Am I the only one who thinks it's possible that the vast majority of VPN providers are actually working for the intelligence agencies of the world? It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened.
There was a Swiss company[1] selling cryptography gear that turn out to be a CIA front.
I spent 5 years making gears, mostly bevel gears. If you see a Marvel 18" bandsaw made between 2015 and 2020, I probably cut the teeth on the band wheel and its pinion that drives it.
Some of the gears I helped make will still be in use in a century. I find great comfort in that for some reason. The job was rewarding, and interesting, but the pay and commute really sucked.
As for helping others, there were a handful of us in the job shop before it was bought by a bigger machine shop. It's a fairly solitary job.
Ward Christensen always gave out unique postal (made up apartment numbers) and email address to allow him to track who used his info for junk mail, etc. He really wasn't happy with NewEgg.
Your benefits amounts are tied to lifetime earnings, and you get less per month if you start early, so it is effectively a personal account, regardless of the details.
It's a weird hybrid. There is a connection to a persons earnings but it's far from what most people mean by a personal account(savings, 401k, IRA). It's closer to an annuity, but a very generous/flexible one that no private company would offer. The difference is minor for the never married but not for most people, and there are unusual cases. I know a guy who retired overseas, married a young wife and had kids. They get like 180% his benefit till the kids hit 18. Then assuming he's passed, the wife gets 100% survivor benefit at 60. I figure his SS account will probably pay out around 3x what it would if he was a bachelor, and that's strictly needs based not contribution based. If, instead, it was a 401k or a personal lifetime annuity at his personal benefit amount, their financial situation would be a whole lot uglier.
An FPGA is like a spreadsheet for bits that can recalculate at hundreds of millions of times per second.
It's a declarative programming system, and there's a massive impedance match when you try to write source code for it in text. I suspect that something closer to flow charts, would be much easier to grok. Verilog is about as good at match as you are likely to get, if you stick with the source code approach to designing with them.
Very good metaphor. I'm going to use that in the future. It even has rows and columns.
Except the spreadsheet is a really accessible technology that's been cloned, while the critical problem with FPGA is the proprietary tooling. This is the same reason that NVIDIA made a gazillion dollars by turning GPUs into general purpose compute: a proper API, CUDA.
Having been yeeted out of the labor market by long covid, my worries about my own employment are settled.
However, that worry is replaced by the fear that so many people could lose their jobs that a consequence could be a complete collapse of the social safety net that is my only income source.
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