ᔑᐸᐱᑚᕬᐱᑎ @skanman@qoto.org

@sraznoff @sgul I think "I think" + "could" renders your theory predictive. But with no evidence maybe a 5th category presumptive. But your posts made me smile, so perhaps for a while, we could simply presume they're consumptive. :-) happy Thursday my fellow mastadonians!

@mattyhari you mentioned before about the metallurgy analysis being abrasive to the metals, and I was working with a mining company that had these handy guns "niton xrf analyzer".

Let me 1st illustrate the bad idea of firing x-rays at artifacts that will likely reflect those xrays back at you in the field. But if you made a box with dense collapsible walls that reflect them back away again. This solution is great cause you could analyze artifacts right there in the field eliminating possible contaminations in transit. You wouldn't need to damage the artifact.

Mining companies use them to prospect in real time by gathering samples and checking alloy percentages inside the mines to calculate in which direction veins travel or if ore contains what they're looking for but disguised in an alloy that normally distorts the observable properties. This is far less destructive than drilling grids through complex terrain "randomly" then checking by chemical reaction.

I would think these xrf guns would be an archeologists dream. While they mostly only measure heavy metals, scio makes a pocket spectrometer that can detect small amounts of lighter trace metals or compounds closer to the surface, but it's accurate enough to detect down to the molecular scale.

Combining the two devices would give you details about artifacts right there in the field that would be clearer than a lab.

Sorry I'm a tech guy. But when I read "abrasive" and "artifacts" together, that seemed like a bad idea. Damaging this great stuff seems unjustifiable if more accurate non abrasive analytical tools exist. If it's an issue of funding, I'm sure I could convince my old client to donate 1 or 2 of the older XRF guns, and SCIO I believe has special arrangements for education and research.

@Lobster http://www.raspibo.org/wiki/index.php/Compile_the_Linux_kernel_for_Chip:_my_personal_HOWTO

It seems there's quite a few people targeting raspberry pis that are legacy.. cause no new updates for those devices. But after examining their process, in theory, the modified process for the use cases aforementioned in my previous messages are about half the steps because it doesn't need recompiling for arm, and it's simple enough to pull a kernel from a distro that universally supports PC hardware. However there's steps to add such as making / downloading an image of the target bios, subtracting it's size from the chip size to measure freespace on chip, decompiling the old bios, compiling a legacy bootloader that targets the memory addresses after the bootloader in BIOS to load the kernel. Configuring the kernel to scan for distro locations. Compile both into the new BIOS image. Flash it.

Theres probably a step missing for some computers in which to add the BIOS itself as accessible storage for the bootloader, like it's a fake EUFI partition, or just add the bootloader code to the execution heap after the regular POST checks. These 2 steps would be interchangable depending on manufacturer.

The main caveat: if for some reason the BIOS decides it can't enter flash mode because of an error, the motherboard is probably bricked. Older boards that enter flash mode via a jumper use too small a chip. Newer boards with larger chips risk destroying the board and the chip is soldered on.

A side theory: it's probably possible to use a 3rd party GPU to pull this off too, I don't know if you've ever noticed but they have a dedicated BIOS that loads before the main PC BIOS. Sweet part of this idea, is that you don't risk destroying the computer, they have even more storage, and execute on a faster bus. You can also swap it in and out of different computers once it's operational. The caveat here is that the GPU will not actually be a GPU anymore, but a wildly fast way to throw a user into their OS before the user even sees a manufacturer logo. I could only imagine doing this on a server distro that has no GUI but just the shell. As soon as you push the power button, you'll be prompted to enter credentials. Boot times would be measured in ms. I think I'll start with a few dell latitudes, and Lenovo thinkcenters I got laying around. I won't shed many tears if I brick them. Usually business class computers have giant BIOS storage cause of all the special "enterprise" features nobody hardly ever actually cared about. As far as GPUs go, to experiment with, I'm not sure, I'll have to buy a few, got any recommendations?

@nullifidian shouldn't it be <= not >= ? I'm assuming the date is stored as the date object ms since Jan 1st 1970 though. If your a true anarchist and wanna be my friend, I would recommend DROP twitter; 😈

@lePetomaneAncien how'd it go? Pretty smooth?

@nullifidian everything about this post screams British. Hope your days improve sir.

@LouisIngenthron hey I didn't destroy them, and i own a tech company that builds plenty, but after a few years and going broke a few times I learned that keeping my money was harder than making it. I thought I would share some of the ways I learned to stop going broke. Keeping large amounts of money is really hard. Making it grow is even harder. So much eats away at it. I actually pay my taxes cause I understand their necessity, I'm not one of those guys that loopholes there way through life. The economy is getting worse for most, understanding how to navigate it can save lives. I even help my employees learn these skills in life cause there's more to life than just the work they do for me. There's no difference between profiting from a stock dropping and profiting from a stock gaining to the markets themselves. But I'm reaching middle age so I want to share more of my experiences that benefitted me and others that were hard for me to learn. That's all. Sorry.

@mattyhari that's insanely great that they got that level of steel quality back then. Everything added up except chariot parts, to my historical knowledge, that was never part of many burial rituals as chariots we're not utilized by any Scandinavian mythologies. Plus, floating a chariot would be a logistical nightmare even today 😂. I do have plans to visit Switzerland in the coming years but I'm still wandering Asia expanding my tech biz. I know the history in that area runs deep and it the region is breathtaking even if there was no awesome complex heritage to immersive myself in. I studied psychology and sociology in University cause those were my weaknesses and learning about sociological development through anthropology and history enabled me to learn the most about human nature by establishing common denominators of behaviors that never change despite region or era. So learning about these artifacts and how people utilized and crafted them makes me appreciate human nature more. This is a blessing for me cause generally I hate everyone. But understanding more about how we became us, really lowers my ego and that's a good feeling. The traditions that made us over the centuries don't define us today, but knowing them helps us define tomorrow. I also bet holding that sword makes you feel a connection to it's history, for that I'm a bit jealous. I'd love to see and read more about it. 🤓

I'm not surprised about the bones though, I learned a lot about decalcification and how it chemically replaces with similar density minerals at a mummification exhibit in Tampa like 10 years ago. That was amazing cause if you donated enough money they'd teach you how to radiomap on real sarcophagus's to create images of contents without opening them. Who could refuse that?!

7am shower thought.

Throughout the next few years as the pandemic tech boom wanes. More tech companies will shrink than grow.

For active investors, it's important to know what shorting is during these seasons. Short selling isn't a complicated thing to understand.
Here is the process example.

Choose a stock that you believe will lose value.
Borrow that stock (don't buy it)
Example: Meta @ 300.00 per share 1 year ago and immediately sell it.
Wait till the stock has dropped in value, today its around $90 per share and buy the shares back.
Return the stock to it's previous owner.
The balance is $210.00 per share that you profited from the stock losing value.

That's short selling, and in the coming years will be easier to predict than choosing to buy stocks that are going to gain in value.

This still carries risks but when a market is going down because of multiple causes, i.e. inflation, quiet quitting, supply chain failures, rising energy costs, the obvious predictions statistically forecast downward trends in various sectors. With all investing, do your homework 1st, otherwise it's just gambling.

Have a great day everyone :)

@theeggking federated timeline can cause a seizures, local timelines are great, qoto server is full of smart people. Enjoy and welcome :)

@dichotomiker you could slum it and give YouTube music a shot, the quality is lower but the library is endless

@Lobster not necessarily the whole OS, but the kernel, it already works hand in hand with the BIOS. Things like windows embedded tried to put the whole damn thing on chip which creates update nightmares. But how often does a kernel actually evolve? Not often at all.. even Windows 11 is still based off the 4th version of the NT kernel from 22 years ago. And the Linux kernel is at version 6 and it's God knows how old. By preprocessing the kernel, every little thing the rest of the OS does requires 1 less layer between it and the hardware. Which is basically all of the rest of the OS. The Pentium Pro a bajillion years ago actually was optimized specifically for the NT kernel, and when the correct kernel was run, that 200mhz machine ran like a 2ghz machine at the OS level. If you consider how many servers are using hyper visors and container layers, you could pull the bridge out of those as well. Chips today are down to 4nm fabrication process. Did you know that 98% of them are tossed in the garbage because of the limitations of quality at that size? Nobody is mentioning this aspect of the chip shortage. At a certain point we need to start reducing the distance between the software and hardware. On a side note we need to stop teaching our programming students about sdks and libraries, it's resulting in so much code being compiled into apps that never gets run making current applications so bloated in size. We also teach stupid ideas like Java in android studio is making a "native app". It's not even close. People are missing the boat that you can write android apps in C, and C++ that are fractionally smaller than there Java equivalent that execute insanely faster on the same hardware. All this can be alleviated by moving software into hardware. The name of the game today is performance. Best games are high quality high framerate. Best search engines are the simplest and fastest. To get to the top of the food chain, these days is run by the developers who implement the largest amount of low level code. Evidence in the stock markets.

Today's 2am shower thought:
Why are we still designing software like software when it's been just telling firmware what to do since it's inception? Why aren't we instead developing micro firmware that handles universal software requests for IO? All operating systems have kernels that govern what the OS can and can't do, so why aren't the hardware manufacturers making the OS on chip. Where's my Windows NT kernel chip? Where's my Linux kernel chip? An OS preprocessor makes viruses obsolete. Software companies can embed their activation keys to the chip so they can stop piracy altogether. #getWithTheProgram #iot #secureSoftware #privacy #efficiency

@jesse_m oh the powermacs do something similar they create keys with missing bits synchronously but with different missing bits, then they subtract the difference from each other creating a negative key, this key is obviously smaller so it repeats the process till the key grows to the size of it's patent keys giving you 2 broken keys in different locations on earth that together compile 1 good key. Then I took a box cutter to the bus of the main board for all user IO like USB display serial and etc. Soldered the CPU and BIOS and destroyed all bus paths for write voltage to the BIOS. Soldered a SCSI controller to the board and 2 SSDs to the SCSI card next to the cache. These 2 powermac g5s create security keys so strong and so large that the keys literally never end, so they stream out continuously in chunks for all eternity. I can't think of better security for the amount of money they cost. If the client wants terabit strength, even petabit, all they gotta do is wait longer for the key chunks. A strange but great byproduct of this is due the streaming nature of the broken keys originating from multiple servers, even if you packet sniff both of the connections, you still don't know where client started listening and stopped in the stream to make their key. It's also pretty awesome that either server can validate a key and return a simple 1 or 0 for good or bad almost instantly. Thanks Motorola and Apple 👍

@jesse_m well, let's first consider what an OS does. It's a translator for other software to be written in a simpler to understand language, then given to various combinations of hardware in a more complex language. But if the application already understands the hardware configuration and rules. Then the OS layer may not be necessary. This might seem overly complex but that's only because of the bloat options available for various IO devices. If most of them will never be used, obviously there's no need to make them accessible. Think of the BIOS as a server that serves hardware availability. It already automatically looks for code to execute in certain places, bootloader's typically. But instead of it loading a kernel which begins loading translation layers for the OS, it can load the application instead. If the application already understands where the hardware addresses are for it's job, it has no need for translation. If you wanna throw all caution to the wind and risk everything. Theoretically, if the application is small enough, and it really does understand it's target hardware addresses, you could probably flash it into the BIOS and start the service at machine post time. I've rewritten a few BIOS so I could install crap like OSX where it didn't belong. I would think installing apps directly into the BIOS would be a later phase of the same project. Oh my old powerpcs serve rolling hashes similar to RSA clocks but they also delete and replace an offset bit that rolls with the hash. This prevents x86, x64, based decryption because the PowerPC is behaving like an x126 architecture.. which is really x128 but 2 bits are shredded by position of it's own internal clock. I'm order to know those positions you have to turn it off and restart it, which conveniently resets the clock to a new position so even if you find the old positions, the keys that roll outside the machine won't match again until they are reset in synchrony with the PowerPC. Something they don't teach you in school about security algorithms, the best ones contain flaws intentionally injected into locations at specified random positions that on occasion work. Then mapping the occasion of when they work to yield a key, is the best key ever, because unless the key is used at the precise time interval it was created, it's not even a key for the same architecture anymore. PowerPC does this with pretty low effort, pretending it's different architectures. Sure other architectures can emulate other architectures using things like qemu etc. But they can't really change architecture on the fly quickly. I've got 2 Power8 machines doing this pretty fast. But eventually my dream is to move them to cell architecture, so the cryptography can just scale with the times. No more coffee for me 😂