The LD54 #gamejam is over!

We just *barely* made it, and got a working game out of it- plus made an entire three levels!

Playable at https://hjemme.computer

This link only has the first level, (the raspberry pi’s owner has gone home to sleep).

I’m excited to go play what everyone else made- but now I’m going to bed. Thanks for this one!

Our #ldjam page:

[https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/tiny-bites-big … ⌘ Read more

Stuck in Big Picture Mode in Steam? Here’s How to Exit Big Picture Mode
Steam, the popular gaming platform for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has an optional Big Picture Mode that takes over the screen of their device or computer, and changes the interface quite a bit. If you’re like many Steam users, you may at some point accidentally enter into Big Picture Mode, and then wonder how to … Read More ⌘ Read more

garden: welcome PET01 to equipment/computers, also update chaos awakening act 3

JMP: Newsletter: Summer in Review
Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Sh … ⌘ Read more

Getting started with edge computing
Edge computing practitioners answer your questions about when and why to build applications at the edge.

The post Getting started with edge computing appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

@prologic@twtxt.net are you trying to reinvent cloud computing?!?

Free Public WiFi: https://computer.rip/2023-07-29-Free-Public-WiFi.html

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.

Moving from a product to a service mindset
Thanks to DevOps, cloud computing and other industry trends, many organizations are shifting from a product mindset to a service mindset. Here’s how you can implement a service-led strategy. ⌘ Read more

Quantum Computing in Reality (Pt3: Beyond the Hype) - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

“The Great Myths of Computer History”, BASIC Week, & Amiga Week
July is gonna be friggin’ awesome. ⌘ Read more

What Is The Biggest National Security Consideration of Quantum Computing? 😳 ⌘ Read more

Make computers inconvenient again.

** week notes **
Last year I set out to rekindle my reading habit. That went well. This year’s reading has been enjoyable, but I’m not cozy with the ratio of non-fiction to fiction I’ve read this year…non-fiction (especially of the computing persuasion) far out balances the fiction I’ve read. I think this is mostly because I’ve been mired amidst a fiction book that I’ve found to be a slog…but enjoyable, too. I’d have abandoned it and moved on, elsewise. Onward!

Spring is quickly making way to summer h … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train…you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that’s the idea–no one can run them locally, they have to rent them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).

There’s a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years.

New talk: “Using computers freely and safely” http://akkartik.name/freewheeling

Lunduke’s History of Computers - Volume 3
DRM-Free PDF is now ready for download! ⌘ Read more

Why an iPhone makes a terrible general purpose computer
(when Android makes a pretty good one) ⌘ Read more

How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything with Michio Kaku & Neil deGrasse Tyson ⌘ Read more

Shapley values are NP-hard to compute, right?

My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it’d be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it.

from a computational complexity perspective, completeness is the “worst” axiom to violate: only O(n²) to find a violation

The Apple IIgs gets a new Gopher client. Seriously.
A computer discontinued 30 years ago & a TCP protocol left for dead. Awesome. ⌘ Read more

JMP: Newsletter: Jabber ID Discovery, New Referral Codes
Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free … ⌘ Read more

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 30, 2023
Listen now (79 min) | Special Edition: Fixing all the problems in computing in a single show (or at least trying) ⌘ Read more

logs/blog: building a computer desktop environment just cuz

Microsoft & Google: “You’ll have no real computers, and you’ll be happy”
This is a trend we need to put the kibosh on. ⌘ Read more

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 23, 2023 - Hour 1
Listen now (0 sec) | The Death of Computer Magazines, A.I. taking away jobs, Tech Layoffs, and iOS Sideloading. ⌘ Read more

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net Animals have inner lives. Computers do not.

Are you really so desperate to make this point thst you’re citing Quora??? Believe what you want to believe.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There’s nothing “in” there for it to express. It’s just generating pixels in patterns we’ve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.

Tillitis TKey
The Tillitis TKey, which I first wrote about in September last year,
is now available for sale at the the Tillitis webshop.

The TKey is a small bare-bones RISC-V computer in a USB stick form
factor with no persistent storage that measures apps uploaded to it
and derives a deterministic secret every time the same app is started.
You can use it, for instance, as a security token to keep your private
key and do signing operations. Everyt … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla, OSI, & the memory-holing of Computer History
Listen now (23 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - April 18, 2023 ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah. I’d add “Big Data” to that hype list, and I’m sure there are a bunch more that I’m forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won’t matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you’d be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that’s hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still…

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 9, 2023 - Hour 2
Listen now (45 min) | USB Flash Drive Bombs, the Great Apple Store Robbery, Google’s war on staplers… and Computer History! ⌘ Read more

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 2, 2023 - Hour 2
Listen now (48 min) | The Mark I computer, The Altair Fest of 1976, & 1990s Linux Gaming. ⌘ Read more

Look Ma: My computer is talking; let’s create a simplified ChatGPT!
ChatGPT is all the hype now, but the math behind it is pretty complex - can we
create something smaller & simpler, possibly under 200 lines of Rust code? ⌘ Read more

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Mar 12, 2023 - Hour 1
Listen now (53 min) | Tech News, Computer History, and Other Important Stuff. ⌘ Read more

The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Mar 5, 2023 - Hour 1
Listen now (60 min) | Tech News, Computer History, and Other Important Stuff. ⌘ Read more

JMP: Newsletter: JMP is 6! Leaving beta this year! And FOSSY 🙂️
Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one … ⌘ Read more

The impending first era of AI
There’s an article in WSJ about the imminent ‘AI Boom’ and how a couple of companies, the ones that have already been both enabling and controlling our existence, to a large extent, are bound to become even more powerful. It’s interesting to ‘see’ the interplay if you’ve been working in computing technology for the past decade or so. Christopher Mims, the author of the WSJ article, posits that the computing requirements of large language models, latent text-to-image diffus … ⌘ Read more

The least happy computer users: Those running Arch Linux & Firefox
Used by the happiest computer users: macOS, Slackware Linux, & Brave. ⌘ Read more

What will computer technology be like in 15 years?
Listen now (22 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Feb 3rd, 2023 ⌘ Read more

When the EU wanted to own all computers ⌘ Read more

Man discovers If Statements, becomes A.I. expert
“I can use these If-statements to actually make a computer think. To make decisions. Woah.” ⌘ Read more

Quantum computing is all well and good, but…
According to @RikerGoogling, the @EnterpriseCPU has FTL nanoprocessors! Can we start focusing on developing -that-?
Quantum computing is all well and good, but…

According to @RikerGoogling, the @EnterpriseCPU has FTL nanoprocessors! Can we start focusing on developing -that-?

Image

The Story of Otrona – The Colorado Computer Company of the early 1980s.
The “BMW of portable 8-bit computers”… has been all but lost to history. ⌘ Read more