@freakazoid@retro.social
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

freakazoid

@freakazoid@retro.social

He/him or they/them. Queer GenX parent of two kids living in #Pittsburgh #Pennsylvania USA.

Boost = endorsement. My posts get auto-deleted after 6 months.

#retrocomputing #amateurradio #space #electronics #c64 #rc2014

#noarchive #noindex #noscrape #nobridge, no training your AI model on my posts.

#nobot means no uninvited interactions from bots whatsoever, including boosts or favorites. All accounts marked as bots or which appear to be automated will be treated as bots.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

LOL I was able to pass USPS's "identity confirmation" using a privacy.com credit card which will accept literally any address. So I'm now forwarding your mail to me as well.

freakazoid, to random
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We don't even have practical quantum computers yet, but it's already looking like we may need to migrate off of some post-quantum encryption algorithms. There's a new polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving some hard lattice problems, which some post-quantum encryption algorithms are based on.

New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/new-lattice-cryptanalytic-technique.html

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

If squatters start using this en masse, I bet they'll fix it really fast.

Crickets from Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/crickets-from-chirp-systems-in-smart-lock-key-leak/

freakazoid, to solarpunk
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

IMO "rebuild the world after it's been cleansed by fire" is adolescent and/or fascist fantasy. And it certainly doesn't fit with the quote I've found most compelling "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, right now."

SolarPunk, like , seems to be about dealing with the messiness of the world as it is right now. The chances you or I will survive the "cleansing by fire" that so many fantasize about are close enough to zero that thinking about it is just escapism. Which is fine, but don't pretend it's SolarPunk or anarchism.

https://climatejustice.rocks/@solarpunkpresents/112275932521284107

freakazoid, to random
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The Nintendo DS GPU seems pretty interesting: scanline rendering of arbitrary polygons. And it clips polygons to the view volume.

https://melonds.kuribo64.net/comments.php?id=56

ZekuZelalem, to random
@ZekuZelalem@dair-community.social avatar

BATTLE FOR THE HORN:
Just here to provide some updates on the geopolitical skirmishing that has involved a number of major players in a race for control and influence of Somalia's coastal frontiers off the Gulf of Aden...which borders the Red Sea and the lucrative Bab El Mandeb strait. That strait has a huge impact on global oil shipments, and has been explored as a possible Israel weapons delivery portal.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@ZekuZelalem Thanks for the excellent write-up!

How much of Turkey's interest in "protecting Somalia's sovereignty" do you think is driven by their own desire to avoid emboldening the Kurds? Seems like nation-states with their own independence-minded groups are always the first to jump to "protect sovereignty".

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Is there an e2e encrypted one-time-access pastebin from a trustworthy org? I was hoping cryptpad or protonmail had one but I don't see it for either.

Use case is emailing myself a username and password from my work laptop without needing to install anything or deal with PGP.

alcinnz, (edited ) to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Now that I've extended my hypothetical hardware-Internet Communicator with the necessary mathematical throughput, how'd we use it to compress FLAC? FLAC isn't a great choice for my motivating usecase of audiocalls, but its a great place to start!

Every n samples would be grouped into a "chunk" & processed multiple times.

For stereo audio the first pass sums the differential compression to check whether we get more compression out of Left/Right channels verses mid/side channels.

1/3?

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz by "dot products at different intervals" are you talking about autocorrelation?

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

The Web is basically an operating system nobody can be held accountable for because nobody designed it.

freakazoid,
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(Which is not to say we shouldn't still hold Google accountable for it and liquidate their assets to pay for their crimes.)

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Is a board like this safe to solder directly to a perma-proto board with no pins? I am guessing the bottom is sufficiently insulated that the pads underneath it on the perma-proto board shouldn't cause an issue.

(This is the board to charge a pair of supercaps from a <=5V solar panel.)

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@cmdrmoto That's a good idea. Thanks!

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

I think this is a Snowden-sized fuckup on GCHQ's and the Spanish government's part. There is no way GCHQ intercepted a private Snapchat message by snooping on the airport WiFi.
https://anticapitalist.party/@a000d4f7a91939d0e71df1646d7a48/111816654683975850

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

Honestly if we want this shit to stop, we need to start saying shit like "I'm going to blow up this plane" all the time in private messages. It's not illegal to joke with your friends in private.

freakazoid, to random
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San Francisco has among the best transit in the country, yet it also has among the highest Uber rates in the country. Why and how do we fix that?

freakazoid, to random
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What if computing weren't divided into siloed "applications"? What would that look like? How could we do it while still keeping software development decentralized?

freakazoid,
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@alcinnz That can work to an extent, but I'd think that without an agreed upon data model, the user experience could get pretty bad.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz Maybe!

It's possible I'm misunderstanding what you mean by transcoders, but they seem like the way around defining a data model. And to me a core feature of a computing system that isn't based on siloed applications is that data, instead of applications, are first class.

This is exactly the opposite of (most of) the iOS and Android models, where all data belongs to applications. Except that both OSes also have certain pieces of data as first class, namely all the PIM stuff: at least contacts, calendar entries, tasks. But that set doesn't seem to be extensible on either OS.

GNOME (and I assume KDE) go a bit farther down this road, though I'm finding as I explore it that it's a rather poorly maintained road.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz When you say transcoders, are you thinking of maybe transcoding to a specific storage model? Or would an object be, for example, an "image", and it would be stored however it was first obtained, and then transcoded from that to whatever another application wanted?

Another model that occurred to me is to still break down, say, a JPEG into its component parts, and store it in some lossless fashion, but for example maybe you could use something more efficient than huffman encoding of the quantized coefficients. That might be too complex, though.

Transcoders are also a big deal for indexing. So maybe you have a "data store" which can store files but also understands enough about those files to know which transcoders to use in which situations.

Speaking of which, are there any generic indexing systems that support things like images and videos?

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz Everybody loves filesystems because they're generic, but it means everything that uses the filesystem has to start from scratch.

Sure, you can have a way to register thumbnailers and other kinds of handlers, but based on what? Right now the only ways to distinguish files are based on their name or their contents. Name is fast but inflexible, while contents is flexible but slow and sometimes error-prone.

And how do you organize files? I have thousands of photos my family has taken over the years, but I rarely look at them because they're just sorted by date. If I want to make use of them I have to stick them all in a "photo album app". Transcoders don't help with that.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz Ah, I was thinking of a transcoder as something that converts a file to another format while keeping the content. I would call something that spat out DCAT an extractor or tagger or something.

Tags could just be other files, under a special "tags" directory. At least some of them could behave like classes or mixins, determining what kind of operations are available on a file.

freakazoid,
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@alcinnz I don't think you need to enforce that transcoders are lossless. More that you use extractors to get metadata.

freakazoid,
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@alcinnz you mention using transcoders to split up projects. @jameshowell mentions Emacs. How could we split up Emacs?

I guess ACME would be one answer to this. And the UNIX "lots of little programs that do one thing well" approach is certainly one answer to my question. X11 and Wayland really fail to bring this approach to the GUI space IMO. Plan 9 does with 8½ AIUI, but Plan 9 feels like a dead end to me. And even if it were "the answer" I don't know how to move the world in that direction.

Nothing about X or Wayland really block us from doing this except for the need to have different clients manage different windows. But neither gives us even a consistent UI language, just some limited ways to share data between programs, primarily the clipboard.

GNOME and KDE try to get us closer, and in particular they give us consistent UI languages and better ways to share data between applications. But in my opinion both are abject failures, first and foremost in that both continue to exist and be popular. And they continue to exist because they are opinionated about things that shouldn't matter, like implementation language.

Freedesktop.org kept both projects from becoming even bigger failures and dragging down the whole ecosystem by at least getting them to agree on some things, but KDE's use of C++/Qt and GNOME's use of C, then part of .Net (worst decision ever), then Vala are each huge problems. They needed to start with protocols and UI languages, not libraries/toolkits.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz @jameshowell Components probably shouldn't be implementing UI at all. By and large they should not be getting "click" and "keypress" events, but commands, which come back from a UI defined entirely by configuration. Whatever that means.

Adding @wizzwizz4 who mentioned pluggable modules.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz @jameshowell @wizzwizz4 Of course, the UI itself would be implemented by components! You'd have a menu component, a text editor buffer component, a paint surface component, etc. And of course other components could hook into various events. Like an autocompleter for example.

alcinnz, (edited ) to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I'm curious how compelling my hardware-Internet Communicator hypothetical is!

So: Given the opportunity to implement TCP/IP, HTML/CSS, (not JS, makes the hypothetical less interesting), Gemini, XMPP, eMail JPEG, PNG, WOFF, Xiph media, DVI, USB, etc from scratch on a novel string-centric CPU (with a couple coprocessors) designed specifically for it... Would you be interested?

Respond to expand on what interests you, or if there's an alternate computer architecture which interests you more.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@alcinnz You left out "Defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada."

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