Ephera

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

What the others wrote is already pretty good. An interesting observation I made in this regard: If you take a white noise sample and cut it really short, it sounds quite a bit like a snare drum.

That's kind of the level of randomness you can expect from various unpitched percussion instruments. They don't just have one tone, or the tone from multiple octaves layered on top of each other, like pitched instruments typically have.
Rather they're all over the place, with many tones layered on top of each other, and those tones change rapidly, too. So, it kind of has many pitches and therefore not really any particular one either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

But that is what I mean with it needing an extension of the language.

So, I'm not saying you could just build a library that calls existing PHP functions to make it all work. Rather I'm saying there's certain machine code instructions, which just cannot be expressed in PHP. And we need those machine code instructions for actually managing memory. So, I am talking about reading/writing to memory not being possible, unless we resort to horrible hacks.

Since we are building our own compiler anyways, we could add our own function-stubs and tell our compiler to translate them to those missing machine code instructions. But then that is a superset of PHP. It wouldn't be possible in PHP itself.

Again, I'm not entirely sure about the above, but my web search skills couldn't uncover any way to actually just read from a memory address in PHP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I mean, I'm a bit out of my water there, both in terms of the featureset of PHP and what's actually needed for a kernel, but I'm still gonna go with no.

For one, PHP uses reference counting + garbage collection for memory management. That's normally done by the language runtime, which you won't have when running baremetal.

Maybe you could implement a kernel, which does as few allocations as possible (generally a good idea for a kernel, but no idea, if it's possible with PHP), and then basically just let it memory leak until everything crashes.
Then again, the kernel is responsible for making processes crash when they have a memory leak. Presumably, our PHP kernel would just start overwriting data from running processes and eventually overwrite itself in memory(?). Either way, it would be horrendous.

Maybe you could also try to implement some basic reference counting into your own PHP code, so that your own code keeps track of how often you've used an object in your own code. Certainly doesn't sound like fun, though.

Well, and secondly, I imagine, you'd also still need an extension of the language, to be able to address actual memory locations and do various operations with them.

I know from Rust, that they've got specific functions in the stdlib for that, see for example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/ptr/index.html#functions
Presumably, PHP does not have such functions, because its users aren't normally concerned with that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Maybe should also be noted that this is not a common word in German. They just built a fancy building, so they chose a fancy name for it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

How? You'd need to compile it down to machine code somehow, for the processor to have any clue how to run it. And you'd need some custom library with custom compile instructions, to be able to control memory allocations, memory addresses etc..

I did a quick search and found two operating systems written in JS, both of which cop out when it comes to the kernel. Did you maybe mix it up with those?

[–] [email protected] 50 points 12 hours ago (15 children)

Good thing that this isn't actually possible...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago

Google isn't exactly excited about the concept of local files. They would prefer you to keep everything in their online services.

If you need support for these, then installing a separate file manager app is your best bet.
I'm using this one: https://f-droid.org/packages/me.zhanghai.android.files/
(No idea, though, if it supports unpacking RAR archives.)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 13 hours ago

I mean, presumably there's a microcontroller in this radio. For programming that, your only real mainstream choices are C, C++ and Rust, since you can't have a language runtime without a filesystem.

But yeah, it's neither the case that Rust is overwhelmingly popular for that (C/C++ do stick around still), nor is it the only discipline where Rust shines.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I'm a big fan of TVP.
It's really cheap, you can keep it on your shelf for an eternity, and you just cook it for a few minutes, then you can use it where you'd use meat.

So, for example, you can get them in meatball-shape, which I just throw into the water when my noodles are almost done cooking.

It's also quite chewy and if you get it in steak-shape and you sear it like a steak, then the Maillard reaction will make it taste quite a lot like a seared steak. As a long-time vegetarian, I had to gag when I first made it like that, because at least my body was convinced that I was biting into meat.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 19 hours ago

I still haven't released anything which is not under the AGPLv3 license, which is even more aggressive than the GPL, primarily because I know that it's prohibited to use AGPL-licensed software/libraries at Google.

I'm also hoping that because my stuff is on Codeberg, not GitHub, that its license hasn't been laundered yet by some criminal AI company, but I don't actually believe so. Certainly makes me more reluctant to publish my code.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

What is this article talking about? That's a UX change. It has nothing to do with privacy or Mozilla's commitment to privacy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I also switched from cursive to print for legibility.

I always found cursive terrible to read. Letters are more likely to look the same and it's harder to tell where one letter stops and the next starts. I also read print all day, so I'm just more used to reading it.

 

We often talk about the climate impact based on greenhouse gases, but extracting fuel from the ground and using it in exothermal processes of course also releases energy as heat.

This is mostly¹ in contrast with renewables, which make use of energy that's not long-term contained to begin with, so would end up as heat in our atmosphere anyways.

So, my question is: Does the amount of energy released by non-renewables have any notable impact on our global temperature? Or would it easily radiate into space, if we solved the greenhouse gas problem?


¹) In the case of solar, putting up black surfaces does mean that less sunlight gets reflected, so more heat ultimately gets trapped in our atmosphere. There's probably other such cases, too.

 
 
 
 

Hi, I just read online that you can apparently run apt --fix-broken install.

I wanted to know, what that really does, but both apt --help and man apt only show a high-level summary of the subcommands and flags. The --fix-broken flag is never mentioned, and presumably many others neither.

Is there some way to access documentation for all subcommands and flags?

 

Real screenshot from (crappy) personal project...

96
July (reddthat.com)
 
 
 
 
 
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