@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

darkling

@darkling@mstdn.social

Software developer. Organiser of data. Ontologist. I'm not a digital native, but I did emigrate at an early age. Contents may have settled in transit.

"He's not drunk. He's like that all the time."

Dieses Profil is von einem föderierten Server und möglicherweise unvollständig. Auf der Original-Instanz anzeigen

foone , an Random Englisch
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Idea: a USB-controlled gun, but the USB protocol implementation is the most cursed part.
Any ideas? I have a better one, but I'll start with that it's a USB printer class. Every time you tell it to print a page, it fires

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone PC LOAD 9MM

darkling ,
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@foone It uses a mini-USB connector.

foone , an Random Englisch
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I know we've moved past fiber-wrapped cables for Good Reasons but I think it'd be funny if some of the Rope Geeks produced ethernet cables.

I want a hemp cat6 cable damn it.
It should come with rope oil and those emt safety sheers

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone Of course, these days, you could have your cable wrapped in optical fibre. You know, for bandwidth!

(I'm sure there's some audiophile nutter out there willing to claim that that's either very good or very bad for your signal).

foone , an Random Englisch
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Based on this idea:
https://aus.social/@Unixbigot/112572811010797144

How about an email client that uses Glide, the 3DFX 3d rendering library?
Specifically targeting the voodoo 2. (I know it's PCI, but there are PCI->PCIe adapters).

The OS can't screenshot it because the OS has no idea what pixels are there!

darkling ,
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@foone I'm now imagining something that embeds a colony of Langford Parrots in the image that crashes all known video cameras...

darkling ,
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@foone My experience so far is that Windows 11 doesn't know how to do anything that you actually want.

foone , an Random Englisch
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Bad idea: you know how sometimes people have a "me but a bot" account? Where they've trained a gpt3 bot on their original posts, and have it regularly generate a fake post by them?

Why stop there? Train another bot on the first bot account's output. And another.

See how many bot accounts it takes until foonebot7 is just posting "floppy floppy floppy floppy floppy floppy" 24/7

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone ... but darklingbot1 would be half snark and half cynicism, and they'd be indistinguishable from there on down...

foone , an Random Englisch
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I'm gonna see if I can get my raspi to boot from a spinning rust drive. Why not?

darkling ,
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@foone Let me count the ways...

(actually, seems like a relatively easy target on the face of it. Are you going soft?)

foone , an Random Englisch
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Gonna hook up a bot to my mastodon account that just periodically searches for people referring to me in the past tense or passing around obituaries.
It'll just reply "I'm not dead!" to those posts.

It won't get a lot of use now, but I predict it'll be pretty funny someday, in the (hopefully far) future

darkling ,
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@foone Just add a config option, and instructions for your executors, so that when you do go, it replies "I told you I was ill!"

foone , an Random Englisch
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Here's something cool I never realized existed:

PCBs distributed through magazines!

From Radio Electronics (June 1987):

https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1987-06/page/n68/

darkling ,
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@foone Like code listings, for the hardware types.

How would you transfer it to the board? Photocopy onto (several(*)) acetates, expose the photoresist and then etch?

(*) For the density of the black.

darkling ,
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@foone I think I met something like this back in 1989 or 1990. A friend's dad was doing this with his own designs. He found that photocopies or laser prints on acetate weren't dense enough to block the UV properly, so you had to run it through the printer several times to get the ink density to make it work.

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone He also had problems with drilling the holes in the board, so he was building an X-Y rig for a drill.

We spent a long night with an Acorn A440, me on the front end with the keyboard, him on the back end with the printer port and an oscilloscope, working out how to write a driver for this thing that ran off the !Draw files he'd use for the board designs, and would put the holes in the right place.

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone Oh, I don't think that was Geoff's problem. He was definitely on the agricultural end of things with his designs. He just found it hard to put the drill in the right place every time. :catsmile:

foone , an Random Englisch
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Can't believe they spent a gigawatt training GPT3 and the fucker isn't even trying to overthrow humanity.

Look, where I come from, if you burn a gigawatt of energy to make an AI, it had better damn well go skynet on you.

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone ... or too many herbs.

foone , an Random Englisch
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There's an alternate universe where Netscape Navigator embedded Lua instead of inventing js, and I'm not sure if that's a better world or not.

darkling ,
@darkling@mstdn.social avatar

@foone And the much closer one where they invented JS, but used scheme and S-expressions instead of C-style syntax.

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