jstgord

[ be sure to a) check for leakages regularly and b) do arm curls well away from electric outlets, just in case ]

Nova at hachyderm.io seems to be doing a great job managing the tsunami of signups, as people flee Twitter.

I do like the social architecture of communities with their local flavor.

imo, many of our systems are hyper-centralized and thus brittle - I guess Id seen adverts increase in Twitter and was going to move at some point.

I dont want to be on a platform that can be killed due to a single entity [ be it rage-quit, selling out to ad revenue, government overreach, conservative religion etc ] I do worry about youtube and reddit for this reason. These things seem like societal infrastructure which should be at least partly 'owned' by the content creators / consumers.

When I go back to poke around Twitter it just seems like a hot mess.. Im glad I left. I do feel some nostalgia towards it, they built a cool thing.

Twitter is dead .. long live the internet.

as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system.

I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine really worked.

Was so happy when I could afford Turbo Pascal back in the day. best product ever.

But I also think we [ the species ] need a way to discuss ideas which cant be turned off at a whim by a single rich or powerful person or organization.

Mastodon may not be that thing [ yet or ever ] .. but there is some hope that it might be that thing for a while.

or should that be @justgord@hachyderm.io in canonical format ?

I signed up today to see if M was usable [ it seems to be ] .. listened to a stream with the oxide guys discussing Mastodon :

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1652616971

https://hachyderm.io/@nova

https://hachyderm.io/@oxidecomputer

and now there is enough churn/pain on Twitter to overcome the activation energy hump of moving to a new platform.

We need a social network to share short texts which cannot be easily turned off at the whim of a billionaire [or a government for that matter ] - Mastodon could be that thing, could grow into that thing, so is worth trying.

It also doesnt have to be perfect or complete to succeed - we can fix things and scale as we use it.

Our individual choices are a vote for the future we want - getting there is a noisy stochastic process.

I sometimes think of a parallel universe in which the internet was controlled fully by Telcos .. we would have had to put in coins every 3 minutes to surf the web. So, I hold out hope for a social network where people can talk relatively freely that isnt killed by spam or individual/corporate/government greed [ for power, eyeballs or money ]

I think a lot of our systems are overly centralized.. which makes them vulnerable to the whims of rich individuals or governments.

Now is a great time to make the move, given recent churn on Twitter.

I would really like to know if my x86 'linux PC', is actually running another 'hypervisor' OS that runs Linux - it seems like a recipe for security vulnerabilities.

If so, there are a lot of Qns :

- what OS, is it up to date ?

- can this OS be communicated with from the network ?

- on which chips does it run ?

- can it be re-flashed / upgraded / replaced ?

- can it interrupt/schedule my normal os ?

- how much CPU/power does it use ?

I would certainly trust an Oxide supplied (Rust) bare metal open-source low-level OS to host linux vms on my dev machine, than say, a totally opaque binary blob that the US government has forbidden xyz company from talking about.. just to speculate wildly.

I also think Oxide has wider market that just the server space - eg. one has to do all sorts of shenanigans to get a core freed up so that you can run timing/latency sensitive apps, without getting interrupted by linux threads doing noisy housekeeping on each core.

Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : )

but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess.

hehe

Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ]

Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.

https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2022/06/29/node-js-perf-foll...

Did a basic test of our new new thing, seemed to hum along okay at 10 w/sec and ~50 reads/sec - short writeup here : https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2022/06/26/mon-pho-aka-how-f...

ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.

It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.

My reasoning : a post-war relatively wealthy middle class and free University education meant more time for things like attending political protests, tinkering with emerging electronics/computers, engineering projects and garage bands.

We have wonderful flat screens now, much better comms .. and yet nothing seems fixable, were killing the planet with our carbon emissions and not many people seem concerned, and our best most energetic young minds are slaves to servicing their student debt.

Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..

Slava Ukraine. Slava Heroime.

Im 10 pages in, taking a break because its too heavy ..

Random thoughts come to mind, given recent events, such as how a whole populace can be subjugated by regular abuse and misinformation .. and follow the whims of a despotic cult-leader. [ It strikes me most Russians have no idea whats going on in Ukraine, or are happy to pretend its not really happening. Why do millions have to have their lives uprooted by the decisions of one person ? ]

How many of us have the wherewithal to question the cultural rules we were brought up with, or the persistence to improve or change things, fighting a life-sapping bureaucracy ?

I fortunately live in a liberal democracy with excess food and security, with only first-world problems .. and yet .. it seems 85% of the citizens want action on climate change, while our elected leaders are hell bent on burning as much carbon as possible - so I have to ask, am I even living in a democracy ?

As a software dev, Ive been long thinking that almost all of our systems are far too centralized, and thus too brittle .. banking/currency/payments, social media, communications, food production, energy supply, politics, military, shipping/trade/transport, workplaces, education ..

yes, all of this is off-topic, but there are echoes .. we do have to keep re-remembering the Holocaust, because we are the same humans.

Wars are not decided based on pure logic - we are somewhat intelligent apes, we will risk it all to defend our tribe - particularly if we feel the aggression is unfair and unjustified.

I would not be surprised if EU offers interim membership to Ukraine, and then offers air support / no fly zone - calling Putins bluff and widening the conflict.

I think Europe _should_ regard war on Ukraine as a declaration of war on Europe, and the rest of the west _should_ regard war on EU as war on all Western countries.

One reason for this is that if the West does not retaliate towards this aggression, then others will surely follow - perhaps Russia decides Lithuania is part of Russia after all, or Chinese leadership is emboldened to 'take back' Taiwan ?

Even if Russia withdraws tomorrow, can the West trust a madman with nuclear weapons ?

I think the West is at war with Russia today, even if we haven't admitted it to ourselves yet.

We now have the perfect excuse to unleash all the decades long pent up hate of Putins regime.

Ursula Von de Leyen seemed to capture the zeitgeist when she slipped up and said "Ukraine is part of us" or words to that effect. Attack on Ukraine is felt as an attack on the West .. even on the other side of the world.

I see the attack on Ukraine as an existential threat to the West as a whole - and Im probably not the only one asking if maybe its worth risking nuclear conflict. Can we trust Putin with a nuclear arsenal in any case, even if he withdraws ?

This works both ways - if we can replace a few climate skeptics with climate action independent candidates then that might move the needle on government intransigence.

Strangely, the uptake of solar panels has been great down-under .. yet the uptake of electric vehicles has been appalling, with state governments even imposing a road tax on sales.

The real problem here is the government _subsidizes_ coal and gas, and we are even approving new gas fields for exploitation.

It is hard to maintain empathy and hope and still be a realist .. but I hope you will stay motivated and take what action you can.

We may be able to use tech in creative ways to circumvent government inaction - For example : instead of waiting for the government to roll out a carbon price or carbon tax .. everyday people may invest in a green-energy crypto token asset which is used to raise funds for clean energy projects ?

side note : Ive been actively DIS-couraging smart people in Australia to talk about nuclear, here - the problem here is it would take 15 years to even do the paperwork, and we have shown very little competence in rolling out high tech engineering projects [ NBN broadband failure as one example, submarines another ] .. so I think unless you have nuclear in place or in development already, there just isn't time. Meanwhile we could and should be building as many solar plants as possible, in parallel, essentially without such major regulation needed.

Dont let the bastards wear you down, keep doing all the things .. every ton of carbon we keep in the ground is a win that buys our kids time - so thankyou.

What if being 'smart' is a measure of the useful 'technology' we have running as the OS in our minds ?

What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity / time / resources / environment / education .. exposure to good ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books, wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as Evolution, access to computers/internet/information, time devoted to hobbies / making things etc.

I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the recycling of 'talented' developers from one startup to another - so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new things from modern building blocks .. and when the 'thing' doesn't work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens, they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring.

Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop, despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining/resource boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been plowed back into technology / science investment. We should be 'mining' our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when one doesn't make it, the people move on to other ones.

Another way of saying this is "smart doesn't come from nowhere" .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you're homeless and all your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to do that to pay off your student debt.

Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn't worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy.

I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of energy is not part of the general public's meme-set.

We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-education culture, political or economic instability.

What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe immigration of skilled/educated/motivated/talented people from poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work in startups, tech companies or university research labs ]

In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new buildings are nice, but they don't seem to have a plan to actually educate people to a higher level in science and math, despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here don't even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our "green solution" is to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan.

I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by education, marketing/dialog, building truly useful things, or using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the technology projects that will improve things.

Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.

.. so, later, when Covid broke they were interested to see if IVT had an effect vs Covid - under the assumption that its anti-viral mechanism was host-centric rather than virus-specific. It did, wow :

The Monash paper - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

Regardless of whether IVT is ultimately found to be an effective treatment vs Covid in humans [ unclear and controversial at the moment ] it is certainly important to understand its mechanism of action, as it could give rise to a whole new class of broad-spectrum antivirals.

Another interesting paper is the Pasteur study of IVT effectiveness vs covid in guinea-pigs - https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122 [ I feel compelled to give further social proof from a big name institution, given the firestorm of social media opinion ]

I can only speculate that the trials showing both effectiveness and ineffectiveness of IVT in humans vs covid, differ so widely due to some confounding factor - the simplest which I can propose is that IVT is absorbed 2.5x more if taken with fatty food .. which is what you want to get the high doses purported to be effective vs covid .. yet, the medicine is normally taken on an empty stomach to treat intestinal parasites, so it can stay largely in the gut, and not be absorbed into the rest of the body.

You may also enjoy his xsv util [ https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv ] for wrangling large csv files.

Monash study, effect in vitro : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

Pasteur Institute study, effect in guinea-pigs : https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202114122