Posts by brion@mastodon.technology
(DIR) Post #AO5iZGb8xk984tV2tk by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-09-30T13:09:37Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@rysiek keep it in a git repo, tell people to "check out my blog"
(DIR) Post #AOAD1rulaYlLB84YRk by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-02T16:29:13Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
me: "software is bad. computers are bad"also me: "it'd be awesome to write this software i'm imagining for this computer i rely on being good with to obtain food and shelter"
(DIR) Post #AOD6bQdINmg6mln0jo by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-04T02:55:54Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
oh that's interesting, noticed 'resizable bar' is disabled on my pc... allegedly a nice boost to rendering can be gotten from turning that on, but i have to disable legacy bios support? should be fine :D
(DIR) Post #AOEpOhuror259Hs360 by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-04T22:18:25Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
whooooooaaaaaaaaa, so meta$ sudo apt upgrade...The following packages will be upgraded: apt apt-utils libapt-pkg6.0
(DIR) Post #AOGPqyrbCmDtBEfhei by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-04T16:19:01Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
what if instead of an ad-revenue-driven recommendation engine hellhole, "youtube" was a commodity video hosting service run for the public good, using distributed mesh caching where possible to reduce costs and paying for the rest out of our taxes as common infrastructure that benefits information, education, *and* entertainment to the public
(DIR) Post #AOGYNassBEylzzKUoS by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-05T18:52:14Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
games without players, made so NPCs can live out their lives in peace
(DIR) Post #AOGdL3MOLktlDZkEIC by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-05T16:16:26Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Boosting your own toot
(DIR) Post #AOIsR8XJu9rcdc8Qoy by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-06T19:51:23Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
For some reason I was speculating about what it would take to have a CPU that natively executed WebAssembly as its instruction set.Honestly it would kinda suck in many respects, as Wasm is meant to be compiled, and the binary format uses indirections and relative indexing that you don't get for free.But there are interesting aspects in keeping separate address spaces for linear memory (allows arbitrary loads/stores) and code, stack, etc which special instructions could gate access to.
(DIR) Post #AOIsR9X0CpChiuzgxs by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-06T19:54:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
For instance, there's no way to overwrite the return address in the stack frame in Wasm; there's simply no way to express access to the stack frame -- this removes an entire class of remote code injection vulnerabilities.Function pointers also can only be overwritten with pointers to other functions with the same signature. You can't force an indirect call to an arbitrary code location (but you could swap between two functions of the same sig, so it's not entirely safe).
(DIR) Post #AOIsRBItcF6nDkPSFs by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-06T19:56:27Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
One could have a separate address space for the call stack, set up by privileged kernel instructions and readable/writable only by the call & return instructions (for return address) and local get/set (for arguments and other locals not spilled to linear memory).
(DIR) Post #AOJJG2M7F37L2tpHE0 by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-07T02:46:55Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
free idea for you billion-dollar corporations who own chip fabs to run with:porous compute infrastructure: "the CPU foam"3d structure embedding individual CPU + RAM cores communicating over a mesh network, with many holes to allow for air or liquid coolingcan be extruded into any shape or size; various software will accommodate certain geometries better than others in terms of throughput vs latency across/within the mesh
(DIR) Post #AOJMwCm7C1DhNymmhs by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-07T03:29:06Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Before memory protection (and thus virtual memory) became standard features in consumer desktop operating systems, classic MacOS and pre-protected-mode 16-bit Windows programs had to distinguish between allocating memory that would stay fixed in place, and allocating memory via an indirection that allows it to be moved to improve memory fragmentation or auto-discarded to free space.You'd allocate memory via a handle, lock it in place to get a pointer, work with it, then unlock it.Dreadful :)
(DIR) Post #AOJMwDADkOVCak42HQ by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-07T03:29:18Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
(corrected typo wrong term :D)
(DIR) Post #AOKoB5sSgYYja4IXT6 by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-07T19:47:00Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
protocols not products
(DIR) Post #AOLmpYhWvvs3oDJQ7k by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T07:28:36Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Carmen Sandiego is what happens when the San Diego Convention Center hosts an auto expo
(DIR) Post #AOMLQiE3seZUVOPsDg by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T05:20:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
cats are better than babies cause if you're holding them and they want down you can just toss them towards the ground and they're happy with that
(DIR) Post #AOMLbstoXN8ynHGzNA by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T13:58:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mansr this is called positive reinforcement -- you're absolutely positive you don't want another cat scratch, so you respond quicker next time ;)
(DIR) Post #AOMLeneUVDQxOAUo7M by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T06:37:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
the other day i was speculating about coding data through meme-posting accountswithout touching on the possibilities of modifying the meme images to encode data, let's start with taking a database of many thousands of found meme images and reposting themif you use a prearranged randomized collection, you can divide the data set into 0- and 1-signaling memes and treat it as a one-time pad -- this is completely secure as long as the pad is not compromised, but has a limited lifetime data size.
(DIR) Post #AOMvwFddIh0JSWiPVw by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T18:31:35Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@deshipu iirc: cost, dynamic range, color distortion at non-straight-on viewing angles
(DIR) Post #AOMvwG6hYcFwugJcp6 by brion@mastodon.technology
2022-10-08T18:33:36Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@deshipu ooh another one -- ghosting on updates was *awful* in the early years. even on a text terminal that kinda sucked(we had a 286 laptop with a b&w lcd screen back in the day -- even without the color issues a crt was considered a better experience for working on. :D)