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2020-11-28.log

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<OriansJ> https://xana.lepiller.eu/guix-days-2020/guix-days-2020-tobias-platen-guix-ppc.mp4
<OriansJ>pity they got the endian behavior for hex2 wrong and missed the armv7l porting being done in Mes
<OriansJ>as hex2 does both bit and byte, big and little endian (And I am not supporting the insane middle endian format)
<OriansJ>but exciting to see someone doing a guix port
<OriansJ>Hopefully it means janneke will be getting more help with MesCC
<fossy>Wtf is middle endian
<V>PDP endian presumably
<V>it's (as OriansJ said) insane
<ericonr>omg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38536969/pdp-endian-and-bit-shifts#38539634
<OriansJ>fossy: it is the immediate encoding format often found in CPU architectures that are too dominated by programmers and not electrical engineers
<lfam>I appreciate wikipedia's comparison of middle-endian to "the standard American date formatting of month/day/year"
<xentrac>nuxi?
<siraben>Ugh, MDY
<siraben>YMD FTW
<OriansJ>siraben: YYYYYY-MM-DD FTW
<fossy>6 y?
<V>very forward-thinking
<OriansJ>fossy: I figure by the year 999999, if anything I have done still matters; someone else will have fixed it by then. Otherwise it'll be long dead and forgotten; so who cares if it breaks then.
<OriansJ>V: well bootstrapping is all about planning for problems that haven't happened yettfgbvhrdjeugrctthurbvdiibtkgrdftrhcldddttrlg
<OriansJ>sorry baby attacked keyboard
<V>like a cat deciding to att--
<V>or a baby
<V>so your dates are all sorted but your machine isn't babyproofed :p
<OriansJ>real hard to babyproof when he is an escape artist
<OriansJ>he already figured out to how to bypass all babyproof locks and figured out a 4digit combination lock; right now the only thing stopping him is a deadbolt and a keyed lock
<OriansJ>as he isn't 9months old yet; one could say we didn't expect the level of creativity displayed.
<rain1>hello!
<rain1>aw thats cute!
<xentrac>/topic yettfgbvhrdjeugrctthurbvdiibtkgrdftrhcldddttrlg
<xentrac>you didn't know you were spawning a Slan, eh?
<siraben>OriansJ: wow, clever baby!
<siraben>how did they figure out the combination lock? brute force?
<OriansJ>rain1: it is all cute and fun, until you have to explain to your wife why your 8 month old baby is on top of the fridge with a circular saw.
<OriansJ>siraben: I'm thinking he simply saw his mom put in the combo and repeated the actions.
<siraben>OriansJ: amazing
<OriansJ>xentrac: I am not familiar with the Slan reference.
<OriansJ>siraben: I am going to be honest. Somedays I wish I haven't given up Energy drinks.
<xentrac>oh, an old sci-fi from the epoch when the popular understanding of evolution was still "lower organisms develop into higher organisms" --- the Slans were the "next step in evolution" after the humans, being, among other things, dramatically more intelligent
<xentrac>the hero of the novel was a lone, persecuted Slan desperately trying to evade the humans' efforts to exterminate the Slans
<xentrac>of course scientifiction fans loved this and started wearing T-shirts saying "FANS ARE SLANS"
<OriansJ>interesting xentrac; I honestly was betting on the likely probablity of regression to the mean.
<xentrac>maybe you were solving combination locks at 6 months
<OriansJ>More like when I was 2-3; I figured out how to pick locks first.
<OriansJ>(years not months)
<OriansJ>I guess that is what I get for choosing a creative and smart wife.
<xentrac>hopefully your kid doesn't have severe autism. growing up with mild autism in the US was hell for me, it's a miracle I survived to adulthood
<OriansJ>xentrac: well I have facial aphasia; I am just hoping he doesn't get that too.
<xentrac>there are more difficult things; a lot of kids with autism have the regular kind of aphasia, although early intervention can prevent that in most cases
<xentrac>given that you wrote a C compiler in assembly in one day, you probably have some autism-spectrum features yourself :)
<OriansJ>xentrac: unfortunately but it is the flaws that make people interesting.
<xentrac>I don't think autism is a flaw
<xentrac>although it can be taken to undesirable extremes
<xentrac>but society has a lot of incompatibility with it
<OriansJ>xentrac: well that is the question of sorts; as most consider the ability to think clearly a flaw in others unless it directly benefits them.
<xentrac>yeah, I think autism tends to make people think more clearly, so in that sense you could claim it involves the absence of a flaw rather than its presence
<xentrac>but that comes at the cost of herd instinct
<xentrac>among other things
<OriansJ>xentrac: well the circuits for that have to come from somewhere in the limited meat we call minds.
<xentrac>probably
<OriansJ>although better software can allow impressive results (knowing Newton's Laws adds 50 IQ points sort of thing)
<xentrac>who was it who said that a science is a discipline in which the novices of each generation can surpass the achievements of the greatest masters of the generation before?
<xentrac>some of that is also a matter of tools. I have an ATTiny45 here
<xentrac>it's 9 mm x 6 mm and with an external crystal it can run 20 million 8-bit instructions per second
<xentrac>it only has 256 bytes of RAM and 2K of Flash, which limits what it can *compute*, although there are things it can do faster than the 286-12 I was using in 1990
<OriansJ>one can buy a teraflop of processing power for under $99
<OriansJ>yet here I am using an x200 (which is 12 years old at this point)
<xentrac>but what it can *automate* is flabbergasting. it can take 15000 measurements per second with, I think, about 0.3% error on four of its 8 pins, and respond to pin change interrupts in about 500 nanoseconds
<OriansJ>what is amazing is one can get a 64bit computer with 4GB of RAM for less than a 2x4x20 block of wood.
<xentrac>and 256 bytes of RAM and 32 registers is, from another point of view, 288 state variables. it can simulate a system with up to 288 state variables at 20 million arithmetic operations per second
<xentrac>so you can build one hell of a PID controller with it ;)
<xentrac>there are all kinds of elaborate mechanical contrivances of previous generations that you could replace it with
<xentrac>a block of wood takes years to grow ;)
***efraim is now known as efraim1
***efraim1 is now known as efraim
***efraim is now known as efraim1
***efraim1 is now known as efraim