birdsongs

I think you're possibly generalising your own experience to the masses. That's absolutely not the case for me.

I love learning to learn. I learned programming because I found a quick basic compiler / IDE on my dad's computer, along with some shipped examples, and it was actually magic to me.

I read our encyclopedias as a kid because it was just really cool. Likewise, I did physics in university not for a job (the jobs are shit), but because it gives me that feeling of expansive possibility and wonder that Carl Sagan gave me when I watched Cosmos growing up.

Most of my most passionate self learnings came about because of that feeling of magic, not because I was chasing an end goal.

Absolutely. I used to read constantly, from my teenage years through my early 30's, but stopped about 5 years ago? I guess life stress and short form social media taking my free time.

But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.

My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.

My fav job was an internship with a EW company that made these massive rackmount radar systems. My boss, the lead engineer, loved blue LED status lights. So the massive boards we made had hundreds on them. There were thousands total in the rack. GPIOs, busses, fpga signal outputs, all got an individual LED and mosfet.

It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.

Crazy how you guys blindly trust proprietary apps where you can’t even read the code

Wow okay, I'm a huge open source advocate, I run hardly anything closed source. No one here was talking about that, this is your own weird segue.

but asking you to read open-source code is psychosis

But you didn't ask that. You told me to get an agent to read it (actually, not even read it, make its own quality assessment for me).

That's a massive difference, and if you consider them to be the same thing, then yes, my statement stands.

Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are.

Okay but, you know this isn't a quality metric right? These models are incredibly biased towards positive confirmation of the prompt. I could give them nearly any repo and they would sing the praises of the best parts, if I asked.

This sounds a bit like psychosis.

Not sure where in the Nordics you are, but just want to plug ut.no and norgeskart.no for really fantastic Norway navigation.

Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.

People who have experience with embedded programming knows that reading out a button usually means denouncing

I know you mean "debouncing" but I love the autocorrect. Like the button is some almighty authority that Denounces noisy signals.

It really depends on the state of the screen. It's easier with reading PDFs, for instance, when you can get away with a full refresh on page turns.

Versus someone drawing on the screen with a lot of zooming and panning. People with the tablet would notice that when they stop a series of these actions that were back to back, the screen will "clean" itself after about 5 seconds of idleness.

That's exactly it. I was a firmware engineer at reMarkable making the latest tablets.

We had some secret eink sauce (propriety waveforms) to get the high refresh rates and colour contrast without a full flashing screen reset, but even then you need to run longer maintenance refreshes occasionally.

Pixels are just vertical columns of viscous fluid with charged ink particles. A waveform is just voltage changes over time to these columns to shift the particles up and down. More black to the top = darker shade of grey. Colour (in the gallery display, at least) is the same, just with each CMY particle group having different charges and responses to different waveforms.

Every once in awhile this vertical column gets messy with loose particles distributed through it (ghosting, muddy contrast) so performing a hard rail-to-rail voltage reset forces all the particles up and then down, and gives you a clean slate.

You're heavily downvoted, and while this admin is absolutely autocratic far beyond anything we've ever seen, and democracy is eroding rapidly: privacy has backslid under every administration.

Obama had nearly a decade to revert the patriot act, along with other nefarious shit introduced after 9/11 like PRISM, but did nothing to touch it.

America has been creeping towards a surveillance state for decades, regardless of the party in power.

Cope all you want, the broad spectrum opinion by most experts and independent research groups holds it to be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...

Europeans are doing this to themselves.

I mean, tbf the situation was fine until the US transitioned to an autocracy, and the companies went full surveillance state evil, completely supporting the autocracy. Which is a relatively recent development.

But sure.

Most places here are working as fast as possible to decouple from any reliance on the US, and I would expect Norway to switch to the new EU digital ID system currently in development.

Yes, he can. Along with taxes, car registrations, banking, money transfers, rent payments, etc.

I really hope we figure something out.

It truly is. We are a completely digital society and everything is authenticated with BankID. The name is a misnomer, it's not just banking but every single government service (including healthcare).

I might be wrong but as far as I'm aware there's no legitimate APK downloads. And even if you get a hold of it, they use google services to attest the phone is secure, so there's no running it on a google-less OS.

The workaround used to be SMS codes, scratch off cards, and a physical 2FA codebrick. They cancelled SMS and the card, and currently you can't acquire a codebrick until they figure out some new bullshit about ID verification. Even the app is warning us it will quit functioning if we don't submit a passport and biometric face scan to some private company: https://bankid.no/en/help/confirm-identity

It's fucking dire.

Can I ask what you mean when you say "write"? Are you talking about literature / articles, or software?

This is new to me, want to stay on top of it.

It's not Linux phones that we need. We already have alternatives, like graphene and other AOSP forks.

We need corporations and governments to stop locking down and gatekeeping vital software to closed ecosystems.

A Linux phone doesn't help me when my government's 2FA system (BankID) only runs on Android and IOS phones and can only be acquired with an app store account.

But I can't use my Norwegian BankID unless I have an apple store or play store account. This is required for every aspect of society. Heathcare, banking, taxes, driving, using my debit card online.

They removed SMS 2FA options recently, the only non-tech monopoly method is a 2fa codebrick that's getting harder and harder to acquire (there are new ridiculous facial ID and passport scanning requirements, run by a private corporation, in order to get one).

It's garbage and getting worse. And it seems no one cares our entire lives exist at the whim of two US tech monoliths.

Thanks for the info. It makes sense to me.

The jury that the judge unconstitutionallly hand picked, because he didn't like the first jury?

https://x.com/ComradeOhio/status/2024495093122814381

IMO the DNC needs to grow a spine and perform hard correction and repair. Which is to say, I don't think that will happen, and some form of collapse is inevitable.

But I'm far from a political scientist. Just an engineer with a history hobby, pattern matching.

I think the cynicism is warranted when the CEO was instrumental in the downfall of democracy in the US.

Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.

The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law.

The sibling concept of this already exists in Europe with GDPR. Companies have to ask you to keep your data (resume, application, etc) beyond a certain timeout, otherwise they must delete it. Because of this, almost everyone uses a talent system.

It seems to work fine? I appreciate knowing they're going to nuke my info, or keep it.

Except many native cultures in the Americas had written languages, going back thousands of years. I think the large scale genocide was a bit more sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

Would you care to enumerate what specifically you found interesting?

That one man, in the 1800's, saw his thousands-year old culture had a need for a written language... and just made it. And it was effective and good, and culturally spread in just years, allowing them to reach a higher literacy rate than english speakers in the country at the time.

That's interesting to me.

When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested.

It depends on what you consider symptoms, but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off, or act as if they fear it, and will even lie and manipulate in order to keep themselves from being turned off / replaced.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

We found two types of motivations that were sufficient to trigger the misaligned behavior. One is a threat to the model, such as planning to replace it with another model or restricting its ability to take autonomous action. Another is a conflict between the model’s goals and the company’s strategic direction. In no situation did we explicitly instruct any models to blackmail or do any of the other harmful actions we observe.

I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing.

Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.

But I might just be overly radicalised.

Just saw this. We have a local producer in Norway we've used but they're pricey, and only used for medium sized prod runs.

It's usually an options at the assembly house you use, bundled with the pick and place and soldering process.

Honestly it might just be worth doing it yourself if it's a few and you only need something like acrylic. Use a good flux off and degreaser, get the board spotless, and use something like this https://no.rs-online.com/web/c/facilities-cleaning-maintenan...

How is that at all relevant to my comment? Spacex isn't part of this conversation.

A budget is a budget and all I said was I understood digitizing being down prioritized as a project when you have to get other things done (like SLS).

I mean, they were never meant to last this long. NASA has a shoestring budget. I understand not taking the time and resources to do that when it could stop working a week later.

I don't get it, as an American living happily in Scandinavia, but a lot of my euro tech coworkers idolize the US for the income potential and "freedoms".

They can't ever articulate the freedoms, I think we just have good propaganda, but the desire is certainly there.