jaygreco

Love these deep dives. It’s fascinating to see how real, low-level engineering we all take for granted today unfolded. It’s incredible that the rough equivalent of an entire 160lb digital computer was built and baked into silicon.

Also incredible reverse engineering. In a time when seemingly all appreciation for expertise is gone it’s so refreshing to see.

I really like epaper displays for all of the reasons mentioned in the article. Shame the patent locks continue to keep prices high even though the core technology has improved enough for prices to drop.

A few years ago I came into a couple of e-ink displays that had been previously used for storefront/product pricing. The hardware to drive them was locked down but I was able to reverse engineer the panel by finding a datasheet that was close enough and hacking up an adafruit thinkink. I had a lot of fun writing my own driver/abstraction layer. I originally intended to support a bunch of different panels but ran out of steam after the first one did exactly what I wanted.

https://github.com/jaygreco/MagInkCal

Is it just me or are those chokes a little bit messy? They look…kinda sloppy vs what I would expect.

> switchboard operators

What? 1920 called and wants its electromechanical relays back

Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought this. The post is also missing one obvious thing that I expect in any technical post: code snippets. Let me see the code.

ChatGPT has ruined bullet points for the rest of us…

No offense but writing this blog post couldn’t take more than a few minutes, why spoil it with LLM? Shoot, use one to check grammar and recommend edits even.

Interestingly, it’s also possible to encode _emoji_ inside emoji!

Ah yes, one of my favorite skills learned in school was how to work around arbitrary rules made up by cranky sysadmins! I still use it all the time.

The smart kids (whom I’m sure look like they are learning that precious openssh client) are doing their assignment locally or on a free tier VPS with VS Code and scping the thing over when it’s done.

They’re also smart enough to learn openssh when they need it IRL.

I really like the author’s writing style here. The quips about the tea especially.

I came here to say this. I haven’t worked with the Elite X but the past gen stuff I’ve used (865 mostly) the accelerators - compute DSP and much smaller NPU - required _very_ specific setup, compilation with a bespoke toolchain, and communication via RPC to name a few.

I would hope the NPU on Elite X is easier to get to considering the whole copilot+ thing, but I bring this up mainly to make the point that I doubt it’s just as easy as “run general purpose model, expect it to magically teleport onto the NPU”.

I don’t know the size or structure of your team, but one thing that has worked for me in addition to other strategies mentioned on this thread (specifically, that oncall is oncall, nothing else) is that you appoint one engineer - typically someone who has a more strategic mindset as the “OE Czar”. They are NOT on call, and ideally not even in the rotation, but rather there for two reasons: to support oncalls when they need longer term support, like burning down a longer running task/investigation or keeping continuity between shifts. The other is identifying and planning (or executing on) processes and systems for fixing issues that continually crop up. Our mandate was 20% of this person’s time spent doing Czar tasks vs scheduled work.

I have one! Any idea if the PZT cubes are added using the typical photoresist masking/etching or are they placed on die using some other process?

I spent quite a bit of time a few years ago recovering my old MySpace account only to realize they “messed up” (unclear whether it was incompetence, or purposeful) and deleted basically anything that had been, oh I dunno, actually interesting: pictures, videos, playlists…you can’t even see the profile pictures of people in your friends list.

In the rush to move to whatever the next big social media was, I’d never thought about backing up my stuff because why would it ever be gone and why would I care? Lesson learned.

I was weirdly bummed out about it. Back when the site first launched I spent loads of time learning HTML just to customize my page before I realized site profile generators existed.

I bought a car thing when Spotify was blowing them out, knowing full well they’d kill it. I planned on hacking on it and finding a cool alternate use for it. I have actually enjoyed using it at my desk as a dedicated “now playing” screen but the way it relies on Bluetooth drives me a bit crazy.

My ideal homebrew app is just like the 1p Spotify one, but with the ability to use network over usb or the like so that it doesn’t need to sync the play status via Bluetooth. I guess the imminent shutdown might actually motivate me to do something along those lines.

Very cool! I’ve been to a few shows with these and was pretty enthralled with the level of effects that are possible given the Simplicity of the setup. I brought one wristband home hoping to mess with it but never got around to it.

Anyone know if and how Hertz is selling these? If the low resale really is as bad as advertised, it could be good for someone on the other side looking to get their hands on one for a good price.

I love SP and was pretty broken up about this when I found out. We use SP keycaps exclusively on our SCRAMBLE [1] and while we could certainly switch to a different vendor and save money, the quality and experience wouldn’t be the same.

Fingers crossed they find a good buyer.

1: https://nullbits.co/scramble/

From one of the links [1] in this article:

> Prusak explained that one Bitcoin is equal to about $35,000 in U.S. dollars, adding that he doesn't have a specific number on how many Bitcoins the site is able to produce in a day.

> "There's a lot of math, so I can't say we make 10 a day or anything like that," he explained. "I can say that they're worth about $34,000-$35,000, and we've got, you know, tens of thousands of machines running to do that."

This really rubs me the wrong way because it’s patently untrue. It’s _very_ possible and in fact is quite easy to calculate the expected daily returns. Prusak might be dull, but I’d lean more toward deceptive. He just doesn’t want the locals to know how much he’s profiting at the expense of their comfort.

[1] https://www.hcnews.com/stories/granbury-us-bitcoin-corp-erec...

I love fzf. The fuzzy reverse-search alone is worth a lot to me.

My thought exactly. This article might as well only exist so older folks can pop it open and feel smug and superior about something dumb.

This is awesome and timely!

I’ve been wanting to set something like this up for the nullbits server for a while. When I picked discord instead of a forum, I wasn’t counting on the growth we saw. There’s a lot of friction for new folks who aren’t yet on discord, and there’s a lot of knowledge in the server that’s locked behind discord.

Just set everything up! My only feedback is that enabling indexing for all of our text channels took a while doing them all individually, but that’s kind of on me for not enabling forums for help requests until now.

One cool and lesser-known fact is that you can enable adb on Raspberry Pi with adbd.

It’s a fairly seamless way to get console/push/pull over USB. Only downside is that it requires the adb tool on the host as well, vs gadget serial/ssh.

My thoughts exactly while reading this. In addition to his hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate, Zuck also lives in this guy’s head rent free.

Whoa, cool! TIL. thanks for sharing.

I don’t understand why they needed to use a missile to shoot the balloon down. Seems like overkill.

VIA is an awesome resource for the community and really lowers the bar on entry (our users no longer need to or are expected to compile their own firmware just to tweak keys) as well as just being convenient and nice to have.

My only gripe is that they moved to web-only from “native” apps instead of offering both, but if that’s what needed to happen to bump up the development velocity, so be it.

Re: the delays, I think I recently saw something about delays being possible in macros now, or perhaps soon — it might have been in QMK nightly, I can’t remember.

RIP. I’m hoping it’s temporary but not optimistic.

Could it be a coincidence that Twitter relaunched the algo timeline for everyone and within a day 3P clients that are linear-first stop working?

Although with the all the people laid off, who knows.

One tidbit I got out of this that is not directly related to the content of the post is that there are apparently some high-quality instructables out there, and that people spend time writing them!

99% of the instructables I’ve come across in the last 10 or so years have been low-effort junk that aren’t even worth reading. The few the author linked are quite great.

Hah, this is hilarious. I just went through this 30 or so minutes ago. I explained to the CS person that I would in fact be saving money and carbon. “Nope”, he said, just go ahead and repurchase and return.

Insanity. It’s tripping over dollars to save pennies.

After seeing the post yesterday about the e-ink weather display, I thought about how to do it with a kindle, since they’re (a) cheap and available (b) basically self-contained versions of exactly what parts are needed and most importantly (c) subsidize the high price of the display.

I pretty much came to this same design, although was thinking more about disabling the screensaver and (hopefully) finding a way to tap into the sleep/wake power controls so that the display would only refresh once per day or and hopefully consume a lot less power.

Cool to see someone beat me to it! Although I’m not too surprised.

This. I’ve been a happy Tweetbot user since it came out in 2011. The best (no, I mean it) feature that has made it worth paying for time and time again is that it’s a _chronological_ feed and not an algorithmic one. I see updates from people I follow. When there are no more updates, the feed ends. That’s it.