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mac3n

374 karma · joined November 28, 2019

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mac3n··on APC says let there be light, with standards to speed up photonics manufacturing
sue it isn't some guy in an Armored Personnel Carrier?
mac3n··on Historical Telecommunications
described in the delightful "Tent Life in Siberia" by the abovementioned George Kennan.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12328

mac3n··on Historical Telecommunications
Anyone remember the Proteon token ring? Seemed much simpler/cheaper than IBM, but they had to switch to IEEE 802.5.
mac3n··on Triplet of 'ghostly' galaxies hints at what dark matter is and isn't
https://www.quantamagazine.org/triplet-of-ghostly-galaxies-h...
mac3n··on What was a Token Ring network?
everything can be deterministic until you lose the token.
mac3n··on What was a Token Ring network?
the token bus combines the one-user-at-a time of a bus with the potential-token-loss of a ring.

IEEE 802.4 token bus standard was withdrawn

polled buses with a master are pretty common when you don't mind the performance hit and central-point-of-failure. i believe cable networks work this way.

mac3n··on Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
mac3n··on OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room
mmmm! Brain-aaS!
mac3n··on OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room
another Sam in play here who can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
mac3n··on Trump says anyone who uses the phrase "artificial intelligence" is "the enemy"
yeah, sooner later everybody is "the enemy".
mac3n··on Toki Pona
Chinuk Wawa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon> a trade pidgin with a simple vocabulary of several hundred words. in common use in the Pacific Northwest a century and a half ago, and still appears in many place names. A few terms even made it into common usage, many by way of the labor movement.
mac3n··on Watson Jr. memo about CDC 6600 (1963)
I might have gone to the same college, in the 80s. I was a TA helping students punch FORTRAN on cards - already pretty obsolescent.

One thing about the CDC - it had perhaps the worst command interface I've run into. Data files were modeled as tapes, and you had to keep rewinding them.

Compiling a program appended to the object file, but running ran the start of the file, so you needed to rewind between, lest you run an old version. Much time lost trying to figure out why changes were ineffective.

FORTRAN variables had 8 significant characters, but the linker had only seven, so it was possible to get unintentional aliases.

As a grad student, I got to use a VAX.

mac3n··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711219v1...

"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.

This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.

mac3n··on Researchers can reconstruct what you're looking at from a brain scan
what's the Salmon thinking?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...

> At the fish counter, he spoke the words that will echo down the centuries as a testimony to the dedication and drive of neuroscientists throughout the ages:

> "I need a full length Atlantic Salmon. For science."

mac3n··on Let's Ditch Google (Verb)
i "altavista'd it.
mac3n··on SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987
see also theworld.com
mac3n··on Quantum Computer Completes in 19 Secs What Could Take a Supercomputer a Century
https://upjoke.com/vermont-jokes
mac3n··on Quantum Computer Completes in 19 Secs What Could Take a Supercomputer a Century
> "could"

yeah, i've written [supercomputer] code like that

mac3n··on The Test
oh, man! i want to see Philomena Cunk interview some of these guys!
mac3n··on Ask HN: Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers?
see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-968X.12...

include a SUMMARIUM in Latin and ΣΥΝΟΨΙΣ in Greek, for that real Scholar effect.

mac3n··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
This talks about the "desktop" experience. My desktop is a laptop. I don't have a desk or a large external monitor. Tiling window managers don't work for me. I try to keep windows stacked in different virtual desktops, but they're getting pretty crowded. I've got Slack and Signal in one, editor and terminals in another, etc.

I work mostly with remote cloud services or headless servers via VPNs. For the cloud I rely on Firefox over networked X (something that is getting harder to support).

A single-computer desktop is no longer a realistic working environment.

mac3n··on The newest ESP32 can run Linux and it's getting close to a Raspberry Pi
it means they're Going Mobile. And they Won't Get Fooled Again.
mac3n··on Ask HN: Why serialize documents to disk instead of memory-mapping runtime state?
Be careful!

I hear the old Microsoft Word save files used memory dumps, which became an undocumented nightmare of a file format.

You need total control over memory layout of the saved runtime state. No hidden fields. No pointers either - you want to be able to reload at another address. Sooner or later, you might want to add some state, and you'd need a place to put it.

That said, I have used mmap something like this, mostly so state (data) could be paged in on demand.

mac3n··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
"the fish stinks from the head down"
mac3n··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
I'm afraid trust and OpenAI are inconsistent.

After all, they're on a mission from Roko's Basilisk!

mac3n··on Perhaps the universe isn't accelerating (and thus we don't need dark matter)
i think it's dark _energy_ that's used to explain accelerating expansion.
mac3n··on Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash
"SBF and the Effective Altruists" could make a good punk band name
mac3n··on Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash
Did this all begin with SBF and Effective Altruism? Looks like here's a lot of overlap in the cast of characters.
mac3n··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
wait until you find about the Yana River people!

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

mac3n··on Komar and Melamid: The Most Wanted Paintings
see also their Most Unwanted Music (revised 2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCWuRJOaltY

their Most Wanted Music is unlistenable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGOvA20kiBg

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