To the person who emailed me a few days ago: Your iCloud account is full and I can't email you back 😭 what a cursed failure mode on Apple's part - I didn't realize that once your iCloud storage fills, all emails start bouncing.

All good things must come to an end... I'm moving houses, so the whole home lab has to get torn down for transport! Blog posts have been very slow the past month, and will probably be slow next month too 😅

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

So.. you mean, the AI era is like.. Nobody doing original stuff — if you do, you would only do it privately and get it protected because otherwise AI will steal the original work from you and show it through a prompt response. And therefore in the public place there’s only AI generated slops left. Is it really good for human innovation? 🤔

when you ask a vibecoder what they've actually built and they hit you with that trillion token stare

I LOVE INDUSTRIAL PCs!!!! they're so cool

link in reply because otherwise twitter nukes your post, the usual algorithm shenanigans blog.quarkslab.com/tearing-d…

MBTI診断したらUARTだった

办公室冷知识：如果你打开 Excel 并按住Ctrl 右箭头，然后再按Ctrl 下箭头，你会来到单元格XFD1048576 如果在这个格子里输入一个”.”，然后按Ctrl A并将所有单元格填满黑色，你就可以在公司的打印机上打印34,000,000页黑色页面并且被解雇

We do a little labeling!! Rivian AXM teardown coming soon :D I just need to compile all of the data from raw notes into a blog post now.