Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 23

We're working in a different tradition of actually decentralized economic networks (where blockchains are centralized in their blockchain, which is a logical central, where each replica of the chain is necessarily the exact same thing.

The other tradition started around 1980 by Bill McCarthy https://www.williamemccarthy.com/ and is called REA, for Resources, Events, and Agents.

It evolved into an economic system model in the late 1990's.

one more for now:

@conatus It would mean that your town would be very clean though!

@conatus What's a weremaid? Someone who has a temporary feminine transformation on the full moon with a compulsion to tidy?

@conatus I won't be!

I've got other shows I love...

@frameworkcomputer

Downgrading the firmware to 3.10 made everything work again, but... for how long?

I am not sure if I want to reflash the firmware every time I want to plug in a USB device!

Though I guess... reflashing the firmware really seems CPU intensive, kicking the fans at full tilt... a different kind of hot-swap?

I really want to like this laptop, but my confidence at this point is ... challenging.

@devinprater maybe this is a dumb question, but what's the point of a braille on screen keyboard? isn't the point of braille that it's physically tactile to read with your fingers, how does that work on a flat display

Found an issue with CatTrap's integration of Balkon/Harfbuzz: I wasn't thorough enough in my unit conversion.

I've now threaded the necessary input through my logic & fixed this issue! That data would be crucial would be vital to have in the output too...

vm_map is a bit harder, because we have to allocate actual memory from Linux. I break'd before the very 'syscall' instruction, set registers as for the Linux's mmap syscall, held my breath, and let it execute 'syscall'. It worked! — so now I just had to save the newly allocated address as Mach would, and make vm_map return KERN_SUCCESS.

The two interesting calls are setting fs_base (that very i386_fsgs_base_state thing) and allocating memory with vm_map.

The former is easy to do, recent GDB versions let me just read and write $fs_base like any other register. So there I go, emulating a syscall (technically an RPC) that does not exist in the real Mach yet!

Linux happily agreed to exec my statically linked ELF, even though the ELF says it's for the Hurd. I had to gaslight GDB into thinking it the executable is for Linux, but that was easy ('set os default').

Then I ran it, instruction by instruction (si, si, si, si...). When it attempts to make a syscall, I make it skip the syscall and model its effect in my head (you want __mach_task_self? here, say that returned a port name of 1).

🎉 x86_64-gnu glibc works 🎉

...kind of.

I was unable to make x86_64 GNU Mach run it (needs further investigation), and then even if I would, gnumach still doesn't implement i386_fsgs_base_state, so glibc would crash & burn very early at TLS setup.

So instead, I'm running it... on Linux. Yes, really 🙂

I'm of course no stranger to running Mach software under Linux, if you know what I mean — but no, I have not implemented the (in?)famous HELL (the Hurd Emulation Layer for Linux).

I'm using GDB!

*Gale dramatis*
Poll results came back! With 41 votes.

I'm mostly followed by sorcerers & magi, leaning slightly magi. Meaning you like applying your skills, with or without getting into the underlying theory.

Of those who answered the poll I have a couple pure-theory "wizard" followers.

@kzimmermann I voted "Possible, but not technically attractive", though I'd prefer to phrase it as "Possible, but not socially attractive".

If they succeed in shifting most of the newcomers into EEE silos, things won't be that different from before Musk bought Twitter.

Once we can send messages back & forth, we often need reusable code ("libraries") or even special hardware to help us generate output data. As well as common languages to common languages to communicate with people over, including configuration to respect their culture.

For some I/O mediums we may use emulators implemented upon another I/O stack, often to cater to device or accessibility constraints.

An OS consists almost entirely of these complex I/O stacks.

4/4 Fin!

Most of these channels come in the form of datastreams since that's easier to implement especially at a hardware level. Thus necessitating a parser & serializer for any non-trivial processing. Any encryption, error-detection/recovery, &/or (de)compression is typically added at this layer.

Text parsers are often have a "tokenizer" split to abstract the input data. And "scanners" abstracts the stream to aid peeking at the next item or track linenumbers.

You can have binary parsers too.

3/4

Simply establishing the communication channel is difficult, spread between Linux itself, the (proprietary) "firmware" beneath it, & userspace components above it. This is challenging because a) a lack of common protocols & more inherantly b) both components want to control the timing. If we value device longevity (which I do!) these problems won't go away anytime soon, we'll just have to live with the complexity the hardware industry shoves on us!

2/?

Not only is generating output challenging for a computer, but simply sending messages between different hardware & software components! Even when you don't add compression where the channel lacks necessary bandwidth, encryption where it lacks necessary confidentiality, or error-correction/detection where it's not reliable enough.

All the same theory applies when storing data to be read later, or when transferring data between computers over the internet!

1/?

Reverse-engineering the register codes for the 8086 processor's microcode - Ken Shirriff: http://www.righto.com/2023/03/8086-register-codes.html

Reverse-engineering a 1960s cordwood flip flop module with X-ray CT scans: http://www.righto.com/2022/08/lumafield-flip-flop.html

Hash Tables FTW - Michal Necasek @ OS/2 Museum: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/hash-tables-ftw/

Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment - Simon Willison: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/11/llama/

ChatGPT's API is So Good and Cheap, It Makes Most Text Generating AI Obsolete - Max Woolf: https://minimaxir.com/2023/03/new-chatgpt-overlord/
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/11/chatgpts-api-is-so-good-and-cheap-it-makes-most-text-generating/
Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35110998