Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
So, I'm nearly half way through Tue book and Winston is... problematic.
I don't know how this escaped me on my first read.
(comment on 1984, p. 130)
1984 - BookWyrm
Which One Will YOU Be IN the Year 1984? There won't be much choice, of course, if this book's predictions turn out to be true.bookwyrm.social
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Had an optometrist's appointment today. Got confirmation of something I've known for some time: my depth perception sucks.
Sadly, it's not correctable, but it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I've learned to adapt.
I've read it before but was in a very different place at the time. Want to see if it hits differently this time around.
(comment on 1984)
1984 - BookWyrm
Which One Will YOU Be IN the Year 1984? There won't be much choice, of course, if this book's predictions turn out to be true.bookwyrm.social
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Sourcery - BookWyrm
When last seen, the singularly inept wizard Rincewind had fallen off the edge of the world. Now, magically, he's turned up again, and this time he's brought the Luggage. But that's not all...bookwyrm.social
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Not sure, but I think the cat may have developed an intolerance to his super expensive prescription food.
That's neat.
like this
𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋 likes this.
40k theory: The mechanicus can't create new technology because LLMs were invented during the dark age of technology.
Most of the media created after that point is AI nonsense, so they can't find the actual plans to replicate most of their technology.
The emperor can work with tech because he saved a copy of the wikipedia before it was too late.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Jeremy List reshared this.
like this
Jonathan Lamothe and clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 like this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe, Liam, Kofi Loves Efia and Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Source for the upper post:
web.archive.org/web/2021021619…
Direct link to the interactive site presenting the work:
web.br.de/interaktiv/ki-bewerb…
The @fasterthanlime 🌌 quote is from its own independent context:
web.archive.org/web/2018092807…
@Wolfgang Müller (DE:er/EN:he)
@Florian
@Klorydryk :unverified:
@Jessica Lam 👩🏻💻👩🏻🎨
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
See also "empiricism-washing"
pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dic…
> This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls "empiricism washing": take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you're just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because "math can't be racist."
@Lilac @Jessica Lam 👩🏻💻👩🏻🎨 It would be especially cool if you could make it real weird like those "place a sticker exactly here on the 50 km/h sign and the car thinks it's a little child" hacks.
Like, the HR software thinks you have great leadership skills because of the mauve and teal pentagram in your lower left. Technomagic!
@gkrnours What you are missing is that someone decided the criteria for inclusion in the training set.
while back we called it bullshit automation, and just recently a scientific paper was published that arguments this distribution nicely.
researchgate.net/publication/3…
Yes I know this is essentially a different class of problem, but the "learning" is done in the same way. And it flows the tradition of garbage in, garbage out.
Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software
switching.software
Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known softwareswitching.software
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Katy just got an ad for a "grounding sheet"... It's literally a blanket that plugs into a wall outlet so that you can be grounded while you sleep.
In case you're probe to static buildup in your sleep, I guess? How is this a thing?
So, I learned about Hamming codes a while back. They're pretty neat, but a lot of modern technology uses Reed-Solomon instead. I've wanted to learn about that one, but it involves some pretty heavy math that often goes over my head.
I've found a few different videos on YouTube that try to explain it "simply" but they all tend to gloss certain details over. After watching a few of them, I've noticed that the parts they gloss over are different from each other, and I'm wondering if I can just hunt down enough of them that I can piece the rest together myself.
All things considered, this seems a weirdly fitting way to learn it.
like this
Guy Geens and uoou (moved to @uoou@mas.to) like this.
I thought I'd come up with a genius alternate solution the the problem that Reed-Solomon aims to solve, but then I figured out why nobody does it.
The idea was to interleave multiple Hamming code blocks together so that the bits of each individual block would be sufficiently distant from each other as to protect against a burst error. While this would work, I realized pretty quickly that the sorts of media that are susceptible to burst errors also tend to suffer a significant speed penalty when reading data that is scattered across the medium like this.
Back to the grind of trying to figure this out, I guess.
𝚛𝚊𝚝 reshared this.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Ángel reshared this.
" title="
"/>like this
Jonathan Lamothe and calvin 🛋️ like this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Justin To #НетВойне reshared this.
Logged into my online banking to be greeted by a notification about an "unusual transaction". It was today's vet visit.
Yes. It was unusual. It was also entirely legit, but thanks.
like this
Guy Geens likes this.
As a side note: I sent my parents a text asking if we could borrow $X to hold us over until next pay day. My mother replied by saying that she'd "accidentally" sent $(X + Y) and to spend the extra as we see fit. We have a tiny bit of breathing room again.
She is amazing, and I am so fortunate to have family who are able to help out in an emergency. It's not lost on me that many don't.
Benny (our cat) was under the weather yesterday so we took him to the vet. We went home with some meds and general optimism. He seemed to perk up later in the day.
This morning he's super lethargic and uninterested in his food. Which is super not like him. Have another appointment with the vet in an hour and a half.
Not only am I stressed out about the cat, but I'm also stressed about the added financial burden of two unexpected vet visits (and I feel like an asshole about the latter).
We'll figure it out, but if the universe could cut us some slack for like five minutes, that'd be great.
Edit: typo
like this
HernanLG likes this.
Sensitive content
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Hacker Memes reshared this.
Sensitive content
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
I've run into a snag with an sqlite database I've been working on. Below is a simplified example of the problem.
Suppose I have the following table:
CREATE TABLE "prices" (
"id" INTEGER NOT NULL UNIQUE,
"name" TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE,
"list_price" NUMERIC NOT NULL,
"sale_price" NUMERIC,
"tax_rate" NUMERIC NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY("id" AUTOINCREMENT)
);Is there a way to do something like the following?
SELECT
name,
CASE
WHEN sale_price IS NULL
THEN list_price
ELSE sale_price
END AS price,
price * tax_rate AS tax
FROM prices;The
tax column doesn't seem to acknowledge the price column's existence, presumably because it's a column in the query rather than the source table. I could re-implement the CASE logic for the tax field, but that feels inelegant and error-prone.Is there a better way to do this?
Shannon Prickett reshared this.
Sensitive content
Probably not as elegant as you'd like, but:
SELECT tem.*,
price*tax_rate AS tax
FROM
(SELECT name,
CASE
WHEN sale_price IS NULL
THEN list_price
ELSE sale_price
END AS price
FROM prices) AS tem;
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Sensitive content
If you're morbidly curious, the final resulting code was:
CREATE VIEW ext_prices AS SELECT
sub.*,
sub.effective_price * sub.tax_rate AS tax,
sub.effective_price * (1 + sub.tax_rate) AS subtotal
FROM
(SELECT
p.*,
t.name AS tax_name,
t.rate AS tax_rate,
CASE
WHEN p.sale_price IS NULL
THEN p.last_price
ELSE p.sale_price
END AS effective_price
FROM
prices AS p
INNER JOIN
taxes AS t
ON p.tax_id = t.id
) AS sub
@((( David "Kahomono" Frier ))) Yeah, that was my assumption. I just wasn't sure what the best way to go about fixing it was. So far, this is the front-runner:
Probably not as elegant as you'd like, but:SELECT tem.*,
price*tax_rate AS tax
FROM
(SELECT name,
CASE
WHEN sale_price IS NULL
THEN list_price
ELSE sale_price
END AS price
FROM prices) AS tem;
WITH to do it in two steps:WITH pre_price AS (
SELECT
name,
CASE WHEN sale_price IS NULL
THEN list_price
ELSE sale_price END
AS price,
tax_rate FROM prices
)
SELECT
name,
price,
price * tax_rate AS tax
FROM pre_price;
Sensitive content
But yeah, you have figured out why you can't do it. You're actually, imho, best off implementing the case in the tax column. Or changing how you handle sales.
Email: "Hey, we noticed you were in our store looking at stuff and didn't check out"
Hey, I noticed you do a lot of creepy tracking shit you shouldn't be doing and seem to think that following window shoppers home and yelling WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY at their house is somehow a good business model
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Justin To #НетВойне reshared this.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Shannon Prickett, Jonathan Lamothe and josh :floppies: reshared this.
... I was supposed to be a lot of things. 😬
like this
cy and Jonathan Lamothe like this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Cory Doctorow reshared this.
I'm broken, sorry.
Wait. I missed this.
What is this?
Some kind of off-brand Underoos?
presearch.com/images?q=+undero…
Edit. i get it. some kind of spencer gifts type thing...
“you’re a smart kid, but…” from teachers.
I even responded once with “how would you know if I never do the work?”, which I don’t think was appreciated. 😬
A text I just sent to my mother (presented with no context):
It's sometimes tricky that my wife and mother have very similar looking names and are alphabetically right next to eachother in my contacts. It's astonishing that that hasn't led to more embarrassing mistakes.
Okay, I'm calling uncle.
I've exported the data from the LibreOffice Base database I've been working on to an SQLite file, and I'm just going to write a proper UI for it.
reshared this
vintage screwlisp account and Steven Rosenberg reshared this.
I'm planning a video a few weeks from now talking about "I switched to Linux and enjoy it."
If you've switched to Linux *in the last year*, do you have any uplifting stories you'd like featured to help my viewers?
Message me here, or via email at explainer(at)vkc(dot)sh.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Light🐧⁂ reshared this.
I was Ubuntu guy for a couple of years, I switched from Windows when Valve started releasing games for Linux.
But I got more into music production than gaming, and when I realized how well Mac was suited for it, I've been a Macbook guy for a decade until a few months ago.
I've dealt with Apple's software and security restrictions, but when my MBP became unreliable because of a botched keyboard replacement from an Apple Service shop, I was over them.
That counts as switching, right?
I mean yes, the only downside so far is only one streaming service (peacock) doesn’t work on Linux (I use iOS for that one for now), but I’d been buying OS-agnostic printers so I’m covered.
I switched last month.
The phones is where I’m in a rut I don’t want privacy nightmare fuel of openAI on next iOS.
@fancysandwiches Wow, that joke failed on a cosmic scale.
It was a bad joke that didn't land. I'm sorry. I'd delete it, but there are a bunch of replies up now.
I went from Windows to Qubes about 8-10 months ago. I don't know if I have any uplifting stories to tell about it though, hahaha.
But I have enjoyed (most of the time) getting everything really settled-in the way I like it as much as possible.
I consider myself very much in the proverbial "Power User" tier of computer competence rather than a more knowledgeable admin/programmer tier.
Hmm no stories, but I’m definitely interested in your video. Or if your video generates a community of Windows expats - I would like to volunteer moderating as a Linux expert for when more people show up looking for a way out…
I switched my grandparents to Linux Mint and they love that it just works and isn't so distracting and unnecessarily noisy.
The trigger for them switching was a driver Problem with their scanner. So when they switched to Linux and the Device worked without having to do anything (got to love inbuilt drivers, looking at you NVDIA), they were quite impressed.
If my grandparents can use Linux, anyone can, at least if you don't have special requirements, like MS office or something like that.
Transition from Windows to Linux for Ham Radio
In this video I cover my experience with Linux for Ham Radio (and daily driver) after one year of switching from Windows 10.► Pop! OS : https://pop.system76....YouTube
I finally got tired of microsoft when they announced Recall and overwrote my windows 10 partition with Debian about two weeks ago.
There's not much I can say though. The best thing is that I do not need to install software that forces the OS to comply and stop asking me to activate stuff that I don't need or want. Other than that, it works and games work.
No good free CAD software though.
Mostly using my pc for gaming.
Haven't booted the Windows drive in months.
couple of weeks ago, no complaints, reasonably easy.
Have a device to look up install stuff if it doesn't go smooth (I had a grub hub boot issue but the Mint page listed what I had to do).
When Google announced that Chrome was going all-spyware, all the time, I started looking into alternatives so as to retire my Chromebook. Saw a bunch of good reviews for Zorin, saw that the lite version was free, downloaded it, loaded it on an old ThinkPad laying around, loved it. Completely painless install, no learning curve.
Am now gradually migrating my media center/DAW stuff off of my Mac Mini as well.
While I’m not the target audience (though I watch anyways) I highly appreciate your approach. It’s very difficult to cater to “advanced” users (first Linux install in 1996) as we tend to be all over the map, and even if I surely knows more than your average computer user, it’s not easy to help those just starting out.
A library of beginner friendly videos is a treasure trove.
I was thinking to myself that it had been too long, but I actually only switched last october! I have dabbled for many years, but just switched my desktop.
The thing that really made it possible now was great game support. I can play nearly all modern games with no issues, often on day one. I play my MMO, I use discord for chat and it is seemless. I am not a power user these days and I am amazed that I almost never use a command line. That was definitely still the image of linux I had.
I help my aunt switch to Zorin OS from Windows this year and she's been very happy with it. She's 72 (I think?) and intimidated by computers. She still gets up to date, secure apps but she likes that the updates rarely move things around. She also gets intimidated by prompts about new features and those aren't a problem now either.
Is her experience what you're looking for?
I'm in the process of switching my main computer (installed Linux Mint on Friday). I've used Windows since 95 and before that I used MS-DOS.
I'm not a complete n00b in that I've used Linux from time to time before. But this time it seems different, it's looking very likely that I'll switch over permanently.
I switched my personal laptop to Ubuntu full time. I still use Windows for career purposes.
I appreciate the very broad ecosystem of desktops and flavors available in the Linux world. There is something for everyone.
I really appreciate how much even bleeding edge Linux distros breathe new life into old hardware. I never have to by a brand new shiny ever again.
I also appreciate that I have full control over my machine and no corporate overlord gets to tell me what I can or can’t do.
Also, I still use both Windows and Linux (Fedora on my PCs, and a mixture of RHEL, Rocky and Debian on servers), nowadays, so I'm not a full convert yet 😅
Sensitive content
Within the last 2-3 months I've moved from ChromeOS to Linux (Manjaro). I did this for privacy reasons. Now I've been watching MS Recall make the case for migrating to Linux.
Full disclosure: I used to use SVR2 Unix, and Red Hat (am RHCE from back in 2004). Since then I changed my career to teaching, and used ChromeOS a lot, which was lovely, except for the total lack of privacy.
I am currently doing the switch, started two weeks ago! I had tried dualbooting years ago, but now I'm serious.
I've tried some options a bit, including Kubuntu, Pop_OS! and Ubuntu MATE.
I was impressed with how easy it was to connect a graphic Wacom tablet! I did not like random crashes in system settings, especially with translations.
I have liked Cinnamon DE the most, and will be installing Mint next. I like how it just works, but I can still easily customize it to fit my needs.
Katy and I like to watch psychological thrillers from time to time, but I've noticed a recurring trope that confuses me. It goes like this: Psychopath lives in an outwardly normal looking house, but has a secret passage to a secret murder basement.
Who built this? Am I to believe he excavated the earth, poured the concrete, ran the (usually admittedly shoddy) electrical himself? Did no contractor at any point ever think to themselves: "this doesn't seem right. Perhaps I should alert the authorities?"
Edit: typo
Edit: I'm an idiot who confused diameter with circumference for some reason. Embarrassing original post follows.
Was playing around a bit with the OpenWeatherMap API. I wanted to know how precise I needed to be with the latitude & longitude values, so I decided to do some quick calculations.
To get a rough idea, I wanted to determine how much a change of one degree of latitude would move in kilometers. I knew the diameter of the earth was something fairly close to 40,000 km but wanted to verify that factoid. I did a quick duckduckgo search, and the top three results (on seemingly separate web sites) all said 12,756 km. In fact one of them hilariously said 12.756 km.
I assume this is the result of LLMs filling the internet with crap, but it's alarming that if I didn't know any better, I'd have just blindly accepted this as fact.
@PerryM ✅ Yeah, but the real problem here was my stupidity. 😛
I don't think post editing works on Diaspora, so you probably can't see the correction, but I confused diameter and circumference.
Edit: why did I think you were on Diaspora? I'm clearly on a roll today.
Also:
Please note that built-in geocoder has been deprecated. Although it is still available for use, bug fixing and updates are no longer available for this functionality.
Source: openweathermap.org/current
12.756 km may be a locale difference; if the site wasn't US or UK-based the decimal might be the thousands separator.
the diameter of the earth was something fairly close to 40,000 km
s/diameter/circumference/?
Fine, I'll watch #wwdc24 to see what everyone's been talking about.
Before a few hours ago, I didn't even realize it was happening.
Today I booked an appointment with my optometrist to get my eyes checked. A few hours later I checked the (postal) mail to find a reminder card from them.
I was shocked at how quick the mail was, only to realize it was just a generic reminder that I was due for an eye exam. It was pure coincidence.
Okay, I'm just going to say it because amazingly enough, some people don't seem to get this.
Just because I'm critical of Israel bombing hospitals in Palestine doesn't mean I'm pro-Hamas. I'm not.
It frustrates me that this is a thing that even needs to be said.
Edit: typo
like this
Khurram Wadee, Aladár Mézga, N. E. Felibata 👽 and Tess like this.
Mx. Luna Corbden reshared this.
Sensitive content
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Judy Anderson reshared this.
Sensitive content
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Conversely, a guilt-free snack that you can add lots of tasty spices to and guilty levels of butter and/or oil.
(I love using the microwave popcorn bowl thing I have, and covering it with the "popcorn oil" I bought and my homemade salt/garlic/chili pepper grinder mix.)
The CPU is far from being the most sophisticated component of a computer.
At least if we're talking about #permacomputing, or, rather, scavenging and collapse computing. Okay, maybe in open source hardware, too.
Designs of new hobbyist computer architectures are seemingly revolving around inventing a CPU and/or mapping the peripherals on the system bus.
And you could find many simple CPUs based on FPGAs, logic chips, transistors, valves and even relays.
What you usually don't find is custom RAM. Before Intel introduced cheap solid-state RAM in 1969, there were at least six contemporary competing types of RAM used in computers, and at least as many were already considered obsolete.
What you don't find is peripherals. There are rare cool appliances, like punch tape readers. But have you seen a custom hard drive? A printer?
All these are "easy" in terms of relative complexity for industry. But they are simultaneously very hard for a hobbyist/DIYer/tech collapsnik.
Change my mind, show me the good stuff~
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Jeremy List reshared this.
@aeva I see! Well, you probably shouldn't do it INSIDE of your flat. It was a common* game for pre-00s children in Russia to cast lead on a campfire, and Zinc has a comparable melting point. If you're wondering where children would get lead, the answer was discarded car batteries and such. If you're wondering if that was safe, no, not at all.
Common = I have heard of this from at least three different regions, including a major city
@aeva a counter point: if you ever tried printing with moveable type, especially without a linotype machine, you would very quickly realise that even the simplest of computers could speed things up a lot.
Even some mechanical linotype machines accept punched tape as an input for the type - word processing like it's 1880
@aeva ah, yes 😀 It's funny to think how people consider "homestead" a solution to this.
FWIW, I think a real collapse-like situation wouldn't mean immediate famine or dying out from cholera, anyways. I've read about the collapse of Bronze age, as well as the downfall of Romans. In those cases, humans didn't rapidly lose access to shelter and sanitation, and they had some food to go around. Even the excess mortality wasn't insane - certainly not the levels in some European countries during the WW2. All of those were very sucky times, that's for sure.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe and Jeremy List reshared this.
But I'm talking about something completely different here! On IBM PC and PC Jr, one of 8255s was used for a cassette interface - a 5-pin DIN that can be connected to a domestic casette player
@Nina Kalinina Just googled (duckduckwent?) what a Colorado drive was, and all the results were about road trips.
I'm not familiar with this term. Could you possibly enlighten me?
like this
Nina Kalinina and PunBoleh like this.
Not a PC, but a Texas Instruments 99/4 I had in the early ‘80’s stored data through a cassette tape port
@nina_kali_nina
In my view, most electronics won't last. The aesthetic is fun, but if we're being realistic, I feel we need to go back to treating computing as a human activity, rather than one influenced by machines.
It's easy, if not desirable, to build things that look like foundations in isolation. But when you strip out something as basic as electrical or mechanical power, design gets.. complicated.
Programming languages, computing stacks, should be able to be run on humans.
@wryl
A few years ago I made a "card game" that could be used to convert an 8 year old child into a touring complete computer running the brainfuck programming language.
The small stacks are memory cells, the big cards are the program. The figure is the pointer. The player just has to follow the instruments on the cards.
@hackbroetchen that reminds me of Cardiac computer, but simpler! Do you have a link for the "print and play" version?
Hm, your post gave me a really cool idea, thanks!
Also it was a bit unfinished. It lacks a loop depth register.
Maybe I should finish that project.
@hackbroetchen gotcha! Thank you for sharing anyway.
As for cutting out, there are simple paper cutter knives that are perfect for this task. I've had a great success with cutting a few hundred small cards with a machine like on the picture, with low effort.
@hackbroetchen @wryl
This reminds me of the game of Alligator Eggs, which seemingly allows an 8-year-old to learn about lambda calculus: worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/
We might be able to find similar ideas among other esoteric languages.
I think the realization you're approaching here is that collapse computing, as currently practiced, is largely cyberpunk LARPing.
You will have a lot of trouble manufacturing any sort of nontrivial IC, including but not limited to a CPU, in the apocalypse. If your design includes any such component and it's not readily salvageable from the devices normal people are surrounded by, you've already failed.
An FPGA is decidedly nontrivial and also needs an existing, working, relatively modern computer to program it, so that's worse.
Writing an OS for simple Z80 computers sounds like a fun project, but branding it "CollapseOS" is a bit silly because... where are you expecting to find the components to build a simple Z80 computer? If you're salvaging from Game Boys and TI calculators, why not just write an OS for those? The average person in that scenario will have a lot less trouble actually installing and using the thing in practice.
You know what's easy to find in the apocalypse? Existing working computers. Refurbishing them and building methods of powering them is *significantly* more doable without factories. But building an entirely new computer sounds a lot cooler to most people.
@emily yep, I think I agree with you, generally. There is still value in CollapseOS and such - it's an attempt at simplification the stack and bootstrapping, and we need more of those.
I am thinking about this topic in the context of how personal computing stopped being accessible thing; we have lots of computers around, but we often cannot reprogram these, and it's unlikely we could repair or expand them, either. I am also remembering the beginning of 2022 and the effects of sanctions on Russia - the electronics shops quickly ran out of everything, and the marketplaces only had used Pentium 3 and 4, as well as Chinese 8 and 16 bit console clones. These times didn't last, because globalisation and parallel imports, but it was a reminder to me that supply chain hiccups or even total collapse are a possibility.
Certainly, there are different levels and genres of collapse. All of them share the common theme of "we have some existing working devices and everything else must be built from scratch or from parts salvaged from those devices".
For existing devices, Linux is probably a more effective collapse computing project by accident than any dedicated software project will ever be on purpose, because of the sheer amount of stuff it can already run on and the number of copies of it floating around.
For building new devices, ICs are probably the wrong level to build up from. You can assume no new ones can be acquired in most realistic scenarios (either they aren't being produced at all, or supply chain issues mean you can't get them). If you have devices to salvage usable ICs from, they probably still mostly work, and pulling them apart is much higher risk than just using them as is.
On that note, I was under the impression CollapseOS targeted only homebrew machines, but I see now they also have ports for an assortment of real retrocomputers. That's great! The TI-84+ is the only one I'd realistically expect to be able to find outside a retrocomputing enthusiast's home, but it's a hell of a lot more than I expected, and so I partly retract my mocking of them.
But more than that, I want to see more "I made transistors in my garage" projects. *That* is the primary thing we'd need to actually bootstrap modern technology. Software is near trivial in comparison.
M. The Crystalline Entity reshared this.
One is to leave them on the board they're from. It works best on boards with lots of testpads, and gives you a tiny breakout board for the chip.
Another is to glue the chip upside down to something, and solder the wires to each pin directly - with enough flux, the surface tension force makes it relatively easy to avoid shorts. It is a bit tedious for chips with over 20 pins, but it's doable as long as you have reasonably thin wires (like wires from transformers)
@emily These thoughts reminds me of my writing exploring "what's the least software & hardware required to build an inclusive web browser?"
I think it helped me better wrap my mind around around existing operating systems, & really emphasizes how vital memory is!
For exhaustive detail: adrian.geek.nz/from-scratch/#b…
(I'm currently preparing a page about dev tools for programming it)
In short: The primary (until visual output's required) component would be a hardware pushdown automaton. Which traverses a labelled graph to parse its input data.
Then I added an "Output Unit" to concatenate & demux the output into a new order, a rudimentary processor for occasional/trivial math, & a couple other things.
Anything specific you're curious about?
Nina Kalinina reshared this.
Also, in a collapse scenario, you're going to be way too busy with basic survival to bother with hobbies. Nor will there be any electricity available.
I've built a printer from scratch, but it's an electromechanical contraption not directly related to computery things and not exactly a convenient form-factor.
(though watch this space, I still have loads of ink and I've been Having Bad Ideas for future projects after watching too many teleprinter videos... 😳)
oldbytes.space/@zxguesser/1125…
ZXGuesser (@zxguesser@oldbytes.space)
Attached: 1 video I'd like to say it worked first time, but then I'd have no explanation for staying up until 4AM soldering...OldBytes Space - Mastodon
There’s hobbyist core memory.
The kind of person who makes a custom CPU design out of discrete transistors or valves or relays also often makes a small amount of RAM with flip-flops or individual transistors. It’s definitely hard to scale up.
Open mechanical stuff is indeed really rare, with the notable exceptions of rapid prototypers and that electron microscope from a while ago.
Turns out there have been more electron microscope designs released than i had thought. U Muenster’s SXM, the ChemHacker effort in ~2010, the recent NanoMi.
An open printer or plotter would be nice. And certainly seems like those would be easier to make than open electron microscopes or CNC machines.
I would expect most types of CNC machine to be more difficult than most types of printer, simply because print heads don’t fight back against the positioning system when they act on the feedstock. The only mechanical resistance they deal with under normal circumstances is on an axis the print head doesn’t move along. Pigment delivery and fixing definitely isn’t easy, but I doubt it’s as difficult as repeatable, extremely strong positioning of tools.
I wonder what would be the best pigment delivery system for such a printer. I’m partial to waxjets (e.g, Xerox Phaser) largely because of the low material waste, but some inkjets come close (particularly if the printer has refillable tanks and you get the ink in glass bottles).
Maybe for wood or plastics. It’s really hard to build a two-axis router to carve channels into metal, though. Swiss lathes and 3+ axis mills are difficult, too.
I’m not familiar with any DIY paper process which yields a uniform enough thickness and composition for most printer technologies. Definitely not good enough for traditional laser. Composition would be a problem for any jet-based. Struck prints like dot matrix or daisy wheel would probably be it.
@bob_zim DIY paper that works with laser is definitely doable. But making it thermo sensitive or cover it with thin metal film is hard 🙁
Soft metal CNCs are okay to make:)
like this
Nina Kalinina and Nelson like this.
Nina Kalinina likes this.
I wonder if anyone's tried replicating the memory used by two of the computers in the Voyager spacecraft. They each have three computers, two with some kind of wire memory and one with a more modern kind.
All the problems the Voyagers have had is with the more modern memory. The wire memory is still working perfectly afaik.
There are a bunch of gpgpu projects, but that's not fun. And then there's FuryGPU but it's Vaporware until it's actually released: furygpu.com/about
Yeah! There's all these projects to make open-hardware laptops but without a GPU that supports standard APIs there's gonna be a hole in the open stack.
A thought I keep having is a good place to start might be to accelerate *just* what is useful for 2D compositing, and pass the rest to Mesa. Then you could get improved desktop performance, and most daily tasks don't involve 3D rendering anyway.
@mcc Vortex¹ ² apparently supports Vulkan 1.0 via a modified SwiftShader—is that at all interesting? (I wonder if it’d be possible to also get OpenGL ES support by layering ANGLE.)
__
¹ github.com/vortexgpgpu
² B. Tine, V. Saxena, S. Srivatsan, J.R. Simpson, F. Alzammar, L. Cooper, and H. Kim, “Skybox: Open-Source Graphic Rendering on Programmable RISC-V GPUs,” in proc. ASPLOS 2023, ACM, Mar. 2023. Online: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016…
@hovav I mean, it's a start! I think it's not what nina's looking for but I'd be curious at least to test it.
I'd heard there were projects like this but I didn't know they'd already reached a Vulkan compliance level.
@hovav I wonder how I'd go about porting this to this FPGA I've got if I wanted to run a test and see what it looks like. There's test instructions here github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex/…
But it's pretty much "run our build scripts!" and don't explain what they do or what they target. Like would I need to integrate this with a litex setup, or…?
vortex/README.md at master · vortexgpgpu/vortex
Contribute to vortexgpgpu/vortex development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
vortex/hw/syn at master · vortexgpgpu/vortex
Contribute to vortexgpgpu/vortex development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I don't know ... strictly in terms of STEM learning tools for bright kids, I'll take AdaFruit, Arduino, etc.any day over the GENIAC I had when I was a bright kid!
The long-term problem wouldn't be finding hardware to read an old SSD -- but how to make such devices at all. If we look at a modern factory, how many of those tools could be remade 100 years after a collapse? Have we documented them? Or are they all trade secrets?
I think learning to desolder and solder SMD components could be the top skill for a scavenger technologist. The vast majority of discarded tech is going to be SMD....
That's why I'm working on DIY co-processing using 8 bit CPUs from a begone era 😁😬
@Nina Kalinina I didn't know the term "ball grind array" but had encountered it in the past and based on context was pretty sure I knew what you were talking about.
Looked it up to be sure. Felt like one of my riskier searches.
Nina Kalinina likes this.
Decided to learn and use #LibreOffice Base for a thing because I thought it would be an easier way to slap a quick and dirty UI on a database than rolling an app from scratch (which I already knew how to do).
I was wrong, but at this point I'm going full sunk cost fallacy.
like this
Adam Hunt, Isaac Kuo and N. E. Felibata 👽 like this.
It's also interesting that (as far as I can tell) the easiest way to export the DB schema from an ODB file (using the embedded HSQLDB feature) is by first dumping it into a MySQL database, and then exporting from there.
I mean... really?
N. E. Felibata 👽 likes this.
periodic reminder: you cannot "pass" a security audit. anybody selling you a passable security audit is selling you a lie, and anybody selling you a product that has "passed' an audit is lying to you.
a security audit can uncover bugs, or not uncover bugs, and can (in the words of the recipient) demonstrate positive or negative qualities about the codebase. but it cannot be "passed" or otherwise *endorse* the product or program itself.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
reshared this
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
@MJ :blobfoxcomputer: Someone else pointed out that the fastest way to get a company to stop using Windows would be for someone to file a wrongful dismissal suit and to subpoena their Windows Recall records in the suit.
It cuts both ways.
Theoretically, if you're forgetful, ADHD, or multitask like crazy, you can use Recall as a memory supplement. Whatever you were working on, your computer remembers so that you can view it later. Additionally, it runs everything you do through an AI so that the search capabilities work "really well" (we hope!). (edit: originally I thought Recall also suggested what you wanted to do next, I was wrong, nevermind on that) That's supposedly going to help you work more efficiently.
Of course this comes with huge security and legal risks, plus privacy concerns since Microsoft's software is now watching everything you do on your computer.
If they had forgone the AI bit, released it as an open-source project, made it an opt-in application that you have to intentionally install, and implemented some actually good security, Recall might have actually been quite handy. The concept has merit, it's just the implementation is horribly flawed and a massive liability. They might still be able to redeem it somewhat if they open-source it and make the security better (i.e., *actually* encrypt the database and require the user to provide their password to decrypt it before viewing it), but I don't find that too likely to happen.
This website uses cookies. If you continue browsing this website, you agree to the usage of cookies.
Matthew Skala
in reply to Rebecca • • •