Status Thread:
£1k/year.
Yeah; that's petty enough that any normal company would be like "pfft, whatever, sure".
@carrievs said in The Official Status Thread:
Anyhow. They offered me the extra £1k. Job search over.
Congrats.
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Leaving to go have Thanksgiving with my daughter's boyfriend's parents. I've never met them. I'm just a little nervous.
Make sure to paint the tip orange. For some reason it puts people a little more at ease...
If he's showing the parents his tip, something has already gone very wrong (or very right)
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
the lecturer said would be able to get our designs (those that had successfully got through simulation and layout) produced all together as one wafer and then packaged separately for us. I was so gutted when that didn't pan out. I wanted my very own IC!
That's what my Senior Project was supposed to be. I did the design, simulation* and layout, but getting it fabbed didn't happen. I don't fully remember the details of why not, but at least one big part was not being able to contact the organization that was going to make it due to unreliable email. Finally, my adviser told me to just write up and submit what I had, up to the point it was ready to be sent out to be fabbed.
* I also wrote the simulator. Much simpler that today's simulators, it was just a C program that had the same AND, OR and whatever logic operations and connections as the schematic, and printed a table of 1s and 0s showing the state of all the interesting things in the design.
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
That would have been fricken amazing, getting the templates made for the the different layers and then the actual process for a one-off run would have been hella expensive though...
We had some kind of grant to get that done for a student project. My project, unfortunately, didn't get to use that money.
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
That was a lot of fun, the lecturer said would be able to get our designs (those that had successfully got through simulation and layout) produced all together as one wafer and then packaged separately for us. I was so gutted when that didn't pan out. I wanted my very own IC!
That would have been fricken amazing, getting the templates made for the the different layers and then the actual process for a one-off run would have been hella expensive though...
I'm guessing there was some sort of arrangement with a foundry specifically to allow universities to do it in an affordable way. The enormous process size we were using probably makes it cheaper too maybe.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US there was at that time, and I think may still be, something at USC called MOSIS, that did just that. Since it's academia, they might have worked with universities in other countries, too.
Something less than leading-edge process does bring the cost down significantly. Both larger geometry (simpler, less expensive photolithography) and fewer metal layers as well as not having extra features like floating gates for flash (fewer masks — what @Tsaukpaetra called templates — and processing steps) reduce both the tooling and processing costs. Just the masks alone for a chip using a leading-edge process today can cost in the neighborhood of $1000000 (I think; I don't deal directly with any of that stuff).
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Leaving to go have Thanksgiving with my daughter's boyfriend's parents. I've never met them. I'm just a little nervous.
There was also some extended family there; I never did figure out who was who.
Went well, except that because of my son's Thanksgiving dinner with my ex, we got to the parents' place just in time for dessert, after they'd already cleaned up from dinner. Dessert was good, but it's not quite the same as a full Thanksgiving food orgy. Nor is frozen pizza after I got home.
Conversation mostly centered around the uneasy relationship between the three resident cats and the two visiting (with the extended family) dogs. At some point, it turned briefly to politics. I somehow avoided saying, "You can't impeach somebody just because you don't like them; there has to be evidence that they committed an actual 'high crime or misdemeanor,'" when everybody except me was talking about how the entire Trump, Pence, and the entire Cabinet should be impeached.
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Make sure to paint the tip orange. For some reason it puts people a little more at ease...
I don't even want to know WTF you're talking about.
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Make sure to paint the tip orange. For some reason it puts people a little more at ease...
I don't even want to know WTF you're talking about.
Filed under: iFramely, you're useless!
-
@tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
But... why would you replace yourself? That's just inviting a grandfather paradox....
Following various links off there, I find this wonderful gem that I need a lot round here:
-
Status: Restarted on a new Ark server. This is the character I chose to make:
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
I don't even want to know WTF you're talking about.
I have that feeling with most of his posts.
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I'm guessing there was some sort of arrangement with a foundry specifically to allow universities to do it in an affordable way. The enormous process size we were using probably makes it cheaper too maybe.
The main costs are in getting a tested design to tape-out; the last stages before that are insanely costly (there's really not that many software packages for doing something that complex on an interesting feature scale). The cost then pretty much scales per wafer. We do do some full chips (our production processors) but getting a full design done requires an investment of millions. Getting repeat orders (given that we have many chips per wafer) is enormously cheaper and that makes scaling up pretty simple and cheap. Well, except for the costs of the on-chip modules that we license from elsewhere¬
Most of the hardware designers round us do most of their work with FPGAs. Alternatively, you can go with building an ASIC if you want to go one step beyond an FPGA, but there's quite a bit of convergence in terms of practical capabilities. The big worry as a hobbyist is likely to be frying the hardware by wiring stuff up wrong internally; at least with an FPGA, you can just slot a new one in off the shelf and don't have to worry about the costs of remanufacturing.
-
STATUS: Picked up my laptop from the bag, wondering why the fans were running. Ofc, since I had been using Windows yesterday and just closed the lid when going to bed, Windows decided that the best time to apply updates would be while I was going to work, with the laptop in my backpack.
For the icing on the cake, upon restarting the computer (as it had got stuck on the broken Grub screen again during the automatic reboot) and returning to Windows, it allowed me to type most of my password before deciding that it had been asleep before the reboot and promptly went back to it.
-
@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
Most of the hardware designers round us do most of their work with FPGAs. Alternatively, you can go with building an ASIC if you want to go one step beyond an FPGA, but there's quite a bit of convergence in terms of practical capabilities. The big worry as a hobbyist is likely to be frying the hardware by wiring stuff up wrong internally; at least with an FPGA, you can just slot a new one in off the shelf and don't have to worry about the costs of remanufacturing.
FPGAs are as close as I get in my normal work. An anti-fuse FPGA is getting fairly close I guess.
I was amazed when reading what the reverse engineers were getting up to. Directly editing an IC, a little more involved than green bodge-wire!
I imagine those FIBs are extraordinarily expensive bits of kit though.
-
@pleegwat said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: It passed tests before I touched it.
Of course it's failing one of the more arcane tests, and I found out just before I went home, so I'll be exploring the solution tomorrow.
Somebody violated the API contract.
-
-
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I was amazed when reading what the reverse engineers were getting up to. Directly editing an IC, a little more involved than green bodge-wire!
It's possible to harden systems against that, but it's crazy difficult and most people don't bother. It's the sort of thing that most would only bother with for a security module, not the rest of the chip.
-
@cartman82 said in The Official Status Thread:
HR from brother's company have heard "good things about me" from various people (including my brother), so they are trying really hard to recruit me - getting my brother to ping me, offering bonuses, the whole shebang. They are desperate for seniors, just the same as everyone else.
Upsides of this company:Well organized
Various bonuses and perks given to employees
Reasonably relaxed atmosphereDownsides (for me):
Outsourcing work (so the level of pain depends on the client you get)
Division of labor, I'd have to give up my full stack ways and pick just one area to focus on (backend or frontend)
They'd probably want me for .NET core or something like that, and I don't want to go back to MS land (rats, sinking ship, direction of travel and all that)They got me to agree to drop by tomorrow to check them out, but unless it's really something special they have there, I don't see myself jumping ship.
Went to the official visit. Had lunch with brother, then a 20 min meeting with the HR lady, and the front and backend leads. I turned up the charm appropriately, I think it went OK.
They indeed seem married to .NET on backend. The backend lead is an old school .NET guy. He raised his nose at node.js ("I don't consider it serious enough for us"). Asked the guy about .net core, he seemed less than enthusiastic they'll ever transition. They are also doing some PHP and java, but I didn't get much further details. Seems like a smart chap, asked some pretty pointed questions (no technical stuff, just "where do you see yourself in 5 years" kind of crap).
It seems front lead was more interested in me, we talked about the latest fads he's into (swift, react vr, graph ql, machine learning, stuff like that).
The offices are all with glass walls, arranged along one long, relatively narrow corridor. 12-ish developers per office (too many IMO, I'd like too see 3-6). They have a recreation room and free drinks in mess hall, stuff like that. No reserved parking, but the space shouldn't be a problem if you come early enough.
My take - it's an OK fallback destination if my startup thing fails, but I won't be jumping ship on my own accord.
-
@cartman82 said in The Official Status Thread:
They indeed seem married to .NET on backend. The backend lead is an old school .NET guy. He raised his nose at node.js ("I don't consider it serious enough for us"). Asked the guy about .net core, he seemed less than enthusiastic they'll ever transition.
sounds like an awesome place to work backend
-
@jaloopa said in The Official Status Thread:
@cartman82 said in The Official Status Thread:
They indeed seem married to .NET on backend. The backend lead is an old school .NET guy. He raised his nose at node.js ("I don't consider it serious enough for us"). Asked the guy about .net core, he seemed less than enthusiastic they'll ever transition.
sounds like an awesome place to work backend
@cartman82 said:
They are also doing some PHP
Yes, indeed
-
@jaloopa
Is there ever a wrong place to work the back end?
-
@izzion said in The Official Status Thread:
Is there ever a wrong place to work the back end?
Yes. Taco Bell.
-
Status: I've just resigned from my job and I'm having an anxiety attack.
-
@carrievs Relax, you already have another job
-
@carrievs Why did the new one fall through? Or do you just have anxiety attacks about, frankly, nothing?
-
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I was amazed when reading what the reverse engineers were getting up to. Directly editing an IC, a little more involved than green bodge-wire!
Interesting. I've only been aware of that being used for a POC of a complicated bug fix before hand-editing the chip layout and getting new masks made, but I've never been involved in the process. I have used SEM and LVP for failure analysis, but not FIB.
@cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
I imagine those FIBs are extraordinarily expensive bits of kit though.
Just about everything associated with semiconductor manufacturing or testing is.
-
@blakeyrat said in The Official Status Thread:
Or do you just have anxiety attacks about, frankly, nothing?
That's pretty much the definition of an anxiety attack, severe anxiety over a situation that objectively should cause no, or only mild, anxiety.
-
@hardwaregeek said in The Official Status Thread:
a situation that objectively should cause no, or only mild, anxiety.
Like death. Some people worry so much about it.
You shouldn't worry about death. After all, it's not gonna happen in your lifetime
-
@timebandit trust me, dying is the last thing that's going to happen to you