Peter Parker built a mesh network to make his neighbours able to connect with each other more easily, to making meeting and working together cheaper and nicer
I need a good beginner's guide to making images for random weird boards. I feel like no one writes it up because it's hard. I know nothing on the topic - but I have some weird boards with chips I know are supported by the kernels I like.
I think it's like "shove some stuff into uboot" - but I'd love a high level overview. Does that even exist?
nobody writes it up because honestly, it's borderline impossible to distill into anything resembling that. For the overwhelming majority of Made in China stuff, it is absolutely impossible because you're quite literally dealing with pirated closed-source binary blobs.
No, seriously. Most of those boards do not have a valid license to the processor and rely on very specific versions because that's what they were able to pirate.
a perfect example of this is the LePotato AMLogic boards. Basically none of them have a valid or legal license to the firmware. You HAVE to use incredibly specific versions of everything because of cryptographic signing and encryption, which not only can you not build, *they* can't build or obtain. DTB is completely worthless because the problem is the encryption and signing.
@RootWyrm 🇺🇦 Oooooh I see. I'm looking at porting OpenBSD to random stuff.
So the issue is that the uboot needs to be signed? Or something else? I am - a person who is good at this stuff, but not done this specific stuff, so I'm just trying to understand which crypto is in use? Which firmware is this?
Except it requires specifically patched u-boot most of the time, and doesn't work anywhere near reliably. And that's before getting into how AWFUL u-boot actually is.
a long time ago, yes, but it involved a custom framing protocol to achieve full duplex without multiple sockets. also, because I like writing custom framing protocols :)
I mean, when evil overlords bought us and forced me out, it was totally worth knowing that was laying in wait for them :)
there's a whole Tears In The Rain speech here, except the attack ships were on fire because they ran on my code and the moments will be lost in time because my framing protocol dropped them.
(but goddamn that app was fast despite beaming around huge blobs of json. also what idiot decided that the browser should block until it reads the whole websocket payload)
@sungo This is reminding me of the application that handled uploads by having the browser parse gigs of CSV and then send them to the server line by line. Good ol' web!
that's basically what the framing protocol did. it'd take the payload, encode the json to a string, and then send the string to the other size one frame ($N bytes) at a time. the other side would append the strings together until EOF and then ask the browser to render it. but data could be passed the other direction between frames so we had full duplex while big blobs were in transmission.
Porn and Crime have mostly rejected LLMs and similar.
Abuse Imagery - porn which is just violence against women, instead of something ethical hasn't. The kind of porn where men can finally shut out women fully and do nothing but abuse. But that's not what people say when they say "porn is an innovator".
Romance novels haven't embraced LLMs.
We need to think about this - how are we using tools that have been rejected anyone in scrappy, innovative, and competitive markets.
No cyber threat actor has been found to use any public AI/LLM for serious cyberattack/cyberoperation goals. Unless they're trolling, because it is already possible to such tools in completely undetectable ways. Cybersecurity and LLM providers have no visibility here.
One thing I really dislike, is the amount people think hosting data is hard.
People talk about needing dozens of cores or gigs of ram to host a database or a website. They get impressed by projects where someone runs a website from an Apple ][ or a pi0.
We, as free software advocates, need to remind people that the charger for a Macbook Pro is enough to run a website, not the Macbook Pro
One of the reason I like static websites is because of the low overhead on the server.
Also you don't have to back up the website because it's already on your computer. Just backup your computer.
And because of this static websites are very portable and can even be run on free hosts. Just be sure to use your own domain so when the free host goes squirelly you can move.
Blogs, audio, video, full websites all have static host solutions.
One thing I really dislike, is the amount people think hosting data is hard.
People talk about needing dozens of cores or gigs of ram to host a database or a website. They get impressed by projects where someone runs a website from an Apple ][ or a pi0.
We, as free software advocates, need to remind people that the charger for a Macbook Pro is enough to run a website, not the Macbook Pro
@silverwizard That said, I fully understand how the average person* could not be bothered to figure out how to do it. The technology industry has done a great job of reducing all their offerings into little magic black boxes that everyone's afraid to look inside of for fear that they'll break them.
* The average person will never read this post because the fedi is too complicated and scary.
One thing I want to focus on is internal - not just internal messaging. I hate all the times I see a youtuber show off their Battlestation. Or when someone builds a handheld device with a full on Raspberry Pi.
@DHeadshot's Alt but I see so many people getting into FOSS who feel they need large server to host things! Even people who know better about slim websites
Thinking about when I was 3 years outt of school and asked anout a project for building apprenticeships for sysadmins, and bristling. I was in a Professional Field damnit! But many people, especially @Gord Spence convinced me my work was different. I wish dearly for a security apprenticeship program now. I wish for sysadmin apprenticeships. I want to nurture a next generation and I want to avoid dumping new grads on those who hire Engineers.
WARNING: It's not safe to visit America. You can be locked up for no reason. Even if you're a white tourist from the UK: theguardian.com/us-news/2025/a…
Graphic artist Rebecca Burke was on the trip of a lifetime. But as she tried to leave the US she was stopped, interrogated and branded an illegal alien by ICE. Now back home, she tells others thinking of going to Trump’s America: don’t do it
depends what _exactly_ you're looking for. Supermicro got themselves on my blacklist. Minisforum is okay if you want a desktop playing dressup, but I don't fully trust them long-term yet.
@furicle @RootWyrm 🇺🇦 To be clear - this project is at the point of "I don't think the CEO has realized we'll need to rent a shelf to store this", so I don't know where it's going to go.
@RootWyrm 🇺🇦 Who is paying: My CEO is asking for numbers, so probably no one - but I would like to collect realistic ones.
Basically - we drank some AI koolaid and then realized it's not cost effective - so they want some numbers on things. So I'm just wondering what vendors people are using these days that aren't the big expensive ones.
I know back in the day Supermicro was the go-to - and Dell is what a lot of people are using as IBM/Lenovo burns its entire brand down. But is there anything that's doing less mainstream work.
so, ballpark, it very much depends on the GPU class. That's your 90% cost, no joke.
ASRock 8U8X-TURIN2 I can't give numbers on, as it's prelim. So, you'd be looking 4U8G-GNR2.
Base chassis, ~$8-10k. CPU, >=$6k. RAM, >=$4k GPU, minimum is going to be NV L40S - MINIMUM. Those are $12k. Each. Minimum. To actually get them expect to pay $20k. Tariffs push that to $19k before 'fuck you' premiums. That's PER GPU and only 48GB which limits the models significantly.
Good choice! AMD has vastly superior FP performance, that's just a statement of fact, and they work great.
MI210 64GB's are $10,000 each with a 12+ week leadtime.
MI300-series are ODM only. Not 'OEM only.' Original DESIGN Manufacturer. Meaning Dell, HPE, Lenovo, etc. A Dell XE9680 will cost over six digits before opex.
sure, if you toss cost considerations out, there's options. Except my point is, there isn't.
I am VERY good at sourcing hardware, thanks to 30+ years as an ODM/OEM. And I could not get you an RTX6000 Blackwell for anything, and the soonest I could get you an H100 is "maybe." This is not factoring in tariffs.
It's just the fact that you are fighting every idiot on Earth for some of the worst yields I have ever seen. And NV is restricting most of the supply to high-profit ODM.
yeah. Honestly the only way you'll get numbers on a single server is Dell/Lenovo/HPE/etc. and it'll be a 9+ month wait unless you have a multi-million per-quarter relationship.
MOQs on ASRockRack and Mitac/Tyan are... prohibitive to say the least. The delusional are simply buying up all the production, continuously. I can get singles but I only do full cab HPC stuff these days.
also bear in mind that as of two days ago, ALL supply from everyone evaporated. Customers are scrambling to get hard commits for every single piece of already onshore hardware for literally everything. And I do mean *everything*.
@silverwizard Kinda a screwball way about it, but a Mac studio cluster maybe? 512GB of unified memory means you can run pretty large models after you cluster a few. 😁
Alright so - I've decided I need to write more. As such - I'm publishing a monster every week from March to March. It's a Burning Wheel monster - kinda designed to be "something I can use when my players throw me a curve ball and I need something weird". I wont promise anything - but I want to practice having deadlines and hopefully make something people like!
@Emmy of the Valley 🏳️⚧️ It's just a spammer who sends you a message saying "Hi, I'm Nicole, but you can call me the Fediverse Chick"
Someone did a deep dive into all the links she sends, and they think it's probably a harassment campaign against the woman whose picture they stole, rather than proper malware. But it's annoying and most people on the fediverse are seeing it.
Yes - I'm still mad about user authorizations - but I'm *also* mad about security and accessibility and the people who think it's ok to think they're in tension.
The problem with having a nerd for a dad: 3yo: "what is Iron Man's dad" me: "Howard Stark" 3yo: "Who is Green Goblin's dad" me: "Ambrose Osborne if it's Norman, Norman Osborne if it's Harry, if it's Ulrich or Hamilton I don't know, but I think it's not Ulrich since he's not a hero"
The only diaper options at costco are Disney branded, meaning it's Disney princesses or Spiderman, and he prefer Spiderman, so I let him watch the show Spidey and His Amazing Friends, but maaaaaaan am I mad he's gotten onboarded to Disney because he wore diapers as a baby.
@Michael Lucas Question: What's the stretch goal where you make an audiobook by watching the movie and trying to read your novel out loud at the same time?
Big brands are spending small sums on X to stay out of Musk’s crosshairs “It’s whatever amount is enough to stay off the naughty list,” says ad executive. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
trust in me. I've tried it. It's not worth it. If you want anise in your coffee, grab some regular Pernot, not their absinthe, just plain Pernot. It's basically alcoholic anise and mixes fine with anything.
Trump and Vance are confused why everyone else isn't behaving like sycophants because they run the US.
Ok, let's sum this up. The thing that gets to me about the Signal chats is the Vice President of the US talking about bailing out Europe. There was a comment about how only the US could drone a building, which is wild, I feel like I could probably throw a bomb at a building using the contents of most kitchens. Sure - maybe the US's bombs and drones are fancier - but I think we need to zoom in on that.
The US administration thinks that it's getting value for its money on defense. There's a theory that the US military budget is being spent on getting stuff rather than mostly just a slush fund for defense contractors. But this leads them to believe that they're the most powerful people in the world and that they're as much stronger than any other country by the amount more they spend on weapons.
And because of that they think that Europe couldn't stop terrorists. There's a belief that people aren't shooting drones at civilians because they *can't*, and they're mad that people are relying on them to fire drones at civilians. They believe that everyone else is just ungrateful for their droning of civilians. They can't envision a world where blowing up innocents in an apartment building is considered a bad move.
Trump and Vance are confused why everyone else isn't behaving like sycophants because they run the US.
This is why he wanted Zelenskyy to say thank you! This is why the defense budget of NATO is so important! This is why they call him the Leader of the Free World! This Propaganda matters!
im glad you touched on spending as a poor metric of military strength/investment. Because I think about this a lot. I don't know if Europe is a good example, bc I feel (don't have actual data) that a lot of defense spending in the EU is contracts for private industry, as well. But China for example... China is definitely spending 0% on the profit margins of private industries. And that shit is going to hurt when our war-mongering leaders finally get the war they've been pushing for.
@silverwizard I didn't think it in so many words, but we got hung up on the same detail of this story. Not the poor OPSEC, not the unaccountability of Signal disappearing messages for public officials, not the vague disagreement between Vance and Trump, but the unwarranted jab at Europe.
@Hypolite Petovan To be fair, this is partly me thinking about your own thoughts (I read your post yesterday). But tthis line definitely was most formed with yelling at Zelenskyy for not saying thank you. But it's all fucked, but it's such background noise in all the warcrimes vomit.
I think the fact that they killed 50ish innocent people who no theory they were involved in anything is also wildly important to this stry!
My least favourite anti-pattern in everything is when someone gets the term Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) stuck in their head. They then start building wrappers around an interface that has all the same inputs as their interface. So now you have 2-3 layers of abstraction on top of every interface, all of which add complexity. Because they are Not Repeating Themselves where things aren't the same. BAAAAAH
One of the worst parts of modern life is innovaton. One of the most annoying things that could happen in my economic life is if Kijiji Innovated. If Kijiji improved/changed it could only annoy me.
I see people being mad about "Dead Games", and I also see people mad about Live Service Games. My entire goal in gaming is for my games to never change. I don't want changes, I want to play, see the story, finish, or mess with systems.
I don't get the search for innovation in corporations, and I don't get why someone would want them to. I don't get why people get annoyed by a product not updating.
@silverwizard I keep circling back to the increase in bullshit jobs in product and marketing mainly. Without new stuff to constantly put forward, their entire job is at stake.
Although I believe this can also happen with engineering teams that were oversized at the start of a project to put out the MVP as early as possible, and then you have engineers twiddling their thumbs and scrambling to find reasons to stay employed, although it would more probably would take the form of refactoring and rewrites.
Nothing to do with customer desires, everybody is just trying to keep their job.
@Hypolite Petovan So I tend to work in companies with 10-100 people. I joke my career is turning companies from 10 person companies to 100 person companies and then moving on.
It often means my teams are unresourced - working with dev teams under 10 people. Often we'll have not enough bandwidth to do the things we need to do. But we primarily add to the things we have rather than improve the daily drive experience.
It's the same mindset as google only promoting for creating things and not maintaining things.
People's obsession with innovation is putting the cart before the horse. It's a (potential!) path towards an objective; treating innovation as an intrinsic objective itself is inane.
Sure, innovation may be required when established means can't achieve a goal.
Sure, when someone makes something we didn't know we wanted, their innovation can be retroactively impressive.
But just demanding innovation? "Why won't you change I dunno what to achieve I dunno what?!"
I really don't understand people's existential horror at Star Trek transporters.
If you're a materialist - why do you care if your body is preserved alongside your mind. Why is it a problem that you get stored in a pattern buffer?
If you're not a materialist - why do you care about the body and not the soul? Why do you think your soul would become untethered because of changes in your body? I don't get it!
I once had a conversation in a philosophy of the mind class, where we were spitballing some things on a similar topic.
A lot of our everyday intuitions on our idea of a "self" involve that self having an unbroken continuity. (Whether one believes this is accurate or not.)
Most things that break that continuity give us the heebie-jeebies when put under a mental microscope.
@trashHeap That's valid. I mean - I am kinda a Lockean on this one - where conciousness is the thing and discontinuity happens (I've fainted before). Sure, I get why it feels weird. But... it's such a meme at this point - I don't... get it!
Maybe it shines too much of a spotlight onto the fact that a person is, much like a legal entity, a fiction; created by shared understanding, which is also a fiction.
You cant move files onto a USB stick - you can only copy them, then delete the first copy.
You can believe in materialism, and computer-files, while still feeling uncomfortable with the full implications.
@Malin Interesting - so you think that it's about the ability to copy. Thomas Riker is the real prior art here - but also kinda the counter example. Mirroring the pattern was supposed to be impossible - the idea of copying something with the transporter is impossible properly.
Maybe it's true - the idea of digital information is what's causing the issue - computers can only properly copy - but as envisioned in the 60s there's this idea that you can be transformed into a "matter stream" and stored in a buffer and it's fine. But now people don't materially engage with that...
Riker's twin makes a great example, along with that guy with the fear of transporters.
I think the fear comes from really thinking about what the real process is, but you're probably right that people understand it more now from working with files.
@Hypolite Petovan If your game has the coolest magic sword in the world, and the PC who swings a sword isn't getting it, it's a wasted detail. That sword should be in the hands of the villain or the hero, or else fuck it.
Maybe some games will have players who all hate swords and it doesn't come up, but the expectation is that the cool parts of the game are used in the game!
@Hypolite Petovan If I'm playing A Game Of Magic Swords my sword can be cool because it's on fire instead of +1, and if I'm playing Grim Gritty No Magic my sword can be cool because the hilt is obsidian or because it helped fight off the Huns.
But don't say "Grim Gritty No Magic has the sword called Magic Sword and it exists but the GM shouldn't let a player have it because it's rare!
A hacker is someone who studies and explores systems. Generally because they find it fun. Many posit this attitude is innate as opposed to learned. I think that that's complicated but I am willing to believe there are innate hackers.
My son is an innate hacker.
He has figured out that if I'm leaving for something, he can always get more time with me by asking for another hug. If he's had 3-5 hugs I'll eventually give up. Meaning he offers me a hug, which always works. If I'm in my office because I'm "at work" he can offer to make me a cup of coffee and then he gets to see me (even if briefly).
The problem is that cutting off these behaviours make him sad and I can't do that.
This means I have a hacker child figuring out how to exploit me. This is really fun but also really weird.
I bought a lineman's handset last weekend. I got a bix strip and a bix block to play with along side it. I am now asking friends "What's the difference between an ATA and a TRS cable punched to a bix block really?"
I think I found a bug in the AWS API. If you check an RDS cluster's endpoints from the CLI - those DNS records don't exist. You need to add -cluster to the domain. I am going mad.
One complicated thing about going to Parent Teacher meetings as a parent is that so many teachers seem to think you'll defer to them in how you treat your child. No teacher I've met is willing to admit wrongdoing or mistake, and it makes my fucking blood boil.
I think I'd put the pyramids and the phone system on par in terms of build complexity and knowledge needed that's mostly beyond my ken. but the phone system wins due to ongoing maintenance costs. Once a pyramid is built, you can mostly just walk away. The phone system, though, gotta keep those experts plentiful, happy, and intergenerational.
@sungo Exactly! The pyramids are wonderful beautiful things.
The phone system is the ultimate joy of humanity. It's communication, connection, and millions of people working together to make that happen. They're paid and unpaid. Phreak and cop. People who are talking, communicating, and agreeing. So I can put to wires into a line anywhere, and find connection to any other line in the world. As long as we all agree that communication matters.
at least that's the trend around here
silverwizard
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