Notices by allison (aparrish@friend.camp)

you know i'd never stopped to consider how annoying tulip mania must have been for folks who just wanted to grow a few pretty flowers in their front garden https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

i am in osaka for a bit and a friend took me to this store in den den town that is like heaven's radioshack, floor after floor of hobbyist electronics stuff, microcontrollers and capacitors and lcds, drawers full of every jellybean logic chip imaginable, pcb breakouts for rare smd packages, just a table full of various crystal oscillators, etc etc. i would move to osaka just to be within subway distance of this place https://digit.kyohritsu.com/

this is such a strange post! the "also" in "I'm also pro open source" leaves open the implication that being "pro-LGBTQ" and "pro-immigrant" is separate from being pro-foss, and that sustaining the latter might require compromise on the former. personally, i'm in favor of foss *because*—and frankly *only to the extent that*—it brings about autonomy and liberation for LGBTQ people, and immigrants, and the marginalized people of the world in general. otherwise wtf are we even doing here

this is my prototype for a game boy on a bus backplane, inspired (obviously) by the rc2014 and https://smallcomputercentral.com/ (among others). the backplane connectors break out every pin of the Game Boy SoC (the DMG CPU, to be specific), so you can pop in/remove cards that interface with any gb peripherals, or plug into the address/data buses directly. in the 2nd photo i'm using a pico 2 to convert the game boy's video out to ascii (to send over serial for debugging purposes)

"exnomination" is a really useful word and I'm surprised it isn't used more often in the context of theory and politics. exnomination is the process by which a group works to depoliticize their worldview and values, so that those views and values come to be considered "natural," "apolitical," and "common sense" (the term is from Barthes' _Mythologies_ but I first encountered it in Robin Lakoff's _The Language War_)

@KinkyKobolds this is the best explanation i've read for why anyone who is monetarily backed by the tech industry is feeling pressured to include generative models in everything https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster

i love living in the future, in which i have to hold my web browser very gingerly so it doesn't replace the thing i'm reading with the carbon farts of a stochastic white supremacy machine https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/

what if instead of investing $500 billion in GPUs and data centers, we'd invested $500 billion in like... HyperCard

i have also written an 18k word document containing almost everything i learned about the Game Boy while designing this cartridge: https://abc.decontextualize.com/more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ "More Than You Wanted To Know About How Game Boy Cartridges Work"

so here's a thing i've been working on for a while: https://abc.decontextualize.com/ "Allison's Bootleg Cart"! it's a versatile, low-power flash cartridge for the Game Boy (and gb-compatible systems) based on the RP2040 microcontroller. i'm not currently selling pre-assembled cartridges, but the source code and design files (firmware, PCB layout/schematic, and ASM) are all available online under copyleft licenses, if you want to make your own!

ok fediverse i need help with a question that has been surprisingly resistant to web searches: when did it begin to become common (or at least not surprising) for microcontrollers and processors to run at 3.3v, rather than 5v (or more)—especially in embedded and portable contexts? who was the first vendor in this area who was like "sure, let's take a chance on 3.3v"? (did it happen in industrial applications before it happened in consumer electronics?)

@aeva wtf "AI is outpacing the social contract" is such a toxic and naive framing. people who are training AI models are *breaking* the social contract. "AI" and "the social contract" aren't even moving in the same direction

any folks out there have good workflows or plugins specifically for writing *prose* in vim? (especially, say, essay and book-length prose) i have been using vim happily for decades as a code editor but—for reasons i can't even articulate?—i find myself always going back to programs with traditional GUI text editing for prose (usually in markdown). i'd like to try to consolidate though

@mhoye learning how to program is learning how to do the real work of understanding systems and caring for people

@mcc clearly we need a greater variety of such symbols so they can compete in the open market of ideas. imagine: pergross, perbakersdozen, pertwopi

who decided to call it the myth of theseus and the minotaur and not "bull-terminated string"

reminder that whenever the gop complains about "censorship" what they always always mean is "you're making me feel bad about being a white supremacist." when they say that universities shouldn't be able to "indoctrinate" students, what they always always mean is "you shouldn't be able to tell people that white supremacy is bad." it is never a good faith argument and it should never be treated as such

@jonny @forestine "prediction is not primarily a technological means for knowing future outcomes, but a social model for extracting and concentrating discretionary power" is such a good and succinct formulation

@GoodNewsGreyShoes like it or not, "like it or not, _____ is here to stay" is here to stay :(

[in the faculty meeting] listen, this new technology is here to stay, and it's useless to fight against it. if we want to prepare our students for the jobs of the future, we *must* teach them how to (responsibly and ethically) purchase and consume up to five Taco BellⓇ Naked Chicken Chalupas™ each day