@M0CUV@mastodon.radio
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

M0CUV

@M0CUV@mastodon.radio

Software crafter/engineer (Rust, Scala, Perl, C++); open source developer; real-time/fault-tolerant systems; Transputer & FORTH enthusiast; radio amateur (MØCUV). Couch to 5K runner.

Let's stick with the past, 'cos the future won't last.

Used to be @mattgumbley on the bird site.

[Avatar: photo of me & my dog Oscar, a white cockerpoo; Header is a quote from the Postlight podcast entitled "Can We Understand Coders?"]

Pronouns: he/him

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M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Thinking of the Stack Overflow situation, where they’re handing over our curated knowledge to OpenAI without our consent, for them to plagiarise into LLMs… and wondering what a world would be like where we only put our effort/time/knowledge into things that the looters would have no economic reason to pilfer.

kd8bxp, to 3DPrinting
@kd8bxp@mastodon.radio avatar

Well, I think I've run out of ideas to get filament out of the hot end of a old 3D printer I have..... worse correct hot end cost more then the printer did when it was new. I might just try a different hot end, but it would be really nice to find one that at least has the mounting holes in the right place.

I am really thinking the printer has just become parts.

Maybe I can take a very small drill bit, and try to drill out the filament.

The printer is a Wanhao Powerspec i3 plus

#3dprint

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@kd8bxp would acetone help to melt the stuck filament? Plus plunger-type solder sucker?

oblate, to random
@oblate@mastodon.social avatar

Writing my own small DNS server. Not too bad. I'm really fed up with the countless layers of abstractions that Linux uses.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@oblate I had to investigate a resolver issue on modern Linux, and oh my! It’s not just /etc/resolv.conf any more :(

Extelec, to random
@Extelec@mstdn.social avatar

Quick tip...

If you have drilled a hole in the wrong place, paint around the outside of the hole with yellow paint, and the hole will get magically filled in.

Doesn't work for you ?

No, me neither, but our council seems to think this is the way to fix potholes.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@g7kse @Extelec our town council has someone going round the streets, circling the dog mess with bright pink biodegradable spray paint. They reminded us of the diseases/bacteria in faeces, and that we should tidy up after our dogs… then have someone deliberately making the mess visible and leaving it there.

M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

I’m lost in a monorepo thicket of gnarly nested bash build scripts and Dockerfiles.

Might get flamed for this, and I’ve been a UNIX user since 1989ish, but I think The UNIX Philosophy was an artifact of its time, and we should move on from text parsing pipelines, absence of type safety and bash obscurity.

M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Looks like I’ll be yeeting Windows 11 into the Sun quite soon. AI Explorer - total surveillance nightmare. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what-is-windows-11-ai-explorer-everything-you-need-to-know-about-microsofts-upcoming-defining-ai-pc-feature

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@g7vkq I can’t see why tech businesses think it’s worth foisting on us? Can they not discern how useless it is? The Windows 11 thing gives them an excellent excuse to add surveillance, so it’s obvious why they’d add it.

M0CUV, to prog
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

If you like 70s progressive rock, with Mellotrons and bizzare time signatures - check out 35 Tapes. Their latest album “Fabric of Time” is turning out to be quite a grower… https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kkFe-jXF_l_N5RvFBUG0uIfz3rI1bpYk0&si=-hKoaqFak1uDjaAQ

mw0ian, to random
@mw0ian@mastodon.radio avatar

At the mercy of the labour market after 20yrs in the same job. Interesting time ahead.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@mw0ian sorry to hear it Ian, good luck with your search.

M0CUV, to logitech
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Needless to say really, but I tried lodging a complaint with Logitech about their forced installation of an “AI” prompt builder into their driver software. Seems like there’s no easy way to email them.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

AI marketing hype is coming for your favorite gadgets

The "AI mouse" is just the start.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/ai-marketing-hype-is-coming-for-your-favorite-gadgets/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@arstechnica I tried contacting Logitech to express my displeasure at them shoehorning this drivel into my mouse driver but could not find an email address - do you know of one?

M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Now if they could bind one of the keys to a Dijkstra quote inserter … nothing artificial about the intelligence there.

M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Hmm, reverse engineer the Logitech K860 and MX Ergo Bluetooth data, provide an open source cross-platform customisation tool with a cast iron guarantee that it will never include any “AI” drivel. It’s an idea… wonder how feasible it is? (The lack of “AI” is the easy bit)

M0CUV, to random
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

Charging my Handspring Visor, which really lived up to the title “Personal Digital Assistant” at the height of my use of it, I’m struck by the thought that it has a display resolution of 160x160 LCD pixels - and was awesome.

thelastpsion, to retrogaming
@thelastpsion@bitbang.social avatar

Current projects:

▶️ : A drop-in FOSS replacement for CTRAN.EXE, the SIBO/EPOC16 OO C preprocessor on . Almost feature complete, but still work to do!
▶️ with : Used for CTRAN for easy development and portability. Honestly, I'm really enjoying it; it fits my needs and makes my brain happy.
▶️ RAM upgrade for 3mx to 4MB: Trying to source old DRAM isn't easy.
▶️ RAM upgrade for 5mx: Got the DRAM. Just need to solder it in place.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@thelastpsion wow, that’s a massive list! I found I had to radically downsize; I’m still overwhelmed. A problem is getting side-tracked: eg I have a test program that uses an existing Rust FFT library to transform an audio waveform into its constituent frequencies, but I MUST UNDERSTAND THE MATHS BEHIND IT! This (and everything I’m interested in) has fractal complexity. I wonder if there’s a role for an open source “manager”, who helps engineers prioritise?

danlyke, to random
@danlyke@researchbuzz.masto.host avatar

Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@danlyke my 1st gen Nissan Leaf has just enough tech, thanks. Everything they’ve added to it since just turns me off upgrading. Bet they’ll add some AI rubbish next.

digichelle, to random
@digichelle@hachyderm.io avatar

The sound of my voice absolutely horrifies me. Any of you feel the same?

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@digichelle @peter I have a face for radio, and a voice for telegraph. Been trying to eradicate my accent for years, but it still pops up.

M0CUV, to logitech
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

The configuration software for my keyboard and trackball has started offering the ability to bind some “ Prompt Builder” to buttons/keys.

I really don’t want to yeet my input devices into the sea. I thought Logitech made sensible products.

tbridge, to random
@tbridge@theinternet.social avatar

Per @ismh, Logi has decided that your mouse driver needs an AI query generator built in.

Your. Mouse. Driver.

Yeet that shit into the sun so hard.

https://512pixels.net/2024/04/ai-overlay-tmp-home-folder-mac-os/

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@tbridge @ismh @thomasfuchs I’m hoping to contact Logitech to express my dismay at this - have used their excellent hardware for years, but this is just wrong.

javi, to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@harshad @econads @javi completely agree with you. After using React for a while, and seeing the impact of the constant churn in the ecosystem, I have returned to using simpler helper libraries: jQuery, semantic UI, vanilla router, handlebars.. writing in TypeScript for sanity. There’s complexity in this too, but the web was always, and will always be hard.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@econads @harshad @javi yes - shifting to a far better language + WebAssembly will be a later experiment. Don’t know what that language would be yet; Rust is a possibility.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@harshad @econads @javi Thanks - I’m read that on a better screen later - from the first few pages, I kinda agree, it’s not ideal - I’ve been using it for micro services and signal processing for a couple of years, as a C++ replacement… it may not be a good fit for web.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@harshad @econads @javi A very good article, thanks for pointing it out. I don’t know of the gamedev issues the author raises, but most of the essential Rust issues are familiar. Especially the refactoring to placate the compiler - when there’s no domain need to do so.

ExtKits, to random
@ExtKits@mstdn.social avatar

The advantage of buying kits.

You own it.
You can repair it.
You can modify it in anyway you like.
There is NO DRM
There is NO "Cloud service" to fail in the future.
You learn by building it.
its 100x cheaper than the latest Phone.
It doesn't require updating, unless you want to.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@greycat @ExtKits Hi, I was thinking along those lines… but that’s perhaps too far a step… I’m thinking of a minimal pocket CyberDeck(tm) kit.. how about an iPhone-sized kit with decent resolution touch-screen, USB-C for power & data transfer, say Raspberry Pi Pico internals, WiFi, Bluetooth, speaker & mic. OS … well, Build It And They Will Come :) (something new, minimal, not Android obvs)

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@ExtKits @greycat yes I’m aiming a bit high :) I’m thinking of this with my retro sunglasses on… Palm Pilot level of OS / hardware simplicity but with a bit of an upgrade. Browser: was considering something like https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi

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