pickledcods

saving (one) swap space by adding 3 reads and 3 calculations.

Say you master this knowledge, how would you go around finding a fitting job?

I'm starting a new chapter in my life and find it impossible to find a position that matches the collection of abilities, and the rare ones available responded with excuses ranging from too old to too mediocre. It is so bad that I'm now looking into switching to education, specifically gifted youngster where my knowledge and insights might rub off, guide, inspire and motivate. But even that is proving to be difficult.

Background: I'm an 70ies wizz-kid, Europe (NL), have an ATW-800, 9 years computer science education including hardware and software, through bad college advice was dis-advised to take the academic path, OS-design (linux, medical, HPC) in 90ies, small single-board computers in 00ies, fractal logic and calculating with structures in 10ies. My handicap: I'm too shy to stand in a spotlight or in front of a camera.

Because it is internet connected, and possibly only works when internet connected, you are dependent on the manufacturer after purchase. Does it have a built in web-server that can device-independent access all functions through a local net. If not then it sounds to me like after-sales.

What are the after-sales terms? Is there a contract? Are you going to pay for an after-sales subscription? If not, how is their business model to finance it? How is your privacy or personal identification involved? How long will the product be supported (Planned obsolescence)? Can you block automatic-updates? Can you downgrade the firmware? What are your legal options if they close down the service before product end-of-lifetime? Or liability if the product gets hacked and destroys/damages property? Will refusing after-sales influence warranty? What are their terms & conditions to ban your access to the device? What are the non-automated options in case of disputes? What are the options/rights when escalating complaints?

Sounds like these questions should be answered on the box before you (or the person installing it) should open it. Or in the first section of EULA in layman's terms.

The weird thing is when I'm mentally exhausted. The sound effects changes and clicks and plops are added.

The only moment I am truly free of tinnitus is losing the fight against falling asleep. Seconds before I slip into a dream state there is silence. Most notable when falling asleep in the passenger seat of a car on a long trip. It's like I'm actually experiencing parts of my brain shutting down.

It also heavily stresses relationships.

I have the equivalent of two jet engines in my ears, including the characteristic phase shifting. Managing it is basically mentally "locking it out", which has the side effect of becoming insensitive to real-world audio stimuli.

So when my SO talks to me when I'm off guard, I only realise that mid-sentence before I "unlock" my perception. The first few words are usually the essence which are lost, so I need to ask her to repeat the first few words.

But as a non-Tinnitus she does not understand, gets annoyed, and starts shouting the whole sentence exaggerated articulated which kinda hurts both my ears an feelings, gets me annoyed because I explained why hundreds of times. Basically ruining the the moment for both of us, especially in public.

Fighting over it isn't worth it, so now I'm more into nodding friendly and hope she doesn't notice that I didn't get what she said, which creates a whole new bunch of problems.

The biggest pitfall with manual bulk transcribing Pascal to C back in day, was that operator precedence between both languages are really different. Not only is their model of thinking different, it is also wrong.

All the fractal related projects have gathered under the github account RockingShip, the main project being Untangle. The other projects give an indication of the direction, most notably the bezier curves. A the moment I have lost the focus to write a nice paper, but there is a large README and lots of in-code and timestamped annotations.

https://github.com/RockingShip

Timing of the article is impeccable.

I've devoted my life work on fractal logic and calculating with structures, spanning 4 disciplines and two dozen discoveries. One of the many opportunities it gives is transforming hash functions, making it possible to calculate the inverse.

This week the first production version was unveiled, which should have solved all the problems the prototype encountered. DES was selected as first example. All the components passed successfully. Only... self-modifying recursive structures behave in mysterious ways, and apparently differently than expected. It was a self financed project and I literally bet everything (wife, house, money) on a single horse which didn't win.

I started hacking computers with the Commodore PET (1977) and worked with micros, minis and mainframes, spanning from firmware to operating systems/developer tools and 9 years of computer science education. I am turning 59 next week, have no recent job history or network and it feels like I just dropped out of school.

Putting Optimal Quitting into practice. I just started: accepting the loss and letting go. It feels weird. Energy levels and sleep have drastically changed. Next step: deciding to return to the rat-race keeping the expertise or quitting everything and walk a different path, after all, this is the last phase of my professional life.

> it is awkward to draw things with Bézier curves

Sorry for repeating my comment, but you really should check out the the interactive examples of the closed bezier curves (which could also be open). They were designed to be intuitive as the control points are on curve.

The project is is in its infancy, yet the interactive examples are working. https://rockingship.github.io/ccbc/README.html

Slightly related: Closed Continuous Bézier Curves with on-curve control-points for a Much more intuitive interaction. It is also used to fit curves into arbitrary outlines like country/region borders.

The project is heavily under construction, however the interactive examples are functional. The examples are intended for desktop, but should work with touchscreens.

https://rockingship.github.io/ccbc/README.html

And then reading the manual to discover the other things it could do

I have the exact same problem with my European passport. maximum name length, that is total first+middle+surname must be less than 30 characters.

Officially I am not who I am.

This is absolutely amazing and is the perfect gift for the research I'm working on: fractal logic and calculating with structures.

The concept is to break down (algebraic) operators into a single fundamental operator and a single reference value (zero/null). And because there is only one operator and one value, they can be removed from the system. What remains is the "essence of information" in the form of connections, opening a new realm of problem solving, especially in the realm of SAT solving. It's not about what the operator does, it's about how they are connected together.

The "fractal operator" is a switch of which one input is inverted. The expressions/structures are stored as vectors and evaluated by activating them sequentially. For some years I visualised it being implemented with photons instead of electrons. And assuming that only a single photon is needed to set the switch state.

This is a wish come true!

  [0] https://github.com/RockingShip/untangle

The rise of Trusted Computing where users are considered untrusted and perhaps even criminal by default. It will only get worse: playing any kind of media with a browser and OS you dislike.

The biggest performance hit that is educated everywhere is accessing pixels through getImageData() as bytes. In many cases it is way better to access it as a 32-bits RGBA value, like with:

  const rgba = new Uint32Array(getImageData(0, 0, width, height).data.buffer);
  rgba[y * width + x] = R | G << 8 | B << 16 | A << 24;

And using Array.subarray as substitute for memcpy() for block copy:

  function memcpy(dst, dstOffset, src, srcOffset, length) {
    src = src.subarray(srcOffset, srcOffset + length);
    dst.set(src, dstOffset);
  }

For a high performance/responsive 2D canvas the best approach is with webworkers and ArrayBuffer, like I did for this project:

https://rockingship.github.io/jsFractalZoom/jsFractalZoom.ht...

It can easily handle 4K resolution.

Thank you for the insight!

The thing I greatly dislike about Ironwolf is that it displays a nonsense value for the smart attribute "Raw_Read_Error_Rate". I have no idea to how to extract the actual error rate, if any.

Wait till your TV license expires

Absolutely underrated comment! Most websites use only 60% of the available screen width.

I'm tech savvy, raised my kids internet liberal, gave them lots of freedom and educated them so they could protect themselves without adult supervision. Training to cope with unexpected situations is far more important than withholding them from exposure because you won't be there when it eventually does happen. They are now very literate and use those skills to get the best out of university.

With all their experience and knowledge, they are now warning me: "Dad, facebook/instagram has become a toxic cesspool that isn't fun anymore and should be avoided at all cost!!"

If that isn't a signal to protect youngsters...

Please stop!

Hi HN!

What started as a simple project to explore advanced javascript optimisations turned into something really big. It gave deeper insight in how we perceive motion and how our mind, brain and eyes play a role. Expanding the possibilities beyond zooming through procedural generated content, I was really interested in applying the knowledge to real-live imagery and motion.

I'm really proud of the results [0]: the "zoomer" engine [1] including API for custom content, and the "splash" codec [2] including an FFmpeg codec implementation.

Enjoy!

  [0] https://RockingShip.github.io/jsFractalZoom/README.html       - README
  [1] https://RockingShip.github.io/jsFractalZoom                   - Direct link to the zoomer (for the impatient)
  [2] https://RockingShip.github.io/jsFractalZoom-media/README.html - 4K zoomer gallery and splash demos

And Hippopotamus are closest related to pigs.

It changed with political correct investments. Some 15 years ago people became aware of companies investing in weapon industry, specifically cluster munition and landmines. A signal was sent by publicly shaming companies that shrugged their shoulders. That set a general trend to avoid negative publications and backfire by explicitly distancing from politically or humanitarian questionable practices. It has now escalated to fear-management and rewriting history.

Thank you for pointing out my grammatical failure. Tom's work is amazing, I read it and was really impressed. There are not many people who swim on this level of coding.

What I meant was that I knew that executables consisting of printable ascii is possible, I just wasn't happy that the ascii art was cluttered with symbols.

To make it more aesthetic and to create shading differences by utilizing the glyph sizes, I was looking into selecting the tallest (digits) and shortest (lowercase letters). However, the lowercase letters with ascenders and descenders make it fuzzy so they were removed too.

With these restrictions the ante of the challenge were raised significantly. In my response I was referring to that. Downplaying Tom is unfair as his work is marvellous, and I know because I also build compilers. I wish I could correct the text to make this clear but it is now locked.

As was noted by jstrieb, there exists a compiler that does that, so basically any native program. There is no challenge in that.

A real challenge would be, how far can you cripple an instruction set such that it still can do something useful.

Crippling is done by reducing the 192 printable characters to 36 alphanumeric characters. That leaves 4 instructions with limited addressing modes.

This problem is hard because what you need, even for self modifying code is not available. What smile does is to make that available with the only two instructions left over that modify values: XOR and IMUL.

ASCII executables have been made in the past and use any displayable ASCII character. The difference with those is that this project is exclusively alphanumeric. To my knowledge that is a first.

Hi HN!

When ASCII art is the executable....

Executables consisting exclusively of alpha-numeric characters. The digits "0123456789" are used for dark, the letters "acemnorsuvwxz" for light.

Removing instructions that are not alpha-numerical, strips functionality down to the minimum:

  - 4.5 of the 7 registers available (%bx, %si, %di, %bp, %ah)
  - 4 of the ~80 instructions groups available (XOR,IMUL,CMP,Jcc)
  - constant values start from 48, (only range 0x30-0x39,0x61-0x79)

By cosmic coincidence, the 2 instructions needed to jailbreak are available. On top of that, self-modifying code and radix13 encoding.

This should have been released a decade ago. As compensation, it has been remastered. The reward was making it 30% smaller.

Things I haven't considered. Thanks.