mafuyu

The keywords you're missing are color spaces and gamma curves. For a given bandwidth, we want to efficiently allocate color encoding as well as brightness (logarithmically to capture the huge dynamic range of perceptible light). sRGB is one such standard that we've all agreed upon, and output devices all ostensibly shoot for the sRGB target, but may also interpret the signal however they'd like. This is inevitable, to account for the fact that not all output devices are equally capable. HDR is another set of standards that aims to expand the dynamic range, while also pinning those values to actual real-life brightness values. But again, TVs and such may interpret those signals in wildly different ways, as evidenced by the wide range of TVs that claim to have "HDR" support.

This was probably not the most accurate explanation, but hopefully it's enough to point you in the right direction.

Just out of curiosity - would you describe companies that are commonly in the spotlight as more mercenary than average?

ANCS gang rise up

I used to always remove affiliate codes from links, but after hearing about just how much revenue creators make from Amazon affiliate, I started clicking them if it’s a creator that I support (especially smaller creators).

With Amazon, apparently the creator gets a percentage commission on your entire cart. Without the affiliate link, the price to me is exactly the same - Amazon just keeps the money. I assume AmazonSmile was basically using the charity you selected as the “affiliate”, but they shut that program down.

So yeah, it hurts my individual privacy stance, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the data Amazon has about me already. Commission affiliate links at least redirect some of the revenue to the creator themselves.

Ahh, gotcha, thanks for the tip. Yeah, systemd is easy to reach for, but it certainly has plenty of footguns.

I just did `ExecStart` with `multi-user.target`. That implies the unit is `simple`, so it very well could be sequencing incorrectly at boot and failing. That's a good point; I'll have to keep that in mind!

Wow, thanks for this tip! I've been dealing with suspend issues with an X570 Aorus Master as well.

Running `echo GPP0 >> /proc/acpi/wakeup` into a systemd unit at boot solved the issue for me... except the first sleep after a boot would always wake back up immediately.

I applied your udev rule and that issue seems to be resolved as well!

I've often heard people say that "true" perfect pitch can only be accomplished with synesthesia, but I have no idea if it's true. Back when I played clarinet, I had decent relative pitch and I could ballpark a B-flat tuning note if I thought hard enough. That was enough to work my way to an absolute pitch, but it took a while.

I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.

While I didn’t switch majors, I had a similar experience with my intro EE class. My theory was that it was intentionally a weeder class to push students towards the other engineering concentrations.

Intro EE is kinda brutal in that there’s a lot of theory to cover, and you need to build the intuition on how it applies to real world circuit design on the fly.

I had a bit of an epiphany when I was in a set theory/number theory class and some classmates were breezing through proofs that I struggled with. I was having to do algebraic manipulations in a way that was novel to me, but was intuitive to math nerds. I felt like that guy who didn’t “get” the intuition in an intro programming or circuits class.

But yeah, students often get some context for math or programming in high school, but rarely for circuit design. E&M in physics at best. EE programs have solved this by weeding out anyone who can’t bash their way through the foundational theory… which isn’t great.

If you’re still interested, I would recommend the Student Manual to the Art of Electronics. It’s a very practical, lab-based book that throws out a lot of the math in favor of rules of thumb and gaining intuition for circuit design.

That’s kinda the whole point, isn’t it? I’m just a layman, but my understanding is that the incompatibilities of GR and QM point to a need for a proper theory of gravity. Looking at the dark matter problem from a purely GR-perspective will miss that context.

From the abstract:

This unique configuration offers the opportunity to combine two major lensing cosmological probes: time-delay cosmography and dual source-plane lensing since J1721+8842 features multiple lensed sources forming two distinct Einstein radii of different sizes, one of which being a variable quasar. We expect tight constraints on the Hubble constant and the equation of state of dark energy by combining these two probes on the same system. The z2=1.885 deflector, a quiescent galaxy, is also the highest-redshift strong galaxy-scale lens with a spectroscopic redshift measurement.

Gotcha, thanks! I'm not in the Apple Developer Program, but I'm tempted to do it just to be able to experiment with sideloading all sorts of LÖVE programs.

Carousel looks neat! I haven’t played around with Lua or LÖVE much, but this reminds me of Processing, except with more of a focus on creating useful mini-apps instead of visual art. It also reminds me SmileBASIC for the Nintendo 3DS.

What would distributing this for iOS look like? I guess it would be publishable on the App Store, since there are apps like Pythonista out there?

About page: https://deskthing.app/about

Looks like a project to open up Spotify’s discontinued Car Thing to homebrew apps.

If the devs are reading this: the GitHub README and homepage both don’t have a description of what the project is. I had to click around for a while until I found the about page.

TechTechPotato (Ian Cutress’ YouTube channel) has a nice summary/analysis video of this here: https://youtu.be/j6kX7JWMiV0

As well as a longer form podcast video with George from Chips and Cheese: https://www.youtube.com/live/T20rxYUySPw

Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more central to daily life. For better or worse, that's going to put limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable.

I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_ coming. Maybe we didn't expect it to look exactly like the iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket.

Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking "man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it actually just works." A lot of stuff was basically just demos back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.

It’s very neat that ThreadX and friends are MIT licensed now. I used ThreadX and NetX a bunch before the acquisition and open sourcing, and generally enjoyed using them. TX has a tight API / system design and implementation that makes it really nice to use.

I remember running into some obscure bugs with the NetX BSD socket layer that we ended up fixing in-house. It’s been way too long to dig up the specifics, but it’s great that fixes can now be upstreamed more easily.

I was just trying this weekend to compile a playlist celebrating Labor Day and I realized that I knew of zero songs about a strong work ethic, or loving one's employer, or enjoying the workday

You do realize that Labor Day is not about any of those things, right?

I haven’t seen any incredible outcomes from them, but I think they can be nice if they’re low key with no real expectation of productization. Definitely shouldn’t be any “prizes”.

The best uses of hackathons I’ve seen are for experimenting with things that will have a direct workflow improvement for your team/org. You’re not gonna impact the company product roadmap with a hackathon project. If you do, it’ll feel lame because it’ll be a product manager lifting your concept and throwing away the implementation.

I’ve spent hackathons getting team members together and working on things like a bootloader rewrite, toolchain improvements, adding that one API to our SDK that I really wanted personally, etc. Stuff that’s hard to find time to work on day-to-day, but can be marketed internally and if it works out, merged to immediately improve things for your team.

Worst part is, a lot of device manufacturers just yeet the GATT out the window and have custom UUIDs with custom everything which you'll never be able to implement properly with reverse engineering it.

Sorry, I’m part of the problem. ^_^; If you read the BLE Developers Handbook, it paints a beautiful picture of a mesh of low power sensor devices that periodically advertise information, and it helped put the design of GATT into context for me. Of course, we had no interest in using GATT in that manner - we just wanted the other features of BLE. One fundamental issue is that if you want E2E transport encryption to a specific mobile app, LE bonding is no longer sufficient. So you start rolling your own crypto only to realize that negotiated MTU means your max datagram size is variable and dynamic. From there, you’re well on your way to implementing a custom transport layer on top of GATT. If you don’t horribly abuse GATT and use it for its intended purpose (like some of the standardized profiles on top of GATT), it works fairly decently.

I’m not much of a watch guy, but I got a “rep” moonswatch for under $20 as my first watch. It’s actually fairly convincing from a distance, but some of the dials were not zeroed properly and the cheap crystal made it hard to actually read.

That then got me to buy an actual Moonswatch and an affordable Seiko Chronos. I can’t imagine myself getting more into the hobby (especially the high end), but I think I can appreciate a little bit more now. I think Moonswatch pulled a lot of new people in (riding the whole 2020s watch wave).

Agreed. I’m honestly not familiar with how they’re structured for hardware contracts like this. I was imagining some sort of cost plus structure. No point in speculating on the details of a contract dispute where we don’t have the contract, I suppose.

I was under the mistaken understanding that EE was not paid out at all. Rereading their statement, they say they were partially paid, so I think I was overly harsh. This is firmly in “boring, messy contract dispute” territory now, I’d say. :)

I get that you’re worried, but I think your kid is probably fine. They’re still a young kid in college at the end of the day. Figuring out how to deal with stuff like this is half of what college is all about.

I went to one of the EECS programs you mentioned, and the workload and stress that gets piled onto you is pretty intense. Just keeping my head above water was tough, and a B average GPA is honestly not something to worry about unless they want to go to grad school. I also played a ton of games, not only for stress relief, but also because my social circle was all online and we interacted via gaming. I imagine it’s similar for your kid.

Of course, if it keeps developing into something unhealthy, maybe it’s worth bringing up. But an EECS program is basically an unhealthy situation to begin with, so you’re going to see all sorts of coping behaviors. At least it’s not alcohol or weed. :)

Reading EE and DEFCON’s statements, I’m inclined to think whoever was managing this on DEFCON’s side was not on top of things and blinked at the last minute. I’m sure there were delays and issues on EE’s end, as it always goes with hardware, but it’s still EE’s design, parts sourcing, and manufacturing run that DEFCON just took over last minute?

I don’t know the terms of their contract, but that wouldn’t fly in a typical contractor setup. You can’t just cut out the contractors labor costs after the fact. I’d be more inclined to give DEFCON the benefit of the doubt if they canceled the entire project earlier on and engaged a different contractor to build an entirely different badge from scratch.

Given that dimitri wasn’t even paid for the firmware(!), my guess is this was low budget. For something of DEFCON’s scale, this can’t really be a “for fun” hacker project if you want to guarantee results. The “for fun” part is ensuring the attendees can all have a good time hacking on the badge, not the people doing the labor.

Ahh, yeah I think you’re right. The story left a big impression on me, but I guess not well enough for me to remember the details. :)

If I'm remembering correctly, Jeri Ellsworth said in an interview that the CastAR glasses were fabbed on a gate array. I thought it was super cool how they were able to prototype a device on FPGA and get chips fabbed as a consumer electronics startup. It probably makes less and less sense nowadays, with how cheap and capable MCUs have gotten.

Hey, sorry for the late response. I posted my notes here: https://github.com/Hylian/beepy-radxa-zero-notes. It's a straight swap hardware-wise, and for software, you just need to build/install the kernel modules and configure some kernel boot arguments.

Feel free to ask in the Discord if you have any questions.

To do better by the employees, the CEO really should have fought harder to have the whole company get acqui-hired, even if Google would have shut down the service. Maybe there were some other considerations that I’m not seeing (ie. There are good reasons the company should be kept going, and there’s a good path to success even without Noam. The article doesn’t specify how many employees are going over, so it’s hard to tell.) Landing the employees a relatively cushy Google SWE gig after helping build your company is the least you could do for them.

My pet peeve with RasPi for these types of handheld projects is that they don't support suspend, and don't have a true poweroff state. Even in poweroff, they sit there consuming a bunch of current.

Beepy is a similar project that uses a RasPi Zero, and their approach is to cut power to the RasPi entirely with a management MCU. On my Beepy, I switched to a Radxa Zero instead and ported over any relevant kernel modules and device tree overlays, because it has an Amlogic SoC that actually supports suspend.

As an embedded C developer who has since branched out to Rust and C++, I’m definitely curious about Zig. Reading about this, I’m a bit split. Losing some of the C interop “magic” sucks, but the proposal to use the Zig build system seems pretty reasonable.

Really, I think what C developers want is a modern, opinionated tooling solution a la cargo. If the Zig build system can deliver that (plus the much better ergonomics of the language itself), I think it could be very compelling.

I’m sick of Make, CMake, Nix flakes, Docker, manually bundling specific arm cross toolchains, etc. If I can send someone a Zig + C project and the zig.build Just Works, I’m all for it.