iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

there was at least one (i suspect more) talks about how immensely painful the attempt to make them compatible is

this is why i really liked it, and why i paid so much attention to the negative result i think solaris hit something similar?

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 6h

it's like an OS version of "if everybody just played together", i think

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 16h

also a friend of mine once built a proglang on top of SAT solving sentient-lang.org

sentient-lang.org

Sentient Programming Language

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 15h

SAT solvers are incredibly cool and powerful and if you apply them judiciously, they can help you breeze through many problems that would be intractable or very difficult to deal with otherwise. but given the general nature of them and their use I do think the analogy holds

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 15h

if you throw an unsat problem that a SAT solver can't easily find a counterexample for, it will start spinning the CPU doing what is morally equivalent to bruteforce (after some reduction which usually doesn't change much). you stop it after you've waited enough you think it's probably unsat

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

incredibly common (as in "there is widespread support for this in tooling") to run like 5 different SAT solvers in parallel on the same problem to burn hundreds of hours on CPU time in case one of them finishes first. this is the state of the art, has been, and likely will be for foreseeable future

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

you're thinking of 2-SAT, which is a narrow special case of mainly academic interest. i'm talking about B-SAT, which is NP-complete SAT solvers will throw some algorithmic reduction at it, which reduces the search space considerably, but in practice it is...

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

- i am regretting it a lot - at no point in my life have i had the opportunity to do so (including "organizing a union myself") so it's uh. a very specific flavor of regret

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

what's a braintrust

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

you still do a decent amount of the old-school type of development, don't get me wrong, but e.g. for the really foundational task of logic equivalence checking (every computer currently in your life exists thanks to that task working) it's mostly just bruteforce

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16h

in my field (digital logic)... yes and no? for many tasks we've stopped trying to do this because applying a SAT solver was faster and produced better results at a lower cost

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qualia @qualia.floofy.tech.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

TIL active lightning rods are a thing. look at this angry bastard. it tries to, faster than Zeus himself, fire its own lightning (early streamer emission innit) back at the sky to beckon a strike to hit it instead of something more important. long live the fantastical hubris of NF C 17-102

brochure ad for the Indelec Prevectron 3 Connect IOT connected lightning rod. it is a cone-shaped metal thing with several pointy things at the tip aimed at a center upwards spike, a large metal band just beneath that, and several sharp looking triangular spikes aimed downwards in a cone. a bit beneath it is a small solar panel.

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 29/09/2026

yet that's the entirety of your enforcement strategy

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 29/09/2026

correct. over time i have reevaluated how much i want your approval based on the way you choose to interact with others

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 29/09/2026

the #0 reason is disability, but you oughta already know that

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 29/09/2026

honestly, reading your posts about it is probably the #1 reason i mostly stopped writing alt text

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

yes, i'm only talking about the specific terabit DSL scheme and application they propose for the real world (primarily because i found it very exciting before i had a clue about what it would actually taje)

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

"under lab conditions" to me in this case would mean "we got a chunk of completely new copper bundle (of the actual type that is laid in the ground), without any aging or damage, and measured a figure of merit with it if they at least used the right cable i'd forgive not looking into bending

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

the main advantage of the terabit DSL scheme is that you don't have to dig up old copper in America. that is a very real advantage, but to make use of it you have to make your stuff actually work with old copper in the ground without modifications. this is incredibly difficult

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

my main complaint is that they're presenting a very impressive-looking figure of merit, but it's on wires of the wrong diameter, with the wrong coating, bent at an impossible (exactly 0°) angle and at an unrealistically accurate spacing that figure of merit is unjustified

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

"non-uniformity of the gap dimensions", which are exactly the things they went to great lengths to *not* investigate

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

okay i have skimmed the paper and i don't think this actually presents much new information? the configuration they're investigating has nothing in common with the type of copper bundle that you'd see in the wild the biggest problems you'd encounter is "bending" and ...

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

ohhhhh this is very cool. i have not been aware of this paper

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

"work" in a real world copper bundle i mean

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 24/09/2026

this *is* a cool topic however as someone who investigated it: as far as i've been able to confirm this has never progressed past conference slides. it's basically all theorycrafting. unclear if it would work at all

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

I expect each Glasgow device, no matter the revision, to last a decade or several, and when you're planning for that much use, even small mistakes get amplified by time

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

I'm incredibly happy with this design. we've managed to squeeze in basically everything we reasonably could fit into this form factor (it's barely bigger than revC), and significantly more than I anticipated; and from a design perspective, we have made few if any compromises.

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

for you, this means the excitement has reached the next level! for us, it means this is the time to fill out a mountain of paperwork while thinking about filling out an even bigger mountain of paperwork

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

thanks to Elen's extraordinary effort over the last several months, #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer revD1 design files have been sent to JLC. we hope this will also be the production revision (or if we do have a revD2, it happens with minimal changes)

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

I would just not fly without my MSA 900 again

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Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 22/09/2026

Happy mushroom season!

A comic titled "Types of mushrooms" with 12 mushroom species. A wrinkly-looking morel is labeled "creepy but tasty". A brownish deadly galerina is labeled "boring but deadly". A witch's butter on a branch is labeled "jiggles if you poke it". A large puffball is labeled "egg". A creepy red-dripping bleeding tooth fungus is labeled "deeply disconcerting". A fly agaric with a green treefrog sitting under it is labeled "frog umbrella". A black chanterelle is labeled "chalice for forbidden elixers". Three straight-stemmed entolomas are labeled "haha, nipples". A bright purple viscid violet cort is labeled "purple is nice". A birch polypore sticking out of a birch trunk is labeled "tree nose". A complex yellow-tpped coral fungus is labeled "cursed citadel where dwells a fairy queen". A Ravenel's stinkhorn is pixellated at the top for your safety, and labeled "NSFW".

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triple cheeseburger @triplchii.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The metafungus produces a kind of mycelium which spreads not through soil but through the events and narratives of history

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eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 20/09/2026

“NVMe form factors are second nature to us, but it’s easy to forget the average person probably only knows about M.2, U.2, and U.3. And PCIe CEM add-in cards, of course.”

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tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

finding out the uk air traffic outage (on the 8th September) was caused by a race condition www.nats.aero/wp-content/u...

nats.aero

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Ian Hanschen @furan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Switching contexts - the assembled ISA-to-HSMC bridge boards arrived from JLCPCB. This will allow an Altera FPGA kit's HSMC port to talk to the bus using an over-spec'd cable for rapid prototyping. Previously I did this for PCI, hopefully this will offer the same flexibility.

assembled ISA to HSMC bridge card in an ISA slot with a power led (very green power led)

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 17/09/2026

programming language where all identifiers must be binomial names and the @/~/& style of pointer is determined by which kingdom you pick

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 17/09/2026

if you want a camera capable SoC the vendor likely just gives you their ancient android tree and that's it

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 17/09/2026

also i can guarantee you they do not have the technical capacity to upgrade the OS or, most likely, even patch all but the most severe vulnerabilities. not because i know anything about flock but because this is kinda how embedded linux is doing

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 17/09/2026

honestly by embedded device standards this is practically fresh bsky.app/profile/mica...

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Dan Luu @danluu.com · 16/09/2026

Yes, more than one DC was blown up, but of course DCs being blown up aren't uncorrelated events. We already know that hardware failures like disk failures, CPU failures, etc., are highly correlated events, and those aren't even adversarial failures!

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Dan Luu @danluu.com · 16/09/2026

Amazon exec: "you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs]" Amazon after DCs blown up: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted ...."

But hold on a second: If we're concentrating all of our data into data centers, and concentrating most of the data centers in one county, doesn't that make a very tempting target for terrorists?

Amazon's Matt Wood isn't worried: "If something does happen or we have a power event or there's a flood in one specific location, that data is held redundantly in other locations as well."

Pogue asked, "I don't mean to give anyone ideas, but let's say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it's so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn't notice?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice!" Wood laughed.

AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

Iranian strikes overwhelmed regional redundancy in Bahrain and left one UAE Availability Zone inaccessible
Dan Robinson
IT INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTER
25
Published Wed 16 Sept 2026 // 12:11 UTC
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran.

In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible.

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region."

After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable.

AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there.

The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US…

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 16/09/2026

i see where yall are coming from, but the amount of history high school taught me was like negative, and to the extent i have a clue today it was because i wanted it which i think underlines the other, more important bit: you either need to be forced to learn, or to want it enough otherwise

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