Notices by cliffle@hachyderm.io

@dalias yeah it's fricking great.

As usual we've got Claire Wolf to thank here. It's a clever trick -- given the reverse-engineered the ICE40 bitstream format, and some (very mild) assumptions about how Yosys maps big RAMs onto FPGA BRAMs, you can find RAMs by parsing the bitstream and just rewrite them in-place.

The "Project X-Ray" reverse-engineering of the Xilinx 7-series bitstream should enable this same thing for Xilinx parts using Yosys, but I'm not sure if they've done it yet.

@dalias he wrote some things that were, if not influential per se, at least widely read and commented on back in the very early days of AWS. He was also pretty visible at Google back in the mid-late oughts, so at least some of the posts are from folks who knew him and are having a hard time watching his journey into whatever-this-is. (I'm not posting on it, but I knew him and am finding it hard to watch.)

@dalias the kids are really excited about this unit conversion rn

@dalias agreed, I feel like there are ways of doing spooling that are less noxious than cups's default queue experience.

@dalias I've been chewing on this since I had to write a cups filter last year, and I think raging against cups is good and wise, but I'm not sure queueing is the first place I'd cut.

Some of my printers, even relatively recent printers, take kind of a long time to wake all the way up from sleep and actually accept a print job. I like that I can close Inkscape-or-equivalent without having to verify that the print job has transferred all the way. (I actually broke this aspect of cups at one point, so I have a feel for how it would behave with no queueing at all.)

@dalias ... I am thinking about this more than I probably should be

@dalias how much are they going for? Are these single stepper drivers?

@dalias wow, like a sea lion in patch form

@dalias I like the GL-iNet devices like that, particularly since they can run upstream if you're careful. 👍

@dalias yeah. It's frustrating.

@dalias the commenters being all "man it sucks that we have to fork the repo just to fix this bug that the maintainers don't want us to fix" is really galling.

A lot of the pro-AI folks flirt with conspiracist thinking when they run into pushback and it's a bit scary.

@dalias sure, you don't _need_ it, but I do think it's a particularly exciting development for non-cartesian systems like this!

@dalias ah, yeah, I've never gotten those tuner apps to work properly (but I have a stroboscope because nerd).

Well, neat! I'd love a proper delta bot, particularly with the recent advances in non-planar slicing algorithms (since delta bots don't move in planes). I will be following this closely.

@dalias looks like the axes are belt-driven -- I've found belt tensioning to be a difficult process for folks who haven't done it a lot, and I'm curious if you've got thoughts on it.

@dalias I don't think the defaults are especially server-specific.

I used to use the defaults on machines with spinning rust disks that were mostly idle -- since each time you spin up / spin down the disk, you're effectively shortening its lifetime.

The defaults can also make sense on a machine with battery backup where disk writes are power-intensive. I actually wound up lengthening them on some laptops, to coalesce small writes into larger IOPs. Not sure if this matters anymore with good SSDs though.

For removable devices specifically, I've seen people use udev to hasten writeback _just for them_ without affecting performance of internal disks, but I haven't personally tried that. (I don't find the flush option to make writes unacceptably slow on removable disks, personally.)

@dalias I mean...

"This watch is timeless!"
"...um...what does it indicate then"
"Cosmic muon flux."
"I'll take two please"

@dalias neat tip, thanks

@dalias neat, so you're basically making concrete using the baking soda as the aggregate? Or is it playing a chemical role?

@dalias this would go great with my registry of mid-grade dependencies that you can use, I guess, but no one exactly loves: sosocrates

@dalias fortunately, there are two kinds of TLS clients in the wild:

- Those that accept gzip and brotli content encoding
- Those that are handrolled and probably trying to evade fingerprinting.

You can just block the second category. It's like wearing a sign saying "I'm a bot please stop spacebombing me."