Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.

The same meme with “wiring and lights” at the top. Then you descend to motors, transformers delta-y phases, RC and RL circuits, op amps, BJT circuits, reverse bias what?, differential equations, and eventually signals and systems.

The summary that I liked from the last post was “python is the second best language for everything”. There’s always something specialized and better for every given job. But, if you want one tool that’ll do a solid job everywhere, python is your go to.

As per all too often, the functional programming world invented them. Haskell (and its ilk) usually has all the future cool stuff already. Then python picks it up, then it moves over to C#/Java, then C++ says “mee too”!

Yeah, those durn data size fields. At first you’re like “why would you do this? It’s specified in the spec, right?” Then you start consuming the data stream and go “oh, yeah need this”.

I was doing some driver work for a real time location tracking board. The serial stream protocol was very well documented and designed. Plenty of byte length count fields, though.

This approach is so much nicer than the threading/queuing approaches we used to have. One async showed up, a ton of the work go pulled out of protocol handing and distributed subsystem sync efforts.

Long lived the multi threaded C++ server buffer! Today, async beging to rule the roost.

Is there a source for the data? I’d love to include the charts in some materials we’re building for transit advocacy, and knowing the sources would help ensure successful distribution.

It’s wonderful how included and valued nerdiness is these days. Being interested in anything non mainstream in the conformist 80’s was hell outside of a tight friend group.

Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There’s plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.

Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.

I’ve started to ask myself this more and more. Why is on street free parking (or even metered, but in a crowded core area) a value choice we make in our cities?

I’m still chewing on the concept, but once I considered challenging that status quo, it opened a lot of new approaches to what is considered a right vs exploiting the common city resources for individual use.

The latest trucks out are being marketed towards family movers now. Basically up to four kids (which is now a large US family) they try to push pickups as a family car.

Edit: current advertising listing off the best trucks to have for a family of 6, especially as the sole vehicle in the household: https://carbuzz.com/cars/trucks-for-family

One of the interesting aspects of humanity is how much people like given text editing methods. There’s a handful of approaches and after learning one or two, people really figure out what works for them.

I am more than happy to say I like vim, but in the end you should use what you like best. Just done be surprised when I can write and edit a ton of text really fast while your nano session is comfortable, but slow.

If an IDE doesn’t have vi key bindings it isn’t going to be used by me. That’s what finally get me to change from terminal only dev to vscode. Until I found the vi editing extension the IDE wasn’t of interest.

Yes, vi is just that good.

I hear emacs bindings are also great, but I just know how to save and exit from emacs.

Before COVID the US was dropping in worldwide math, science, and writing rankings. I would be willing to bed $1 that this will just hasten our decline.

• Do not treat people or animals as things
• Consent first from others, especially your family
• The Earth and it’s creatures should be shepherded and guarded, not exploited
• No gods, no kings, no rulers - instead have empathy, sharing, and collaboration
• It’s round you nimrods, because that’s how gravity works

Such great Exploits of a Mom: https://xkcd.com/327/

Aside from using them in reactions during discussions with group that I know (Discord, Chat/Hangouts), they’re too fuzzy in definition to be useful in conversations. When reading on Lemmy if I run into emoticons, I just skip over them as noise in the stream. I don’t even try to figure out what the person is trying to convey since I’m not going to be able to track whatever the latest trends are in their meaning. It’s the same reason you don’t spam a public forum like this with youth slang if you want to communicate with a wide demographic of members.

Then Disney Inc will need to get creative and figure out a new way to brand itself. That’s whe reason why copyright is limited, not eternal.

One thing to keep in mind is that in the US, there’s very few people or companies that actually own the land that they’re on. Most of the time you have the rights to use the land for certain types of things, but not actually own it. The US government (federal on down) has various ways of seizing property for its own purposes.

There’s only a handful of people who actually own the land they live on. Most of them were granted the land by prior governments (mostly Spain) before the US was a country. Their ownership was grandfathered in and has passed via inheritance through the families. Several of those family plots are in Texas and Florida. Everyone else is just allowed to stay as long as they play ball with the rules.

The GOP tried to establish their dictatorship and failed. The normal progression after you get your strongman into power is to start a series of internal pogroms based on the daily purity test. Essentially, the people who are the most strident and extreme without your power bloc begin tearing down anyone and anything that stops them from continuing to consolidate power into an ever smaller group. Since this is supposed to begin after you gain the authoritarian rule, you can basically do it with impunity since there’s no minority party internal or external to your group to stop you and wrest power back.

Because their coup failed, they’re now going through a round of purity tests without having removed the minority party so it’s just a self destruction of their party. The risk is that they continue to winnow down their numbers internally, but the voters of the nation just don’t care that the GOP is a party of insurrectionist traitors and actually votes them more seats. If that happens, or if they just decide to do it without the majority of seats anyway, they get to try coup #2.

In either case, we’re dealing with an ongoing coup attempt in the US by one of the major parties.