Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.

I don't know, "Killed by electron gun breakdown" sounds like a rad way to go. You can replace "electron gun" with "particle accelerator" if you want.

Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.

My high school science teacher used to share anecdotes from his days in electrical repair.

He said his coworkers would sometimes toss a television capacitor at each other as a prank.

Those capacitors retained enough charge to give the person unlucky enough to catch one a considerable jolt.

Touching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).

lol I did this with my mates. Get one of those 1 kV ceramics, give it some charge and bob's your uncle, you have one angry capacitor.

This can be deadly :/ just wow

Many fun things can be.

I remember smashing a broken monitor as a kid for fun, hearing about the implosion stuff, and sadly found the back of the glass was stuck to some kind of plastic film that didnt allow the pieces to fly about :(

I can't still get over how we used to put them straight in our faces, yet I never knew of someone having an accidental face reshaping ever.

That doesn't match my experience of deliberately dropping an old CRT monitor off the roof. Implosions are unfortunately not as exciting as explosions.

Some recent HN comments about CRT implosions people have experienced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355765

"I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354919

"2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.

CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356432

"I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically."

The ''tube'' was indeed extrememly fragile and thus extremely dangerous. I'm talking about only the unguarded ''tube'' itself. Repair and manufacturer technicians had to deal with that on a regular basis. Later, consumer protection laws and other standards came into effect that made TV and monitor superstructures more capable of guarding such a dangerous internal component. Your experience was clearly with those much safer, later types.

Conversely, traditional SPICE simulators embody an inherently bottom-up approach

- its a lower down approach, but far from the bottom!

Haha, ok fair enough. In the world of system-level integration of power electronics, SPICE is often considered the bottom. There is already a long way from an ideal on/off switch to a SPICE model of a MOSFET with a gate driver featuring 15 000 variables. Especially for a model that wants to include everything like the controls, the converter, the mechanical load, the thermal and magnetics. But I know that IC design go much lower down. I believe I have seen articles from Xyce pushed to many millions of variables and more. I forget the details, but I think I remember seeing an article somewhere for a benchmark of KLU of an integrated circuit with over a billion variables. We are definitely not at such a low level with our tool.

Is that hard soldered RAM? Very modern!

You mentioned something about custom holes. What does that mean?

I think, it means that it cannot be mounted in any standard case, like AT (I know, there is no official AT standard formally), ATX, µATX or ITX.

They are just a bit confused about which Martin Luther they hate.

Am I right to understand that all those cams are pointed to the street / public places?

- I think you would be wrong to understand that. How on earth did you reach that conclusion?

But how is that different from the thousands of live cams over youtube or the wider internet? Or the poorly secured CCTV watching every angle of any street in most big cities.

- More than one thing can be wrong at once. Requires nuanced thought I accept.

The author then uses face search engines to find personal information on the individuals. That is the creepy part.

- I think he is demonstrating the creepy opportinities. Did he share any of that information? I think anyone with bad intent probably probably not make a video explaining what they did.

> - I think you would be wrong to understand that. How on earth did you reach that conclusion?

from the video only showing cams of public places (parking lots, parks and streets). And also it seems that this is how Flock markets itself on its website.

> - I think he is demonstrating the creepy opportinities. Did he share any of that information? I think anyone with bad intent probably probably not make a video explaining what they did.

I am not saying the author is creepy, I am saying face search engines and personal information available publicly are creepy. But nothing to do with Flock.

I'm massively paranoid that some cable clips I printed that will sit on a circuit board will perish in the heat. Meanwhile, some idiot couldn't care less about thermal stability for flight hardware!

Yet again no justice for the fish.

That is one of the things one learns with time (if one not smart enough to understand it from the beginning) - it is small guy who get caught in the fight between Big Guys who suffers the most and pays the price, so don't be that small guy.

For few decades it looked like we've been building around the world the system which would protect small guy, yet the last few years the system has come down crashing. Interestingly that one of the architects of that crash - Dick Cheney (RIP, was just on the news and this is why he came to mind) - has lived to see those fruits of his labor and ultimately even voted against the most prominent expression of his policies - ie. against Trump and for Harris.

Some people have the capacity to think something is wrong even if they are not affected.

10^5 orchestra hit polyphony.

Finally a realistic helicopter sound?

what is the reference here, out of curiosity

I am referencing one of the sound-effects contained in General MIDI. GM gives you many sounda of instruments like piano, harpsichord, guitar etc.

But it also contains these (much to the fun of everybody who ever played around with a GM keyboard):

  125 Telephone Ring
  126 Helicopter
  127 Applause
  128 Gunshot

I can clearly hear in my head myself repeatedly playing middle C and going through that sequence of patches.