I've been slacking a bit on the #FriendFinder5000. And I'm nearly out of time for EMF! Which is... a little stressful. Sorta made my own bed there. Oops. However! There is progress! The API is now running on the cloud, with auth, and I can poke it.
Hello, floofs 🎉
It really baffles me that there are a bunch of people who still think that LLMs are great, or even intelligent. This era we’re enduring will become a case study in the future of human psychology. It’s the fear of being left behind. Of missing out on territory in the life-sized monopoly map. It’s a gold rush. Couple that with the opportunism of the perception of not having to do anywhere near as much work, plus a generous measure of not understanding what these tools are, and we find ourselves in the perfect storm: humans are generally greedy and lazy.
So many of my colleagues are desperate to jump on the train before it leaves the station. Hardly any of us are thinking about where that train bound for. Or the fact that monopoly is a game designed to illustrate how awful capitalism is.
I yearn so badly for the Star Trek universe: where all our basic needs are met, currency only exists as a dramatic device to take the piss out of greed, and instead we can focus our collective endeavour on reaching to the stars.
#FriendFinder5000 update: I’ve now got the networking config set up so that a raspberry pi acts as a bridge between the outside world via wifi, and sending messages to the big screens over ethernet. And I figured out how to fix the flickering issue on the wee screens by tying the ground of the pi pico into the power supply for the board itself. I’m so excited that it’s coming together nicely 😃😃
#FriendFinder5000 update: going well! Two of these ENORMOUS netbrite symon banners are in full working order and I’ve managed to send messages to them. Which means I have 7 screens to scatter around a hackercamp 🎉
Anyway the proprietary software they’re locked into is a sealed black box of garbage but conveniently some wonderful nerds on the internet have already reverse engineered them. It’s so much fun to find a ridiculously niche problem and then immediately discover that wonderful nerds have fixed it. What a time to be alive. Looks like I’m gonna be learning some perl and XMPP in the very near future 😅 #FriendFinder5000
3 new LED banners have been added to the collection. And they’re HUGE. They’re made by Symon, a company that went bust years ago. Which isn’t that surprising considering that they charged £thousands/yr for the privilege of using these. I think they used to be office stock ticker boards. Exciting! #FriendFinder5000
Achievement unlocked: one of my LED screens is (just about) working with a hello world. It’s not pretty - the repo I borrowed is set up for a 2040 chip and this is rp2350. A little polishing to do. But it’s got power and letters so I’m calling that a win 🎉 #FriendFinder5000
The #FriendFinder5000 is coming along nicely 😃🎉. Pleased that the typescript API to tell the screens what to display is pretty much ready. Tomorrow I’m gonna try to get these screens showing some text. Lastly the mastodon bot should be the easiest bit to pull together.
How it started: let's plug in some pins to a raspberry pi zero/pico to get this thing showing a "hello world".
How it's going: 8 amps? Jeez. That's... a lot. I guess I need a power supply. Now I'm waiting impatiently for one of these bad boys feeling like Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes waiting for his propellor beanie https://www.led-card.com/meanwell-lrs-50-5-switching-power.html#FriendFinder5000
