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We’re talking about spending a couple of hours learning the basics of negotiation for a likely 10-20% increase in salary/equity. That’s certainly not making the difference in solving the world’s problems.

If you’re speaking more broadly than just salary negotiation - I’d just say that humans aren’t perfect machines. We care about solving problems but we also have desire for money, power, status and following random rules.


The title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I interned at a power company I saw them install “squirrel guard” insulating equipment terminals


Yeah from what I recall it was just important enough to actually push through system wide, but not important enough to bother with a PR effort.

Speaking from experience as being the intern responsible for pushing through most projects in Toronto during the summer of 2016.


This is a classic security dilemma that is not easily resolvable. Suppose we just look at the US and China. Each side will discover some number of vulnerabilities. Some of those vulnerabilities will be discovered by both countries, some just by one party. If the US discloses every vulnerability, we’re left with no offensive capability and our adversary will have all of the vulnerabilities not mutually discovered. Everyone disclosing and patching vulnerabilities sounds nice, but is an unrealistic scenario in a world with states that have competing strategic interests.


If the money went to a bad cause instead of a good cause, the incentive to go to the gym would be higher


Church of Scientology is the worst I could think of. Anyone have better (worse)?


Haha yeah I thought about this. But I guess everyone has a different idea about a bad cause. But yes a next version of this would let you select from a few different organisations.


I can’t relate to that. When I see a banner ad I find it obtrusive whether it’s from Bank of America or my favorite HAM radio company. If I’m in the market for a product I value hearing the testimonials of people in my life rather than an advertisement.


The one case where I find ads useful, when word of mouth isn't an option, is in a static image on a site (review site, blog, whatever) where I'm researching a thing. The ad would be related to that thing, doesn't need to know a thing about me other than I'm browsing that page, and is related to the content on that page. I click on those ads sometimes.


I'm mostly thinking about finding things that you werent even aware that they do exist


I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.

The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.


>I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.

Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?

like Cola vs Pepsi, McDonald vs KFC, etc.


This also seems generational to me. I’m an American younger than 30 and the only people at my company who embody this are the senior people over the age of 40.


It's because us millennials came of age at a time when there was massive optimism that computers and the Internet would make the world a much better place. From equalizing education through online resources to bringing people around the world together through online discourse and intellectual discussion.

Most of that didn't happen of course (although Khan academy has helped tons of people), but we were raised to believe that the software we wrote was going to help people.

It is sad that Gen Z doesn't believe that, it signifies a large cultural shift in the computer geek culture.

Fwiw I have written software that saved lives, and I still believe software can do a lot of good in this world. We should aim to create things throughout our life, using the skills that we have, that make the world a better place.


There is no quicker way to get yourself put on the back burner than failing to pick up the pom poms. If you are valued by management you will get a few warnings but other than that you go one a silent list for the next restructuring or making an example of.


Maybe that's just because the stakes of losing your job are higher once you move up the ladder, have kids etc.


As a Gen Xer, I figured this was a millennial thing. Given the age ranges you cite that may still be the case. I don't work with enough Gen Zers to paint them with a broad brush.

But most of the people I've worked with who wanted feel "part of something" had been 10+ years younger than me.


I think it’s a “has work experience” thing.


How would you describe the under-30 American vibe?


>the only people at my company

So your sample size is 1 company? That's very anecdotal. And you're younger than 30, so you probably haven't worked at many companies. There are plenty of people in plenty of other companies that you've never met.


It sounded anecdotal because I shared an anecdote. I don’t have a research study on the topic. Still anecdotally, I’d say the same thing about my 3 internships, so I’ll say n = 4. Happy to hear your anecdotal experience or non anecdotal data.


My more qualified anecdote after 30 years in the industry is that you are wrong. I've worked with 20-somethings that have been all-in-drink-the-koolaid, as well as anyone of any age, as well as people of all ages that were there only there for the paycheck. It isn't "generational", it's a personality trait. You either have it or you don't.


What does it mean for an op amp to outperform an ADC?


It can have wider bandwidth, lower noise+distortion, smaller Vos, maybe other things I'm not recalling off the top of my head. In practical terms, you might not be able to run any test with the ADC that can find the limits of the op amp.


According to the paper, this worked because the dielectric change from all other blood diagnostics was negligible, allowing glucose to be measured. Gluclose in blood is around 80 mg/dL. It may be possible to measure other blood chemistry metrics that are similar in concentration at other frequencies, but there’s a lot of blood tests, many of which would probably be impossible - like white blood cell count, anything enzymatic, something whose concentration is measured in ug/dL, or something that has no effect on dielectric properties of the blood. I wouldn’t expect to see a whole blood panel via wearable radar anytime soon, but we may get a few more tests from RF sensing.


Yes, it is sub optical RF sensing. The important factor here is that the gluclose blood capacitively couples to small sensing antennas. The sensing antennas are resonant elements, whose exact resonance changes depending on the surrounding environment, in this case gluclose in the blood. You can then transmit an RF signal to the antenna, then record the signal reflected from the antenna’s port to estimate the gluclose level.


It sounds more complicated than it is. A metasurface is almost always just a fancy patch antenna. If you reduce some parameters down, you can really just view it as a resonant circuit. You could design a meta surface in a few minutes in any pcb design software and get it fabricated on low tech PCB fabrication equipment. In this case, they used an array of a specific type of patch antennas (that’s a meta surface) called the complementary split ring resonator. In a sense, all split ring resonators are “micro radar” surfaces, because a split ring resonator is designed to be electrically small compared to the wavelength. The researchers here found that the change in glucose in the bloodstream changes the dielectric properties of the bloodstream, and the resonant characteristics of the complementary split ring resonator change depending on the surrounding dielectric (a dielectric just describes the electrical properties of a material - for instance, a higher electric dielectric constant will slow down the phase velocity of an EM wave, which leads to various measurable effects in an RF system). Looks like great engineering work here, but I’ve always thought the term “metasurface” was foo foo jargon since I first began studying antennas.


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