As a small note, IP67 sealed connectors vary greatly in price, with excellent high pin count options like the Ecomate Aquarius line being in the low tens of dollars. The Deutsch/Amphenol AT automotive connectors are also very cheap yet provide a watertight seal.
I've seen some fairly generic looking many-pin connectors that are water tight. Is it just best practice to route everything through the 40+ pins and break out on the other side? Even power?
Promin Aerospace, a Ukrainian company founded by a friend of mine, has been working on the same technology. Interesting to see this take on it though, it's an idea that seems almost too fantastical to work.
Roblox is likely one of the closest things to an actual "metaverse" that exists right now. An extensible world, where anyone can add/program in locations and experiences, is the truly transformative part of media like Ready Player One.
This, and it's also about the worst version of metaverse that could possibly exist: a total company town where everything is proprietary and owned by the company.
Related, regarding Roblox's creator program (where third-party devs, including kids, can (try to) earn money by generating the content that brings users to Roblox in the first place):
> Most of Roblox’s userbase is under 18, with about a third between 9 and 12. Emil, 11, tells People Make Games that he “saw other developers getting money in a way that looked easy.” It wasn’t easy. To withdraw money earned through microtransactions in a game, a developer must earn a minimum of 100,000 Robux, the platform’s in-game currency. Buying 100,000 Robux through Roblox’s store costs $1,000. Selling 100,000 Robux back to Roblox earns you just $350. Withdrawal is not even possible unless these developers pay a five-dollar monthly fee for a Roblox Premium Subscription. (Second Life and Entropia Universe, which also allow players to sell items, respectively have $10 and $100 minimums for withdrawing money.)
I had the exact opposite experience moving from Canada to San Francisco. While wages are much higher, the cost of living is not even comparable - anecdotally much, much higher in SF than either Toronto or Vancouver (both of which I have lived in). Healthcare has been a horrible experience here too, with Kaiser putting my through endless levels of bureaucracy in an effort to avoid paying for my medication.
But when did you leave Toronto? Because the situation is getting exponentially out of control. The housing market in southern Ontario & lower mainland BC is a pyramid scheme. When my wife & I first bought our house in Toronto in 2005 in a "bad" neighbourhood (Oakwood-Vaughan) it was a bit of a squeeze on our dual tech-worker salary, but we were able to do it. Fast forward almost 20 years, we would not be able to afford what that house goes for unless we financed to like, a 35 year mortgage, and my compensation has gone way up from back then.
Meanwhile COVID f'd up the health care system extremely badly and there's no real commitment from the province to getting the funding situation under control.
No it's not normal, they are talking a bit out of their ass. Based on their dates, I'm significantly younger than them and yet I was able to afford a house in one of the more desirable neighbourhoods with only me being the one working in tech.
I'm not targeting the person you are replying to with any malice, but since almost all of the major financial and business institutions in Canada are headquartered here there is an overabundance of people that would claim they work in "tech" when in reality they are making a respectable but decidedly non-tech salaries at places like TD Bank or Thompson Reuters as examples.
The range of possible salaries for devs in Toronto is quite large.
Also as an additional anecdote, every single one of my classmates who went to the USA and decided they would like to start a family, came back to Canada to start that family.
That is not to say it is all rosy here. There is an overabundance of poor or terrible talent that's been shipped in to cover the exodus of Canadian educated people chasing better salaries in the USA while business leaders and purse string holders are content to celebrate their mediocrity while being confused why productivity is so low.
Wow, you're classy... and yeah, I feel targeted a bit ... hah
Our old house @ Oakwood & Vaughan was bought for $285,000 in 2005. It's likely "worth" north of $1M now, not 20 years later. My senior software engineer salary in that period was between $75 and $100k CAD. Are you saying that a SWE salary in Toronto is over $300k now?
I know it isn't, though there are plenty making more than that Google Canada, that is a huge anomaly from the rest of the market.
The distortion in housing prices and the continued upward growth has a negative effect on the ability of young people to prosper. It might help me retire, sure, but it isn't going to do much good for my kids.
BTW, I worked as a SWE at Google for 10 years. And my wife was at Apple before that. Does that count as "tech?" Just checking.
I work as a software engineer at a company whose only products are software. Are you saying I shouldn't claim to work in tech because I don't make FAANG money?
I took Lukas Chrostowski's silicon photonics design course back when I was studying at UBC and it was one of the most interesting courses I ever participated in. We designed and actually did tape out for multiple projects like DBR resonator cavities, which was an incredible experience. For anyone intetested in the field I recommend his book Silicon Photonics Design: From Devices to Systems.
I used to go to vice a lot for news, but over the past 2 years the article feed has been flooded with a huge quantity of low quality, low effort content. A significant amount of the stories are either affiliate link compilations (hottest new vibrators!) or horoscopes (which occasionally make up the entirety of the first ~10 elements in the "latest news" section).
They used to do actual reporting/journalism. They'd send people overseas and check out for themselves the facts on the ground. However, like everyone else they succumbed to low effort clickbait and rage-engineering.
The affiliate link content marketing spam is really sad. There are good journalists that work or worked in the past for them that have had real world impact, even if you don't like their irreverent gonzo style. It is a shame that their hard and sometimes dangerous work gets put up online beside such trash. In my country, I've seen a few names show up in other more mainstream publications but fun is gone and replaced with a standard bland removedness from the story.
While very cool and seemingly well-designed, this seems like a derivative of the lock developed by the YouTuber StuffMadeHere. A little strange to see someone applying for a patent for a version of someone else's design.
The principle is the same, but this design is different and better in some ways. Depending on the generality of the claims a patent may be reasonable. The Enclave design is more refined/compact, but I'm skeptical of the longevity/durability of the wedge mechanism.
The underlying principle that's common between the StuffMadeHere and Enclave designs is 1. Decouple setting the pins from testing them, and 2. Do not allow the keyway access to physically manipulate the set pins while testing them.
Interestingly this same principle is used throughout cryptography, e.g. in constant time comparison algorithms. Basically, any partial success information leak can be used to reduce the search space exponentially. And that's what single-pin picking is all about, so it's cool that this idea has (finally?) migrated to physical security.
Except this isn't a constant time comparison. You still reach the "no more turning" angle at whichever pin is incorrect first. This is more like forcing the password to be fully retyped after each failed attempt. A good feature, but not a feature which eliminates side channels which might be there.
There's still no direct way to detect which pin blocks it from opening. Maybe you could determine if the failed pin is the same as a previous attempt by listening with a stethoscope, or very finely measuring the turning angle, but you can't directly feel out which pin. So there may still be a way to reduce the search space in theory, but that attack still seems very difficult to pull off, and for the complexity it seems vastly better than previous locks.
Well, it didn't advertise itself as a "very difficult to pull off lock", or a "vastly better than previous lock". It advertised itself as an "unpickable lock". That's a very strong claim to be making. I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a proof that it is impossible to reduce the search space down to sub-exponential.
Building a lock which does not leak any information about what's happening inside is equivalent to building a mechanical, room temperature quantum computer. For if that information isn't leaking to the environment in some way, there is no mechanism to decohere a superposition state. Hence in principle a mechanical lock which is secure in the information theoretic sense is impossible. It is still theoretically possible to make a computationally secure lock (eg a mechanical implementation of a hash function). But there's currently no real proof that one-way functions are actually one-way. The security of such a lock is subject to a foundational guess in cryptography.
My understanding of MPEP 2126-2128[0] is that prior art published to a website can be disqualifying.
I don’t like patents, because given the world population, any idea was had by someone that didn’t have the resources to file it. Publishing a timestamped design is, I believe, one of the least expensive ways to create prior art without creating patents.
If I am not mistaken, there have been many cases where prior art was available (and in some cases quite well known within the field) but did not come to the attention of the examiner (or the examiner did not recognize its relevance), and the patent was granted anyway. In fact, there was one such case on the HN top page today.
Getting it revoked is likely harder than successfully defending against a suit. Many aggressors will fold at the "here is obvious prior art, go find someone dumber to extort" phase.
First-to-file doesn't mean what I think you think it means.
Prior art, whether from another patent or from some other source, will still establish that the applicant is not an inventor and not eligible for a patent.
First-to-file (FTT) only differs from first-to-invent (FTI) when there is an "interference". That's when two or more separate parties are simultaneously applying for patents on the same invention.
Under FTI your priority date was the date you conceived the invention if you then worked diligently toward reducing the idea to practice up until you filed your patent application. If you stopped working diligently on reducing the idea to practice and then resumed it, the date you resumed became your new priority date.
What counts as a break in working toward reduction to practice sufficient to reset your priority date? How much documentation do you need to prove you were working continuously on it from your claimed priority date?
Figuring all that out can be expensive and time consuming and often gives results that seem wrong. It's almost random whether the priority date by this method actually matches who seems to morally most deserve the patent.
FTF gives priority to whoever files first. It doesn't produce any worse outcome than FTI and saves a lot of time and money for both the patent office and applicants.
would likely depend on whether the filing date was before or after this, but yeah, this would likely invalidate any claims for the most interesting improvements over the SMH designs
Need to see the patent or published application, and in particular the claims. I've got a few patents under my belt, but I'm not a patent lawyer. Typically when prior art is found during the preparation or processing of a patent application, the inventor can either argue for why their thing is new and different, or narrow their claims to the point where what's left satisfies novelty. Now at that point, one is left wondering if their idea is still worth patenting. But that's another matter.
Even as an inventor with some experience in the patent process, I still find it hard to second guess the patent office on what they will accept or reject as prior art. The lawyers are better at it than I am.
More than once I've rushed breathlessly to the lawyers with screaming hot obvious prior art, and they say: "Meh, it's not prior art because of X, Y, and Z, nice try."
The concepts employed in the StuffMadeHere video were derived from techniques used in other pick-resistant locks. His implementation is unique, of course, but he also derived his lock from other existing techniques.
There’s a big world of lock design and research out there, and I doubt this company simply decided to rip off a YouTuber.
> and I doubt this company simply decided to rip off a YouTuber.
While you’re likely right, YouTubers are massive in terms of reach and popularity, and there are heaps of cases where companies have done exactly that…
> A little strange to see someone applying for a patent for a version of someone else's design.
Apparently it's common depending on the country you live.
Some countries have a first-to-file versus a first-to-invent patent system. And so you end up with people (often inventors or retired lawyers) who spend their days filing patents for other people's inventions. The idea being that they only need one or two of the patents in their lifetime to result in a massive payday for it be all worth it.
Even in the US, which is first to file, your patent can be invalidated by published prior art that makes it obvious. The stuff made here video is a textbook example of an invalidating piece of prior art.
I assume they are going for a design patent, which they may well get (and doesn't protect against much other than direct copies). A method patent or a utility patent is a lot harder in light of the prior art.
The problem is that the patent system tends to just approve anything that meets a certain quality threshold. And then they leave it up to the courts to adjudicate whether a patent is invalidated due to prior act.
And so rather than litigate, roll the dice and potentially strengthen the patent's standing sometimes it's easier just to negotiate a deal with them.
Yes, it costs money to get a patent invalidated based on prior art. But: an amount that even a single person who stands to actually gain from having a patent overturned should have no problem with. You're asking the USPO to spend time redoing work, literally halting any other patent work they could be doing instead. So it's not a trivial amount, but it's also hardly a prohibitive amount if you actually want a specific patent revoked.
The AIPLA Report of the Economic Survey for 2017 notes that the typical patent infringement suit with less than $1 million at stake costs on average costs more than $600,000 dollars, while the typical patent infringement suit with between $1-10 million at stake costs on average nearly $1.5 million to litigate.
I also seem to recall that the LockPickingLawyer was able to break that lock using two separate methods that I didn't see addressed in the article, so I wonder how much this person just copied StuffMadeHere..
LPL “cheated” when picking SMH’s lock but still provided valuable feedback. Both weaknesses he found are easily fixed. In one case he could walk the deadbolt back because of a precision error/oversight in SMH’s lock. The other he stuck a small shim between the door and the lock to tension the second tumbler which is not an issue with this lock and easily fixed on SMH’s lock by closing the back with a plate.
Quite surprised at the position of Japan in this. I was under the (obviously unfounded given the data) assumption that the Japanese government was well-respected by the populace.
