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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com This is like Weird Units but for programming languages.
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John Ripley
@jripley@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06San Francisco. He/Him. US/UK. Open to work. No "AI". No corporations.
Software/hardware/chip architecture, generalist from silicon to apps, somewhat InfoSec. Ex-Big Tech.
Alumni: empeg / Diamond Rio / SigmaTel / Google / Apple
Mostly posting about building gadgets (PCBs, embedded firmware, etc), and snarking about big tech and politics.
Carrying water for “AI”, fashtech, or having an email address ending in ".ai", gets you blocked.
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Joined November 09, 2017
Pixelfed:
Loops.video:
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@fivetonsflax@tilde.zone @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @steve@discuss.systems The theory goes the billboards are targeting an incredibly small demographic of CEOs and CFOs, while the rest of us suffer. Not even CTOs—the idea is these seed an annoying conversation with the CTO wherein they end up with a technology forced on them, because a billboard said so.
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Or the most horrifying realization: all the folks who say "It's been a record summer", and you have to invoke the Simpsons meme, "So far. Record summer *so far*"
On average, every summer is expected (>50%) to be a new record. This will continue for your entire life, probably regardless of any changes to our energy sources.
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These two parts are completely not the same or in any way compatible placement:
- INA381A3IDGSR
- INA381A3IDSGR
Besides the fact the vendor should be slapped for creating such part codes, JLC totally did not flag this, and I only caught it because it's rendering the part in 3D as a "graphic missing" icon. Le sigh.
My hobby: Annoying people by deadpan, and relentlessly referring to "AI" (ai) as "Al" (al).
So many billboards for Al along 80 and 101 in San Francisco. What's with that guy.
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The same with plot of global temperatures. Or even the local progression, notably Europe, in particular France. Summer record-highs have been creeping consistently beyond 40C. This is killing a *lot* of people.
But it's not some "linear" thing. Again, the same mistake. You hit that temperature, and every degree exponentially kills more people. Not even exponential, really, because there's a point where basically everyone not in climate controlled environment dies.
We're getting there.
Framework isn't really building you a better Linux laptop, and you might as well still buy a Dell/Lenovo. (Or an MNT if it fits your uses)
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com I suspect on ARM9 it's going to be hard to beat a boring lookup table, especially as the pipeline for all the variants is short, cache or no cache.
The Galaxy-Capitalism-Brain level is where even the ultimate rent-seeking technology (fake AI) also has to pay rent.
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@nixCraft@mastodon.social Absolutely this. A decade and a bit before, Ubuntu used to be the OS of choice, simply because it did modern things, and worked with modern hardware (drivers). That stopped being a differentiating factor a long time ago, though.
Pretty much every "Linux sucks because doesn't work" comment in the decade since, can be neatly responded to with "That is an Ubuntu issue". Ubuntu made Linux suck. Or, Arch issues for people (as you point out) who like their box to be like Windows PC.
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@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social A large part of the problem is that the web standards process has become utterly captured by corporate interests. (I half-jokingly refer to this as the Web Standards Industrial Complex). It didn't used to be overwhelmingly complex—it's was a choice, perhaps not entirely deliberate, but one which corporate interests had no incentive to avoid.
I think it what would help is if prominent members of the _open_ web helped reduce, and define the minimal spec they actually need.
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@MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social I love to remind right wing types that all the "wealth" people like Elon Musk have is _notional_. They couldn't even realize (sell) all those assets as cash, because the act of doing so would crash their value. Or you wouldn't find sufficient buyers. They're "whales" but the flip-side to being a whale is you don't actually have the ability move that wealth.
This hints at a way to obliterate the power and influence of these folks too: crash their stock.
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@brouhaha@mastodon.social You're probably the sort of person who's already played with this, but 4MB used to be plenty to run Linux in, if you were prepared to manually run through the config and turn off pretty much every option not relevant to your use case. Did this a lonnng time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Receiver
Plan was it would be silent-refreshed down to 2MB once we were confident it fitted, which we never did (didn't sell enough), but it would have fit.
Not sure if Linux can be put on a similar diet today.
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@valpackett@social.treehouse.systems Missed opportunity to market this as USB-Cone Of Shame.
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@soatok@furry.engineer "Do you mean ASN.1/DER or ASN.1/BER?"
[Apologies for the obscure reference]
Group of SREs sat around a table at a bar, dishing about broken shit at work
“I’ve got a teeeeeeext!”
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @joe@f.duriansoftware.com Once had to use a proprietary C compiler for an oddball architecture (Motorola 56K based), where the presence of any indirect calls in the graph prevented a significant optimization. Offset-addressing (stack) was inefficient, and memory tight, but it could figure out an overlapped placement for absolute-addressed (faster) activation records (locals), so long as the entire graph was visible.
So it was almost always a performance win to switch(fn_idx) to a bunch of functions.
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@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be I’ve given up trying to place silkscreen for every component, because it’s taking longer than placing the components! Will always need to refer to (pdf or otherwise) layout to find something. On the other hand, this means I’ve started putting useful info on the PCB, like pinouts, now that it’s no longer 100% covered in text in every gap.
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@zwarich@hachyderm.io @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @joe@f.duriansoftware.com Unfortunately, despite some heroic things it would do, this particular compiler was the buggiest POS I've ever had the misfortune of using. It couldn't even compile "a *= -1;" correctly, which for a C compiler targeting a DSP, was quite an achievement. I suspect whole-program was beyond their abilities.
The thing that really gets me about how all these LLM prompts are written, especially Claude, is that they're *IN ENGLISH*. You would think that they might be expressed more precisely and effectively as something in a vector space, native to the model.
Nope. Just in English, instructing a mindless, unintelligent algorithm to *hopefully* emit a different token sequence.
None of this shit is coding. It's not anything. This is the upside-down hellscape inverse of coding.
Lol Anthropic are an Accidental Tech Podcast sponsor now? (Not an April 1 joke)
Having dinner with Trump is harmless they said. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/31/iran-reportedly-warns-apple-potential-target/
Trying to stick Home Assistant OS in a simple Xen HVM, and it instantly reboots the moment it gets to linux kernel. Like, early enough that it doesn't even emit any debug on max debug settings. What the actual. This is why I *hate* projects which turn into giant fucking monoliths, especially when the monolith unit is a whole machine image.
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I guess the one useful thing Lindsey Graham did in his putrid career, is to 100% confirm Kavanaugh is a predator.
The bothersome thing about the Cesar Chavez erasure is not that he got erased (well-deserved), but that everyone who was so very angry has now packed up and gone home, probably via a bunch of streets named after similarly awful, but white, people.
Home Assistant deprecating all installation methods except, essentially, "entire (virtual) machine" is not a good sign for the project's health. In general, it means you're about to lose the ability to bootstrap, and inevitably lose the ability to reuse any part of it, piecemeal.
Expecting any minute to hear how Dems have relented on DHS funding, thus making this entire action pointless, and centering the fault on Dems.
Every corporation tomorrow: “Hello, fellow jesters”
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@mattblaze@federate.social But Matt, those two resistors would bankrupt so many companies, the US would go into a great recession!
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I guess we already established >2 decades ago that Torvalds doesn't understand the purpose of free software licensing, what drives people to use Linux, and what "social justice" is, so meh.
Time to consider the "walk away" scenario.
Phase: swearing at Home Assistant while trying to integrate a ratgdo, and occasionally saying "sorry" to my spouse who is getting random, weird notifications about garage doors opening in the "Office".
I was this >< close to buying a Framework laptop last year, until I found out their shtick is just social-justice-washing. They're still funding fascists, and still not doing any kind of backpedaling or restorative action. Heck, I even picked up a business card at one point, thinking that might be an interesting place to work...
Personally, I've decided this is actively worse than, say, buying a laptop from Apple, Dell or Lenovo; because at least they're not pretending to be social good.
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@tante There's definitely a need for an actively _anti-fascist_ approach to tech, and in particular as you point out, software licensing. Restrictive free/open licensing has been eroded over the decades, and the time really is _now_ for an ecosystem attached to an explicitly political license.
It's no accident that one of the uses of "AI" is to launder copyright violation, and that further erodes open source licensing. "The robot did it" gets you a copy of any licensed code, lawyer-free.
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@thomholwerda@exquisite.social It is so great being surrounded by people who are effortlessly expert at a subject I'm interested in. Inspires me to go read some more, at first so I can better understand what they're saying, and later so I can actually get in the threads!
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com Actually, you might shave a few cycles off with one of the classic versions:
https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#InterleaveBMN
or specifically as in stackoverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/38883125
Looks like roughly 8 cycles per 16 bit input, which is probably going to be faster than 2 table lookups + recombine.
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @fay59@tech.lgbt Pretty much any attempt at wiping secrets fails unless it is part of task/process management (system/kernel), and even then it is still leaky (e.g swap, SRAM/DDR contents across reset, etc, etc), or can be snooped (spectre, SPA, DPA, etc).
If leaking secrets is ever a concern where you'd want to apply sanitizing at *compiler* level, you're likely in a threat model where that isn't sufficient.
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@rmondello@hachyderm.io It serves as a warning that the driver is the kind of person who puts a "Baby on board" sticker on their car.
Managed to cram the radio board into 1x2" with every pin routed to a header or test point, in just 2 layers. One more thing I don't need from adafruit. Now I just need to figure out the zone fills, and the silly RF trace impedance.
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@30p87@chaos.social @ret@furry.engineer @anselmschueler@ieji.de @davidgerard@circumstances.run General rule of thumb: if you have to add a field in a database a few specific apps care about, it is a crime against software architecture if your root of userland security needs a pull request to add support for it. Not just general, this is specifically the crime a lot of us warned about with the way systemd is architected.
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The fact that one cannot simply fork Linux, because a zillion corporate interests would lobby *hard* against any attempt, essentially means Linux is fully corporate owned. This is why it's grown into such a "mess", and growing hard, single point dependencies on trash architecture (e.g systemd).
I have very, very carefully resized, *LIVE*, the crypt (luks), LVM, and partition tables on my home server-in-a-cupboard. Which means either all went well, and I can finally fix a nearly decade-old issue with the boot partition size.
Or... when I reboot it, I'm going to spend most of a day making it bootable again, and/or recover whatever I corrupted.
My wife, the voice of reason, has suggested I may want to wait until the morning before I type in the reboot command.
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@azonenberg@ioc.exchange It has been proven many times, that if you give an inch to government, they will take that as permission to go an extra light year. It is also the case that non-government actors also end up with the vulnerabilities. There's really no alternative other than designing for a reasonable balance of cost/convenience vs security. Government just doesn't enter the equation _at all_ and any company which does so is going down a dark path.
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@30p87@chaos.social @ret@furry.engineer @anselmschueler@ieji.de @davidgerard@circumstances.run The bigger issue is why the hell does the root process manager need to be *involved* whatsoever in age verification. It’s not just bootlicking, it’s an unjustifiable crime against software architecture.
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Of course, the scenario Torvalds probably hasn't considered is that *it actually gets forked* as-is, with the same governance and maintainers, with an anti-LLM policy, and with him deleted from all authority.
But Linux has long since been a Corporate OS and there's not enough power to pull that off.