@jbqueru@fosstodon.org
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

jbqueru

@jbqueru@fosstodon.org

I'm JBQ / Djaybee, Husband, Immigrant, Veteran, Highly Sensitive Person #HSP. He/Him. I write about tech and other things. I'm fluent in French and English.

I like: #skiing, #hiking, #biking, #games, #photography, visual #astronomy. #PixelArt, #painting, #knitting, #weaving, #crochet. #bead weaving, #CrossStitch and #BlackWork embroidery.

I am in the year-long process of moving from Spokane, WA, USA to Preveza, Greece.

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

dis, to random

My spirit animal has been "Linux devices that don't resume from sleep" since before Linux had x64 suspend/resume.

Today it's my kindle.

jbqueru,
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@dis I have an NVIDIA card like that. My wife has a USB WiFi adapter.

jbqueru, to random
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The very first hand I ever played in live poker (Texas Hold'em), I got 7-2 off-suit in the big blind, nobody raised so I checked, and I ended up winning the hand with a full house.

Yeah, that was unexpected.

root, to random
@root@sms.cybik.moe avatar

On one side, the nVidia 555 drivers ABSOLUTELY F*CKING SMASH and they actually work nice. Explicit sync is SUCH a boon and it fixes so many things with Wayland.

On the other?

Steam streaming on Wayland is uberf*cked now. It was trying to work before, now it doesn't even try to show the "let me work on it for a bit".

At least the steam link flatpak still works.

jbqueru,
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

@root does 555 wake up from sleep properly under Wayland? That had been my biggest issue by far with older drivers (525).

Right now I'm using my Intel iGPU as primary, my NV is relegated to compute co-processor. I think I'm on 535.

never_released, to random
@never_released@mastodon.social avatar

suddenly lost interest for the AMD NPUs after setting the driver for mine up and wonder how I could run custom kernels for it and seeing that (in https://github.com/Xilinx/mlir-aie/blob/main/docs/buildHostLin.md)

jbqueru,
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@never_released I feel that even GPL variants have been tiptoeing around this kind of issue, never yet going as far as requiring that the tools be Free Software themselves.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What is the best explanation you’ve heard for 1 not being a prime number? For me it’s “because it breaks everything in my programs since the loops won’t terminate” but that’s obtuse. “Because the God of math decrees it so!” is compelling, but shallow.

“it can only be divided by 1 distinct number” is contrived.

1 “feels” prime— it has the fewest factors. (Primeness being about NOT having factors) ruling it out for having too few? eh.

“it’s the zero of multiplication” is better… thoughts?

jbqueru,
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@futurebird It's invertible, and primality is defined modulo invertible numbers.

jbqueru,
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@winter @glitzersachen @futurebird Yeah, the definition of "only divisible by 1 and itself" is only valid for natural numbers, but gets weird in larger sets. E.g. if you include negative numbers, 2 is still a prime, but it is divisible by 2, -2, 1 and -1.

(and, weirdly, 2 is not a prime in gaussian integers, since it is (1+i)*(1-i))

jbqueru, to random
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

"We value your privacy" and "1556 partners". Probably not even a record.

E_OVERFLOW

Look, I can understand a dozen partners, one for analytics, one for telemetry, a few for logins, a handful of privacy-respecting ad networks. But I challenge anyone building such a site to convince me separately about the need to involve 1556 other companies.

annaecook, to random
@annaecook@mstdn.social avatar

I’m so tired of having to make a business case for accessibility.

Make your product at least compliant it’s literally your job.

Do your job.

jbqueru,
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@annaecook Compliance = "making something so bad that any worse would literally be illegal."

gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

jbqueru,
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

@gabrielesvelto @cr1901 maybe that's why it sometimes felt like those old machines were rock-solid in spite of their limitations: hardware has become less reliable faster than software became more reliable.

gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

I didn't anticipate there would be so much interest in how memory in consumer devices goes bad, but since there is I'll try to write a short thread later on the topic.

I personally encountered lots of computers with bad memory while helping friends and family, but what really gave me a measure of the problem is when I figured out a heuristic to detect how many Firefox users encounter crashes because of it.

jbqueru,
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@gabrielesvelto I don't have statistics (we never spent the time gathering them), but, when I was at Yahoo, we had evidence of single-bit errors in our analytics packets: Flurry event names are strings, and it was easy to spot events whose name was off by one bit.

jbqueru, to random
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If I had a Euro each time a train trip recommendation includes either a "connection" between different stations in the same city, or a "connection" that requires spending one night in a train station, I could actually afford taking the train.

rbreich, to random
@rbreich@masto.ai avatar

Stock buybacks are lethal, literally https://robertreich.substack.com/p/stock-buybacks-are-lethal-literally?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

jbqueru,
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

@rbreich Beyond market manipulation, stock buybacks are also tax evasion: they allow shareholders to recognize long-term capital gains and to control the timing of such gains (e.g. to match them with tax loss harvesting).

selzero, to VintageOSes
@selzero@syzito.xyz avatar

Did you used to make computer games using STOS or AMOS?

I tried but I was too young to afford the resources I needed and ended up using copies pirated from friends. Even so it was a much better experience than the other development environments I was using at the time.

AMOS The development environment for Amiga game programming.

jbqueru,
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@selzero I have not published anything that I wrote in STOS, but it helped me understand the framebuffer structure and, from there, it led me toward learning 68000 assembly.

jbqueru, to random
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Hmmm. Write Z80 first, then port to 6502? Write 6502 first, then port to Z80? Write 68000 first, then port to both Z80 and 6502? Write a bytecode interpreter on both 6502 and Z80 and then code to that bytecode?

I guess I'm looking for an excuse to think about writing code instead of, you know, actually writing code.

jbqueru,
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@gilesgoat But looking for excuses is so much more satisfying! I can blame other people for their mistakes (which I'm sure made perfect sense at the time) without making any mistake of my own!

jbqueru,
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@pulkomandy I had never heard of that CPU. Now I'm curious!

jbqueru,
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@brouhaha @pulkomandy Technically, I'm not sure you can drop X, because you then lose TXS / TSX... (yes, you could implement replacement instructions with A or Y, but that wouldn't be compatible with 6502 any more).

jbqueru,
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@jarkman Yeah, that's how languages happen. But, then, wouldn't it be fun to use an extinct language, like B?

jbqueru,
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@jarkman I'm vaguely aware about the way some of C's features are explained by its lineage. It would be enlightening to push that further, for sure.

jbqueru,
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@patrick I'm routinely torn by such discussions, because I'm too obsessed about performance.

On the one hand, I like the idea of high-level languages exposing capabilities that are otherwise unnatural at the assembly level because of limited CPU capabilities.

On the other hand, I am horrified by the overhead that those high-level constructs imply.

What might act as a tie-breaker could be the possibility of squeezing an interpreter into time-constrained routines, such as on the Atari 2600.

jbqueru,
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@gunstick And suddenly I remember that Apple did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

jbqueru,
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Replying to myself, after lots of valuable and thought-provoking inputs from the wise crowd: some bytecode interpreter might make sense.

-Write once for multiple platforms.

-The interpreters are reasonable to test from within their respective target environments.

-The bytecode is easy to test in any modern host environment.

-Having an interpreter gives me flexibility to interleave it into time-sensitive code (2600, but also CPC and ST where I like racing the beam).

jbqueru,
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@mariani1 my challenge now is not to fall for that seduction and to finish my current project instead. If I keep changing focus 2 months into 6-month projects, I'll never get anything out.

jbqueru,
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

@teajaygrey that's really awesome!!!

I can relate to the learning process of going from a high-level language down to the metal, and then bring horrified at the cost of the abstractions built on top of that.

jbqueru,
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@bscloutier oh, that's interesting stuff. I haven't worked much with asymmetric multiprocessing, and the little that I did ran the processors in parallel (Megadrive, NeoGeo, Falcon030) so I never had to worry about the cost of switching.

jbqueru,
@jbqueru@fosstodon.org avatar

@bscloutier Yeah, those older CPUs don't like to share with other bus masters. The Z80 is somewhat more amenable to it (e.g. the Amstrad CPC graphics component steals cycles from the Z80), the 6502 likes that a good deal less (e.g. the 6502 derivative in the NES does weird things during audio DMA cycles).

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