Mastodawn

Zimmie 3d ago

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woe2you 3d ago

@0xabad1dea Stop, my freude can only get so schaden.

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Zimmie 6d ago

Just had yet another call in which my team and I figured out a problem in an environment we have no access to. It took over 30 minutes to get the other company to even look where we knew the problem was. They had dismissed it using indirect evidence from a tool which, we discovered, wasn’t telling them quite what they thought it was.

Zimmie Apr 17

Wren Reilly Apr 17

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 Apr 14

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 Apr 13

@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 2026. The book is in your hands 2 months later. I'd love it if you signed up for pre-launch notification now and joined me in the long game...

Khumalo Kickstarter fantasy trilogy-ender pre-launch link activate!

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.