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there were countries in South America in the war. Brazil was one such country.

I don’t know about other South American countries.

I wouldn’t call Portugal an European power, they never had a significant population. Same for Switzerland.

Spain was completely destroyed just before world war 2 during a civil war

Most of Asia and Africa had been put under European control before world war 2, which actually was one of the reasons there was war: Germans had almost no colonies and wanted to expand

Turkey had lost world war 1 a few years back (Ottoman Empire)


Companies all over the world are having supply chain issues and you comment this lol


I think this could be linked to obesity


TCL is still the language of choice for EDA


Unfortunately. It's not too bad for interactive use (it's somewhere between Bash and Python in terms of sanity; maybe closer to Bash). The problem is people end up writing huge scripts and workflows all TCL which is just way beyond its wheelhouse. Often with a bit of Make and Bash thrown in to make it especially awful.

Sadly there is no end in sight because all of the proprietary tools use it and you can't really do anything about that.

They did add a bytecode runner in one version of TCL and I experimented with making a new language that would compile to TCL bytecode, but unfortunately one of our tools (PowerArtist I think) still bundled TCL from 2005 or so and didn't support it.

I also experimented with a WASM to TCL transpiler, and got it to work a little, but the WASM spec is actually quite big and the TCL code you get out is huge so I don't think that is the right way really.

The only good thing about TCL is that it's value based, not reference based. Value based languages are much more intuitive and easy to reason about, but unfortunately most languages are reference based.


Would you like to elaborate on the meaning of value based versus reference based?


What does this print?

   a = [1, 2]
   b = a
   a[0] = 3
   print(b[0])
In JavaScript, Java, C#, Dart, Python, etc. it will print 3 because a and b are references to values.

In C++, Rust and TCL, (and maybe Go? I don't remember) it will print 1 because a and b are values.

In value based languages you need explicit syntax to make references and dereference.

In reference-based languages you need explicit syntax to copy values. Often this is omitted entirely which is quite annoying. Until very recently the standard solution to copy a variable was to serialise it to JSON and back again!!

Also worth noting that for immutable values (i.e. all values in Haskell, strings in JavaScript, etc.) there's no observable difference between the two.


Thanks for taking the time to explain that. I don't think I ever knew this a clearly as I now do!


Wow, had no idea. Is there a rich ecosystem for this?

Is this on the level of R/tidyverse/ggplot?


I have no idea what tidyverse or ggplot are.

The two dominate EDA companies are Cadence and Synopsys. All of the digital design tools for synthesis, place and route, and static timing analysis use the Tcl language as the built in scripting language. These tools have literally thousands of built in commands.

You can look up some of the tools like Cadence Innovus that I use every day. A single license has a list price of over $1 million. We get big discounts because we have about 800 licenses.

https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/tools/digital-design-and-... Then you write more Tcl code to script things within the tool. A standard thing is building a power grid. You need to write a for loop to build a metal 1 stripe every 5 microns. That's done in Tcl.

You have a list of clocks you need to define with names and frequencies. Use a Tcl array and a for loop.

Our CAD flow is literally tens of thousands of lines of Tcl code to take Verilog and go through all the steps until we get a GDS file with mask data to manufacture.


The confusion here stems from an acronym collision between Exploratory Data Analysis (where R and related packages like ggplot are popular) and Electronic Design Automation.


LOL, I just thought the person I responded to was confused.

There are so many TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) that are the same across industries with completely different meanings. I was on the ECE subreddit which is for Electrical and Computer Engineering. Someone posted a rant about how annoying these children were, how the pay was bad, and the parents were awful. There were some funny comments about how some engineers acted like children and others about the new grads. Finally someone pointed out that ECE was also Early Childhood Education and pointed them to a different subreddit.


And the Reddit group for Tcl https://www.reddit.com/r/Tcl/ often gets lost souls asking about problems with TCL tvs or phones :-(


The "ecosystem" would just be, e.g. the suite of ASIC place and route tools, or FPGA synthesis tools, provided by each company. They pretty much all have TCL built in, for to help script them all together.

Each individual script is typically very ad-hoc, to address a specific shortcoming in a tool, or to get a particular mix-and-match of tools from various vendors integrated into a design pipeline.

That being said, it is an ancient and venerable tradition, dating back to the creation of tcl itself, and as long as we're making chip from Silicon it will be the duct tape holding it all together.


Not really. Most of the tcl that gets written is very straightforward and business-logic. The framework you're using is pretty much just the host tool. Trying to integrate other libraries is often difficult if the tcl runtime is missing some features (looking at you, xilinx...)


I assumed tcl easily embeds with C code, and from there you can do anything with other libs?


It can but that's working against the design. How you are "supposed to" do it is write reusable standalone objects in C (think the old CORBA way of doing things) and then write a TCL script as the main skeleton of your program that calls them when needed.


And now that I think of it I think the really orthodox way to do it was to write your whole program in TCL, then profile it and if you needed performance improvements use C to implement some of your more expensive blocks. The TCL library for C let you compile a shared library that the TCL interpreter would load and add the functions you wrote in C as new commands to the language.


There really isn't an ecosystem. It's mostly just used for driving the tools and describing the configuration. For example, if you needed to generate power straps for an ASIC, you'd add a line to your place-and-route tcl script to generate them.


Some fifteen years ago I briefly worked with Cisco VoIP and the IVR was all Tcl scripted.

F5 BigIP load balancers has hooks in Tcl that control the balancing and can rewrite requests.

So there are niches for Tcl still. Nice language.


It’s not a solved problem. It’s a nonexistent problem. You can’t solve a problem you don’t have.


You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard, everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Maybe not American cities, but most suck anyway


> You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

As long as you only ever want to see people who also live in the same transit route.

I have some friends that moved to an apartment in San Francisco, it is nearly impossible to visit them since there is no parking anywhere nearby.

> Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

This morning my elementary school age kid walked to a friends house in a different neighborhood (10 min walk). As I'm typing this, one of his school friends just walked over from his house (3 min walk) to play. Being able to walk (particularly the kids) to friends is one of the prime reasons people like the suburbs.

> Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard

And the road biking, mountain biking, playgrounds, sport fields and so on.

> everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Clearly a matter of activity preferences, so it is not an objective truth to say one or the other is worse. Dense cities are great for bars, clubs, museums, that kind of thing. Suburbs are great for outdoor activities, sports, hobbies that needs space (e.g. woodworking, try that in an apartment), walking to friends, forests, etc.


Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections


> Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

I didn't say anything with the intent to be impressive. I'm describing differences between dense urban and suburban pros & cons. Neither is objectively better, they are different.

> No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections

Sure. So now you need to spend a lot of time traveling in the wrong direction just to get to a central terminal and then take another bus to the intended direction. It's all tradeoffs.


It’s not the wrong direction…

You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

Maybe you are for America specifically but most of what you described is normal in urban areas of Japan or Germany for instance


> It’s not the wrong direction…

You can't make that statement without looking at a specific case where someone is, where they want to go and how the transit lines run. It often is the wrong direction, which consumes time.

I was staying by Columbia in Manhattan recently and wanted to go to the upper east side (straight east). Subway doesn't go that way. Need to take one south to 42st, then east to grand central then north to my destination. Easy example of having to go away from the destination. That one is not so bad as the NYC subway is pretty quick.

Close to home if I want to visit a shopping area two miles west, I need to take a bus 6 miles south to a central terminal and then another 7 miles north. Adds about two hours to the trip. Easier to bike there.

That's always going to be the nature of mass transit because it can't possibly be point to point for everyone.

> You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

I don't know what to make of this statement, since I'm specifically describing the different pros & cons of urban vs. suburban.


Nah, you're right. My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way. We still just hang out online, cause no one wants to spend their life on the highway. Wish we lived in a place with real transit / density.

Heck, even in Tokyo, you can hop on a bus to go do outdoors stuff easy.


> My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way.

Please post the name of the suburb and city, I really want to look at it on google maps. I can't begin to imagine a housing development that takes 50 minutes to drive from one end to the other (assuming you both live at opposite edges).

> on the highway

Highway? Ok so you live in different towns probably, not the same suburb.


You are bad at managing money if you think eating out is just a bit more expansive than cooking


I can go out and buy a Bahn Mi for $10AUD which includes fresh bread baked that morning, fresh vegetables and grilled chicken. It's basically impossible to match this without doing it all from scratch and baking your own bread/grilling your own chicken. At which point you have to produce like 20 in a single go to match the value of the one I can buy pre made.


Then Australia is incredible expensive

I can get the same dish in Canada for 8 AUD and can cook for less than half the money, and Canada is not a cheap country


We also have minimum wages, social safety nets, and broadly a high standard of living on most metrics compared to North America.


The weird thing is in Melbourne, you can get top quality food for less or around equal to buying groceries. It's an actual "economy of scale", same with Tokyo. It's hard to comprehend for folks in places like the USA, where it's definitely way more expensive to eat out (and typically worse for you).


I lived in Tokyo

When I lived there you would be able to get a gyudon for roughly 300-400 yens

It will get you full but it’s not very nutritive

You can eat many eastern / western fast food dishes for around that price, but if you want to go to an actual sit down restaurant it’s much more expensive

I didn’t cook in Tokyo because I was on a scholarship so I didn’t care, but friends told me it would be cheaper to cook too


So basically you throw the responsibility to the user for Be My AI reading medicine label wrong


I think as all in life it's situational. Would I trust imperfect AI to pick medicine out of 1000 available in a drugstore? Probably not - what if it picks Fentanyl (or whatever drug that can kill me). Would I trust it to pick Ibuprofen to treat headache from my home medical cabinet? Absolutely. There is nothing there that can kill me. Would I trust it to tell me dose in mg? Current systems are already better at OCR than average human.

This summer I used Google Translate to pick medicine in Italy and it was pretty good at translating labels - definitely better than pharmacist who did not speak English at all.

By the way, lots of people die in US because wrong medicine was dispensed - and that has nothing to do with AI. People are imperfect and many drug names are long, incomprehensible and easy to confuse with each other.


One reason costco is cheaper is because they charge for a membership. It’s not that cheaper. Honestly it’s not even cheaper if you compare against a regular supermarket and you are willing to buy a different brand then the one offered at Costco

I have never seen a rental saying where you can or can’t go with a vehicle


And with the rental:

https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/gold/displayTerm...

> 5. PROHIBITED USE OF THE CAR NEITHER YOU NOR ANY AUTHORIZED OPERATOR MAY:

...

d. ENGAGE IN ANY WILLFUL OR WANTON MISCONDUCT, WHICH, AMONG OTHER THINGS, MAY INCLUDE RECKLESS CONDUCT SUCH AS: ..., USE OFF PAVED ROADS OR ON ROADS WHICH ARE NOT REGULARLY MAINTAINED, ...

National:

https://www.nationalcar.com/content/dam/National/functional/...

> (10) Vehicle shall not be driven on an unpaved road or off-road.

Budget:

https://www.budget.com/en/legal-documents/rental-terms

14. Prohibited Use of the Car. ...

... 4) to be operated in a test, race or contest or on unpaved roads

Avis:

https://www.avis.com/en/legal-documents/rental-terms

14. Prohibited Use of the Car. ...

... 4) to be operated in a test, race or contest or on unpaved roads


A basic Costco membership is $60. Their chicken is $5 + tax. Same chicken at Safeway is $8.99 + tax.

So if you eat >15 chickens per year Costco is cheaper.

And even that is incorrect. Costco's chicken is 32oz, the Safeway one 28. Forgetting about taxes, Costco's is $0.15625 / oz, Safeway is $0.3210714285714286 / oz.

So now we have 2 equations, and we need to find the intersection:

* y = 60 + x * 0.15625

* y = 0.3210714285714286 * x

They cross at 11.37594799566631 chickens.

But larger chickens have larger bones, so let's keep it at 15. I definitely eat more than 15 chickens per year.

Then there's the issue of cost in general, while the house-brands of Safeway / Frys / Kroger / ... are cheaper, they are much more likely to have stuff added to it to make it 'bulkier'. A good example is Cottage Cheese from Walmart. They add a thickener to the liquid which allows them to sell you the same amount for less, but you actually get less cheese and more filler.


Walmart chicken is the same price as Costco and you don’t need a membership

I don’t know if the cottage thing is true or not, but even if it is, it doesn’t make difference for the customer if their goal is to save money


The problem with saving money is that they're replacing nutritious stuff with filler. So cheaper per oz, but you get a worse product.


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