ash spiders
my armchair opinion about computers for the season is that i wanna see a "software degrowth" movement. seems like software, games, even programming languages (i've heard), are made like overpowered computers are normal, good, and gonna be around forever (and always improving), and anyone on slow old hardware needs to e-waste it and buy a new machine. it's giving "speeding your SUV down the freeway for 10 minutes to buy a bag of factory-farmed milk from the grocery store".
Feb 25 at 10:48pmWeb
Show threadash spidersFeb 25

permacomputing takes this a step further, and its worth thinking about and taking seriously. but i'm not hoping everyone's gonna switch to DuskOS and writing in forth or programming in uxntal (that would be based tho). i just wish that the idea of "progress" was shifted more towards making stuff that doesn't rely on an anomalous abundance of memory and cpu and gpu power.

obviously not every task is suited for low powered hardware. some tasks have very good reason to be using a lot of memory/cpu/gpu. but outside of those niches, i feel like most stuff, esp the internet, chat programs, etc, should at least run on like, 20-year old hardware.

permacomputing

By Devine Lu Linvega

XXIIVV
Show threadAisling "the bastard of earth" FawnFeb 25
@spiders now you've got me wondering how much indie game potential there is in a revival of printed-out computer programs you have to type yourself distributed as zines
Show threadmx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 25
@spiders this is why we're into Forth implementations on cortex m0+ microcontrollers :)
Show threadash spidersFeb 25
@atax1a extremely good. thank u for this. >:3
Show threadmx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 25

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@atax1a/115131687170161360

@spiders other people make a WS2812 LED light up in a specific color by bit-banging it from arduino C. we compute timing values and make the hardware timer request updates over DMA, from forth. (next we need to make it, like, cycle colors, etc, but, ya know, one step at a time)

Show threadConsensus TullyalityFeb 25
@atax1a @spiders it's fun to sneak in a brightness-scaling multiply to the individual RGB values while waiting out the previous subpixel's transmission time
Show threadmx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 25
@tully the idea here is that our mainloop sits in wfi and only wakes up when the DMA runs out, tho
Show threadnone gender with left politicsFeb 25
@spiders meanwhile me, trying to get my software fast enough to run reliably on an 804 MHz ARM11
Show threadash spidersFeb 25
@vikxin very good (from what little i know of computers that sounds like the kind of spirit i wanna see in the world...)
Show threadIrenes (many)Feb 25
@spiders yeah absolutely
Show threadbrib [has moved again]Feb 25
@spiders Reminds me of the concept of "decomputing" which @danmcquillan has talked about