bcaa7f3a8bbc

> NO TECH MAGAZINE – We believe in progress and technology

> No Tech Magazine hosts all links and updates from Low-tech Magazine. We refuse to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution.

Is it a parody site? Is it a "Low Tech Magazine" mirror site? Or is it sister site operated by low-tech magazine fans, just with a slightly different altitude towards technology, hence the joke?

But it's probably irrelevant to most systems today, as the assembly version is almost always used, e.g.

* i386: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/i386/str...

* i586/i686: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/i386/i58...

* i686 w/ SSE2: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/i386/i68...

* i686 w/ SSE2 + BSF: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/i386/i68...

* x86_64 w/ SSE2: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/x86_64/s...

* ARM: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/arm/strl...

* ARMv6: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/arm/armv...

* ARMv6T2: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/arm/armv...

* ARMv8a/AArch64: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/aarch64/...

* ARMv8a/AArch64 w/ ASIMD: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/aarch64/...

etc.

But I think the bigger problem is not the packets, but why didn't the backbone reject those malformed packets.

Interesting. When your company is big enough, the intranet becomes a community that mirrors the Internet in general...

This is no longer a problem today.

> using the most direct and shortest wire.

Unfortunately, it's often not even possible! A DIP-40 chip already occupies most columns, leaving only two or three columns for wiring. Impossible to wire the bus directly...

Which is why getting them from China is a good idea. I'm building the real thing and I'm well aware of that, but I've found a very economical solution: I've found that buying single-row 40-pin sockets, like this one (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32959627004.html), is a good low-cost alternative to wirewrap sockets, it only cost you one dollar each.

It's not extremely easy to use, as you have to cut them and manually plug two rows of them to make a poor-man's DIP header, but not difficult either, and doing it is straightforward. Also, if the socket is too rough for the components you need (for example a heavy ZIP socket, or a DIP-40/64 chip), I found you could install the wirewrap DIP header to the board first, then plug a generic, cheap DIP socket on top of it, then plug your ZIF socket on top of those.

The only real disadvantage is the increased weight and height, so the solution is not very elegant, but hey, one 40-pin header only costs you one dollar, 10 dollars buy you ten 40-pin headers, which is good for ~15 chips!

I'm currently working on a homebrew Z80 computer. I'm at the stage of moving the preliminary designs to PCBs, but from my experience, wirewrapping is a lot better than breadboarding when you start building circuits with many signal wires. Breadboards are quick and simple at first when you can "plug and play", but it would quickly become a nightmare when the number of connections and wires exceed 200. It may be a less concern for a modern microcontroller as i2c and SPI are serial interfaces, but on a 8-bit computer, you'll hit this number really quickly, because the system bus is 24-bit (16-bit addr, 8-bit data), parallel. A bus driver using two unidirectional buffer has 24 x 2 + 8 = 56 wires, two RAM chips have 48 wires, a ROM has another 24 wires, it's already 148 wires now for a bare-minimum system without even an I/O port. It will get out of control soon. Also, a 16-bit machine will become a nightmare even quicker as they have 32-bit bus.

On wirewrapped boards, you'll never get a bad connection without any visual clue, the connection is as solid as soldering, and there are no jumper wires hanging in the mid-air to stop you from probing it using an oscilloscope. Strongly recommended, to learn more, search keywords "wirewrap electronics" at YouTube.

> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. - an HN user previously told me.

The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking.

One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well.

But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - after (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths.

I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.

* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220

* Recommended comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914

Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.

We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.

On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse.

What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems.

Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon.

Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm.

P.S: Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations.

----

Appendix:

David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine.

Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press.

[1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on

etch their name into history ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

It belongs to the long tradition in Western Philosophy and has been proposed by many great philosophers in different variations, Godel's proof can simply be seen as the same metaphysical argument rigorously expressed in modal logic. And of course, this argument, like many other issues in philosophy and theology, is not without its controversy. It has been criticized by many people in the past 1000 years, including some high-profile theologians as technically flawed, which is also covered by this Wikipedia article.

https://github.com/FormalTheology/GoedelGod

> When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"

This is a timeless classic from Wired, written by Neal Stephenson in 1996. I love this article not only because of the article itself, but its enthusiasm and energy from the age it was written in.

Today, Wired is a mainstream tech magazine written mainly for a nontechnical audience, which has said stupid things like "a new evolution of DDoS [is] known as Memcache" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18020811), and only occasionally has good articles. But back at that time, it was just before the dotCom bubble, Wired represented the avant-garde of Silicon Valley that was going to revolutionize everything through computing and the Internet, the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization, and would liberate us from all the old forms of political control. It was an age with a bright future where everything seems possible.

You can see many of those optimisms from this article.

For example.

> Q: Why not just go south around Singapore and keep the cable in the water, then?

> A: Because Singapore is controlled by the enemy.

> Q: Who is the enemy?

> A: FLAG's enemies are legion.

And

> In any case, the deal fell through because of a strong anti-FLAG faction within KDD that could not tolerate the notion of giving any concessions whatever to IDC.

One goal of constructing FLAG was explicitly reduce United States's and challenge traditional ISP's control over the infrastructure. Decentralization!

> The lack of freedom stems both from bad laws, which are grudgingly giving way to deregulation, and from monopolies willing to do all manner of unsavory things in order to protect their turf.

With a techno-libertarian free capitalism "innovation/disruption" spirit.

> Douglas Barnes, an Oakland-based hacker and cypherpunk, looked into this issue a couple of years ago when, inspired by Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, he was doing background research on a project to set up a data haven in the Caribbean. "I found out that the idea of the Internet as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a myth,'' he discovered. "Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn't that great.'' And he cautions: "Even outfits like FLAG don't really grok the Internet. The undersized cables they are running reflect their myopic outlook.''

Cypherpunk! And yes, Neal acknowledged multiple times in the article that FLAG was not the holy grail, it still had a lot of problems and far from the libertarian ideal of decentralization, but he still believed FLAG was going to be the beginning of the new network order.

---

However, the dream eventually came to an end.

Wired-inspired dotCom bubble busted.

Although FLAG was the first move to break U.S. and traditional ISP's monopoly, future projects in the next 10 years didn't quite accomplish this goal.

Silicon Valley became the new giant establishment and monopoly, and the massive deregulation was partially responsible to that.

Authoritarian regimes have done a good job preventing the information flowing online to bring liberal political changes.

Arab Spring ended horribly.

The revolution of the Internet has been seized as the means of mass surveillance.

The unfortunate side-effects of empowering individuals created wild populism, "Fake News", and flat Earth, and we started to suffer from them. I know it's unavoidable to an extent and I feel the freedom from the Internet is still worthwhile even with these side-effects, but back to 1995, it was pure utopianism and we were too overoptimistic and completely ignored this aspect.

How? Did you mean to remove all the existing solder, reapply the paste, and reflow again (can that even be done on an already populated board, where do you place the mask/stencil?), or it's something else?

Yes. The designers of ATX specification have considered this problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_good_signal

On the motherboard power connector, there's a pin called "power good". The controller chip in a properly-designed PSU will determine whether the voltage rail has stabilized and only generates this signal when it did, the motherboard will only attempt to start when the "power good" signal is activated by the power supply, at this point all the inductors are saturated and capacitors are charged, so it's good to go for most boxes. Spinning fans are typically a non-issue. Also, the power circuitry on a modern motherboard has sophisticated control and protection, some can turn itself off or force-reset when significant over/undervoltage is detected.

However, if you have too many HDDs connected it could still be a big problem. When BIOS spins up the disk simultaneously, the inrush current of the motors is HUGE. In a good server setup, the disks have its own dedicated power supply, and a good disk controller will take care of it by not spinning all disks up at the same time. Some BIOS can also do that.

> Once that is loaded up, the firmware loads and activates the RAM and disables the Cache as RAM.

This is an interesting step.

Initialing the memory controller and activating RAM is a difficult process on modern hardware. When the computer first boots with a fresh RAM module, BIOS needs to "train the memory" to make it usable. "Training the memory" means commanding the DDR controller to perform a series of testing to find the suitable operating parameters (e.g. latency) for the RAM, which is required to overcome the hardware variation on the electrical level. It's a combination of heuristics and lookup-tables, which can partially explain the variance of compatibility of RAM and different motherboards. It's also why the computer may have 10 seconds of apparent "black screen of death" on boot if you just updated BIOS (or installed a set of fresh RAM), which can be scary ;-).

On many platforms there is no free and open source implementation and coreboot developers had to reverse-enginner Intel's blob.

When I was working with Linux kernel and coreboot I digged into the datasheet of my motherboard chipset to troubleshoot my unresponsive power button. It was pretty complicated, the kernel driver of the power button (yes, it's a thing!) actually first communicates to the EC/keyboard controller, and setup a GPIO input for the button to the appropriate mode and then hook an interrupt handler to it, finally it reroutes the interrupt of the EC to southbridge to generate an ACPI power-managerment event (PME), which triggers the actual hardware wakeup from suspend (it's not a standard x86-compatible machine although it uses x86 peripheral chips). If UEFI/ACPI is involved, the whole process would occur at a different layer.

So I started to think often since then: "What happens when you press the power button" can be the hardware-equivalent to that interview question. It seems to be a good question for a variety of hardware engineering fields, including simple embedded systems and complex computer systems.