he/him; I live in Portland, OR and get paid to write software. Some time ago I worked on federated social web protocols but I've not been actively involved for several years. Increasingly skeptical about technology. 🙃
Public Key
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Published at
2026-07-01T19:19:07Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins With how things are currently set up, folks who make that much money through wages today will probably use them to buy stocks and similar, making them also owners. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I don't want to hear politicians talking about going back to some ill-specified better time in the past, regardless of what party they belong to. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I am inner northeast. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I guess you live an entirely different Portland, Oregon than I do. 🙃 npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins It seems to me like the memory access itself is the main bottleneck either way, so it might not make much difference to speed but does free up a CPU core to be doing some other work. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I dunno if it's worth the trouble when you have four CPU cores just sitting there anyway 😀 but FWIW the SoC's DMA controllers are quite useful for this sort of copying. Some of the channels have a "2D mode" that supports copying multiple chunks with a specified stride, exactly as needed for copying dirty rects. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I keep distracting myself messing with everything else except this so I've only played with it superficially, but I thought this looked promising: npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins When I was still doing a bare metal thing (before I switched to running atop a Linux kernel) I had things set up so that the extra cores were essentially pretending to be separate "chips": npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins One thing I've run into on my project: npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins Admittedly I made my life a bit harder by using Rust for my bare metal bits, so it took some fiddling to even get my program to start running. Starting with Circle would probably have been the better option, but... I dunno, I just feel like writing Rust right now. 🤷🏻♂️ npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins That JTAG/FTDI HAT I'm using is my own design, here: npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins FWIW, I found bare metal on the Pi4 generation considerably more efficient once I reconfigured the bootloader to netboot (from a tftp server on my dev machine) and attached a JTAG interface to it so I could step-debug my early boot code using OpenOCD. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I previously said that it seemed like you and I were both working on fantasy computers with different goals, but actually it seems like our goals are remarkably similar. 😀 npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I might still be misunderstanding, since the math involved is a little beyond my current capacity for quick learning 😀 but the sense I am left with is: npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I guess what was nagging at me is that if the optical flow sensor starts with a grid of light intensities then it already has "multiple sensors" in some sense. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins Unfortunately I was not able to find any definitive answer. I have seen some claims that it's hard to distinguish rotation from translation in optic flow, but couldn't get a sense of why. 🤔 npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins That way of describing an optical mouse made me wonder: npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins We've already seen that my motivations are a little different than yours, but FWIW on my own fantasy computer I'm using 640x360 for the terminal and code editor (though the latter is currently _total_ fantasy) but game software defaulting to 320x180 for the sake of the very chunky aesthetic. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins FreeBASIC is written in FreeBASIC but I believe it can transpile to C and its native code output uses the C ABI so maybe possible to adapt its compiler to be a library instead of an executable by one of these two methods. 🤔 npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins In particular I made exactly the same screen resolution tradeoffs. It's funny that it's called "widescreen" and not "shortscreen" since it typically means removing rows, not adding columns. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I hinted in a response to a question you asked a couple weeks ago that I was working on something and what you've described overlaps with it considerably. 😀 npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins Since you said "distribution" I assume you mean something a little more substantial than that... I'm curious where you would draw the line between distro and application in your ideal solution to this! npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins I am in the early stages of building something like this, though what I'm building is tailored just for my one application so I don't think it would actually quite meet your description. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins Ah, I just found your other post that confirmed using USB, and now I also spotted it in your photo! Sorry for the noise. npub1ej2ahxcsam4vw2h06j2sfv3p2e8wv2m0ue46hvatm6u4fnn90gaq068d64 Martin Atkins Do you have the scope connected with USB?
