LeonsBuddyDave @leonsbuddydave - Tumblr Blog

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groddramitfronk

i have to go to work soon. You’re not helping.

groddramitfronk

sumafiaquotes

groddramitfronk

Excuuuuuuuse me. But the politically correct term is “African-American Friday”

leonsbuddydave

and Unaffiliated Web Denizen Monday

kremlin

there is no problem for which X11 forwarding is the correct solution

these days i spend most of my time trying to trick my university into awarding me a degree by designing digital machines in hardware description languages and drawing them out in fancy CAD programs, transistor by transistor. designing CMOS circuitry is a fantastically hard problem necessitating a fantastically complex solution, and i am sick of dealing with things that are fantastically hard or complicated

let’s take a look at some ingenious, simple things

this is a tricam. it is comprised of exactly two components pictured above. it is no more complicated than it appears

i have never, nor do i ever plan on, climbing a mountain. i know nothing about mountain climbing

people who climb mountains frequently need to anchor and re-anchor themselves to the mountain so that when they fall, they stay stuck to the mountain and don’t splatter. this is problematic as they must carry numerous anchoring devices with them as they ascend which contribute to their mass. they also contribute negatively to the climber’s bank account as mechanically advanced anchoring methods such as spring loaded camming devices tend to be exceedingly expensive

the traditional (read: old) method of doing this involved pounding metal stakes into the mountain and hoping they’d hold. the people in charge of protecting the mountains often do not want weird hippies-crossed-with-X-games-athletes punching a bunch of holes in the mountains every time they want to climb the mountain, so this method has fallen out of favor

what do you do?

you use a tricam

the tricam works in two ways. let’s look at the first, boring way:

you shove this shit into a crevice in the rock. your dumb ass hangs from the rope-y part exerting a large downwards force (red arrow). the tricam, wedged in the rock, responds with an equal & opposite friction force as it cannot easily pass through the rock. yawn

the second, interesting way is ingenious:

we assume the previous setup: this shit is wedged in rock. the rope-y part attaches to the top of the cam and sits in a groove cut laterally in the cam. this allows the downward asshole force (red) to be translated into a strong torque on the came (blue). the cam “wants” to rotate per this torque, but cannot as it meets the mountain surface

what you get here is an anchor that digs into the mountain (securing you) according to how much downward force is applied. genius

this thing costs me $10 and weighs about half an ounce. compare to

moving on

it is only a very recent phenomenon, historically speaking, that european countries have ceased trying to exterminate each other (for the most part). volumes upon volumes of historical texts outline the brutal forever-war occurring just a mere century ago. what i’m about to talk about has to do with one specific incident in this anthology of bloodshed occurring in france during the middle ages

as we all know, france is full of assholes and really really good programmers. during this period there was also a population of disgusting slovenly burgundians and hideous dutch residing in some-fuckin-part-of-france that the french didn’t take kindly to. they were known as the flemish. just like any population at this time, you had a 99-to-1 mix of starving stupid peasants catering to genuinely evil aristocrats

the french jerks hated the flemish and wanted their dope cities so of course they waged a bloody, brutal war against them. on the french side, you had a relatively small number of well-trained knights on horseback clad in all sorts of fancy french fuckin armor. they were super french about it, is the best way i can put it

on the opposite side you had bumbling illiterate peasants who didn’t much care about borders and chivalry and all that crap and just wanted to protect their shit. they weren’t soldiers, were not in a military, were poor, and did not have access to any real armaments

they took to the primitive crap laying around their fields and invented the goedendag:

they owned the shit out of the french jerks with this simple spear-lookin thing. a bunch of idiot dirt farmers obliterated french knights who did nothing but train and do gay shit like read books all day

it was called the goedendag because “goedendag“ sort of meant “good day!” back then and i really cannot tell you how funny that is

just like the tricam, this shit is dead simple. you have a pokey spear part at the tip. behind that, you have a big fat flared base made out of iron or whatever they could find that was heavy. all of this sat at the head of a really thick wooden shaft

here’s what would happen: french jerk sees flemish idiot. flemish idiot brandishes what looks like a caveman speer. french jerk chuckles to himself arrogantly all french-like. french jerk charges flemish idiot

before they collide, flemish idiot genius plants back end of spear-thing into ground and aims it at the knight’s horse. the mass of the spear-thing plus its angle into the ground/towards the knight guarantees its not going anywhere. the horse slams into the pointy end of the spear-thing and gets fantastically injured. the big flared base thing prevents the horse from impaling itself further through the spear, which prevents the horse from mauling the fleming

at this point, the horse freaks the fuck out as horses tend to do. this throws the french asshole off the horse onto the ground, which is the worst place to be if you’re wearing a bunch of heavy armor. the flemish idiot proceeds to beat the knight senseless with the mass of the spear club-thing i guess, now. armor like that is really only useful against slashing and piercing, but when you start mauling someone in it you leverage the fact the armor is heavy and moves independently from the dick inside it. you break a lot of their bones real quick

this stupid spear-thing was ridiculously, ridiculously effective against the french. the french eventually won that war, but not before suffering embarrassing losses at the hands of, again, dirt farmers. this is analogous to my spindly scrawny ass taking out a team of navy seals with nothing but a football helmet, a sock full of quarters, and a doctor pepper

good things are simple things

kremlin

as far as web languages go though theres not much choice

correct

cjbrowne-deactivated20201215

Incorrect. It’s the lowest common denominator of web languages but it’s not the only web language. Saying it is is kind of like saying machine code is the only hardware language.

TypeScript, atscript, coffeescript are all web languages built for the web by javascript engineers.

Then there’s more traditional languages that have tools to shoe-horn them into the web paradigm. Java is a notable example with the Google Web Toolkit, an abomination I’m forced to use at work at the moment (although I’m rapidly moving away and into my own, brand new project). But you can also compile down C, C++, C#, basically anything can be compiled (or “transpiled”) into JavaScript for use in web pages.

But it’s a terrible idea. Where machine code is a very, very concrete, low level language, JavaScript is abstract and high level. This means that targeting JS with a compiler/transpiler means you’re not gaining much in the way of tangible benefits (alright you get some compile-time checks in the case of static languages). You’re actually just trading one abstraction for another, and adding exrta complexity into the debug cycle. It’s a costly mistake, one that I would strongly advise against.

ES6 is one small exception, being that it is a strict superset of JavaScript and follows the same patterns and conventions. Transpiling that is less costly since the output code will look more or less the same as the input (except for the new functionality which will be modelled in a way that a JS programmer should probably understand) so the extra debug complexity is minimal, and the benefits are quite real.

JavaScript has limitations, but I wouldn’t say it’s inherently bad any more than a phillips-head screwdriver is “bad” and a flat-head is “good”. JavaScript certainly doesn’t scale well to complex applications, and has difficulties with resource management, but it enables extremely rapid development cycles that allow programmers to test new ideas quickly and not feel too bad about throwing stuff away. That said, complex projects written in JS often suffer more from emotional attachment to code since the code gets exponentially harder to manage as the complexity increases, and as such development pace will slow and the sunk cost fallacy starts to rear its ugly head.

All in all, it’s about using the right tool for the job, and gaining as much knowledge and comfort in as many different tools as you can.

[EDIT: just realised we should qualify “web” with client-side since there are a lot of server-side web languages, but it’s a bit silly to talk about server-side ‘web’ languages since they’re really just languages being used for web stuff. Except PHP, that’s just a mess]

kremlin

tinylightorb replied to your post: How do computers have a sense of time?

I have a silly question, sorry Ian. But is the reason square waves appear different than a sin wave because of the predictable period of time between high low high low, or because like you said there’s less info than in a sin wave (so 1s and 0s)

this is actually an excellent question with which you have inadvertently revealed your deep & intimate understanding of engineering as construction of the fundamental laws of mathematics and physics

i told you a bold faced lie when i said there’s less info in a sin wave than a square wave. a square wave is actually only a transformation of the sine wave just as any wave is a construction (summation) of numerous or infinite sine waves. jospeh fourier figured this out over 200 years ago when he discovered the fourier theorm

a sine wave contains an infinite amount of information as no matter how small you divide it, each segment is quantifiably different than the last. in the case of the sine wave, this difference follows the simplest mathematical function possible which is why it is the sole building block of every waveform ever

it follows that, as every waveform ever is a construct of sine wave, that every waveform ever has an infinite amount of information contained within itself. “infinity” is much more than “two”, which is the target amount of information we want in a square wave (as it needs to describe two states, 1 and 0)

it does describe only these two states, but only during the periods of the waveform where the waveform is not switching to a 1 to a 0 or a 0 to a 1. for it to be always only 2 states, you’d have to have the voltage described by the waveform go from ‘high’ to ‘low’ in an infinitely short amount of time. during this singular, indivisible quantum of time your voltage would be both ‘high’ and ‘low’ simultaneously, which is impossible since waveforms are described by functions and functions always resolve to exactly one, and only one value. this is something that was proven to be absolutely true no matter what the case is (a law in mathematics). since the waveforms we’re talking about are continuous, which is to say they always have a value no matter what and can’t just “break” suddenly forming a discontinuity. all of this was discovered, tested, and logically proven by people who existed long before christ

so what the fuck then, right? let’s look at another wave:

when you grow up and put your big boy pants on, this is what a square wave looks like. it’s all fucked up. the voltage doesn’t suddenly jump from high to low in an instant, in fact, i can see the slope of the leading and trailing edges. what the fuck is it doing once it reaches the intended voltage level? what the fuck is that squiggly shit? jesus christ

you see, the flip side of engineering, the opposite side of all the nice, poetic mathematical truths we’ve just discussed, is the dirty, shifty-eyed bandit side of engineering that exploits these beautiful, fundamental truths in conjunction with cheap tricks & lies as to come up with a realistic design of something that could possibly be constructed in the real world with economically-sound levels of success & function. this is my favorite side of engineering

you see, instead of the voltage dropping from high to low instantaneously, we just build a dope ass transistor that switches so quickly as to trick the other parts of our circuit into thinking it happened in an infinitely small amount of time. it switches it so fast that it overshoots the intended voltage and has to be frantically reeled back in (which also happens too quickly, resulting in a frantic push in the original direction yadda yadda yadda that’s that squiggly shit you see at the corners of the square wave)

this lascivious chicanery comes at a price, however. if we keep making circuits operate at faster and faster frequencies, those previously-immediate lookin voltage transitions quit lookin so immediate. as you cut the line closer and closer you get increasingly more unstable circuits and eventually cross a threshold where your computer effectively becomes a space heater

if you have a solution to this problem, you can exchange it with intel, qualcomm, freescale, AMD, micron, and other such Illuminati-sized companies for rockafeller money and probably a few nobel prizes

anyway

this might have been the best question anybody has asked me throughout my apparent career of making people furiously flick that scrollwheel on their dashboard. usually i have to tediously dumb-down an explanation of a simple hardware or software concept but for this i had to walk around the block a few times and smoke a few cigarettes to bring this question from start to finish

people like you make me nervous about career competition in my field

his-shining-tears

deafilion replied to your photoset:Hanging out with James Earl Bonesis that a new keyboard?

Nah, it’s my old Das Ultimate - I got tired of carting the Ergodox back and forth between home and work, so I’m using this at home while I wait for the Infinity to ship.

#deafilion #ergodox #keyboard

Hanging out with James Earl Bones

#skeleton #halloween #spooky scary skeleton #skull #selfie

pulpfanfiction

come to mother base command platform in the next 50 minutes if you like anime and want an ass kicking

The bags under my eyes are so massive that Delta makes me check them

hackerfucker

insidehtml5

Modernizr 3: A new release and website After what appears an eternity to us and the wider development community we are ecstatic to announce the release of Modernizr 3.0! This is a massive release and from our last release almost 2.5 years have passed - an unacceptable timeline. We plan to fix this and have faster releases where it makes sense.

kremlin

your code is so bad we had to make /etc/local/ just for you

you are in the mid 1980s and computers are in a very strange place. personal computers had not quite caught on yet & the idea of having a personal computer in your home is a foreign concept to most people

most people at this time understood computers as extremely large and expensive mainframes that resided exclusively at businesses to be used for professional and commercial purposes. one would take a relatively cheap console, which looked like an ordinary CRT monitor, and connect it to the mainframe which might reside many rooms or floors away. everyone had their own console and keyboard (and possibly mouse, if they were fancy) but shared the same physical hardware. everyone connected to The Computer

this worked fine for most purposes, but was proving to be unsatisfactory for computationally intensive industries, such as the ones that design and simulate aircraft, or the ones that need to sequence entire genomes. most burroughs or IBM mainframes were built to scale horizontally, meaning they’d better serve 100 consoles performing minor tasks such as data entry or text processing rather than 10 consoles churning out integrals describing how air would flow under an aircraft’s wing. as performing computations like that is not as easy and straightforward as it is now (no matlab or solidworks), there was also a demand for systems that could be easily introspected, debugged, and changed by individual engineers, which was something mainframes couldn’t easily do as one mistake by one engineer could bring down a system serving dozens

thus enter lisp machines

lisp machines are, quite literally, like no other computers ever produced before nor like any produced after. lisp machines were made by (pretty much) a single company (symbolics), and their heyday was in the 80′s-90′s. although they contributed a great number of ideas and concepts that carried with more modern computers, the hardware itself was never to be replicated in any capacity again. they were extremely high-quality and specialized machines.

lisp machines, from the bottom up, are entirely predicated upon the lisp programming language. the hardware is built to suit kernel/system software written in lisp, and all subsystems/programming environments/etc available to the user are written in lisp. this incredibly tight coupling of hardware/software provided what was described to me as “truly the best computers ever made” by someone who had hand-wrapped Z80 boards in the MIT AI labs at one point.

“they were easy to debug, since i had memorized the Z80′s pinout”

within the lisp machine’s editor, zmacs, one could write code, compile code, debug code, debug the system and debug the hardware. the debugging interfaces went down the the microcode which is much farther than you could manage even today. the amount of engineering effort that went into these machines far outweighs what you might get in a modern computer, and that’s something i don’t think the world will ever see again

very, very few of these machines were made. adjusting for inflation, a lisp machine would run you about $200,000. the software (which was treated like intellectual property on the scale of nuclear energy systems or other such deadly serious things) would easily run into the millions for licenses. the computer in front of you was probably purchased for a sum between $100 and $1000, and it represents $100 to $1000 worth of engineering. the kind of computer representing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of engineering are, well, pretty slick

symbolics lisp machines are, with very little argument, at the top of the food chain when it comes to collectible computers. if you collect computers, and you are enormously lucky, a lisp machine would be the last computer you would ever get. they are the holy grail

and your boy here fuckin got one

through an incredible deal between myself and some friends in high places, we purchased 3 of these machines from a very respectable man whom i dealt with directly. what you see above is a symbolics 3620, which we got two of. the other machine was a symbolics 3640. it weighs about 200lbs:

this one is being freighted to the curator of a museum, for what it’s worth. what drew me to lisp machines initially was their keyboards (not my images):

it was a dream of mine to one day own one of these keyboards, and now, well, uhh:

selling even one of these in today’s market would recoup the cost of everything we purchased, the van rental & gas between here and boston, the cost of freighting hundreds and hundreds of pounds of equipment from new york to washington state with enough left over to purchase a brand new macbook

the situation was as follows: an older eccentric millionaire type had lots of this equipment rotting in his basement from years past. it needed to go, and he didn’t care much about scoring big for it. the people paying the market price for all this stuff would certainly mistreat it as they’d just flip them to profit. he wanted to see them go into loving hands who would restore them and treat them properly, but mostly wanted to see them go out of his basement. there was a lot of equipment besides the lisp machines. here is a color CRT monitor made to go onto a united states battleship:

here are a hell of a lot of tapes full of the aforementioned intellectual property worth more than i care to find out

here’s a hilarious mouse:

this all happened last weekend. right now i am chiefly concerned with freighting all the equipment that is not mine (everything but one complete symbolics 3620 machine with console/keyboard/mouse, and that battleship monitor) to its respective owners/museum curators

then we begin the long and arduous task of restoring it to a working state. so far, i have plugged in my machine & powered it on which resulted in all the proper lights & such coming on. incredibly good news as it indicates the backplane is intact and functional; the backplane is the only irreparable part of all of this. as expected, the machine tries to read the disks which are crap. that is not problem as they are emulatable via a special adapter i have to make & solder that plugs into a normal SATA hard drive

the machine ran for 24 hours until i turned it off, meaning the power supply is good. running it for this long caused the capacitors, which are very flaky electrical components that are quite susceptible to failure over time, to reform

the next steps are to build that hard drive emulator & fix the CRT console which will certainly take months. i will keep you updated on this incredible piece of history

cjbrowne-deactivated20201215

reblogging as well as liking because that makes it 256 notes and I’m a massive nerd

when did you turn into a food blog?

I had several militaristic vegan blogs follow me out of nowhere and I had to make my position clear