Dave.

Having a need for a “valid travel document” to cover for your perceived ethnicity stinks of “papers, please” and I am alarmed that you cannot see that connection.

It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean.

The way you’ve phrased it sounds quite dystopian.

There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.

Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your “loop” becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.

Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.

If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don’t get tasks treading on each other’s toes.

FreeRTOS is in the Arduino libraries so you can just add it to a blank project and then have a play running two tasks at once.

Only systems that have framebuffer console enabled at boot I guess.

Recovery mode booting would probably be normal 80x25 text console in case there was something up with framebuffer initialisation.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.

It can be a Cron job that runs every minute. Run a script that:

• Checks for the existence of a file, if it exists, exit.
• (Optional) ping your end, if it’s up, continue, otherwise exit
• Touches said file.
• Runs SSH to try and connect to your end. If the connection is made everything halts here until the connection drops.
• Cleans up said file.
• Exits.

If you can arrange a fixed IP address externally (or dynamic DNS that follows your IP around) you can set up a reverse SSH connection instead.

Basically your server connects to your external computer via SSH and then sets up port forwarding so that when you connect to localhost:2222 or similar on your PC, you’re actually connecting back to the server.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

I know, instead of folders, we could use “shelves” and the Dewey Decimal System.

32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it’s just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.

Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there’ll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.

How does a person get this far down a rabbit hole?

I don’t know. Software engineering is tangential to my field but I have to wonder, is software efficiency even a consideration these days?

It seems that maybe a week of just solid thinking about what they have and what they need - WITHOUT touching a keyboard - could have put them in a better position. But move fast and break things doesn’t seem to accommodate that kind of approach.

Ok there’s a whole lot of wtf going on here.

AI codebots in the cloud doing your code for you, cool, I guess.

So you need to watch them? And presumably intervene if necessary? Ok.

So then:

They decided that they’d stream a video of the AI codebots doing their thing.

At 40Mbps per stream.

For “enterprise use”.

Where presumably they want lots of users.

And then they didn’t know about locked down enterprise internet and had to engineer a fallback to jpeg for when things aren’t great for them. Newsflash - with streaming video peaking at 40Mbs per user, things will never be great for your product in the real world.

How, in any way, does this scale to anything approaching success? Their back end now has to have the compute power to encode and serve up gigabits of streaming video for anything more than ~50 concurrent users, let alone the compute usage of the actual “useful” bit , the AI codebots.

For say, 5 users out of a site of 200, IT departments will now see hundreds of megabits of streaming traffic - and if they’re proactive, they will choke those endpoints to a crawl so that their pathetic uplink has a chance to serve the other 195 users.

All of this for a system that is fundamentally working on maybe 5kB of visible unicode text at any particular moment.

I use MX Linux because it provides a simple way to use both the NVIDIA 340 drivers and the latest kernels with my 14 year old laptop.

…so a modest but significant improvement has been achieved, but nowhere near the temps required for melting ore.

Just stack six of these in series, problem solved. /s

Try harder. A simple request to filter out the nonsense in Gemini gives:

After filtering out the “nonsense”—the pop-culture references (Lord of the Rings, IT, Purple People Eater) and the random metaphors (poison, sandwiches)—the core message appears to be a critique of modern data processing or AI training compared to traditional publishing.

The “correct” message hidden in the text is:

The Core Message

It is inefficient and costly to pay humans to fix low-quality or “noisy” data. Instead of spending money to clean up automated nonsense, it would be more effective to invest in high-quality, verified sources (like books) and pay human creators fairly, as the system was originally designed to function.

Breakdown of the “Noise” Removed

“Poison and noise are the way”: Likely a sarcastic opening about the current state of data. “Making a sandwich for those you love”: Irrelevant personal imagery. “Off to take the ring to Mordor”: Lord of the Rings reference. “Clowns in the sewers… red balloon”: Stephen King’s IT reference. “Purple people eater… walking downtown”: Reference to the 1958 novelty song.

The Logic Retained

The Problem: It is “not fruitful” to pay humans to undo/fix “noise” to make it “useful.” The Result: This process ends up forcing people to “ingest fact” (raw data) without proper context. The Solution: “Buy the books and pay people correctly” according to the original “system.”

Would you like me to help you rewrite this message into a formal argument or a professional email?

it is really more useful than Katie from Sales getting skin cancer on a beach in Thailand or that…

A large chunk of air transport is also freight. And business. And regular domestic travel for people going from A to B, travel that doesn’t include holidays for Kate or that drunk dude in Mallorca.

And when you look at those uses, AI is still running a pretty distant second place.

It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.

The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.

The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.

Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.

Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.