@freakazoid@retro.social
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

freakazoid

@freakazoid@retro.social

He/him or they/them. GenX parent of two kids living in #Pittsburgh #Pennsylvania USA.

My posts get auto-deleted after 6 months.

#retrocomputing #amateurradio #space #electronics #c64 #rc2014

#nobot #noarchive #noindex #noscrape #nobridge

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

both telegram and matrix have untrustworthy cryptography, but telegram has gaslit me significantly fewer times and generally not on an ongoing basis, which is really the main thing i care about in a messenger

"it's vulnerable to IND-CCA3" anybody who can pull off that attack on me deserves whatever they get out of it. i just want a messenger that isn't built by americans who have a Single Phone Number and also doesn't gaslight me. is that too much to ask for?

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@whitequark Telegram doesn't encrypt group chats at all, though. They are not comparable in that regard.

And it only encrypts DMs if you turn that on.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

https://mstdn.social/@Smith007 bot or sock puppet account. All its posts that aren't pro-Israel are bland nonsense accompanied by an unrelated image with nonsense alt text.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@tuckerm Looks like we have a whole network of bots on our hands.

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

An ongoing pattern in the AI march:

  • the hardware efficiency improves
  • the software efficiency improves

So I continue to argue that energy consumption as a PRIMARY criticism of AI is going to be unpersuasive, as incentives drive down the energy costs with time, and all critique of the energy costs is just as applicable to conventional cloud computing, which we have already accepted into our social bargain

(and which underpins every single tech salary)

so instead:

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo While I agree with your overall point, the Jevons paradox applies. The cost of energy is the primary limiting factor for both AI and cloud compute. As its efficiency goes up, its power consumption won't go down; instead they'll just do more AI, and the total power consumption will almost certainly rise. So arguments about the per operation cost won't hold up, but arguments about total energy and water consumption will. So I guess it will depend on how people think about the total utility of AI versus other energy-using endeavors.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo I'm sure a golf course does.

Pop quiz: how many datacenters does Google have?

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo Average data center is what, 100MW these days? That's the equivalent of 100,000 homes.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo Sounds about right. And that number keeps rising faster than other consumers of electricity, so it will be equivalent to ever larger chunks of human activity over time. Which is fine, if people consider the utility of those datacenters to be worth it.

And by "worth it" I mean not just the price of the electricity but the externalities that come with it. One of the great things about datacenters from a multinational corporation's perspective is that you have some flexibility in where to put them. Flexibility to avoid, for example, places that do a better job of pricing in the externalities of electricity production. Fortunately, Google and Facebook (and I think Microsoft as well?) have also tried to choose places that have cheap electricity from sources like hydroelectric, but that can still displace other users into dirtier energy sources.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo Incidentally, what year is that figure from? Europe's, and especially Germany's, energy consumption have been dropping due to high energy prices. I seem to recall Google had a few datacenters in Germany. I'm sure they'll operate them until the equipment has depreciated, but I wouldn't be surprised if they shut them down and take the loss on the buildings after that, if they haven't already.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo I totally agree.

Personally, I never found the energy arguments against crypfocurrency to be particularly compelling. I figured eventually transaction fees would have to pay for all energy consumption due to the transaction, or mining wouldn't be profitable. It's still too soon to tell, but I think we're starting to see that with this latest Bitcoin halving, but it's hard to tell because it seems like transaction fees are driven a lot more by demand than by miners. The total hashrate seems to be dropping, though.

faab64, to Israel

Massive fire ongoing at military storage facility in Tel Hashomer, Israel, May 14.

Authorities are reportedly responding to a warehouse fire at Tel Hashomer military base the afternoon of May 14. The cause of the blaze is currently unclear. There are no immediate reports of casualties.Heightened security and localized transport and business disruptions are likely in the affected area over the coming hours. Officials could evacuate nearby premises as a precaution.

There are no reports of what caused the fire, but it's one of the largest weapons storage locations in Israel.

Videos available on telegram:t.me/newsvideofa/2219?single

#israel #fire #military
@palestine @israel

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@faab64 @Justis4u That account is a bot. All their non-Zionist posts are bland nonsense. But the real tell is the alt text on images they post. Nothing to do with the images.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Redistribution can only have so much of an impact on inequality. We have to eliminate the things that are producing the inequality in the first place: financialization, rents (in the economic sense, of which finance is a special case), and barriers.

The wealthy will fight this tooth and nail. If making them give in requires bringing out the guillotines, so be it.

freakazoid, to mastodon
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Anyone know a tool for doing analytics on follows and followers? I'd like to prune truly dormant accounts (no posts or replies visible even on their own server, not just ones that have made it to mine if I don't follow them) and followers who never interact with my posts.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

So wait did the storm go from G4 to G5 at some point?

faab64, to Palestine

destroyed the last operating cell tow in Rafah and set it on fire.

One of the key goals of Israel is to prevent the world witnessing what they are doing in Gaza. From murder of reporters, preventing foreign press to enter and destroying the means of communication, they are setup up the stage for full blown assault on and mass murder of innocent palestinians who have no where to go.

Video available on telegram: t.me/newsvideofa/2185


@palestine @israel

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@faab64 Never would have thought Team Blue could fit their heads even farther up their asses than they were in 2016. Not only did they fail to learn anything, they appear to have become even more disconnected from reality since then. And they're driving us headlong into 4 more years of Trump. Which I'm sure they'll blame you and me for.

At some point you have to start wondering if that level of ignorance could really be unintentional.

@palin

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

"The United States government and the asbestos industry have been criticized for not acting quickly enough to inform the public of dangers and to reduce public exposure. In the late 1970s, court documents proved that asbestos industry officials knew of asbestos dangers since the 1930s and had concealed them from the public."

When has a government or industry ever informed the public of a danger in a timely manner except when they were exaggerating the danger with the expectation of profiting from it?

Government works for industry, not the public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos?wprov=sfla1

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

This is where AI is headed, folks. Not replacing us; killing us.

Robot dogs armed with AI-targeting rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2022843

va3db, to Electronics
@va3db@mastodon.radio avatar

Seriously?

https://www.gcaudio.com/tips-tricks/cd-dvd-demagnetization/

(HT cctalk)

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@va3db "We investigated our own highly profitable products and found that they might possibly actually do something."

Yeah, sure.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

As expected, TikTok and Bytedance are suing the US government. I hope they win.

TikTok sues America to undo divest-or-die law
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/tiktok_bytedance_sue_usa/

ifixcoinops, (edited ) to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Alright so you know how there are RGB LED strips, where each LED is individually addressable, right? How each LED has a little chip that waits patiently for its turn to get a colour instruction from the MPU controlling it?

Has some cleverclogs invented That But For Switches, where I can get a bunch of little switches with chips built in and just run them all to the same damn pin, or am I stuck building a switch matrix like a chump

EDIT: Cheers Fedi, think I'm on the right track now. Don't worry, I'm not gonna try and do anything timing-sensitive like a pinball machine or anything haha

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@ifixcoinops You mean, like, I²C relays or something? Or do you need more than can be addressed on an I²C bus?

The LEDs essentially form a long shift register rather than using addresses, so such a thing should be fairly straightforward to build. Just need wires for data, clock, power, and ground. I seem to recall they do something a little more clever than that so you can do away with the separate clock wire (long and short pulses I think? They have tight timing constraints IIRC), but that would be harder to build without specialized chips.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Apparently some people think it's a good idea to generate internal Go structs and interfaces using protobufs? How shitty does a language have to be for people to reach for a completely different language to write their types and interfaces?

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Can't tell you. Temporal Prime Directive.

scott, to random
@scott@typetura.social avatar

🤞🏻 Ceasefire in Gaza

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@scott And then Hamas changed their charter to accept recognition of Israel and agreed to form a government with Fatah in 2007. And then mysteriously a civil war started.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

The Emperor's Old Democracy

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

I wonder how many projects end up shooting themselves in the foot when using an ORM because they fail to resist the temptation to let the ORM objects leak into their API?

I worked on one project that had to make DB schema changes every time they changed their API because of this. It made it very difficult to maintain compatibility across updates without complicating their schema, too.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Is it still possible to obtain and use a cellular modem in a USB stick form factor? Everything I'm finding comes in a standalone WiFi hotspot form factor.

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