Could you explain more? I could ask an LLM but I find it friendlier to ask you, ha! If you don't mind of course.
What does a bias oscillator do that would help, and is the ips speed slow ie it's a low "resolution" (so to speak) analog recording?
10,523 karma · joined November 7, 2010
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Cofounder of a web mapping startup acquired by Apple.
Received awards from the US Coast Guard and the Governor General of Canada for creating a map that helped rescue 1,700 people during Hurricane Harvey.
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Currently refurbishing laptops with robots! https://www.reviserobotics.com/ (YC W25)
Also working on Disco, an open source self-hosting software: https://disco.cloud/
See my talk about it at the Recurse Center: https://youtu.be/z2lP7C8VT6M
And this (slightly less chaotic) Devtools FM episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr3JJpbCRP0
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And even more stuff that's wildly out of date - https://greg.technology • https://tandy.link/s/greg.technology
What does a bias oscillator do that would help, and is the ips speed slow ie it's a low "resolution" (so to speak) analog recording?
- OSC is a reasonable upgrade from MIDI, is IP-native (e.g. works with addresses and ports) and has messages/paths ie you can send some value (int/string) to `/some/path`
- OSC typically being transported over UDP (most libraries have UDP support, and only some TCP) means that you cannot get a confirmation that you're sending messages to the right IP or port, or that you're sending to the right port but that the path or payload is wrong
- and as mentioned in the article, UDP messages does not guarantee the order in which messages arrive
For sending a series of updates when a rotary knob is turned, I can see why you'd reach for UDP (even though out-of-order'ness can still bite you).
For sending one-shot not-idempotent messages, it seems terrible to me?
And... I also recently learned/saw that in very very big theatrical productions, audio professionals do reach for OSC and use it over UDP, which seemed not-the-best.
In any case, would love to hear thoughts from others on this topic!
The tooling is open source, and Fable in a loop - especially when paired with a digital scope that Fable interfaces with (the Saleae’s [1] are great) - gives you a level of verifiability that feels like beyond what software typically gives you. ie it feels more like Lean than code with tests.
I had ai implement a few toy circuits (sha hashing, 8088 emulation, a tiny llm) but yeah. Still looking for fun applications.
There have been a few recent fpga threads on hn, check them out. [2][3]
[0] https://1bitsquared.com/products/icebreaker
Also, you are the most incredibly generous person for lending me that extraordinary piece of computing history!! I recorded its relay sounds and actual resistances. I truly cannot tell you how happy it made me.
Yes, even more greg stuff here, what the heck: https://minivac.greg.technology/
- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.
- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.
- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]
- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding
[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver
[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...
I tried it on https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ and saw this small typo
cheers!
p.s. same as you, I was introduced to Logo around the age of 8 and I remember writing programs on paper when I was home, stepping through them line by line... it was inevitable I'd gravitate towards programming, ha :-)
I reached out to my friend Zack Schollz who's behind croc (past thread - [3]) and asked him whether he could add support for ssh and he... just did. He added read, read+write, web and terminal client sharing support. It's bananas, and it works super well (just tested on a fresh digital ocean droplet).
Just wanted to PSA/Tell HN!! Tmate was a really beautiful and great solution - it's sad that it went away. But we have something else now! Cheers
[0] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate
[1] https://tmate.io/ - 503 error
[2] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate/issues/322 "I'm closing the servers permanently"
I found out about these industrial routers just now (looking for an out of band option for a robot we're deploying in the field) and thought it might be interesting for others as well.
As mentioned by the other commenter, there is openwrt support for them - so they're just an additional option (for 5g routers), etc.
Also just curious if anyone’s used them and have comments or thoughts. That's it! :-)
re: language model - here, the embedding lookup, layers, logits all run on-chip and loops its own output back.
the only off-chip piece is the id to string table, i.e. the chip (once I get it!) will speak token ids and my laptop will print them as letters
From what I understand, one of the big advantages of the up5k chip (the same chip on the webfpga and the icebreaker) is that there's an open toolchain that runs in seconds (at this chip size), which is not the case in the closed/Vivado/"typical fpga" part of the world. (feel free to correct me)
Purely in simulation this week, I had Claude (Fable) design a working Tetris out of 1400 relays - originally, this was for a Minivac web simulator that I/Fable had built [1]. Then, it compiled the relay netlist to Verilog and ran it on the simulated chip, comparing this (bezerk) port relay-for-relay against the original simulator. All matching (total llm time: less than an hour). I had it also make a viz of the netlist blinking through one simulated run [2] - sort of like visual6502.org..!
Today, I (Fable) ported tinystories [3], a very small language model to this exact same chip. It's currently "golfing" to get it to fit onto the real chip size (it's ~10% over, I'm hopeful). EDIT: it just golfed it! ~~7 tokens/sec at 12Mhz in simulation!
None of these are "use cases", but these boards seem small/cheap enough that you can do new deranged things with them, which is very very exciting to me. I see a great future.
[0] https://1bitsquared.com/products/icebreaker
[1] https://minivac.greg.technology/tetris/
Most media outlets will use "pirate informatique" (or just "pirate") when talking about hackers, and "piratage" for hacking. Example: [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_...
[1] https://vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/resultats-de-rec...
[2] https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-faits-divers/2...
And two - does anyone know of a keyboard that has some-trackpad-like (or pure scrolling..?) device pretty much where the trackpad would be on a laptop?
I spend time working on my laptop, get used to scrolling / moving the mouse "under" the keyboard (ie closer to me) using the trackpad, and when I go back to my desk with my full sized keyboard, I see myself reaching for a phantom trackpad.
Thanks!
When there’s a will, there’s a way :) I’m not immediately sure re Fitbit Air (that’s nasty if it’s e2e encrypted!), but… maybe it doesn’t pin the server certificate and you can intercept communications?
Seems like you would have fun reversing this! :) reach out!