somat

Sigh, webcams, at one point they were solved. How far we have fallen.

Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.

And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.

So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"

The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.

Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.

I suspect the danger of pivoting into a pure fashion design is that even in the fashion market people crave a little authenticity. Perhaps you never run but you like the idea and so buy running shoes. do you get the fake running shoes or the real ones?

The other one I have noticed is work boots. With a complex market interaction. Real work boots are expensive, built to survive in an adverse environment. However people crave something with substance. So there is a large customer base buying them for fashion. The manufacturer notices this and start to reduce quality(no need to build them so well if the customer won't notice) and you end up with an expensive boot that sucks. The (much smaller) real customer base, the workers, do start noticing and slowly start moving to a different brand, the fashion customers eventually pick up on this and follow. the whole process can take decades.

If we are doing a survey of self hosted video conferencing services I would like to propose galene. Very easy to set up, I run it on obsd(an unsupported platform) and it just works.

https://galene.org/

For what it's worth(not much) On OpenBSD swap is always encrypted, With or without full-disk encryption. I don't know why linux always has to make the easy things hard.

A skit

Boss enters, enthusiastic hand gestures

dev: Web 2.0? what the hell are you on about?

Boss: evasive mumbling

dev: Oh... css border-radius Sure, I will get right on it.

I just got nerd sniped by the room map in the movie, it is a minor 30 second scene where the clerk shows the guests a map of the hotel so they can pick their room.

The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.

However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".

Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"

This is the source of my favorite border dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...

In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.

Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.

"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."

We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.

Yeah, insisting on "only" shell is weird, shell is at heart a process orchestrater, and denying it it's processes is rejecting most of it's functionality. It is equivalent to saying "do this in python, but you are not allowed to use any modules"

Without processes shell is just a weird sad little language, with them it turns into this epic data flow language. With some real design stinkers, Most of these are due to it's interactive first focus, The features desirable for interactive use, often start to stink for stored program use, I will note that having the same language for interactive and scripting is pretty kick ass.

On the subject of dataflow languages has there been any research in this area? Something that can stitch together processes as well or better than shell? Perl may work in this role but I have to admit I really dislike it's syntax, and as such I never learned Perl enough to love it. and while most other scripting languages can technicaly create pipelines, it is very awkward compared to shell.

Very depressing, and I believe it.

I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)

My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.

It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.

Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.

Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.

Boy it would be nice however.

On that note, I remember reading how some phones were able to use the headphone jack as a serial debug port, which is pretty neat.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Serial_debugging/Cable_sc...

It is sort of like english spelling, we all know spelling in english sucks(So pointlessly difficult we have contests centered around the skill), we also all know we can do nothing to fix it. Still gonna complain about it however.

The fundamental problem in music notation is that it was designed for an 8 note system and we use a 12 note system. It's.. fine I guess, they got those extra four notes in there and millions of people read music with no problems. But it does create a lot of confusion for novice readers who now think those 8 notes are somehow more important than the other 4 or that the sharps and flats are somehow half notes(they are not, all 12 are equally spaced on a log scale) and don't even get me started on the confusing terminology, there are 12 notes in an octet, semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.

With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.

I was watching a video of a guy fixing up an old homemade guitar he found. A well built solid piece, only one that exists in the world. A thing somebody spent real time and effort to create, and nearly worthless. While some soulless factory built item from the same era that sold in the thousands is highly collectable with a price to match. There is a sort of tragedy with these things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngq4Hw4B9J0

Flow batteries specifically are liquid, or more accurately fluid, there can be gas flow batteries, where the chemical sub-products are pumped in and out of the cells.

They tend to be large utility scale things that look like a chemical plant, correction, are a chemical plant with electrical storage as the product.

Liquid electrolyte batteries have been a thing from when batteries have been invented. But not much work has been done to really scale it up.

The public is not going to buy a flow battery anyway.

Or perhaps they will, but only when public is taken in the context as in public utility or public city. But individuals are not going to buy a flow battery, it is a chemical plant.

Static-site generators.

Nothing wrong with that, I like to think there are some apps you should probably make yourself, like the blacksmith apprentice making their own tools.

The tricky bit, especially for the small operater is keeping a working drive as long as you want to keep the storage.

As a interesting tangent consider the data structure and the data behind a thesaurus. I was using the wordnet data for a project. https://wordnet.princeton.edu My first pass was to do the modern thing and just load the entire data into memory, it would fit with no problem. But when I noticed their screwball dataformat was designed to be dynamically accessed from disk I could not resist and rewrote the whole thing to do just that. Probably a waste of time but it was a lot of fun to write.

For what it is worth every reference word is coupled to a byte offset so lookups are a simple seek away. Today we would just jam it in a sqlite db and call it a day(salutes to sqlite for making this so easy) But I thought it was really clever.

A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.

It sounds like the only end result of this is them making the bureaucracy even more bureaucratic by employing their own agents, where the only way to get anything done is to have your agents fight their agents.

Frankly, it feels like Kafka was actually an optimist.

Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end.

“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”

As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.

Aside from the fact that it is a stupid law, there should not be any sort of exemption.

I have not read the other proposed laws in this category but after reading the California law, I found it was so vague that my interpretation is that any operating system where the owner, well... actually owns the system is already in compliance. The law requires a mechanism where the OS can provide owner age data to applications. All operating systems where the owner is in control already provide a mechanism to supply data to apps, on most (mac, windows, unix, dos even) systems this is the file api, So to be in compliance with the law the owner can make a file that an application could access with the required info. No, there was nothing there about when an application needs this data, or even, like so many people assume, that it has to be out of the control of the owner.

The CA law was so vague and pointless, my only conclusion is that it is a sort of frog boiling scheme. Test the waters to see if they actually have jurisdiction.

I would argue most data is inherently(naively?) hierarchical(the document), relational structured data is a clever but unintuitive mechanism to introduce powerful analytic opportunities to a set of data.

Basically a document is a report, a large disjoint volume of information on a subject, I consider this the natural form of data because this is how it is collected and how most people think about it. relational is sort of like storing that data as vertical slices through your stack of reports. Not natural at all but much nicer for analysis across the data set.

The "document" is sort of the native data type, Put everything in a big hierarchical structure, It is very flexible but analytics across the set can suffer. "relational" is another way to store data, break your big hierarchy into sets of related rows and store the rows as a table, If I were to describe it in geometric terms where the document is a report on a paper, the relation is a vertical slice through a stack of those reports. This is slightly non-intuitive but provides for interesting analysis opportunities.

But nothing prevents you from treating your relational database as a document database, set it up as a key-value store where each key is is the document title and each value is a large blob of document data. If your documents are fairly consistent it is also easy enough to build indexes and query features to regain some of the analytical ability of relational data.

I am in that club. As someone who quite enjoys writing sql but does not like the big sql strings intermingled in the rest of the code I even wrote a clever little python library that loads the queries from files as a function call, that is, you have a file with a pure sql query with parameterized variables and you call it like "for row in sql.video_search(title_like='bridge', date_after='1964-1-1', date_before='1975-1-1')" Nowhere near an orm, everything just produces a result set.

I am sure there are many projects like it, I suspect it is like static site generators and notekeeping apps, easy enough that everybody just makes their own. But this one is mine, and I have grown quite fond of it and use it in all my scripts. It is a little more magic than I am normally comfortable with. dynamic function generation is a bit of a black art, but having each query as it's own callable unit is super handy.

openbsd.amsterdam is notable because they use the openbsd native vmm as the vm host. It is obsd all the way down over there.

It is a small and no frills service but the sys-admin, who runs the project, is very helpful and attentive. That is to say probably much better and human customer service than the big players. There are definite downsides, but if a project fits, highly recommended.

My rather limited understanding is that. first there is a lot going on and due to the forces and gravitational gradients involved, matter itself probably would not survive the journey that close to the horizon. But ignoring that, When in compressed time, from the point of view of someone freefalling, timewise everything is normal, the rest of the universe has accelerated and in the case of a black hole has just aged out and died but you are fine. from the external point of view they are taking forever to get there.

Where my imagination fails(above my pay grade) is in the face of infinity, what are the implications of infinite time compression?(everything happens at once?)

They are, but there are some interesting theories about their internal structure. Be aware that this is probably junk science but I have currently been enjoying this effort to describe them via the em field.

https://quicycle.com/understanding-electrons/

And the video essay on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyrgDEJLOA (Huygens Optics: Williamson & Van der Mark electron model | Are electrons made of light?)