It's become a bit of a meme: You could have used a 555 for that!
Unfortunately, those days seem to be gone. Now any time I see someone point out "you could just use a 555 for that", people are replying "I just threw an PIC/AVR/STM32/RPi in there instead...software is so much better than having to do math to calculate those R and C values".
MCUs are just too cheap not to use them these days.
They were always more flexible, are usually more accurate, and are often easier to engineer. With the price point now being roughly the same, it makes zero business sense to go for a 555.
"You could've used a 555" is becoming the new "you could've used a punch card"/"you could've used a vacuum tube": true, but would that make it better?
It's a embrace-extend-extiguish play like the old days. Add a 'feature' that doesn't technically break the rules (or only does a little), get your users used to it (by making it the default, opt-out, etc) and hope that your users will pressure people not using your product to move. "What do you mean you didn't see my email reaction? That's the best feature in the whole world. You should really switch to outlook, etc.". See: every M$-only feature in IE.
How is this argument not just “no one should ever implement new features”?
I don’t really care for the Outlook reactions and find them out of place, but this implementation doesn’t break anyone else. It’s also exactly how Apple implemented reactions being sent to SMS recipients.
Yes, we got the "you're just a luddite that hates progress" sophistry from you guys in the IE days (and before). "We're doing the same thing as Apple" isn't a particularly persuasive counter. I always appreciated Balmer in that that he didn't waste time bullshitting anyone that he was trying to create walled gardens for M$ products by cooping standards.
It would be very strange if American weapons weren't used in a conflict this big, which is a very different question from "did the US government sell weapons into this war".
I've looked for articles and don't see anything about US weapons. It would be very strange, indeed, but supposition isn't proof and I can't find anything suggesting the US is involved in anyway. Colour me surprised, tbh.
I wasn't here to 'provide proof'. Just pointing out that any conflict beyond a certain size almost certainly has some weapon from every large arms producer deployed in the field. I can't image how many tons of small arms we left laying around in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest that are now being recirculated around the worlds conflict zones. I remember after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan if you were in the right place and knew the right people you could get cases of NIB AKs for like $25 a rifle (no, I didn't). It's not politics...it's logistics.
Guess you are on the wrong side of things if you know your weapons are getting laundered through other countries to get to a conflict. And of course uk, us and china know this and always knew this.
No...it's that "can an LLM do it better" with no other commentary is perhaps the absolute lowest effort, lowest value comment possible on HN these days and mercifully gets an appropriate downvote. The condescending response to downvote is also par for the course from a particular sort of reader.
Unfortunately, those days seem to be gone. Now any time I see someone point out "you could just use a 555 for that", people are replying "I just threw an PIC/AVR/STM32/RPi in there instead...software is so much better than having to do math to calculate those R and C values".
reply