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flyingcircus3

471 karma · joined April 4, 2018

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flyingcircus3··on Booting the RP2350 from UART
Are you implying the SWD signals would send the RAM contents every time? If I had to do that, I would first use a logic analyzer like Saleae to capture the SWD signals of a JLink performing the necessary operations to load the image into RAM. Then figure out, from the bytes that get send and received, whatever needs to be parameterized, and where to put the image data itself, perhaps by capturing different scenarios, and seeing what changes. Maybe even look up the SWD spec. You would also need to figure out what kind of back and forth is necessary, what must block waiting for a response. From there, assuming there isn't cryptography involved, it just becomes a matter of providing bytes to a bus in the correct order or timing based on the proper events. Some of those bytes are "canned" and never change. Some of them are parameters that describe some important quantity relevant your specific image. And the rest are your firmware image, probably chunked up with some overhead wrapped around it. I allow for the possibility that SWD is far more complex than I imagine, but this approach works pretty well for figuring out whats going on with SPI or I2C or BLE.
flyingcircus3··on Show HN: LTE-connected IoT module with remote programming and NL data analysis
The remote programming seems like a novelty aimed at hobbyists. If I have a deployment of remote devices, large or small, iterating on code on a device in the field is a recipe for disaster. How will you track the different versions of code on the various devices you have changed individually? If you need to directly change the code on a field device, doesn't that imply that you are unsure that the changes will work?

If the code needs to change, that is much safer to do in a controlled, low risk, nonproduction environment, where you will very likely have development hardware that has been optimized for ease of development/debugging. Once changes are tested and otherwise validated, an over the air update process would be used to send that new firmware image to the device. This way, your devices all can be on a single version of the firmware, meaning you can scale the deployment of that update to 10, then 100, then 1000 devices, etc.

flyingcircus3··on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
Luckily for those people, more messages were released this morning, with times, planes and weapons described.
flyingcircus3··on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
This exemplifies my point. I laid out how illogical it would be for your claim to be accurate that Biden approved otherwise illegal activity so long as it occured over signal.

And you've simply incorporated this as additional straw for your strawman.

Does this mornings additional confirmation in the form of messages including times, planes, and weapons further solidify your feelings that this is all Bidens fault?

flyingcircus3··on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
Just to clarify on what is moot, you are claiming that sharing classified, perhaps TS/SCI information, over signal, as well as deleting the messages, which are both illegal when isolated from any specific communication method, has all been blessed as above board and legal, simply because Joe Biden allowed Signal usage at the CIA?

Couldn't every whistleblower and double agent from now on just make sure to do their leaking over signal, and therefore receive the magical immunity your logic claims signal usage provides?

flyingcircus3··on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
I think that there is a parallel story to this one that is equally as interesting. There is one group of consumers of this story who see the receipts provided by Jeffery Goldberg, along with confirmation of their authenticity from a spokesperson at the National Security Council, followed by admissions by cabinet member participants of the Signal chat in hearings before congress, and those consumers of all this news can only conclude that the evidence is about as conclusive as you can get that Jeffery Goldberg is telling the truth, that these people are sharing the names of active intelligence officers, and describing imminent plans of action of the US military.

Then there is another group of consumers of this story, with the same access to all of the same evidence, and all of the same first person confirmations, who confidently declare the argument that this might be illegal null and void because Joe Biden allowed the CIA to use signal, and are persuaded away from accepting all of that evidence by articles with that contain such gems as "what the media wont tell you about the Atlantic hit piece", "Democrats talking points on this story quickly unraveled", and "help us continue to expose the lefts desperate attempts to manufacture scandals".

How can propaganda be so effective that people lose the skill of object permanence?

flyingcircus3··on When should we require that firmware be free?
Perhaps that would prevent people from selling clones as if they were authentic, but the stated problem is that clones are undercutting the original creators devices. Changing the name puts an increased burden on the cloners to get their name out there, but in a hobbyist market surrounding a technical subject, that seems pretty small compared to the burden of developing hw/fw that users are willing to pay for.
flyingcircus3··on Debanking (and Debunking?)
It all just sounds similar to claims that Donald Trump was being prosecuted for too many crimes at once, and that's how we can all tell that it's lawfare, and that none of those prosecutions were legitimate, rather than having to reconcile the possibility that Donald Trump is simply a prolific criminal.

You'd like us to view this purpose built Ames room from the singular vantage point that presents your side in the best light, rather than the other various angles which reveal a seedier reality.

flyingcircus3··on Debanking (and Debunking?)
Wouldn't your argument be far more defensible if it wasn't dripping with a siege mentality and provocative, yet unfalsifiable claims? Youre a step away from claiming that the children yearn for the mines.
flyingcircus3··on The Need to Grind Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction
I'll go you one further. Many Electrical Engineers who learn about the progression of transistors, logic gates, flip-flops, registers, arithmetic logic units, central processing units, instructions, and so on, have such a profound epiphany about how all complex systems are merely collections of less complex systems working in concert, that they can't help but to see the rest of the world through that same lens, at all times.
flyingcircus3··on Wuhan lab samples hold no close relatives to virus behind Covid
One administration was applauded for reducing the amount of time and resources spent evaluating the possible negative outcomes of the vaccine.

One administration was harshly criticized for reducing the amount of time and resources spent evaluating the possible negative outcomes of the vaccine.

flyingcircus3··on Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
An even easier method, which I was taught is interval training. The jaws theme is a minor second. Do re mi starts with a major second, and so on. Interval training is easier, imo, and would then allow you to memorize fewer songs with absolute notes.
flyingcircus3··on Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
I believe my claim of having perfect pitch stands on solid ground, and consists largely of what OP is describing. That's because I can demonstrate it. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the described method is a reasonable way to _acquire_ perfect pitch, but I do contend that what is described is a reasonable method of demonstrating and explaining one's perfect pitch. If you do have perfect pitch, that is reflected in the fact that you don't transpose the music you hear on in your head.

This idea of recalling songs is an easy way to explain perfect pitch to others in a way they can easily try for themselves. If you can sing the first note to a song, and then afterwards you actually listen to that song, and you are actually in tune, then you have perfect pitch. That's a far cry from being able to name the note, or rattle off the notes in a chord, but in my view the mental recall is the true innate essence that undergirds every other component of the umbrella of perfect pitch.

flyingcircus3··on Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It seems like a "bit less accurate" is a misnomer here. If you can successfully employ this technique, and use calibrated test equipment to measure it, you have in fact demonstrated your accuracy in recalling the pitch of notes, also known as perfect pitch. The means of achieving this recall do not in any way affect the accuracy of the results, because the results exclusively speak for themselves.
flyingcircus3··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
"playing strong chess" would be a much less hand-wavy claim if there were lots of independent methods of quantifying and verifying the strength of stockfish's lowest difficulty setting. I honestly don't know if that exists or not. But unless it does, why would stockfish's lowest difficulty setting be a meaningful threshold?
flyingcircus3··on Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back
Perhaps there were multiple iterations of the Garmin Edge 530, and we're talking about two different interfaces, but this is the process for zooming and panning the map on my Edge 530:

From the map screen, to change zoom, hold a button until a +/- appears next to other buttons. Use those other buttons to zoom in or out. To pan up or down, hold that same button again, until up/down arrows appear next to the other buttons. Use those other buttons to pan up or down. To pan left or right, repeat this process once more.

The entire value proposition of a bike mounted map is to be able to navigate without stopping to use your phone. But if the interface to adjust the map is this cumbersome, stopping to look at a phone is the smart move, never mind the better user experience.

flyingcircus3··on Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak
It's only interesting when you oversimplify the two situations for the express purpose of sowing distrust.

The only reason you've left out the details that Tina Peters actually facilitated physical access to voting machines with both required passwords, while this current leak was not even sufficient for someone to repeat Peters' actions, is that it would be absolutely devastating to your entire argument.

flyingcircus3··on A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance
In your videogame example, there was no change in the concept of ownership between Nintendo 64 games and Playstation 5 games. If you have the physical media and the console, you can play the game.

Although Nintendo 64 tried to push the envelope in what consumers would pay, the price of video games on the mainstream consoles has stayed in the $50-$75 since at least 1985.

flyingcircus3··on Show HN: Facad – A colorful directory listing tool for the command line
I assume its pronounced the same as "facade" - an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant reality.
flyingcircus3··on Affirmative Action Was Banned. What Happened Next Was Confusing
I'm of the opinion that these baiting headlines are exclusively used in articles with uninteresting stories.

When LeBron James retires from the NBA, no one's headline will read "NBA Legend makes shocking decision about his future".

flyingcircus3··on Embedded Swift [video]
"it usually lacks many facilities commonly found in desktops or servers."

This is where they implied that operating system level functionalities are not found on computers without operating systems.

The fragmentation that exists in embedded is due to the nature of embedded systems, not programming languages. PCs, laptops, and smartphones are general purpose computers. Just about everything else is an embedded device, hardware custom designed for a specific purpose, given just enough resources to accomplish its intended task. Writing software for a general purpose computer on top of a full OS can largely be done without caring about the underlying hardware. Writing embedded firmware without an OS is only possible through understanding the specific hardware you are targeting.

flyingcircus3··on Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of fake news
This take is akin to finding a broken clock that just happens to show the correct time at the moment you found it, and then refusing to accept that the clock is broken, even hours later. Then as the days go on, you accumulate more evidence that the clock is actually working, because you keep checking on the two minutes per day that the broken clock is "accurate", while discounting the other 1438 minutes per day when the clock is wrong.
flyingcircus3··on TinyML: Ultra-low power machine learning
Man, everyone at work is going to be really bummed when I tell them that some guy on the internet has invalidated our empirical evidence of acceptable accuracy and performance with assumptions and appeals to authority.
flyingcircus3··on TinyML: Ultra-low power machine learning
I'm genuinely confused at how you made these assumptions about what I'm describing. Because the "more correct" design you contrast with the strawman you've concluded I'm describing is actually what I'm talking about, if perhaps imprecisely. A pretrained model like mobilenetV2, with its final layer removed, and custom models trained on bird and house images, which take this mobilenetv2[:-1] output as input. MobilenetV2 is 2ish megabytes at 224x224, and these final bird and house layers will be kilobytes. Having two multiple-megabyte models that are 95% identical is a giant waste of our embedded target's resources. It also means that a scheme that processed a single image with two full models (instead of one big, two small) would spend 95% of the second full model's processing time redundantly performing the same operations on the same data. Breaking up the models across two stages produces substantial savings of both processing time and flash storage, with a single big model as the "feature detection" first stage of both overall inferences, with small specialized models as a second stage.
flyingcircus3··on TinyML: Ultra-low power machine learning
Why not three models? One model does basic feature detections, like lines, shapes, etc. A second model that can take the first model's output as its input, and identify birds. A third model can take the first model's output as its input, and identify houses.
flyingcircus3··on Non-interactive SSH password authentication
Overly contrived examples are the hallmark of software zealots. I knew to stop reading after "its more correct variant".
flyingcircus3··on How to attach logic probes to tiny SMD components (2021)
Hot glue is good for strain relief. 30 gauge wire on tiny pads is going to be extremely fragile. Shifting the mechanical stress to the glue will make all of this more durable.
flyingcircus3··on What Took Down Airbnb
When I think of a hotel room, I picture a one room studio apartment with a desk chair, and maybe a couch. This studio apartment has no kitchen, but it might have a small refrigerator and a microwave. It's a cramped space, and not very functional, outside of sleeping. For most people, this means making a bunch of sacrifices from their normal living situation. Lodging that doesn't force people to make these sacrifices will continue to be in demand, even at higher prices than hotels.
flyingcircus3··on So You Think You Know C? (2020) [pdf]
Consistency would be using parentheses for all cases of sizeof, because people without 10 years of experience can pick it up.
flyingcircus3··on So You Think You Know C? (2020) [pdf]
sizeof still requires parentheses if it's a type and not a variable. To me it's like curly braces' optionality on conditional blocks with one line. If you aren't consistent, you're setting yourself up for heartache.
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