Been on a break for a bit, but before that we got a Tektronix 535A oscilloscope from the 1950s-60s up and running (with the exception of a gain issue with the vertical amplifier, haven't quite figured out the cause yet), and did some work on reverse-engineering and emulating the analog filters of the MOS 8580 SID on an FPGA (still heavily WIP, haven't gotten around to a rewrite yet so it's still really jank, college is a bitch).

One of my favorite emacs features is the VHDL stutter mode (which replaces certain repeatedly-typed characters with operators), as well as an easy to get to rectangle select, and it just being decently fast compared to something like VSCode. I also never have to take my hands off of the keyboard, because it's all right there. It just feels better to me.

Just off the top of my head: Alien and Aliens are wonderful, Apocalypse Now needs no introduction, Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and finally Oppenheimer, which is one of the best movies ever made in my opinion (what can I say, I'm a sucker for an incredibly well-told story).

I grew up with a Wii and an Atari 2600, and my favorite console is, no surprise, probably the 2600. Both because I put wayyy too much time into it, and because it's incredibly neat from a hardware perspective (seriously, that anyone actually managed to make functioning games on it is a miracle).

Do repos on GitHub and assorted messages on text-based communication platforms count as content? Because if that's the case, then all the time, because I generally write stuff down in case I proceed to forget exactly what that function did or why I calculated this bypass coefficient like this or why for the love of fuck does vivado keep reverting to incremental synthesis and how did I fix it last time aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

As for if my random technical nonsense has any bearing on the world, not really, outside of maaaybe the demoscene if the SID stuff works out, and the few people who like reading my ramblings for some reason.

Personally, I'm a big fan of XMPP, due to the inherent resiliency in being decentralized/federated, and due to the security provided by OMEMO (based on signal's algorithm). Don't have to worry about third-parties messing with my data if it stays on my server that's in my house.

This one on lemmy.today, and my original account with the same username on lemmy.world.

People can also stop saying words and think for a second about the information they're actually saying first, whereas an LLM just vomits up words that seem to match the pattern of the rest of the sentence. If I were to ask you what 2 + 2 is, you'd stop, run the math in your head, get 4, then reply with 4. An LLM would just start vomiting out words based on what it's been trained on without verifying that the information is good (or even relevant), and can end up confidently telling you that 2 + 2 is in fact equal to the cube root of 5 because that's what the data said so it has to be right, for instance.

I'm aware this is a drastic oversimplification, and I think the tech is neat (although I avoid non-self-hosted models like the plague due to privacy concerns), but it's oversold to all hell, and is definitely not even close to intelligent.

I am fully aware, I speak nerd and computer.

The computers speak back. It's a good time.

I might be going insane?

I'm also ~~ripping off~~ being inspired by another comment.

Poe's law strikes again?

English, C++; Z80, 6502, and 45GS02 assembly, some SQL, VHDL, a bit of Python and Verilog, BASIC65, bash, CP/M ED, and a few other odds and ends

In theory you can fire up vi(m) in an emacs terminal, so... I guess?

I call my server "the server", "the shitbox", or "the 36TB", my pc "the PC", and my surface... "the surface". Creative, I know.