Reverse address lookup servers routinely see escaped attempts to resolve ULA and rfc1918. If you can tie the resolver to other valid data, you know inside state.
Public services see one way (no TCP return flow possible) from almost any source IP. If you can tie that from other corroborated data, the same: you see packets from "inside" all the time.
Darknet collection during final /8 run-down captured audio in UDP.
I don't understand how foveated tracking won't cause a sense that peripheral vision is fuzzy. Or how it will track saccades, and so avoid fringe effects.
But, the "I don't understand" is strong in this. it doesn't mean "it can't work" but I don't understand how it avoids the problems.
Maybe the size of the computed foveal coverage area is made big enough, to cover the movement? But if you move your eyes suddenly, there's got to be some lag while it computes the missing pixels. So you'd see the same as when Netflix ups the coding rate: crude render becomes clearer. Banded would become smooth transitions.
Speaking as someone who has been using HMDs since '05, and periodically checks in on dynamic foveated rendering every year or so, the frustrating thing is that sensitivity to it varies significantly.
Some folks experience the image pretty much continuously and don't notice the edge blurring. Others see it every time they move their eyes left/right. This is on the same headset.
Part of it is driven by differences in eye geometry, and even color (as this impacts the effectiveness of the camera track of the eyes). I've seen the raw camera buffers for eye track on a couple headsets and they're.. a mess.
Honestly that the feature works at all, for anyone, is still mind boggling to me.
Imagine watching Netflix out of the corner of your eye. You wouldn't notice those transitions at all. Your eyes and brain are mind bogglingly good at making stuff up.
Do you know you have a big hole in your vision in each eye where the optic nerve is? It's about half the size of your fist at arm's length, and 35 degrees to the side. Your fovea happens to be roughly the same size. It's the HD part of your retina, and it's where essentially all of your vision happens. It's the only section of the retina that sees color, for instance. The periphery sees motion and that's about it.
Saccades top out at around 700 degrees per second. At 120 frames per second that's only about 6 degrees in either direction. Compared to the FOV, that's tiny. Overfill it!
I had to edit the code and change scale from 90 to 300 to see it easily in full screen landscape on my phone. I have presbyopia and often need reading glasses to see small things.
Well that's both unsettling and informative. It would explain why I seem to be a better gamer on a good sized monitor unlike the oversized one I have now. (I am ignoring the aging factor here, deliberately. Denial isn't only in Egypt.
Sufficient additional coverage + predicting the trajectory of your eyeballs. As far as I know, all of the journalists invited to try it were unable to see the low-res periphery, despite actively trying to break it with fast eye movements.
I don’t have an answer for you, but take some applause from me for spelling this out :)
It’s very difficult for most people to intuitively understand that what they could not figure out after five minutes of thinking might not necessarily be impossible.
You're thinking about foviated rendering. They're just doing foviated streaming. So it renders at full resolution, and only streams the parts that you're looking at with full resolution on the stream.
Your eye is just another input source, if you don't feel the controller lag from streaming games otherwise, you're probably not going to feel it here either. It's not like an additional round trip or anything, your eye is here and the joystick is here can be sent at the same time, and you get back the rendered frame in return.
As for peripheral vision, any gradation being smooth probably helps, but there might be more tricks to make it look normal. I'm reminded of how jpeg images and some sound codecs only store information that we can actually perceive.
whats the impact of epigenetics on this, given we're looking at a cohort of Boomers whose parents in many cases underwent extreme dietary restriction across the years of puberty or close?
the post ww2 children are the ones I'm talking about: their parents have in large part had cataclysm events in their fertile windows. my parents were 192x babies and their parents in turn were 1890/1900 window, and so dodged a lot of things because of a peace bonus. But my parents began a family in the 1950s after stress, and since neither fought nor were in the ETO or Asia, I suspect impact on me is minor but for dutch, or german, or french, or polish or chinese ...
I very much hope this doesn't descend into licence wars but I would think all of the BSD, MIT, ISC, hold-harmless, RAND and GNU licences qualified. If that's true and it was understood the public/commons got an outcome, I'd be in favour.
If the code is under restrictive clauses, or gets tokenistic input and the quotient of time and money is spent doing something else, then I think this is a licence to cheapen out contracting rates for-profit.
they are loosers.
they spent decades and billions and billions
and billions of dollars , sort of rebuilding used shuttle parts(SLS= shuttle leftover systems), and cant fill the fucking tanks, cant get things to seal, there thruster valves(old shuttle stuff) sieze up, and they are a bunch of bumbling grifter loosers.(sorry! to the many good people caught up in this debaucle)
A lot of productive thinking happens when asleep, in the shower, in flow walking or cycling or rowing.
It's hard to rationalise this as billable time, but they pay for outcome even if they act like they pay for 9-5 and so if I'm thinking why I like a particular abstraction, or see analogies to another problem, or begin to construct dialogues with mysel(ves|f) about this, and it happens I'm scrubbing my back (or worse) I kind of "go with the flow" so to speak.
Definitely thinking about the problem can be a lot better than actually having to produce it.
There's a reason the Martin B57 which NASA crash landed recently was not made by English-Electric despite being a Canberra Bomber, and the Harrier Jumpjet is known in america as the McDonnell Douglas AV-8B. National-Strategic concerns dictate production happen on-shore, and has done for a very long time.
Comac will make better and better aircraft. It won't stop Airbus or Boeing being viable companies any more than it will stop Bombardier, or Embraer. All airlines make political compromises. Wings are assembled inside one economy, so the aircraft can be sold inside that economy. Or, engines are maintained inside that economy. Or, a new JV is spun up which blends both economies interests somehow.
If you look under the covers, Bombardier has had many acquisitions, sell-offs, "manufactured under licence" in it's time. Not bad for a snomobile company!
Aircraft are not bought solely on price, despite what people might say about fleet bidding. operating costs might be a stronger reason than initial fleet acquisition cost. Or cost of compliance. Or pilot re-training. or, in the post MAX crash era, reputation.
(not in the industry, don't drive an aircraft for a living)
This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC construction) -Anything you don't specify will be done least cost, and there is no amount of "least" which cannot be chased in manufacture.
The other one noted if you don't specify the density of plastic for bags, or paper for bags and packing, you get clingfilm thinner than you thought existed, and paper which is almost tissue in its weakness. You don't even get boxes to put the boxes in, if you don't specify boxes to be delivered in boxes. So now wrapping a pallet becomes a nightmare if they don't stack. And if you don't specify how many to stack, and how to pad the stack, they won't do unit height stacking if it costs labour time. Your risk.
Some of this like the casting mistake, or the knob thing, could happen anywhere and you have to be close to final manufacture spec to find out e.g. the metal coating impinges on the knob at the free space you specified, because your test rig didn't have powder coating. Or, that a design feature you need like the light entry holes, is used by the casting engineer as pour points because it looked like you'd specified mould pour points not functional holes.
But other things like "yea, you didn't spec how long to make the tails so we cut the tails as close as we could" is just the cheapening above: if you don't SAY its a 10cm tail for the connector, it will be 2cm, if saving 8cm of cable saves money for them.
I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.
That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China.
They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.
They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.
It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.
I ordered cups and did specify the thickness (based on a reference) of the plastic but didn’t specify how thick the boxes they shipped in should be. Guess what happened!
> It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.
That's the thing that makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it work better for everyone involved, including the manufacturer, if they come back with a "here's exactly how we interpreted your spec and what materials we're using, including cases where we picked something you left unconstrained", and a corresponding price for using those materials, with the understanding that if you want different materials you get a different price, before they do any manufacturing whatsoever?
Yes but as OP pointed out, that requires you (or them) to spec it all out. And if you do, that’s how it works, and that’s probably exactly what happened when you buy any well-made product that was designed in America and built in China.
But a whole lot of manufacturing relies on the OEM not just for the production but also some of the engineering. They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.
A friend of mine worked for a major vacuum company that has 3 well-known lines. The very high end line is manufactured in the USA. The mid range line is fully designed here but manufactured there.
The low end line they basically tell a Chinese OEM what it should look like and certain parts of it and let the OEM fill in the blanks. OEM makes vacuums for other brands too, they know what size wires to use where, why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium?
OP is making something fundamentally different than what exists in some ways. It’s a lamp, but obviously it has some considerations other lamps don’t.
Also hardware (as OP pointed out) has long development cycles during which prices can actually fluctuate significantly. You don’t want to lock in cost plus pricing or you’ll end up buying components from their sister company at astronomical prices. You might not have time to source 100 different parts from Chinese OEMs yourself. Etc.
The whole thing is a complex guessing game. I’ve only manufactured approximately the simplest objects imaginable (stuff like gaskets and cups) and found it to be far more complex than I thought it would be. Manageable but something like a lamp I could see being a lot of unexpected work. I did not see, for instance, how much effort I had to put in speccing out the packaging for simple objects but then I found myself repacking things here.
> They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.
And yet, every single time I've seen reports of people having trouble with manufacturing, this was one of the problems. Someone presumably had to figure out all the little parts, so send the result of the figuring out before manufacturing begins!
I'm not trying to oversimplify, here. There are constraints this doesn't account for; for instance, getting a spec written in English might be an added expense. But getting whatever was written doesn't seem unreasonable...
> why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium
But someone had to spec it out, and it seems like it'd help everyone involved to communicate that spec, even if it's just filed in a drawer somewhere.
Well, they will send you whatever you ask them to, and it would help you if you caught an error. That would require you to know what you were looking at. For that you’d probably have to be an electrical engineer.
So you’d have to spend electrical engineering salary on checking over every little wire. That adds to cost and timeline.
Part of what you use the OEM for is so that they have to spec it out, not your expensive engineers, and get something lower cost and faster.
And frankly, a lot of things you just don’t expect that you have to tell them. Like the wire length issue in this particular post, you would expect them to just get that at least approximately correct.
You don’t know what you don’t know and it’s easy to evaluate in hindsight, but what you’re not seeing in this post is all the things they just did correctly with no prompting. There were surely very many, and each of them saved a good amount of time and money.
You're not wrong, but there are 1000 of those rc cars, and maybe 20% have that feature you want, but everyone buys the cheapest because they don't know which has slightly better quality.
Now go with Kyosho or Tamiya and you DO know it will be best in class, but at 10x the cost.
We live in an age where we can make our own inflation. We can choose between 2 products one with realistic expectations at greater cost and one that just looks like the other product but didn’t go the extra mile to ensure the product will function.
Working with a Chinese vendors is an adversarial first relationship, where 差不多 is deeeeep in the culture (and, from my experience, tends to survive trips across the ocean).
There are professional communication/training courses for working with Chinese vendors/colleagues that spell all of this out, because it's not some secret. It's just a very different culture, with high context communication (I'll let you read what the practical implications of that are elsewhere). Want to have your mind blown? Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.
Being a low context person, I have significant and severe communication problems when working with Chinese colleagues/vendors.
I did not find this to be the case, except with a few low quality vendors we ended up dropping.
It was mostly the same as anywhere else, you go talk to them in person, tour their facilities/processes, and see what else they've built.
I was warned strongly about IP theft and cost cutting, but didn't find that expectation quite met reality. It may have been that our products were mostly un-copyable, and we specified everything precisely, or were just lucky.
Given that Mandarin has many forms of "yes", isn't the problem that all those forms map on to our singular "yes". For a native speaker "yeeeessss" means something very different to "yes", but they would use a different word.
Knowing which is being spoken or heard is going to be hard.
chabuduo is basically fail fast, fail early with Chinese characteristics. Maybe because I was in a frat, but talking to Chinese salespeople seems very similar to talking to my frat brothers.
Personally, I never really had too many issues sourcing from China because I made sure I was always introduced to a reliable partner first.
And secondly, I told them when deciding on two options, choose the better quality option, regardless of price.
Basically, I didn't tell them to save us much money as possible if that made all the difference.
Can you share some resources/books/courses to learn more? I'm interested in exploring working with Chinese vendors and it would be nice to learn from someone else before jumping into it.
Googled that ‘yes’ thing. Not different from my experience in other parts of the world. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. What is your environment?
As someone living in the Nordics my experience already with central Europeans and especially so Americans is that these cultures are already much more high context than the Nordics. I guess up here we're all borderline autistic?
I've done business the other way around, Western Europe with Finland. I think it's just different context? There are unwritten customs and meanings in Finland as well, just different ones.
Even UK vs Netherlands is a significant difference in how things work in business deals and that's just a 45 min flight. Unspoken expectations are different on how the other side is supposed to behave.
I have observed the same across a bunch of linguistically Germanic countries (DE, AT, CH, NL, DK, NO, haven't been to SE, didn't observe it in IS), and I thought of it as "cultural autism." Apparently "higher context" is the politically correct way to say it. Now I know!
Danish and Norwegian are not linguistically Germanic. If anything, German has more old Norse influences. And dutch.. Well, dutch is the illegitimate child of england and germany.
>Danish and Norwegian are not linguistically Germanic
Where do you get that notion? My education (and some googling to refresh my memory) has Norwegian, Swedish and Danish classed as "North Germanic" according to comparative linguistics. That is one subset of the West Germanic languages which most of northern Europe speaks.
I live in Germany. 'Ja' here means 'ich stimme zu' only when explicitly asked. That's why Germans stick 'Ja?' after every second sentence. Ja? In general, 'ja-a...' means 'I hear you', same as almost everywhere else. That has been my experience.
And why do they say ‘right?’ every time? Because without it my ‘ja’ does not mean ‘yes, sir’, but rather ‘I hear you, go on’. So, same as everywhere else.
Hardware engineering, where an inappropriate yes can mean massive amounts of time and money wasted, making it a very low context environment, by necessity.
>Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.
Is there a term for this? Because I see it in my personal life as well dealing with some low price manual labor that doesn't speak english.
Instructions often get lost in translation, the reply will be "yes" and it doesn't get done. I know they want to sound professional and confident, so saying no or asking questions is a "bad thing".
Lying. It is called lying, deceit, or bearing false witness.
In my house I do not permit "yeah", or "okay". It is "yes" and anything else is interpreted as a 'no'.
Once you press someone to speak a "yes" as a solid commitment, for example to an understanding of an instruction. If this puts the person on the defensive then you are dealing with someone who is not interested in being held accountable.
This isn't fair, because it's misunderstanding the problem. It's not that they're lying, it's that, in their culture, the meaning of yes is something different, meaning "I hear you" rather than "I understand you". If they're not strong with english they might not have a grasp of this, so (in the case of Mandarin as primary language) you have to usually think of it as an empty "uh huh" type filler word, not a word with actual meaning.
The real problem I have is the "saving face" concept prevents them admitting they don't understand something. This is where the "high context" part comes in. You can't listen to what they say directly, you have to go off how they say it, and other context clues. This is what I have the biggest problem with. The only way to know if they actually understand something is test their understanding, like have them repeat/explain it back to you. From a low context/western perspective, this results in low verbal trust (because it technically is). I've wasted so many hours on taking something said at face value, that I just default to verifying everything that's said, and trying to be patient when I find out the truth. But, I am getting much better at reading the cues, so can usually spot when the (from my western/low context perspective) bullshit when it starts.
There are old stereotypes around this clash of meaning/culture, but it really is just that. If you're from their culture, and speak their language, there's no "bullshitting" or "lying". From what I've been told, it's incredibly clear when someone is saving face, and it's very clear what the response should be, to "help" them save face. Westerners are, literally, just blind to it all. It's an incompatible mindset and language/expression that requires a robust translation layer that needs to exist in one of the parties. I seem to be mostly incapable of high context communication, even in english, so I'm just as "at fault" in the two party role of communication.
I live in a different world than most where the expectation is we speak the truth, stand behind our word, and in the event of failure we maintain the relationship after resolving the conflict.
As for saving face, I provide opportunities to walk back, restate, or take back something that was said. People get angry, misspeak, or respond with fear and that is understandable.
This is generally true, volume and low cost situations exacerbate it, but it’s not limited to Chinese manufacturing. You see it everywhere. As a completely unrelated example: home remodeling. The guy I contracted did wonderful work and charged a completely fair price, but there were many parts that I hand waved at “he knows best” “he’ll pick the most sensible approach that matches the quality of the rest of project”. Wrong. Cheapest, fastest thing, using materials on hand if possible every time. The economics are obvious and it doesn’t matter to him insofar as I acquiesce or don’t notice. Why should it be any different for low cost mass manufacturing?
A lot of it comes down to differences between “ask” cultures and “guess” cultures, where if something is unknown we in the west may expect the person to ask for clarification, where as other cultures prefer to just guess, because doing _something_, even if it’s incorrect, is seen as better than not doing.
A lot of success in working with suppliers in China (and really anywhere in Asia) is in building a relationship with them where they know exactly what your expectations are and holding them to it until they understand that it is just easiest for them to do it right to start.
I've got suppliers who I can send a difficult part to and know that I'm going to get exactly what I expect, faster and cheaper than just about anyone else. It took a few years to get to that point, but these few vendors make it really hard to go with anyone else, much to the chagrin of the sourcing team who rightly recognize it a risk to rely on just a few suppliers.
Once you get to a certain type of supplier you end up running into the problem where their processes are such that they won't do anything without you clearly documenting it. They simply refuse to make any assumptions on your behalf. They can be so frustrating when you are used to the other way of doing it. I simply cannot answer some questions because I'm so used to my other suppliers just doing it correctly and haven't ever asked about it.
There is an amazing book called Poorly Made in China, by Paul Midler. The title doesn’t do the book justice imho, but it offers some insights into what can go wrong and why. It was a very recognisable and enjoyable read.
That's not my experience at all. I manufactured simple objects in China some years ago (2017-2020) at scale (around 50k units) and everything went extremely well.
The objects were order of magnitude simpler than in the post (no electronics and no plastic, only metal) so maybe that doesn't compare, but I never had any bad surprise from any supplier, including packaging (which can be quite complex and involve several providers), etc.
Everyone will gladly send you samples (for free!) and prototypes of what you imagine (usually at cost) and if you're explicit about what you want and validate each step before the next, everything goes well.
Eventually I moved on to other things for mostly bureaucratic reasons; selling objects in Europe is an administrative nightmare that's simply not worth the hassle.
But the manufacturing part was not just smooth -- it was the best part of the experience.
(And I never left my town and never even talked to anyone over the phone: the primary means of communication was email.)
Edit: why would anyone downvote this, and so fast? If anyone thinks I'm being insincere, I have proof! ;-)
I would reckon the simplicity of the objects and the single material helped. If you specify 304 and you get 304, they can really only cheap out on tooling, and that'll cause them pain rather than you.
HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it.
I tried many different suppliers, for the objects themselves and for the packaging (which involved 3-4 different parts); some were better than others (esp. regarding delays) but no one tried to take advantage of me. And I was just one guy from Europe making small batches: the ideal target for a scam. Yet it never happened; quite the opposite in fact.
At some point given the cost of transport by air or by sea I tried train+truck. The shipment ended up stopped in Mongolia for about 3 weeks. The factory in China, which didn't have anything to do with the shipping company (except that they selected it; but it was a completely different entity) went out of their way to find out where the goods were and what was happening, and eventually made sure they were delivered to my door.
> HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it.
Yeah I know, I've been here a long time. But it was instantaneous and that surprised me.
Curious what type of metal object and if you tried factories in different regions. Jewelry is pretty smooth… This 500W superlamp thing is effectively an appliance and seems quite brave for this guy to work through.
> the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works
I've had a 90% failure rate on what was supposed to be the final prototype before production. Turns out they hand-soldered the batch because the proto run was (obviously) only a dozen units - and some parts were just too tricky to reliably hand-solder.
I understand the logic as fully-automated assembly has a nontrivial startup cost, but a big reason of doing later prototypes is evaluating the manufacturing process as well. If the assembly method used doesn't match what I can expect in production runs, what's the point?
Weirdly enough the batch before this was totally fine. In the end we did get a massive discount on the hand-assembled run and managed to do all the testing with the one prototype we got working with some small rework, but it still cost us quite a lot of time and money. We would've happily paid a significantly higher fee to have them just do it properly - per-prototype cost is pretty much irrelevant during development.
So I'm curious, if you give them a really detailed specification, will they actually follow it all? If they don't, do you have any recourse? Are these small shops/fronts that are constantly coming/going like Amazon sellers, or do they have reputations?
> I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.
That is very rational. Each 9 in uptime or quality represents expense. The expense of moving to the next level up can't always be "shift left", but instead done at the point in the process where money can be applied.
Lets say you have a process that goes right at a minimum of 20% of the time for cost of 100. The manufacturer can add QA that makes the cost 120. Is it better to trust the manufacturer at the cost of +20? Or is it better to do your own QA for 20 and gain any correct pieces above the 20%?
I think this is a very nicely thought out approach. I particularly like it doing allergen tracking. Obviously you're at the mercy of supplier/supply-chain integrity but if you do e.g. wind up with ground cumin contaminated with god knows what, this is what will get you where you need to be.
No AGI or incipient AGI here. Language to intentionality is misplaced.
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