When a physicist at a university turns their diagnostic tools to mundane every day things, rather than say quantum particle collisions, the difficulty of doing the experiment is usually going to be much easier. However it can have good consequences for the rest of us.

For example an Italian guy decided to take a look at how filter paper under an espresso puck affects the espresso. Here . This showed that the puck improves extraction and reduces channeling. It's a simple thing to do and it has helped me with making good espresso in the morning.

So I'm happy that this sort of research gets done.

It's pretty obvious that P doesn't equal NP, but can you prove it?

I didn't have to. I have good knives. I sharpen them. I cut onions. Knowing something to be true is different to knowing why something is true.

But could they explain why and show evidence supporting their hypothesis?

I spoke with a friend working at Microsoft. He doesn't believe the 20-30% number either.

I did school in the UK and exactly 100% of my grades depended on only the final exams.
It seems pretty cruel to expect students to perform great all year, every year in order to get optimal grades.

But when I do, I mostly be buying Framework laptops because I don't then have to put up with that sort of crap.

There's one surface laptop in my household. The screen is cracked and It's built of unmaintainium. Never again.

If I lead you to Leeds to fine ledes, I bet you still wouldn't find any.

They deployed an AI ban bot didn't they?

Just wrap the lede in bacon and put in the oven for 30 minutes.

If people have been burying the lede for centuries, why don't we find ledes when we go digging in the garden?

The offer was a function of years of service. I ended up getting about a year of pay. Technically I 'retired from Intel' in the sense that I met the retirement criteria. So I left with the full pension intact and access to the retiree services. It's a few years before that comes online though.

I've been living off that pot of money since. It's a hefty sum, so it's enough to effectively day trade. I do a bit of trading on the stock market most mornings and I've kept the pot of money maintained and even up a little with profits from trading to pay living expenses. I aim for about 1% a day. This is less risky than it sounds. My skills in random time series analysis are highly transferable skills. Tax was a lot this year (wages + payoff + serp + capital gains + my wife's business making a surprise profit) so my trading project for this month is to make that money back. I'm half way there. It will be less next year with wages gone.

So I'm not going at a minimum lifestyle. I'm just maintaining the one I had.

I've started a company and I'm doing consulting in the area of FIPS140 and ESV certification and secure hardware design. That hasn't paid out yet but it will. Contracts take a while to complete. More importantly, working for myself is a lot more satisfying. I'm back to spending more time designing (cryptographic hardware) that I am having meetings. I attended ICMC in Toronto for the first time in a decade and presented a paper at SPACE2024 in Kerala in India in December. Intel declined to pay for that travel when I worked there despite those events being central to my role. They saw the cost of travel, not the opportunity cost lost. I'm squeezing out another book also. I'm keeping busy.

I took the offer and left Intel a few months ago. I had been there 21 years.

Intel used to be a nice company to work at. You could do good work, travel, accomplish stuff, put your designs on the most advanced silicon processes and feel happy that you were having an impact on the world.

Then, year after year, with penny pinching, bureaucracy and a long sequence of shifting management, they slowly sucked all the fun out of working there. So I had no qualms about choosing to leave. I had decided to wait until the next generous "please leave with this pot of cash" and take it. The offer came with the recent voluntary layoffs, so I took it.

The management very much lost the plot on how to enable engineers to do their job.
 

>All the big expensive CAD or PCB layout packages won't even bother with builds for Apple. AutoCAD did come out with one some years back. I'd love to do PCB layout on a nice 5k retina display (Yes I know about KiCad).

KiCad is so much nicer than Mentor or Allegro. Now that I don't have a huge corporation for pay for the software license, KiCad has become my board software of choice.

>but it sucks that it's the only selling point.

The ability to have the keyboard in the middle (like Macs do) is a selling point for me.
The ability to replace the battery is a big selling point. I swapped the battery in my Macbook pro and it was a multi hour struggle, rated as the highest difficulty on iFixIt.
It's not HP. That's a big one.

So selling points abound. That's why I got one.