“As we flirt with a prospective IPO for our hilariously unprofitable company, I would just like to say our product is so good it scares me.”

I’ve been reading this for years, and the hypothesis always seems to be that zipper merging is good because it maximizes road usage. You know what else maximizes road usage? Bumper to bumper gridlock.

I see them as ways to find content that otherwise wouldn’t be on my radar. I generally don’t let them “talk me out” of seeing something that interests me.

Yeah, the whole exhibit on Goya is a trip. You walk through this guy’s decades of professional work leading up to the war, his fall into depression, and the black paintings. I really can’t recommend it enough.

I’m just guessing here, but it’s probably for battery management and wireless charging, which are tricky problems you’re not gonna solve with a 555. I generally trust EEs to not put MCUs where they aren’t needed, so this must have been the cheapest/easiest option.

The incredibly silly true answer is that the software industry’s love for “deploy early, deploy often” has led to all embedded devices shipping with over-the-air (OTA) update support even when it barely makes sense. The earliest units of a given product run will ship with a minimally viable product build that has lots of bugs, but solid OTA.

Fun anecdote: I had a TV backlight die after about 3 years, and the root cause was a shitty embedded app that incorrectly regulated the voltage for the LED strips.

Causing annoyance is one of the more polite ways of expressing your dissatisfaction with the status quo.

No true leftist would post this

Space exploration is weight lifting for science.

For top left I’d like to humbly nominate SCO Unix.