Mastodawn

If politicians gave a shit about children, the schools would feature:

- HVAC systems that cleaned viruses out of the air
- at least two child psychologists on staff
- age-appropriate lessons to help children identify abuse
- funding for well-paid staff in numbers sufficient for a buddy system to reduce the chances of abuse
- arts education and after-school clubs to provide third spaces for kids
- massive, safe playgrounds
- protected biking and walking infrastructure from the school to residential neighborhoods

Instead we get “parents’ rights”, funding cuts, book bans, and car-centric infrastructure that kills pedestrians and bikers.

If social media is bad for kids, THEY NEED ALTERNATIVES.

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Zimmie 3d ago

Test equipment is also so much better and more accessible. My multimeter has been annoying me (it takes *six* AA cells!), so I got a combination multimeter, signal generator, and oscilloscope for under $75 shipped. The oscilloscope part has limitations, but it’s extremely capable for the price. 50 MHz bandwidth on each of two channels, Y-T and X-Y modes, the ability to do math on the two signals and show the result as a third trace, live FFT, the ability to save a waveform for later viewing on a computer, all kinds of stuff.

Logic analyzers have also gotten really good and really cheap.

Zimmie 4d ago

@mwl This seems relevant to your interests!

https://onefoottsunami.com/2026/04/13/a-massive-magawa/

A Massive Magawa

Reporting claims this is stone, but it sure looks like wood to me.

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Zimmie Apr 4

I have a small new project which needs a little compute and a Bluetooth transceiver, so I picked up a pack of ESP32-C6 “supermini” boards from a Chinese seller. I’ve seen boards like this pop up then disappear when the seller moves on to something else, but they also sent a solid documentation package. Schematics, board footprint, datasheets for all the chips down to the voltage regulator. They were something like $3.20 each.

The microcontroller world is so much better than it was when I was learning.

Zimmie Apr 3

Zig Claybourne Apr 3

The Kickstarter launches this October. The book is in your hands December. Sign up for pre-launch notification now and join me in the long game...

Khumalo Kickstarter pre-launch link!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/khumalo-tales

Coming soon: KHUMALO TALES

Book 3 of the Khumalo Trilogy

Kickstarter

Zimmie Mar 19

A lot of people criticize iOS and Android for making it harder to learn the low levels of how computers work. I’ve got to say, though, modern microcontrollers are so cheap and powerful it’s unreal. My first microcontroller was a 4 MHz PIC with 16 *bytes* of RAM and 256 *bytes* of storage for the program.

Today, for $19, you can get a pack of three ESP32 S3 units. Two primary cores at 240 MHz, a third core at ~20 MHz, 512 kB of RAM, 384 kB of main storage, 8 MB of SPI flash, all kinds of built-in peripherals (UARTs, SPI, I2C, even WiFi and Bluetooth). Learning how computers actually work has never been easier for people who want to know!

Zimmie Mar 14

Fun pi fact which too few people know: the digits actually do follow a pattern! In 1995, Simon Plouffe discovered a formula for pi which he used to create what is called a “spigot algorithm”. This algorithm allows a given digit of pi to be calculated *without* calculating the preceding digits. Originally, it only worked in hexadecimal, but he later discovered another algorithm for a given digit of pi in decimal.

The known spigot algorithms for pi are non-constant time. Calculating the millionth digit takes longer than the thousandth. Still, they’re interesting because they have much lower memory requirements than other methods of calculating a value for pi.

#BaileyBorweinPlouffe #piDay

Zimmie Mar 11

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Mar 11

Claude Desktop app was unresponsive for users for several hours because it did not account for daylight savings time:
https://status.claude.com/incidents/pqpgkf52p3tg

> Root cause: Users with scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork or Claude Code who are in a timezone that observed daylight saving time last night were affected by an infinite loop. When the app tried to locate tasks scheduled during the “skipped” hour, it couldn’t resolve them and got stuck.

Enterprise quality. Serious company. Many wow. 🤡

#AI #Hype #Claude

Claude Desktop app unresponsive

Claude's Status Page - Claude Desktop app unresponsive.

Zimmie Feb 28

𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"Feb 28

1. Abolish ICE
2. Prosecute ICE for its crimes
3. Repeal Patriot Act
4. Lift refugee caps
5. Offer complete amnesty and citizenship to any person living here who has not committed a violent crime
6. Prosecute Trump for his involvement in the ICE genocide
7. Restitution for the families of every survivor of the ICE genocide, whether they are a citizen or not

And that's the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM.

Zimmie Jan 31

It’s fascinating that apparently, Epstein was personally connected to basically all of the negative social movements in the US and Europe over the last 25 years. Several friends shuttered an MLP fandom convention they ran because they couldn’t deal with the Nazi problem. Epstein was the cause of this Nazi problem in the MLP fandom.

Deeply bizarre to see laid out like this. The guy was borderline illiterate! His influence was due to his friends, but why was anybody friends with him in the first place? What did they bond over before he could afford pedophile island?