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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Anyone interested in this concept should take a look at plan9. Everything is even more of a file there.

    Taking a screenshot, for example, can be done with:

    cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png

    That combined with the way that parent processes can alter their children’s view of the filesystem namespace allows for extremely elegant abstractions. For example, every program just tries to write directly to screen or audio, but the desktop environment redirects their writes to the relevant servers. Which means that, in the absence of those servers, those same programs can run just fine and don’t care whether they’re being multiplexed or not. That also means that the plan9 userspace can be nested inside itself just using the normal mechanisms of how the OS works (that is, without a special tool like Docker).


  • There is a pretty clear influence from ancient Greek and Roman religion on Abrahamic religions (especially neo-platonism), but you don’t even have to go that obscure to make the argument you’re making.

    They descend directly from the ancient Babylonian religion, which was polytheistic. It was converted from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion first by moving to monolatry (the other gods are real, but its only valid to worship one of them), by conflating various gods with each other (saying that they are simply different names for the same god), and finally by creating a false history where the favored god was always the only one and the other ones were always considered false/idolatrous/demonic.



  • Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

    I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

    I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.




  • Chemicals like sodium lauryl sulfate and other fatty acids with organosulfate head groups, which are much more powerful surfactants than the fatty acid sodium salts you get by reacting lye with a fat (like vegetable oil). “Traditional” soaps like that also contain glycerol (formed when the lye cleaves the glycerol backbone off of a triglyceride), which acts as a humectant moisturizer.

    Technically, at least in the US, chemicals like SLS aren’t legally classified as soap, and must be called a detergent. Which is why so many products are called things like “body wash” and “body bar”, and you wont find the word “soap” on their packaging.



  • My mom has trust issues with computing so deep she doesn’t even do any fucking software update.

    IMO software vendors have created this attitude. Don’t get me wrong, in an ideal world users would be much more technically literate, but given the behavior of the software industry this really should be the expected outcome.

    Its similar to how popups on the web trained users to instantly close dialog boxes without reading them. Its not the fault of the individual person writing the CRUD app that uses a dialog box, but it is the fault of the system that collectively produced all of the things you see on the computer’s screen.



  • Alchemists (correctly) observed that everything in the world was subject to disorder and decay as time progressed, but noted that gold seemed to be immune to this effect (since it is highly resistant to oxidation). Add into that the belief system that they were working with:

    • That everything in the world exists on a chain of being from the most corrupt at the bottom to the most noble on top (with god being most high).

    • That everything is really the same thing, and through physical processes changes its form, including up and down the chain.

    And they belived that if they could figure out how to transmute a lesser metal into a more noble one then they could probably move other things up the chain of being as well. Which is why the Philospher’s Stone was supposed to make people unaging and immortal, and cure all disease, in addition to transmuting lesser metals into gold. Alchemists like John of Rupescissa probably belived that creating the Stone would also bring the world closer to the divine in some way, and it was god’s wish for mortals to do this.




  • The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired.

    In the transition from plugboards to programmed sequence control the thing that took over the task of routing values between registers, through the ALU, and to/from IO ports was the control unit. Microcode being one way to implement functionality in the control unit.

    One other approach was to use what was basically a finite state machine, implemented physically in-circuit. The output of that FSM was fed into a series of logic gates along with the current instruction value, with the output of that combination being connected to the control lines of the various CPU elements. Thus the desired switching/routing behavior occured.

    Modern chips are really complicated hybrids of microcode and a ton of interacting finite state machines. Especially in x86 complex or less commonly used instructions will be implemented in microcode, whereas simple/common instructions will be implemented by being “hardwired”, somewhat similar to the FSM technique described above (although probably more complicated).




  • I didn’t bother to read the paper, but the article says the system produced “10s of nanoamps at 10s of microvolts”. I’ll just assume each of those values are “100”, since that’s the highest value you could describe as “10s” of something.

    That works out to 0.01 nanowatts. For comparison the tiny solar panel on a solar powered calculator might produce 0.0075 watts, or 750 million times that amount of power.

    In reality, since wattage is a multiple of volts and amps, lowering both of those figures from my highball estimate would massively decrease the wattage. The solar calculator probably produces billions of times more power than this 1 foot long cylinder.

    So, i think its neat that they were able to measure an effect, but the article really should not even be mentioning power generation.