Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
This is wonderfully crazy. Every page of every issue of BYTE magazine in a single image. Zoomable to great detail. With regular expression search!
https://byte.tsundoku.io/
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tom jennings
@tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
mastodon 4.6.8+glitchI make things. The older i get the less i know. Trying to work out a long view of technology and software, not liking what i see, pondering how things might be made better.
Not real keen on chauvinists, tech or otherwise.
West Coast, Norte Americano.
PS: I filter out/will not see any post with any of these words: AI, LLM, chatbot.
934 Followers
245 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 26, 2022
website:
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Huh, I didn't know smolweb had a specification, and a validator! https://smolweb.org/validator/
Tested my www.bleeve.me. Mixed results; I had been assuming I was already lightweight. I wasn't too bad, four Class F, six D...
... but the validator is looking everything in the .css file, little of which is used. I understand the problem I think, so no complaints.
A half hour with the .css file and I got most of the smol heavy=load stuff out.
Interestingly the few high-load feetch I will continue with are (comment from my .css file):
/*
border-collapse: collapse;
Table default is a drawn box around each td; collapse generates tables in the traditional way, with a single line between tds/elements. I intensely dislike the html-default box.
position: top;
Persistent and consistent top-of-screen navigation.
z-index: -1;
Required for pull-down menu stacking. Done only manually.
*/
I worked out a clean, dumb and simple, consistent navigation system, pulldowns at the top of the screen. I am extremely reluctant to go through THAT again. Works on phones and desktops with no shenanigans. It keeps the rest of the html very simple. (Example: https://www.bleeve.me/fZ80/index.html)
Also the validator has a bug: it sees that "position: top" in the comment! Doesn't see the others though. Odd. EDIT: opened issue on codeberg.
I'm making a smol css file, and all new work will adhere to it (with those few exceptions).
But smolweb is pretty decent.
PS: the validator also complains about all the missing 's but no way I'm every gonna go add those. Tough luck.
Ages ago I bought a bunch of NOS Philbrick classic opamp modules from some old guy who had a warehouse at the Oakland airport. A buck each in the box! I gave most of them away, and somehow, not one datasheet survived.
Which is terrible because these Philbrick opamp data sheets are THE SINGLE PROTOTYPE for nearly every (American thread) electronic component data sheet from then to date. Every IC datasheet copied the Philbrick sheet verbatim. All I can find in 30 seconds of web search is this shit copy from that annoying radiomuseum page that gateways everything.
These things were deeply formative of the modern electronics era. Though made as an assembly of more or less standardized parts (tubes, resistors sockets, etc, custom case) Philbrick treated the GAP/R series as a "black box" -- the black box theory itself being a cybernetic concept conjured up by Brit cyberneticist Ashby.
The datasheet describes the op amp as if it were itself a component. This was a totally novel idea in 1960! They had 8-pin octal plugs on the bottom, and the datasheet describes the device's characteristics from that interface.
In other words, interoperatiblity, like internet protocols. Doesn't matter what's inside, it is what it does. This was a radical departure at the time and now utterly boring today. Good old George and crew did this.
Friend of mind has a Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo. Not sure if it boots, but it's intact.
Are these interesting today? They were neat-o when new.
My bob's name is plumb.
Sigh, even I have to have an "AI" policy.
https://www.bleeve.me/AI.html
(Interim one for now, I'm busy.)
There's a depressing amount of LLM garbage in the vintage forum. I suspect I will cause Problems in my usual subtle way at some point.
There's someone cloning vi for CP/M; a commendable project. But it's all crapped up, I won't run it. I haven't told him why yet.
As is always the problem, the author seems like a decent person, except this One Thing. But of course things are not always what they seem.
Goddammit.
Replying to
Even for 10cm (~3000 MHz/3GHz) the high energy pulse that drives them has to be about a microsecond long. Tough to do when all your fastest electronic switches take about 10 uS to switch. So a slow switch dumped a charged up capacitor bank into (initially) a coiled up length of co-axial cable, shorted at one end. The pulse, reflecting off the abrupt impedance change (whatever 50 ohms to 0 ohms), went from long (10's uS) and short (600V) to brief (uS or less) and tall (many KV) and the average energy in the long slow pulse was transformed to the short fast one and dumped into the magnetron, peak power as it says, KW to MW.
Lol then of course radar makes a huge outgoing pulse but then has to switch immediately into a sensitive receiver -- connected to the same antenna -- and switch fast enough to hear the weak pulse reflected back by the metallic target. So this sensitive hand-made diode is subjected to the KW/MW pulse... it's preptected by a clever TR switch tube that arcs internally, protecting the diode.
It's all nuts, and developed by a small handful of very young british engineers. Pretty weird shit. Wartime or not its fkn magic.
One engineer took their one working magnetron model to Bell Labs in NJ, flying on a passenger jety with the thing handcuffed to him and an armed gaurd, for Bell to figure out how to make them reliably/in quantity. MIT et al developed the shit out of them (NJ wasn't being bombed; London was) but it's entirely a british invention.
Replying to
@worik@mastodon.social
Because LLM crap is showing up on vintage forums that I'm part of. And LLM derived work is kinda literally, and emblematically, the violent opposite of how amateur computing was built: by people sharing experimental results, trying nutty things, helping each other improve, and by intentionally building community.
LLM corporations are all OPENLY SUPPORTING FASCISTS for fucks sake.
So writing code with LLMs is taking a solid political stance that they support the destruction of civil, legal, political infrastructure.
Lol, TLDs:
"In 2018, Spamhaus rated .men as the worst top-level domain in terms of spam and scamming. .men comes top with 60.6% of its 73,000 domains identified as "bad", resulting in a badness index of 6.48. The company that runs .men, GRS Domains also runs the third worst registry – .loan – with 59 percent bad domains and a 6.22 index."
wikipedia
Replying to
@tsturm@famichiki.jp
...unless it means the tape, with the band off, rolled down the stairs and out the door.
Not yet beep and flash.
I just found a copy of the original distribution/installation disks for EZ-ROUTE, a PCB layout and routing program, for Windows, from year 2000. It was fairly primitive but it worked; I used it a lot.
If you want it, it's here: https://www.inglevale.com/EZ-Route.zip
Contents of two 3.5" flops in a ZIP file.
EDIT: EZROUTE seems to still be around!
The first step to a general strike is a full pantry. For yourself and one other.
Where does everyone find the time to watch all these videos?
Went to two big corp chain stores this week! Weird.
Bust Buy, i think its called, had an SD card holder, biked over instead of online. The front of the store, with a phalanx of salesmanmals, where sll the oversized TVs and impulse buy crap usually is, was empty, with stuff pushed around to hide the fact.
Last store I remember looking like this was Fry's Electronics, a couple months before they went bust.
Today went to the Target at Eagle Rock mall. Wow, dead mall, with one lively store. Wow. Surveillance plus. Got my stuff, no receipt, i asked how ill get out without being tackled... Finger to the ceiling salesmammal says "cameras".
On the way out passed at least two "plain clothes" types skulking like drug dealers. Just walked out
This does not bode well.
Remember when you could carefully pickup the telephone handset of an other extension, put your hand over the microphone, and listen in on someones phone call? Good times.
Having found the manual for pmate text editor I'm more in love with it than ever.
Its insanely compact. About half its commands are written in macros of its basic commands.
It doesnt do regexps for example but your search command can contain commands to match variable things. And things stored elsewhere as variables.
Ok granted a lot of this is aesthetics. But there is this phenom i keep coming across, in "early" development stages (Unix, cpm): for a given program, a large amount of succinct functionality, often invoking 'elegance', is found in shockingly small programs.
The pmate program is under 22,000 bytes, so under approx 15,000 instructions (guesswork).
The manual describing the program is 100 pages, many times the size of the program.
Theres got to be something to this phenomenon. Ita obvious that much of program size growth is in dealing with error detection and handling, and theres a deminishing-returns rhing there.
Also true is that many crucially useful programs are very large. Im not exclaiming a consistent observation. But i think a close look at this would be very interesting.
Replying to
@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz
My mnemonic is:
Computing is the human art and science.
Computers are capitalist product.
There's our tension, simplistic though it is. I think that's part of why it felt so radical, we were literally freeing the machines and ourselves.
It's not a sufficient description, but a component.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
A friend of mine just now sent me this text:
As I was pushing stuff around at my storage units a woman across the hall was pushing her stuff about. It turns out she is the daughter of Curtis Schreier, one of the totally visionary artists of Ant Farm.
I'm friends with Chip Lord, one of the Ant Farm founders, and I met Curtis at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Media Burn. Curtis is the total hippie tech visionary genius crackpot.
His daughter just sent me this:
Has anyone here tried out one of the small language models, tinyLLM for example? Are they truly self-contained? Don't need an internet connection to run?
To run on against the contents of /home/tomj.
Does this idea piss people off? Be blunt. Assuming it would be actually self-contained and not a tool tethered to one of the corps.
The FSF is our ARRL.
Replying to
@LabSpokane@mas.to
Pot smuggler? That counts as "drug smuggler" notoriety? Sheesh who cares sbout pot, even when it was illegal.
Still, if you work up that angle, with a quote from the story and a link i bet you could get decent money for the bike!
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @scott@mastodon.clitheroe.ca
A friend with an iPhone attempted to send me a photo (MMS) to my android (grapheneOS) phone and got, from number 866:
"sorry, this service is not available"
And the image/text does not arrive.
Is this some extended iPhone service thingie? Web search turns up helpful suggestions from Apple Support "did you try power cycling your phone", and this gem: "To send a message as iMessage or MMS, you need a cellular data or Wi-Fi connection."
Weird.
Replying to
@toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place
There is a paper going round about researchers trying to define "religion" who went at it frem a new angle: as a set of behaviors, not beliefs.
In short, that the core mechanism of a religion or similar is: public expression of a belief in an assertion that cannot be proven, that the group shares. The specifics don't matter, this declaration puts you on the inside.
This dangerous time has lots of people grasping for something anything, and a nicely modern scientificalish one involving computers is a QAnon for nerdfolk. And this oracle you can actually ask questions!
I have a copy of the paper on a real computer but atm im sitting out in a sunny socal parking lot with my phone.
@BillySmith@social.coop @jonny@neuromatch.social @yora@mastodon.gamedev.place
A friend of mine is doing that crazy long walk up the sierras (he's done 1048 miles), had his Pixel 10 in AIRPLANE MODE for days, and of course no wifi to sniff, and the clock drifted off more than one hour. So GPS stuff becomes not usable.
My first thought was that GPS provides accurate clock but my second was, I don't really know how GPS nav works.
Replying to
@mattblaze@federate.social
Lovely people. Friends have contacted them with bugs and they fixed them pronto.
Non-traded corporations. Makes all the difference.
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @cvvhrn@sfba.social
Replying to
@iBlame@kolektiva.social
Rolls of toilet paper is what i use. Far too damn yankee to buy boxed Kleenex.
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io
Oh goddammit. What is going on, that every up in scaling of a business creates such murk? PJRC selling Teensy 4.1's through SparkFun generated a lot of noise with Adafruit, and from the outside, it all sounded like personality nonsense.
I like crowd supply folk, and I have no projects with them, so no stake here. But it's sad and I hope it works out well.
I
Replying to
@datum@zeroes.ca
Thanks; alas, I can't readily parse that stuff, and data is not information. I'll see if I can get in touch with medical folk here. What a mess I live under
Replying to
@ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog
Implementor nor reader understand what the words really mean.
@jonny@neuromatch.social
Replying to
@paculino@tech.lgbt
Lol that's great. Theres a Discordian calendar too, i think one of the Unix time display programs can display it.
Claude Shannon made a calculator with a roman numeral display.
@jef@mastodon.social
Replying to
@jef@mastodon.social
I wish we had two times. Locally and personally, pure sidereal. Noon at your current location and so strictly speaking its later 200 feet to your east. Thats how we live, go to lunch. Winter, sun comes up later, goes away earlier.
Then UTC coordinated 24 hour time. Centered not in "Greenwich", whatever that is, but something sensible, like our chicken coop or the Azores or something.
Your phone can calc whatever when you need to know train sched or something.
So Synology says this:
Warning:
Enabling SSH service may bring security risks to your system. Please enable it only when necessary and avoid making changes to system configurations.
? lol
Replying to
@MLE_online@social.afront.org
Internet throttled to 56K. You can get email and not much more.
The internet was overall more fascinating in the days before images, in many ways. Not saying it was causal.
I have a group of people doing important work on the ground, who are very smart but are not nerds.
They want to use Proton to share files amongst the group. Im not convinced its a good idea.
How does their encryption work? I can look later offline (sic) but wondering if anyone had any experience.
Or can share experience with smaller scale sharing systems?
Replying to
@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange
I think here is the point:
"Mayes advised ICE to take their masks off and identify themselves.
“If you’re being attacked by someone who is not identified as a peace officer, how do you know [not to shoot them]?” asked Mayes.
The attorney general also created a reporting page online to submit reports of ICE activities for potential prosecution.
“We want people to record ICE in the state of Arizona,” said Mayes."
Replying to
@iBlame@kolektiva.social
In my case, yankee poverty and mostly long habit. It's paper you load up with body goo then flush/pitch. Its also as ephemeral as a disposable product can be without even the kleenex box. Which I don't find objectionable or anything.
We buy hardly any disposable products. Shit like baby wipes are offensive, obvious plastic garbage american product and I'm judgemental as shit about people who buy them and use them like they just disappear or something.
Its more old yankee than modern hippy or whatever. Lazy convenience waste is criminal.
Im not completely consistent. We use too much disposable plastic food shit in the fridge. Plastic trash bags. Its tough. I hate it all.
Boosted by @harblinger@wizard.casa
I should make this thing go. Its got a five opamps, the top slots are for options i think.
The modules are not potted, so repairable.
In 1980 i lived at 333 Columbus ave in boston. Philbricks 1960s plant was 300something columbus. I didnt know that til the early oughts.
Replying to
@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space
Take a dog into a motel room. FASCINATING.
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social
What? There's a NEW Mexico now?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJzXbqyU8A
Do COVID tests from 2020 have any efficacy in 2026? I assume not, that tests have degraded and virus mutated. But web search reveals no timely information.
I had forgotten just how fucking tremendous Dr. Dobbs Journal was. Check out Volume 7.
(The Volumes contain all of that years' monthly issues.)
https://archive.org/search?tab=all&query=dr+dobbs+journal+vol&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22dr_dobbs_journal%22
Replying to
@stux@mstdn.social
We loosely vet people into office.
Then we vote on them after their term ends
1 retire with w plaque for good service maybe a small stipend.
2 "thanks"
3 please leave quietly out the back door.
4 a day of public humiliation
5 beheading.
Then see who signs up next year.