2022-03-14 13:58:41 <KipIngram   > I've read all that stuff that Chuck wrote, and the similar stuff that Fox wrote, and it all just resonates with me.  It's like "software Zen."
2022-03-14 13:59:00 <KipIngram   > All of the mainstream practices are "compromises" by comparison.
2022-03-14 14:00:44 <KipIngram   > But I think it's easy enough to understand why the mainstream has gone the way it has.  Chuck's philosophy puts an enormous burden of responsibility on the programmer.  It's *all* up to you - to understand your problem in enormous detail, and to solve it in the best possible way.  Mainstream software seems all about making it possible for a large number of programmers who have only limited "problem specific"
2022-03-14 14:00:47 <KipIngram   > understanding to nonetheless contribute toward its solution.
2022-03-14 14:01:05 <KipIngram   > Programming a la Chuck is an "elite endeavor."
2022-03-14 14:01:24 <KipIngram   > If you can do it - you are *very good*.
2022-03-14 14:02:02 <KipIngram   > An expert craftsman, in every sense of the word.  I think that not everyone is up to that.
2022-03-14 14:02:48 <KipIngram   > Chuck's philosophy really brings out the "art" side of programming.
2022-03-14 14:03:49 <KipIngram   > You can apply the same ideas to hardware design too.  They implement in different ways, but you can still approach it with an eye toward truly understanding what every single component is doing, in your unique circuit.
2022-03-14 14:04:12 <KipIngram   > Or you can go buy some pre-made IC and slap it in there.
2022-03-14 14:05:16 <KipIngram   > I think to really really apply Chuck's ideas to hardware, though, you need to be working at the chip level.  It's not like there are board level ways to compete with the density and speed that IC-level circuits can have.
2022-03-14 14:07:26 <KipIngram   > I'd really like to someday make a run at writing a chip layout system the way Chuck did.  Even if I never use it to make a chip - I just find the whole idea, and the way he talked about it, fascinating.  That's really the big thing he did - start with nothing, and wind up with working integrated circuits, having written all the tools the whole way through - that just kind of elevates him to demigod status in
2022-03-14 14:07:29 <KipIngram   > my eyes.
2022-03-14 14:07:47 <KipIngram   > Talk about self-reliance.
2022-03-14 14:41:39 <KipIngram   > Oh, happy Pi Day, guys.
2022-03-14 14:48:54 <Zarutian_HTC> KipIngram: oh, it is half Tau already?
2022-03-14 15:07:17 <KipIngram   > :-)
2022-03-14 15:41:26 <crc         > Good afternoon
2022-03-14 17:02:37 <KipIngram   > Hi crc
2022-03-14 17:25:46 <Zarutian_HTC> I have been looking into Othernet (formerly outernet) datacasting and I though hmm why not make minimal forth interp in js that has access to a canvas on the page
2022-03-14 17:27:01 <Zarutian_HTC> and limit that forth interp to 128 KB of wram&pram
2022-03-14 17:27:31 <Zarutian_HTC> for fiendishly small games
2022-03-14 17:40:01 <KipIngram   > That would run locally, right?  Outernet isn't a two way service, is it?
2022-03-14 17:40:43 <Zarutian_HTC> yebb, same way wikipedia is 'casted
2022-03-14 17:42:19 <KipIngram   > Do you interact in any way to tell it what to send you, or do you just "tune" what you want from what's already sent?
2022-03-14 17:42:37 <KipIngram   > Trying to get a feel what what these games would be like.
2022-03-14 17:45:31 <Zarutian_HTC> othernet/outernet is basically wifi shared usb drive in which files apear via radio-reception
2022-03-14 17:46:36 <Zarutian_HTC> so basically something like 100 BASIC games, CHIP8, DCPU16 to PICO8 or such level
2022-03-14 17:47:18 <Zarutian_HTC> somewhere between NES and SNES probably
2022-03-14 17:47:31 <KipIngram   > Interesting.  So they've just decided on some batch of content and seek to make it available anywhere on the planet?
2022-03-14 17:47:56 <Zarutian_HTC> yebb, pretty much
2022-03-14 17:48:30 <Zarutian_HTC> well anywhere where you can 'see' the geosync Inmarsat satellites
2022-03-14 17:50:03 <Zarutian_HTC> they broadcast wikipedia, bbc world service, aprs messages with outernet or othernet tag in them
2022-03-14 17:51:05 <Zarutian_HTC> another datacaster is blockstream though they are not using the L-band, iirc, as othernet is doing
2022-03-14 17:52:52 <Zarutian_HTC> blockstream is 'casting the bitcoin blockchain and any files that people upload to them via an for pay gateway that accepts bitcoin via both blockchain and lightning net
2022-03-14 17:55:01 <Zarutian_HTC> plus there are quite a few sms to btc blockchain gateways around the world, so an vendor somewhere with spotty or expensive Internet can still accept payments that way
2022-03-14 18:00:00 <Zarutian_HTC> but if you want truely global datacasting then one could use that opensource irridium decoder + rtl-sdr dongle to listen to the paging channel and send a chunk as msg to a pager nr of yours
2022-03-14 18:00:28 <Zarutian_HTC> slow, low bandwith, and quite expensive
2022-03-14 18:00:52 <KipIngram   > Gotta run my daughter to a friend's house - back shortly.
2022-03-14 18:02:04 <KipIngram   > That's all pretty interesting.  I like finding new little things like that.
2022-03-14 18:13:28 <Zarutian_HTC> so I was musing that one could design and get made an usb stick that is also an irridium pager slash datacast reciever
2022-03-14 18:15:09 <Zarutian_HTC> would need an internal rechargable battery but as bigclive.com showed what inside a poundland/tesco 'single use' top up smart phone thingy that is well doable
2022-03-14 18:19:29 <Zarutian_HTC> and the iridum paging channel has enough signal strength to be recieved inside even shipping containers
2022-03-14 18:23:12 <Zarutian_HTC> as the pager messages can be max 160 ascii char each chunk can be 7 * 160 bits, spend 256 bits as sha256 signiture (using rsa or ed25519) one gets about 108 byte payload
2022-03-14 18:23:50 <Zarutian_HTC> letssay we spend 8 bytes in overhead protocol stuff
2022-03-14 18:24:40 <Zarutian_HTC> so, 100 bytes per say every 5 minutes
2022-03-14 18:26:23 <Zarutian_HTC> that gives 1200 bytes per hour, 28800 bytes per day
2022-03-14 18:27:49 <Zarutian_HTC> so investing into heavy compression pays here
2022-03-14 19:06:17 <remexre     > siraben: did we chat about separation logic in the past?
2022-03-14 19:07:00 <remexre     > (for verifying machine-level forth impls)
2022-03-14 19:19:18 <KipIngram   > Zarutian_HTC: If you had a target language you could focus on compressing that language.
2022-03-14 19:20:11 <KipIngram   > I mean like at the word or phrase level.
2022-03-14 19:20:36 <KipIngram   > I did a quick jab at the net, but didn't find any immediate results for how heavily English can be compressed.
2022-03-14 19:20:45 <KipIngram   > Surely someone's studied that.
2022-03-14 19:27:06 <KipIngram   > I just took a set of 19 novel-length epubs I've got and ran them through zip -Z bzip2 and got 73% compression.  So compression gets you at least 4:1.  I bet serious work focused exclusively on English language could get more.
2022-03-14 19:30:31 <KipIngram   > Way back at the beginning of information theory Shannon did some experiments and suggested 69% redundancy in the English language.
2022-03-14 19:31:41 <KipIngram   > That experiment was designed to take full account of as many things as possible - he gave a fleet of people samples of text with missing parts and asked them to guess what went there.
2022-03-14 19:31:57 <KipIngram   > So it involved context, lines of thought, related ideas, etc.
2022-03-14 19:32:15 <KipIngram   > Not just word / letter frequency - those calculations produce lower values for redundancy.
2022-03-14 19:32:36 <KipIngram   > So maybe bzip knows what it's doing at least fairly well.
2022-03-14 19:33:32 <KipIngram   > Interesting side note - zip alone, without the -Z bzip2, only gave 63% compression.
2022-03-14 19:33:45 <KipIngram   > By default zip uses "deflate."
2022-03-14 19:34:13 <KipIngram   > Must work better on commonly encountered files, or it wouldn't be the default.
2022-03-14 19:50:18 <KipIngram   > Oh, looks like Shannon only did that with one person (his wife), and one book.
2022-03-14 19:50:27 <KipIngram   > Here a team has done the same thing more broadly:
2022-03-14 19:50:30 <KipIngram   > https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/411/j42-hamid.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
2022-03-14 21:33:13 <Zarutian_HTC> man, three lightning strikes around here surely made me jump
2022-03-14 21:34:30 <Zarutian_HTC> thought ww3 had started
2022-03-14 21:36:45 <Zarutian_HTC> ca 15 sec between flash and thunder of the first two and too low thunder to hear for the last one
2022-03-14 22:06:19 <KipIngram   > Where abouts are you, Zarutian_HTC?
2022-03-14 22:07:05 <Zarutian_HTC> Iceland, Capital area
2022-03-14 22:07:52 <Zarutian_HTC> basically next muncipality over from Reykjavík
2022-03-14 22:08:30 <Zarutian_HTC> (Capital area is translation of Höfuðborgarsvæði)
2022-03-14 22:09:05 <KipIngram   > :-)  The first was likely more informative to me, but... cool name.
2022-03-14 22:09:55 <KipIngram   > I'm near Houston, Texas in the U.S.
2022-03-14 22:14:15 <Zarutian_HTC> well the weather service here had predicted sharp drop in temperture
2022-03-14 22:16:00 <Zarutian_HTC> and the perceptation can then freeze quite quickly into ice crystals that charge up due to airfriction when falling
2022-03-14 22:16:20 <Zarutian_HTC> which causes lightning