jmole

This article is a good reminder that essentially everything in your computer boils down to really precise mechanical engineering.

Any chance you'll release on macOS/Linux?

Unless it's a key that needs to be sortable (e.g. insertion order) or a metric/descriptor of some kind, I'm not sure why UUID would be overused or inappropriate for use.

i always worry about tools like this, maintained by small teams, that are so universal that even if only a small fraction of installs are somehow co-opted by malicious actors, you have a wide open attack surface on most tech companies.

e.g. iTerm, Cyberduck, editors of all shades, various VSCode extensions, etc.

The question is, are we storing the state of a chess game, or the state of a chess board?

If a game, you might also include timers or other state as well, including full position history.

This is great, I've been looking for an easy to use local chat app for me and my kids, and Adium on Bonjour has been flaky with my VLAN setup at home. Will have to give this a try...

Isn't circular funding how the entire economy works?

I can see how you could make an argument that this particular ouroboros has an insufficient loop area to sustain itself, or more significantly, lacks connection to the rest of the economy, but money has to flow in circles/cycles or it doesn't work at all.

> worst case scenario being the flat profile where program time is roughly evenly distributed

It sounds like the “worst case“ here is that the program is already optimized.

I think the correct strategy in this case is to return your laptop to the store if it has linux compatibility issues, and keep trying until you find one that works.

i.e. don't support vendors whose laptops don't work in Linux.

Its not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with laptop manufacturers not caring about designing their ACPI tables and firmware correctly.

It's ACPI - most laptops ship with half-broken ACPI tables, and provide support for tunables through windows drivers. It's convenient for laptop manufacturers, because Microsoft makes it very easy to update drivers via windows update, and small issues with sleep, performance, etc. can be mostly patched through a driver update.

Linux OTOH can only use the information it has from ACPI to accomplish things like CPU power states, etc. So you end up with issues like "the fans stop working after my laptop wakes from sleep" because of a broken ACPI implementation.

There are a couple of laptops with excellent battery life under linux though, and if you can find a lunar lake laptop with iGPU and IPS screen, you can idle around 3-4W and easily get 12+ hours of battery.

I thought this article would first start with the most essential question: "How to decide what you need on your devboard".

Without that critical piece of design work, you may as well call this "How to build a Raspberry Pi Nano from scratch". Which, to be fair, is also a good article to write.

But step 1 for really building a dev board is answering the question, "What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?"

Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.

"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"

Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.

Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?

> The I-team also found six sergeants in the Sheriff's Office who live out of state - in Idaho, Nevada, Texas and Tennessee. Two of them work on the bomb squad where they made almost $600,000 in pay and benefits last year.

Not sure about you, but when I submit a “contact us” form, I am about 10% sure someone will actually read it.

When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.

Is there any intrinsic value whatsoever in the DNA or SNPs themselves? Or is it just the link between your name and your DNA that is so concerning?

It seems like you could do lots of useful things without having a name attached to any particular sample. There must be some kind of differential privacy approach here that would work well.

What use case?

I got mine to make a backup copy of the remote controls that I'm worried about losing, which happen to be sub-GHz and infrared.

> Imagine an AI engine like a block of swiss cheese. New, original content that fills one of the holes in the AI engine’s block of cheese is more valuable than repetitive, low-value content that unfortunately dominates much of the web today.

Great statement in theory - but in practice, the whole people-as-a-service industry for AI data generation is IMO more damaging to the knowledge ecosystem than open data. e.g. companies like pareto.ai

"Proprietary data for pennies on the dollar" is the late-stage capitalism equivalent of the postdoctoral research trap.

That would be a great argument if you could actually install apps from outside the Apple App Store.

"No user ratings and reviews" - that just means you rank last in app store search, right?

Apple will do whatever they can to ensure that developers that don't pay will suffer the costs.

That was a worldwide change after they figured out long acting beta agonists were basically killing people because they don’t treat the underlying inflammation like inhaled corticosteroids do.

I have 3 kids, all around the same age (K/1). They all got laptops about 18 months ago for christmas. I installed mint linux on all of them, and installed a few free/libre games for them to play, and I self-host the game server at home.

One game they play is luanti (formerly minetest). I gave them instructions on how to clone the git repository for the game, run the build script, and then start the game. They've probably forgotten the build instructions, but they know to play, they have to type `cd code/minetest` and then `bin/luanti`. Occasionally they have to run `git pull` to update the code on their computers. I handle all the game server administration.

I initially blocked all internet access with a kill switch, but this quickly became an issue because you need to be able to run `apt update` and a few other commands to keep the system up to date. So now I run a proxy server called e2guardian that lets them access sites that I choose.

Later, I introduced them to scratch, and I downloaded the entirely of griffpatch's youtube library with yt-dlp and organized it into folders on each of their computers. I've done the same thing with other tutorial style videos. They don't have access to youtube, and I don't really think it makes sense to give them access at this age.

They run scratch locally, as opposed to using scratch.mit.edu. I enabled the scratch website for a couple of days as a treat for them, and as expected, they spent most of the time exploring and playing others' games, but very little time building their own. I sort of expected this to happen, so we closed off access a few days later, and they took some of the ideas they saw online and started playing with them locally.

So my experience is:

a) linux makes a great platform for kids, since it's very easy to tweak things to stop behaviors that you don't want to reinforce. e.g. `sudo chmod 400 /usr/local/games` turns off all the games, `sudo killall kidname` will close the desktop session if your kid isn't listening when it's time for bed, you can set up time-based login policies with pam_time, you can install your own root certificates for SSL MITM, etc.

b) games reinforce that "computers are fun", and games like luanti are free, open-source, and hackable.

c) interest in games naturally spills over into interest in making your own games.

If you want to try luanti/minetest, I recently cleaned up/released a mod that I built for the kids last year called turtlebots. It's a visual programming tool that lets you program little turtle-shaped robots that can navigate in a minecraft-style world and build things as they move around. Source is here: https://github.com/jmole/turtlebots

> To facilitate this synchronisation, stable base-load power is required, which is normally provided by nuclear and other large gas and hydroelectric facilities. These sources act as a natural buffer against disturbances, helping to keep the frequency stable in the face of sudden changes in generation or demand.

In theory, it seems like you could instrument a photovoltaic array to carry some "inertia" with the right control system.

If you need to feed power, you run some power point tracking algorithm, and if you need to consume power, you just overbias the cells and heat them up.

not really, since tokenization combines multiple characters

IDK, I think Gemini is great. Way better than bard.

That’s ridiculous, there is plenty of confidence in US manufactured goods, the problem is that US manufacturers have impossible economics for anything that isn’t boutique or super high margin.

Need an impedance controlled 16 layer board for your fancy new military radar? No problem.

Need a basic 2 layer PCB for mass manufacture? No one in the US will make it at the price you need to be competitive.

This is so cool. I modified the script so that the countries are a bit darker (#777), and I found that it helped the borders pop a lot more. It would probably be equally interesting to play this game with no borders at all.

Not to scope creep, but it would be great if users could pick from 1 or 2 themes. Or maybe just refactor it so that changing a global var from the javascript would let you change the colors.

edit: also the collective north and south poles take up about 60% of the zoomed out map. I bet you could crop most of antarctica and a significant portion of the upper northern hemisphere without degrading the experience.

You'd think this would be more well known. In fourier analysis or other frequency/wavelet decomposition techniques, the data you get out depends a ton on the windowing function that you use.

For example:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function#Examples_of_wi...

I can't say for sure, since I don't work on search or web crawling, but it doesn't seem unlikely that the Google of 2000s would serve nothing but spam on the internet of today.

> I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google.

Yes, and that's why Google is embracing AI here. "Web Search" doesn't perform as well as it used to, and people are usually looking for answers, not search results.

What I do miss, and I think what you're getting at here, is that there is a certain amount of dark matter in the web today – all the little sites that used to show up on google to fill little niches throughout the internet now feel undiscoverable, even if they are still there. Every results page feels like a list of forbes.com and medium.com news/advertorial/aggregator sites, a couple reddit links, and a couple of forums.

I can't, for example, ask Google for a list of online portfolios of artists who have experience in three.js. It seems like back then, you _could_ do that and get a reasonable list of results.