Please leave the Internet :)

When I was a boy into electronics the one thing that always stymied me designing circuits was how to make an inductor of the right value. I can't recall these many decades why but I needed to make ones of a value and you couldn't specify "xuH" to a component supplier, like resistors or capacitors, but nor was there any resource to say "x turns of y gauge wire" etc. It was all a black art to a 12 year old in the early 70s.

Funny, I had the exact same experience as a kid in the 70's. Up to coils it all seemed pretty easy.

So yes, coils (or, to be more correct, inductors, in Dutch we use 'spoelen' which is closer related to 'coils' so I tend to make that mistake all the time) are 'different' in that sense, as are the equations that govern them. And the theory is sufficiently complex that you have a hard time hitting the right value right off the bat if you put something together that you think will have a particular inductance unless you've done it many times before. Slight variations can make big differences. On the plus side: the values are critical, even so, there are usually plenty of ways to compensate if you got it wrong. One trick is to overwind and then to remove windings until you hit the right value. Another is to hook up a scope through a very high impedance probe and to couple your coil magnetically to an oscillator with known frequency. You can then tune for the required response without ever knowing the exact inductance that you're looking for.

In the higher frequency domain (when you start using air coils of silver plated copper) you can usually achieve the same effect by slightly opening up or compressing the coil windings.

Resistors are easy, capacitors are bit harder, coils are 'magic', but with a bit of practice that magic becomes ritual and ritual should be at least reproducible to the point that the part becomes a manageable quantity.

Similar experience to me. I tend to let glm-4.7 have a go at the problem then if it keeps having to try I'll switch to Sonnet or Opus to solve it. Glm is good for the low hanging fruit and planning

Background agent in the decoy identity that periodically browses the web, retrieves email from a banal account etc.?

Even more complications for a “why can’t they just…”. It’s almost as if this kind of thing is difficult to do in practice.

> Background agent in the decoy identity that periodically browses the web, retrieves email from a banal account etc.?

No. Think about it for a second: you're a journalist being investigated to find your sources, and your phone says you mainly check sports scores and send innocuous emails to "grandma" in LLM-speak? It's not going to fool someone who's actually thinking.

"Idunno copper, I'm a journalist not a geek"

Hope she knows she still only has 3million trial days left

Grandson was naive to his grandmother's mortality.

Yep – she died a couple years ago.

Hope she enjoys the full version of life better than the trial we live in :’)

The snowflakes are all flocking together! Can you have a murmuration of snowflakes?

Bloody poor people deciding for themselves what they want. Shouldn't get a vote unless you have a degree and property. If only they'd had the sense to listen to their betters.

And those poor people are objectively poorer because of Brexit. But as long as there's fewer foreigners coming in, then they're happy?

There’s more foreigners coming in. Which was “project fear” back in 2016.

Those poor people voted for something for which they were explicitly mislead. The results of Brexit have in no ways made their lives better.

In other words "democracy" - people with an agenda tell their version of its benefits. Saying "the vote was invalid because the poor uneducated people were too stupid to realise they were being lied to"

The elites made the mistake of actually putting political power in the hands of the British people for once.

Catastrophic error on their part, they won't do that again

That's particularly true of tech books. I want to hang on to my copy of "Tinker Tailor" but "Adobe Air in Action" 2008?

That's a sad indictment of tech.

Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.

> Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book,

True enuf, but how often do you actually refer to the books underlying ideas? I've had (now gone, presumably) TAOCP on my bookshelves for years, but how often did I use it? Stuff on RNG a bit, I guess...

TAOCP is trash. I wish I grew up in the era where you could just hit up zlib for an accessible book on any topic instead of highly rated and hardly read 'classics' like TAOCP.

Yeah, well, I do kind of miss "The Design & Evolution of C++", but I can't convince myself I actually need it.

True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...

Ditto. It is very very slow but I never hit quota limits but people on Discord are complaining like mad it is slow even on the Pro plans. I tend to use glm-*air a lot for planning before using 4.7