yellowapple

Location: Reno, NV, USA

Remote: Yes (open to hybrid/onsite if in the Reno/Tahoe area)

Willing to relocate: No (but willing to travel up to 100%)

Technologies: Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora/CentOS, (open)SUSE, Alpine, OpenWRT, plus many others non-professionally), Unix (OpenBSD, Solaris/illumos, macOS), Windows (desktop: 3.1 through 11; server: 2000 through 2022; includes Active Directory domain administration experience), AS/400 / IBM System i, infrastructure as code (Terraform/OpenTofu/Terragrunt, CloudFormation), configuration as code (Ansible, Chef), shell scripts (sh/bash/ksh, PowerShell), programming languages (Erlang, Elixir, Python, Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Go, Java, C#, C++, Tcl, Groovy, SQL, HTML, CSS, plus many others non-professionally; frameworks/libraries: Rails, Phoenix, Sugar, Qt5, Tk, Sinatra, Node.js), databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server, CouchDB, Redis), Amazon Web Services (VPC, EC2, EKS, RDS, Secrets Manager, S3, Directory Service, Workspaces, Route 53, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, DynamoDB), Heroku, CI/CD (Argo, GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins), containerization (Docker/Podman, Kubernetes, Solaris Zones, LXC), mail servers (OpenSMTPD, postfix, sendmail, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, ClamAV), enterprise / domain-specific applications (DataHub, Keycloak, NetSuite, Boomi, ShipHawk, ShipExec, Worldship, Körber/HighJump Warehouse Advantage, Peoplevox, SAP, Keane / First Coast, NextGen, CPSI, Epic), a lot of other stuff I'm probably forgetting

Résumé/CV: available on request

Email: askhnwhowantstobehired@yellowapple.us

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15 years of experience wearing a lot of different hats in a lot of different industries (most recently government/defense; previously fintech, fulfillment/logistics, edtech, healthcare, various others), at everything from brand-new startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. If you've heard the term “wildcard person”, that's me to a T. I typically end up gravitating toward backend development, DevSecOps engineering, and system administration, but I ain't picky; I'm happy to go where I'm needed.

Full-time or part-time, W2 or 1099, I'm flexible. Security clearance (US DoD, Secret/L) through my previous employer; obviously therefore authorized to work in the US for any employer without sponsorship. Active CompTIA Security+ certification (plus expired AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate and Terraform Certified Associate certs).

I've wanted to do something like this for a long while now. Seems like an obvious way to make executables of varying “fatness”: for example, starting with some platform-agnostic instruction set (like WebAssembly), and gradually adding natively-compiled pieces that the executable runner could swap in if the machine satisfies various conditions. Want to use some fancy new instruction set extension but you don't know if all your target machines support it? Ship multiple versions of that particular function in the same SQLite-database-based executable, and let the loader decide which function version to use based on the host machine's known capabilities.

If these AI companies were smart they'd be contributing their own scans to Anna's Archive, such that all of humanity benefits.

And SQLite: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

In fact, relevantly to this article: https://sqlite.org/affcase1.html

> you lose animations

lol. lmao, even.

https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/animate/an...

> I understand you think you're making a cogent argument against intellectual property because the very concept requires drawing of the line, but no, you're really not.

So you say, but inherent in the drawing of that line, anywhere, is the legal authority for one entity to prevent another from engaging in creative activity. Once upon a time it was not uncommon within online communities to believe, as I do, that such a prohibition is morally perilous and has indeed done more to hinder creative expression than to reward or protect it.

> If you come knock on my door to sell me shit, you're fine.

I don't consider that to be fine, either. There is a time and place for sales pitches; my front porch ain't it.

It's the “own little DOS environments” that makes WINSTART.BAT's functionality surprising for people who ain't intimately familiar with the Windows 3.1/9x architecture, because those DOS environments are launched from within Windows but without running anything in WINSTART.BAT. Most people would expect those DOS environments to be running inside the Windows environment, not in parallel with / independent from it.

> And many musicians have won copyright cases, because their shit wasn't similar enough.

And many musicians have lost copyright cases, because — per my point — their shit was similar enough by complete accident, because

1. We Live In A Society™ and therefore are constantly exposed to all sorts of things we don't consciously remember 5 minutes later but which stick around subconsciously, lurking for your next “Eureka!” moment; and

2. Musical genres (especially the mainstream ones) tend to coalesce on rather limited sets of chord progressions and rhythms and such, so it becomes more and more difficult to write songs that fit within that genre without accidentally “plagiarizing” some other existing song in that genre (or a related one).

That's indeed one of many reasons why I'm staunchly pro-UBI.

> Like, now with the advent of AI, or even before?

My disdain for intellectual property predates the existence of LLMs by at least a decade.

> Who decides which artists get subsidized?

The easy answer is to just pay literally everyone. This is called a “universal basic income”, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a good idea for many reasons besides decoupling creative expression from the need to put food on the table.

The government can already do that if it so chooses, given that the government is the singular reason why any corporation is able to exist as an independent legal entity in the first place (as opposed to a bunch of individual persons collaborating informally).

That, too, is something for which I've been advocating for quite some time now.

Correct, and if it wasn't already obvious by now I believe that to be an unambiguously good thing.

> That notion only applies to patents and trademarks

You literally just gave an example above of that notion applying to copyright. There's no mere “seem like” at play here: the litigious music IP owners suing the pants off of musicians know full well that precisely zero musicians (least of all commercial ones) exist in a vacuum, and that's indeed the basis for the success of their litigiousness. Even if you can somehow prove you've never heard a particular song, You Live In A Society™ and that existing intellectual property's influence on society in turn influences subsequent creators.

There is, in other words, no such thing as true “independent creation”.

> Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention.

Don't threaten me with a good time :)

> If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code.

For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code.

The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place.

> And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.

In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.

> Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.

The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.

Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole.

Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.

From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks.

But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.

Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.

That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.

> For the setup price alone of a low-end home lab1, you could buy several years of a paid subscription to one of the AI providers. The power costs would come out to around $50-$300 per month, depending on how much inference you’re running: again, the price of a couple more paid subscriptions.

Okay, but I already have multiple computers capable of running local models with acceptable performance, so for me the cost is $0. I suspect that's true for most people of sufficient technical inclination to be interested in and capable of running models on their local machines.

Also, no, the monthly electricity price of even my power-hungriest machines ain't anywhere close to that figure. Hell, at the high end that's more than my power bill for my whole household.

Run it with a self-hosted model on a gaming PC running off a solar panel and UPS.

Or Trident, which was (and maybe still is?) Joyent's flagship product in the private cloud space.

Not just limited RAM, but limited RAM bandwidth, which seems like it would make this particularly painful on the N64 (ironic, given that the in-file README says that this came about specifically to support porting a game to the N64). That said, should be possible to wrap these with some non-inlined functions in a pinch, yeah?

Re: floats, I wonder how well it'd perform if compiled with soft-float support?

I've been resuming work on a Zig library for developing N64 homebrew¹. Previous milestone was getting a framebuffer onto the screen, and after achieving that I took an overly-long break.

Current goal, which I've been working on for a bit more than a week now, is to add support for controlling the RDP (the part of the N64's GPU that actually does all the rasterization), such that programs can actually draw triangles. I'd already implemented the control registers, so the current work is defining all the RDP commands, along with documenting what they do and how to use them — which means that I need to fully understand what they do and how to use them, and that's been a fun rabbit hole to explore.

I'm currently about halfway to two-thirds of the way through defining packed structs for all the RDP commands, then the plan is to build a CommandList struct with methods to build RDP command lists and validate that they make sense (make sure all the triangle/rectangle rendering commands have all their subcommands in the right order, make sure you ain't calling them without there being a framebuffer defined as the rendering target, make sure the needed synchronization commands are in place where needed, etc.). Then that should hopefully be enough for Zig64 to draw its first triangle :)

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¹: https://fsl.yellowapple.us/zig64

The obvious solution here (besides, like you say, requiring datacenter electricity to be from 100% renewable sources) is to just charge datacenters more for electricity, such that they offset their impact on demand. That's exactly what my state's energy company (NV Energy) has been trying to do with so-called “large-load electrical service agreements” (LLESAs).

Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.

I've been on-and-off writing a Zig library for writing N64 games and it's indeed pretty wild how getting working code was as simple as telling the compiler to use LLVM's MIPS III target.

Of course, getting working code that actually does anything useful is a much different story (it's taking multiple days just to write the wrappers for RDP commands, for example; lots of cross-referencing between N64Brew wiki pages v. official SGI docs v. libdragon source code v. Peter Lemon's assembly code to figure out what all the different bitpacked fields really mean and how to best represent them), but it still feels magical that I can just use an ordinary toolchain and not some ancient proprietary monstrosity.

While I agree with you, I think it's interesting that LLMs have progressed enough to be able to write working code even for niche and heavily-constrained platforms like the N64. I'm sure it helps that modern toolchains make that easier (I don't expect very many LLMs to be able to put up with the old Windows 9x or IRIX toolchains, to say the least!).

The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.

And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.

Pretty slick stuff.