@nixCraft Don't forget:
"Many hats" = Nobody knows what's going on for anything, and that's going to include you, who will be held accountable.

"Hybrid" = You'll be in the office 5 days a week regardless.

"Startup-like Environment" = All of the above.

There are certainly more that I've personally encountered, but you've covered a lot of them.

IT jobs lingo decoded:

• “We’re like a family” = no boundaries & call at midnight

• “Fast-paced” = chaos everywhere

• “Self-starter” = zero support for anything

• “Team player” = unpaid overtime & get ready to work on all holidays including weekends

• “Competitive salary” = below industry average

• “Nimble” = drop everything & work on my problem

• “Flexible work hours” = starting time is fixed but don’t think of leaving early

What else?

@alilly @mctwist 14G/s is the current limit, so you'd need a system able to run 8 in parallel at once. Not many platforms have enough PCIE lanes.

That said, need a 100GB boot doesn't mean all those bytes need to be read every boot.

(And yes, the story is probably just a work of fiction)

Twenty years ago today we released the little web framework we’d developed at the Lawrence Journal-World to help us build news sites and apps. We hoped maybe a couple of other media outlets, and maybe a few in the Python community, might find it useful. Never in a million years could I have predicted what happened next… https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2025/jul/13/happy-20th-birthday-django/

@alilly I knew a guy that claimed that he had an OS named GAME that could start within a second, and any program could also do like so after the initial start. It also took up about 100GB for boot only. When I came over he said he had removed it.

He was definitely a mythomaniac.

This week, probably, I'll start exploring how to reimplement the LOVE2D APIs for (2), having recently published how I'd bootstrap Lua onto it from machine code.

After that I'll return to my favorite hypothetical (1) & finish it by discussing how to implement USB, NVME, & BtrFS on it. Whilst reengineering USB peripheral & hub hardware.

And once those hypotheticals are done, I'll start (3)! Which so far has been planning stages.

2/2!

this whole conflict wherein multinational corporations demand unpaid labor from hobbyists is only happening because the free software movement has built stuff that capital is not capable of building for itself

just so we're clear

My 3 main hypotheticals I love exploring:

1. A web browser (and internet communicator) built from scratch upon hardware specifically designed for parsing text (or other binary data) from the internet, etc.

2. 1980's PC experience idealized with 2000-era hardware; that is LOVE2D bootstrapped from machine code on a risc32cfimv with memory-mapped I/O.

3. A highly-multicore "video workstation" based in part on the PlayStation3, for artists.

1/2!

Public service announcement.

(Created by https://bsky.app/profile/campfireharve.st )

Since working on #CHERIoT, I've been surprised at how many other potential security problems I can just ignore if I have temporal memory safety that works in the presence of malicious compartments.

If I free an object, I guarantee that nothing else I care about will alias it. Another compartment may have kept a reference, but they either claimed it (and so it counts against their quota) or didn't (in which case its pointer stops working right now).

A whole chunk of the TLS stack can be riddled with TOCTOU bugs and I don't care because the scoped delegation mechanism means that, once a receive call has returned from the TCP/IP stack, I know that the TCP/IP stack can't hold a pointer to it, so the only thing that can mutate the object is the TLS compartment (and it's not actively trying to attack itself), so as long as it doesn't check something in the packet and then mutate it, it's fine: nothing else can, not even untrusted assembly code in the TCP/IP stack.

I guess it's not surprising that it's easier to build secure systems if the hardware and core platform give you a sensible set of core guarantees.

#CHERI

Fun, learning, and community don’t need economies of scale.
If a single human soldering a PLA replacement at 2 am feels joy, the activity is already justified. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

Most importantly, in order to preserve that healthy spirit, they need not to hear from misery guts at all.

When someone says “retro-computing is tiny, why bother?” it helps to remember that the “small world” now contains multiple thriving hardware and software ecosystems that didn’t exist even five years ago.

And even then... where does it originate the imperious need to be misery guts telling others they shouldn't have fun, even if it's one single guy minding his business and toying around with transistors?

That mindset that only sees value in economies of scale, only accepting the capitalist mode of production is completely wrong.

People make things because making things makes them happy. People make things because they must, or for no reason whatsoever at all.

Perhaps the misunderstanding stems from the fact that the guys who can't understand that form of happiness for the sake of creation alone are the men who can only enjoy watching the world burn.

Approximations are necessary, since there's far too many paths light can take (and far far too many particles it interacts with) for a perfectly accurate simulation.

Anyways here's Sebastian Lague tackling these challenges:

Water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOkfC5fLfgE&list=PLFt_AvWsXl0ehjAfLFsp1PGaatzAwo0uK&index=3&pp=iAQB
Atmosphere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxfEbulyFcY&list=PLFt_AvWsXl0ehjAfLFsp1PGaatzAwo0uK&index=13&pp=iAQB
Clouds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QOcCGI6xOU&list=PLFt_AvWsXl0ehjAfLFsp1PGaatzAwo0uK&index=18&pp=iAQB

2/2!

Some of the trickiest things for a computer to render in a realistic scene are the mundane background details. Like clouds, sunsets, or water!

Because light interacts with them in strange (compared to solid objects) ways! In each of these cases we use different variations of ray tracing.

For clouds & the atmosphere we we calculate how much light of which frequencies reach each visible point, & how much of it is redirected towards the camera.

For water we trace reflections & refractions.

1/2!

@csepp ZFS encryption is not stable. IIRC the biggest problem is sleep/resume but it means there's a race condition somewhere

Fun Fact: "Max Headroom" won an award for computer generated effects, even though it was not computer generated.

If it doesn’t cost you anything, no one else will value it either.

Not emotionally. Not intellectually. Not reputationally.

Skin in the game is so much more than a principle.

It's the price of being taken seriously.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-make-people-give-a-damn-92e3af37926932ef

With all the Commodore news... And the topic of my upcoming threads...

I cast absolutely no judgement on this new computer, but it does indicate to me that the risc32cfimv machine with memory-mapped I/O I've described at https://adrian.geek.nz/from-scratch/personal-computer would have an audience.

And I've heard suggested, would do a lot of good for RISCV!

I'm not going to actually build this thing, so feel free to steal my idea!

Are you curious how browsers work? I'm working up a list of essential web performance resources, and many of the talks from this 2020 instance of Chromium University ("internal" training for Chromies) are incredible:

https://code.sgo.to/2020/12/16/chromium-university-fall-2020.html

First #selfHosting baby steps: bare metal server is finally up and running. :neofox_uwu:
Couldn't figure out remote unlocked encrypted root on #ZFS with #NixOS, but also I realized it would be overkill (what's the point of encrypting the Nix store?) and that I can selectively encrypt datasets, so it's whatevs.