Michel Salim 🇺🇦 @michel_slm@floss.social

https://uk.pcmag.com/processors/140392/researchers-power-an-arm-processor-for-a-year-using-algae

“A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge successfully replaced a battery with algae to provide continuous power to a microprocessor.

“The tiny system is roughly the same size as an AA battery and runs an ARM Cortex M0+ processor. However, rather than sipping power from a rechargeable battery, the researchers used a non-toxic blue-green algae called Synechoycystis to naturally harvest energy when exposed to the sun through photosynthesis.”

i made a keyboard that looks like two slices of toast with eggs on them

eggy toast breadboard

@natecull "Not having applications at all" goes a long way toward conveying my intent in relying strongly on shell / console / command-line tools principally. I've never liked monolithic applications, and for a long time the only one I really used was a GUI web browser (and if possible, I'll still gravitate to a terminal-based one).

I'd also started off mostly working with remote access to my real computer, whether that was running Unix, VMS, MVS, or whatever. The idea of a local interactive client (text or GUI) and some remote box, or set of boxen, on which Heavy Shit ran, seemed sensible. Local side remained responsive. Any given remote box might get saturated, but there were usually others.

Shared resources might be disk, comms channels to common storage, and external networking. Mostly those didn't matter much (we're talking 1990s-era here).

The workstation age was ... in some ways a step back. I mean, it's nice having a bunch of power on my desktop, but that also means that when I want it to get busy it's absolutely pigged out.

And no, I'm not a gamer, so local low-latency high-graphics performance wasn't really a need.

@TerryHancock

You, with your laser eyes, telling me Bitcoin is environmentally friendly.

Me, with my block button, blocking your whole damn domain.

OpenCollective are currently hiring, 2 senior software engineers

https://opencollective.com/hiring

Longing for the day when "crypto" means "cryptography" again.

LWN is now on Mastodon https://lwn.net/Articles/895898/ #LWN

#introduction Hello! I am a #sysadmin for #linux systems at the #highered #university level and interested in #privacy #federation and #horizontalism (in an organizational/political sense). With a sprinkle of #psychology and #philosophy thrown in.

I am an #OSR (whatever that means!) #RPG gamer and run one #OSRIC based game in meatspace and play two #1e #PbP. Also playing some #burningwheel . Open to other systems for #TTRPG ; I'm a curious kid!

My actual system is base OSRIC with some "secret sauce" OSR bits thrown in. Rounding out with a sprinkle of #Dragonsfoot Footprints articles and my own houserules wiki.

https://osricwiki.presgas.name/doku.php?id=index - is the #OSRIC #SRD

Feel free to say "hello!" I may not approve a follow otherwise. Also the case if you have no avatar or profile or any posts. Just be a human!!

Alt account is @PresGas

The problem I have with the Internet today is that, in the 1980s, I thought (hoped) that massive access to a) personal computing and b) networking would be a force that (slowly, perhaps, but inevitably over time) made us all smarter and kinder.

Instead I fear that networked computing is making us all dumber and crueller. And the dumbing and the cruelling is accelerating.

That's maybe too simplistic an analysis: it probably always had the potential to do both, and it probably *is* doing both.

@chronrevisited @natecull A big realisation of mine about five or six years ago was that changes in media have huge effects on the societies in which they emerge, and always have.

Smartphones, Broadband, Dial-up Internet, the Web, cable TV, talk radio, FM radio, television, paperbacks, radio, cinema, telephone, phonograph, mass magazine publishing, telegraph, mass literacy, printing (and multiple revolutions there), papermaking, Arabic numerals, maths, writing, trigoonometry, mapmaking ...

The first hunter-gatherer tribes which worked out speech, basic logistics, maps, and military strategy (or agriculture) had huge advantages over those which hadn't. And it's compounded since.

Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein especially develop this concept.

The subturing language I shipped was a huge success because it was constrained but I've never met someone who hasn't slung haskell who saw the value of limited power.

The new article in Wired about the history of BBSes really captures what was nice about them back then.

Original tweet : https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1527115647934771201

How do you design a CPU for functional languages like Haskell?

Use a stackmachine where the function referenced by each head is popped with a given number of arguments copying the referenced function body into its place on the stack with argument references replaced & relative references resolved.

Opcodes are added for arithmatic, with ints shuffling the stack to ensure they're fully resolved before the arithmatic.

This has been prototyped on FPGAs!

1/2!

Duck DB; Friendlier SQL: https://duckdb.org/2022/05/04/friendlier-sql.html

Jan Lukas Else's response: https://jlelse.blog/links/2022/05/friendly-sql-duckdb