Notices by The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social), page 2

@leah Unix V7 seems to sleep.

Bizzare Unix semantics question. Given the parent of init is init (getppid(() of pid 1 is 1) is init the child of init, and if only init is running what is the correct return from wait(NULL);

Believe it or not I actually found a case it matters in my Fuzix init today and having read various docs I'm really not sure what the answer is. ECHILD or blocking ?

#unix #fuzix #retrocomputing

@pluralistic That's just FUD ;)

@cstross @graydon We've got an enormous list of computation problems that we don't have the resources to compute properly. What we don't have is the ways to build the software systems to do those computations because of their complexity.
And any chemist can find a reasonable, grant supported manner to use an arbitrary amount of compute 8)

@fishidwardrobe @cstross @graydon We are hitting lots of limits - on silicon sizes, on power, on validation (hardware and software), on correctness, on data sets and many more.
A human brain weighs about 1.5Kg, outperforms an LLM and doesn't require a large power plant so there are clearly better ways of doing some kinds of computation (although humans of course suck at many kinds of computation too so it's an iffy generalisation).

@fishidwardrobe @cstross @graydon If the law of requisite variety is indeed correct, we may well never truly be able to know how we think because it would require something with more state than us to distinguish all the state we have and understand the relationships.

@jwz Sadly he's still doing better than a lot of data centres who haven't managed even this level of joined up thinking.

@glynmoody the brexit lot even had some seats in the assembly for a while - and spent most of their time fighting one another and spiralling into oblivion, so it's even more sad.

@gamingonlinux And let me guess the only reason there is one standard protocol not 2 is that Apple don't make buttplugs 8)

@shinmera @andyprice Used sensibly a lot of them (like C sequence points) make an enormous performance difference to code.

@Crofton @jwildeboer It's also increasingly in their interest to play hardball. If they drop the price to $40 the US and Canadian producers go under. They'll not be able to get funding because it's also obvious that the Saudis can do this whenever they want and that oil is on a rather short runway at this point.
As a side benefit they get to screw their rivals in Iran and the Houthis.

@jwildeboer @cstross Something approaching 75% reduction in cost per watt in ten years. Not quite comparable to microprocessors but huge by most industrial standards.

What also astounds me is how global it is - the numbers from places like Pakistan are just mind boggling

@jwildeboer I am hoping that if Trumpy goes oil gas oil gas, he'll piss off the Saudi's who will then decide to bury the US fracking and gas industry by flooding the market a bit. Would probably take out the Russians and a few others too at $40 a barrel.

@jwildeboer There's hints where the rest is going too. Musk is in with the Trump team and busy with this
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/5965923

Join the dots

@sjvn They could make it happen pretty soon by fixing liability laws. Not going to happen in a hurry and certainly less likely under the next lot.

The Unix original choice of a 32bit time_t ending in 2038 seems particularly inspired today.

@lanodan @neil I did implement this at one point for X using a very early cheapo head rather than eye tracking helmet. It definitely had potential but the kit was never ready for it.
Didn't find looking away a problem you just had to remember to look back before typing again. I suspect some kind of "and don't change window until they keyboard is idle a bit" might work too.

Was more useful for quake.

@ryanc @mjg59 The UK can be a bit funny if there are things like name changes recorded on one passport but not yet the other.

@GossiTheDog Are they signed garbage ?

Homcom cursed cable. That or @NanoRaptor has escaped onto Amazon too

#cursedcables