errantspark

I will not have an operating system that shows me ads. This is my computer. It will do what I want.

Nice! I did one of these ages and ages ago copying the win 3.1 pattern editor (which doubtless is a ripoff of the mac one anyway)

https://errantspark.github.io/3.1/#0056755500caaeaa

I get a lot of use out of the PRUs on the BeagleboneBlack, I would absolutely get use out of an FPGA in a laptop.

Wait sorry back up a bit here. I can buy a laptop that has a daughter FPGA in it? Does it have GPIO??? Are we seriously building hardware worth buying again in 2024? Do you have a link?

wat, we have plenty of aerospace companies, Boeing is the only one making consumer air travel jets right now, but they're far from the only aerospace company in the US

The claim is that llama is "lobotomized" because it was trained with safety in mind. You can't untrain that by finetuning. For what it's worth the non-instruct llama generally seems better at reasoning than instruct llama which i think is a point in support of OP.

I tried to use buttplug years ago but I found it to be difficult to work with and introduce too much latency into play. My partner and I have replaced it with 37 lines of javascript that give us more realtime control of our toys (albeit only Lovense, by just spamming .writeValueWithoutResponse()).

I'm curious what your background is that you approached the problem in the way that you did? I appreciate that you're covering all the edge cases for a lot of different toys, but it also really feels like you use 1000 lines of code where 10 will do.

Mostly bad take. The long term solution is to remove the incentives for criminal behavior and enact laws that prevent power concentration, authoritarianism is not stable. That being said I can see the value in an authoritarian clamp down as a way to rapidly improve the situation in a country as far gone as El Salvador, I remain extremely skeptical about the long term efficacy. Australia is not in a situation analogous to El Salvador by any stretch of the imagination.

Fun fact: I took the photo she used as a cover for one of her books, she asked me if she could use it and I said I'd like to be compensated and her response was something akin to "oh I was just asking assuming you'd say yes, I'm going to do it anyway". Nobody's perfect, maybe she regrets it, and it hasn't really crossed my mind in years, but I guess it still sort of irks me to be reminded of it. Anyway if anyone needs a portrait for a book cover feel free to hit me up XD.

So don't pay the engineers that built the product and continue to maintain it?

Saas isn't the only way to pay people.

most software is living and breathing and requires continual investment

Is it though? or is this broadly another side effect of value extraction focused engineering? I'm quite happy to buy a new version if it makes my life notably easier. CS2 is broadly a better experience than CC, etc. etc.

The real reason for the software as a service model is that it makes it easier to extract/capture value. Many SaaS offerings would be better at providing value to customers with non-SaaS architectures, unfortunately providing value to customers is second to providing value to shareholders.

Don't pay for SaaS, don't encourage this bullshit. If foss offerings don't cover your usecase piracy is better for humanity than paying.

Oh yeah this is absolutely fucking stupid, my dad put solar on his roof recently and if this shit goes through he may end up with a bigger monthly energy bill than pre-solar. Make that make sense to me. Where's the fucking equity when you're trying to be sustainable and efficient in your electricity use and you get punished for it. Talk about perverse incentives.

At least it'll be fun to help him build a fully off grid system.

Ranked matchmaking is worse at delivering a competitive experience than a community of people who want to have a competitive experience. Don't kid yourself, competitive gaming existed long before ranked matchmaking.

This wasn't near as much an issue when you had actual servers run by actual people. Too bad the technology to implement a server browser has been lost to time. : ( Perhaps one day we will rediscover it.

I don't think it's always been that way, not exactly, the distribution gets less flat as people are able to make more optimized choices.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27089-8

No, it's not. Java and C++, hell even Java and C# are much more relevantly dissimilar than setting A at 440 vs 432. I'd love to see a citation on Vivaldi's love for 432, he wasn't even playing in 12-TET was he? He'd probably be playing in meantone during that era right? I figure he'd be way more mad about using the wrong intonation to play his music than a difference absolute pitch reference.

rounding 432 to 440

Rounding from what to what? Why does the number cycles relative to seconds being any particular number matter?

Ahh yeah, magnitude vs. power, my mistake on the terms.

Is "dropping the phase" the same thing as computing the spectral power distribution?

P.S. A4 = 432Hz is a stupid fad that can't die soon enough.

This is such cool content but the way it's presented is so fucking frustrating to me. I wish the narrative wasn't so intrinsically tied to the actual data. I hate that I can't blow up and rotate the models side by side, the whole thing feels so shallow. Now to be clear in an absolute sense this is a good article, this is cool content and the scrolling as something other than scrolling works better than in most instances.

My criticism is that the format does a disservice to the data, it's not the best way to present something this cool.

:waves:

You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.

What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage. That's the sort of infra we need, it's frankly embarrassing that we're not looking at amazon as a country and thinking "why don't we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good".

P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.

Drivers are mostly not too hard

Except when they are, which is anytime something is poorly documented, which is pretty much all the time. Let's not even get started on vendors who don't WANT you to write drivers for their hardware.

Hell, Apple OSes barely support any hardware.

Would be interesting to see an OS target specifically Apple HW to make it a bit easier on the devs.

Next to impossible to kill a starlink satellite and there are thousands of them, I don't think any country has the capability to to take starlink satellites down en masse by force. The US, russia and china could probably take down a few, but I doubt the stockpiles of anti satellite missiles of all three combined equal the size of the constellation. Guessing about that though.

You could probably blow up a nuke on orbit to EMP a bunch of them at once but that would have a lot of collateral damage.

I was mostly quoting it to reference it's context. The full quote (by Stewart Brand) is:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

So you have these two fighting against each other.”

So yes, NFTs are absolutely one of the myriad of (stupid) ways we're trying to grapple with this conflict as a society.

As some guy once said, "Info wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive"

IP ownership as it exists today is fundamentally broken from the underlying reality. We need a culture where coming up with something new is compensated fairly but at the same time recognizes that the cost of sharing info is next to nil and we're all being held back from a global optimum by pretending otherwise.

I think most people assume it's okay to for example, use the office printer to print a return slip for a package you're going to mail back on your lunch break.

If the volume for your line of work is tens of thousands of pages, maybe printing 470 return slips is just y'know, fine, gets lost in the noise and makes everyone's life easier to just let it happen.

In any case, it's still not cheaper than a box fan and a HEPA filter, which ought to be the baseline you'd test against if you were providing value to your readers.

Don't dismiss this as a cantankerous rant. This is an extremely good point. The advantages are not only there in terms of cost but in terms of environmental impact and waste as well. It's telling that this sort of DIY solution isn't highlighted as the goto, especially in a publication catering to a crowd that claims to care about not fucking up the planet and wrings it's hands about the harms of capitalism. Instead of an air purifier bungee a HEPA filter to a box fan and donate the difference to some group capitalism shits on, repeat this approach for all things. Problem solved. Welcome to the solarpunk revolution.

Disclaimer: I did in fact buy a Levoit air purifier off Amazon during the wildfires last year so you know, ain't nobody perfect.

I think there's truth to the nostalgia-goggles view here.

I think the early internet:

- was a more distinctly bounded subset of individuals - now it's closer to a random sampling of humans

- had less "background monetary radiation" so there was far less incentive to make low value content

- content spread mostly by human -> human interaction so the bar for something being shared and consequently your likelyhood of seeing it was set higher

It feels like the signal to noise ratio was significantly better as a combination of those things. This sort of product-shilling was less profitable. Also in general the profitability vector being "people click the buy link" vs "people's continued trust in my expertise" influences the sort of content that's created.

For real? Is there a citation you've got for this? That seems crazy low.

This is the fundamental truth that creates the isomorphism between cash and crypto, something a younger me didn't understand. Fundamentally there is no hard "truth" in a crypto system anymore than there is one in a fiat system. At the end of the day it's just one particular reification of a useful societal construct. Or to put it more succinctly:

We live in a society.