AmpBenzScientist @AmpBenzScientist@qoto.org

The smell of cannabis is somewhat annoying when you're not the one smoking it. It's not a particularly pleasant smell. Reminds you a bit of cat piss. I knew one guy who smoked it constantly. His breath smelled like literal shit. Makes your brain feel kind of foggy for days after you smoke it too. Not an unpleasant feeling exactly, but there's definitely the feeling that something's in your system.

Easter has been an opportunity to stay completely off the bottle too. Did have a couple of beers with my gym buddy, but honestly, coffee would've been better. We were already full of endorphins from the workout and didn't need any more tranquillisers.

The drugs are a bit like cheating. They hijack brain circuitry that's meant to be activated by actual happiness-inducing activities and distract you from seeking those out. That's not to say that I will never indulge. I'm just saying that there's rarely an upside to it, yet many potential downfalls.

Even if you're a staunch defender of imperial units, you're still using metric. They were redefined in terms of metric at one point. An inch wasn't always exactly 25.4 mm, but that's how it's defined now, even in the United States. So, in a way, everyone's using metric.

Watched a video by Technology Connections about old pinball machines and... actually lost interest by the end of a video of his for once.

That electromechanical stuff reminds me of digital logic. It *is* digital logic. Just done with switches, relays and cams. Early electronic computers worked just like pinball machines. I saw a working replica of an electromechanical computer at Bletchley Park and it was essentially the same thing.

Pinball machines are hilariously complex, but so are computer chips. Electricity can't count, wait its turn or make decisions, so it takes a lot of trickery to convince it to do that. The chips do it better though, and pack a lot more complexity into a much smaller space.

Pinball machines are good for visuals, but you can learn exactly the same concepts if you take a computer engineering course.

He began the video by showing off a more modern pinball machine with a computer in it. It was frankly more stimulating for the player than the older machine. There's a ton of stuff, such as strobing lights, voice effects and animated displays, that the older machines simply couldn't pull off. Little is lost from the newer machines by putting in a computer, and much is gained.

He sounded disappointed as he said "it's a computer". Again, there isn't much to show there. Not unless the audience knows programming and electronics, that is. There's plenty to explore if you reverse engineer those chips and probe at them with an oscilloscope. But that doesn't make for a good video for general audiences.

Apache #NuttX RTOS going mainstream 👍

Source: https://share.libbyapp.com/title/10286092

Running an #LLM Locally (PC / Mac)

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3705035/5-easy-ways-to-run-an-llm-locally.html

GitHub Actions will run our Automated Test every day ... For Apache #NuttX RTOS on #Ox64 BL808 Emulator

Article: https://lupyuen.codeberg.page/articles/tinyemu3.html#daily-automated-testing

https://www.notus.org/technology/dhs-access-phone-movements-data
"The Department of Homeland Security is expected to stop buying access to data showing the movement of phones — a controversial practice that has allowed it to warrantlessly track hundreds of millions of people for years.

Since 2018, agencies within the department — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Secret Service — have been buying access to commercially available data that revealed the movement patterns of devices, many inside the United States. Commercially available phone data can be bought and searched without judicial oversight."
#privacy #FourthAmendment