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Findecanor

2,884 karma · joined September 24, 2021

Fell in love with computing on the Amiga. Started programming in BASIC and assembly language, as you did in those days.

Multiple cancer survivor; Mechanical keyboard enthusiast; Prop replica collector; Technorealist; Vegetarian.

Unemployable: Recruiters are full of prejudice for unemployed people, which I was after my first cancer, which made me fall into a depression awaiting my cancer to come back. It did and I "survived". I'm looking forward to dying from the next cancer under a bridge somewhere. I just want to work in a righteous occupation, without taking part in exploiting people with gaming/phone/social media/AI addiction, or to be exploited myself. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

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Findecanor··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
Why could it not mean multiple flags at once?
Findecanor··on The USB Situation
I think Nokia's original Micro USB socket design had only two through-hole pins, which was not sturdy enough.

A standard USB-C socket has four: one in each corner like some later Micro USB sockets. There even exists USB-C sockets with all through-hole pins but there's no space for USB 3 pins so they are all USB 2.0 or charging-only.

I used to buy cables with non-standard reversible Micro USB plugs, but I think there was only one manufacturer of them and now I can't find replacements.

Findecanor··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
Between Netscape Navigator and Firefox, their web browser was called simply "Mozilla". It supported GUI themes in XML with images which were officially called "Chrome". Mozilla also hosted user-contributed themes on a web site called "Chrome Zone".

The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.

Findecanor··on You can beat the binary search
The range is 1..4096, so 4096 bits = 512 byte bitmap would suffice.

That is, if you're only ever going to test for membership in the set. If you need metadata then ... You could store that in a packed array and use a population count of the bit-vector before the lookup bit as index into it. For each word of bits, store the accumulated population count of the words before it to speed up lookup. Modern CPU's are memory-bound so I don't think SIMD would help much over using 64-bit words. For 4096 bits / 64, that would be 64 additional bytes.

Findecanor··on Laws of UX
I sometimes use a trackball — without a "scroll wheel".

So in Google Maps on the web, I'd have to click the + and - buttons on the screen repeatedly to zoom in and out.

But those buttons don't always stay put. There is a status bar underneath it, that sometimes contains text so long that it wraps: and then that pushes the buttons up.

So sometimes, I click + + + - . Very annoying.

Findecanor··on Laws of UX
Fitt's Law does not just apply to screens but also to input devices. That is why the keys on the outskirts of a keyboard are larger than other keys.

... except for the anorectic vertical Return keys on Apple keyboards with any European layout: which is a 1×1 key with a small vertical sliver. Japanese "JIS" keyboard layout also has a vertical Return key, and Apple made that properly sized, however.

Findecanor··on Diatec, known for its mechanical keyboard brand FILCO, has ceased operations
Update April 27th. The Taiwanese subsidiary is still alive, and has expressed that it will continue to sell and support FILCO keyboards.

http://www.filco.com.tw/index.php/news_view/index/36

Findecanor··on Diatec, known for its mechanical keyboard brand FILCO, has ceased operations
I've never had a Filco, but I remember it was significant in the early start of the keyboard hobby. Many mods had been tried on the Filco Majestouch first. The first custom key sets had been made for Filco's Majestouch layouts first, etc.

My daily driver at home for over a decade is a keyboard that I had built myself around community-designed replacement parts for the Filco Majestouch TKL. This included a controller to customise the firmware, and that was my first start in programming microcontrollers.

Findecanor··on Your hex editor should color-code bytes
If you're making a hex editor and going to have colour coding, I'd think you expend some effort to make the colouring schemes configurable — and easy to configure and change. Maybe load and save as separate files.

Different colouring schemes for different types of data.

Findecanor··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
One should not trivialise depression. It is a lot different than just a feeling.

I've suffered from and been successfully treated for depression. I would describe it more as an addiction to feeling low than anything.

I suspect that in the EU there can very well have been a lot of overprescription of SSRI for conditions other than depression, however. Many times, people are just melancholy because of external life factors, and no drug could improve those.

Findecanor··on A programmable watch you can actually wear
The Sensor Watch circuit board [1] inside the case of a Casio F91-W / A158W / A159W satisfies 2, 4, 5, and 6. Accelerometer or thermometer available as daughterboard. Battery life measured in months, if not years. Although the simple LED backlight and the segmented LCD leaves a bit to be desired, and there is no wireless connectivity for notifications. Open source firmware.

The Ollee watch circuit board [2] is similar, better backlight but closed-source firmware and configuration over BLE in a smartphone app. Still no notifications over BLE though.

I'd think combining 1 and 6 (O₂ monitoring and waterproofing) would be difficult.

[1]: https://www.sensorwatch.net/

[2]: https://www.olleewatch.com/

Findecanor··on XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
On 64-bit ARM, the same register number is XZR in some instructions and the stack pointer in others.
Findecanor··on Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed
You can not put a price on human suffering.
Findecanor··on Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed
Some cities have streets where internal combustion engines are banned.

Some have bans on just diesel engines. Others ban combustion engines during some hours. Some inner-city congestion taxes have been introduced for health reasons.

Findecanor··on Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed
Second-hand smoke does affect people around you. It is how people get addicted to nicotine. It is how new smokers are created.

And there are some people who are more sensitive to temporary exposure to smoke (and pollution in general) than others. That is why smoking tends to be is banned around hospitals and day care centers ­— because those are places where you will find those people. My father was one of them, after he had got his larynx removed for throat cancer after having smoked for decades. He could not suffer being subjected to even small amounts of second-hand smoke again because then the breathing hole in his throat would get irritated, fill up with mucus and have to be cleaned with a suction device.

And if you drink alcohol next to me, it does not make my clothes and my hair stink so much afterwards that I will want to wash my hair and change my clothes before going to bed.

Findecanor··on Michael Rabin has died
I don't think that is AI slop. adrian_b often post long posts because he thinks he has a lot to say, but you can often tell that they contain his personal views and points that he thinks are important related to the discussions whereas actual AI slop tends to be bland and generic.
Findecanor··on A simplified model of Fil-C
There are algorithms to align allocations and use metadata in unused pointer bits to encode object start addresses. That would allow Fil-C's shadow memory to be reduced to a tag bit per 8-byte word (like 32-bit CHERI), at the expense of more bit shuffling. But that shuffling could certainly be a candidate for hardware acceleration.

There is a startup working on "Object Memory Addressing" (OMA) with tracing GC in hardware [1], and its model seems to map quite well to Fil-C's. I have also seen a discussion on RISC-V's "sig-j" mailing list about possible hardware support for ZGC's pointer colours in upper pointer bits, so that it wouldn't have to occupy virtual memory bits — and space — for those.

However, I think that tagged pointers with reference counting GC could be a better choice for hardware acceleration than tracing GC. The biggest performance bottleneck with RC in software are the many atomic counter updates, and I think those could instead be done transparently in parallel by a dedicated hardware unit. Cycles would still have to be reclaimed by tracing but modern RC algorithms typically need to trace only small subsets of the object graph.

[1]: "Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566660

Findecanor··on Ada, Its Design, and the Language That Built the Languages
That does look a little suspicious. There do exist AI-based tools now that can take other people's blogs and rewrite them with other words. Those are all the rage over on Reddit subs on blogging for ad revenue ...
Findecanor··on Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)
The "Dragon Book" is big on parsing but I wouldn't recommend it if you want to make many optimisation passes or a back-end.

The first edition was my first CS textbook, back in the '90s and as a young programmer I learned a lot from it. A couple years ago, I started on a modern compiler back-end however, and found that I needed to update my knowledge with quite a lot.

The 2nd ed covers data-flow analysis, which is very important. However, modern compilers (GCC, LLVM, Cranelift, ...) are built around an intermediate representation in Static Single Assignment-form. The 2nd ed. has only a single page about SSA and you'd need to also learn a lot of theory about its properties to actually use it properly.

Findecanor··on The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing
I used to do cosplay. Many costumes from movies, TV-series and anime are of characters that wield guns, often unique or at least quite distinctive guns. Carrying the correct gun is sometimes a thing that identifies the character, and therefore is an integral part of the cosplay.

For example, I used to cosplay for charity in the Star Wars costuming club 501'st Legion [0], where for most costumes a blaster gun of high likeness to the original is required. It has hundreds of members in California.

These days, it is very common to make cosplay accessories through 3D-printing. A ban on replica guns parts would hit the hobby hard.

[0]: https://501st.com/

Findecanor··on The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing
How about blasting caps? Those are integrated into modern brass cartridges, and I think making them that way would require more precision than you'd be able to achieve with simple hand tools and an anvil.

19th century revolvers tended to require separate blasting caps, but you still had to buy them even if you could make the bullets.

Findecanor··on Can Claude Fly a Plane?
Douglas Adams formulated how it would be possible for a human to fly continuously, though.

http://extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php

Findecanor··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
And Sweden. And probably lots of other countries too. It's a world standard, and there are very few places that use hyphens in dates that are not ISO dates.
Findecanor··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
That can get messy and confusing if the user's locale is different from the language of the web page.

When I write in English, I of course also want to edit dates and numbers using English conventions. But instead, I am forced to use decimal comma and day/month order because those are the default locale for Swedish, which is my default locale. I have never encountered an OS that doesn't work that way. On the web you'll often don't know: it could be anything.

Findecanor··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
How about: It's too easy for users to use the product wrong, leading to unnecessary tech support calls, and doing tech support costs us money.
Findecanor··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
That was the convention on many older computing platforms.

A "Backspace" key on a typewriter did not actually delete: It merely moved the typing position back one space.

Findecanor··on Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack
Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei were high up at OpenAI before becoming competitors. They are just two of many people who have known Altman personally who have accused him of being a lying sociopath. I would not call that vague.

It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.

Findecanor··on Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack
I don't think it is obvious which "far end" of the political spectrum you are referring to.

I have seen anti-AI sentiments from people known all over the spectrum.

Findecanor··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
There is a RISC-V Server Platform Spec [0] on the way supposed to standardise SBI, UEFI and ACPI for server chips, and it is expected to be ratified next month. (I have not read it myself yet)

[0]: https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform

Findecanor··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
Bankman-Fried has already done it.
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