Taniwha

6 ms·

1.
by Taniwha 18d ago
Blackrock used to be pretty wild-west (I was going before Burning Man started), pretty scary stuff at times (a friend once did something silly and hurt himself badly, Clinton was doing something in Reno, the SS heard about it, thought it wa
2.
by Taniwha 23d ago
From my observation Scientology starts by teaching you to be selfish, more self assertish, in the process you end up pushing your friends and family away, but guess what, you have some new friends in the 'church' Just in case anyo
3.
by Taniwha 29d ago
I think that has more to do with the amount you could get onto a die at that time, architecturally they had to move the MMU onboard first which left the cache(s) offboard
4.
by Taniwha 29d ago
Maybe, but Norway should still wait until the inevitable AI crash
5.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
They're from roughly the same era (and the same as 68020s/396s/88ks/mips) - 29ks came out of AMD and sadly didn't fly as high as we hoped at the time - their unique stack management may have been part of that
6.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
The other thing he doesn't mention is time, I live in AoNZ and we do get free shipping from Digikey if we order over a minimum (~$60US) - but the big deal is time - you have to order everything you need ahead of time and get it all to
7.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
ESP32-P31s are cheap - samples are cheap ($5-6 for WROOM modules) production prices are going to be lower - and twice the number of pins ESP32s are known for (but say goodbye to castelated modules hand soldering is going to be harder)
8.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
I wonder if it gets the moon the right way up in the southern hemisphere
9.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
Not even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
10.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
Yeah but when I started the words weren't in common usage - we understood "freeware", but not really for hardware yet
11.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit: http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):
12.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend, tickets available now, be in before they sell ou
13.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.
14.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
You might is they included DFT (design for test, stuff to make sure when you make a chip all of it actually works) - a scan chain thru all the internal flops will provide you with info about the internal flops and how they are connected - r
15.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
In fact if you have the sky130 libraries installed (it's where I'm working) you can get a spice netlist out of it in about 10 seconds - really they should have flattened it
16.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
I take it back, it's a sky130 .gds the gates are explicitly in there
17.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
I'm a chip designer, back in the early 90s I visited a small silicon house who were doing some work for us, their boardroom table had been taken over by a giant sized photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip and they had a bunch of summe
18.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
yes, but at the transistor level .... it has no idea at that level how those transistors are arranged into gates directly
19.
by Taniwha 1mo ago
It's even easier in this case because they've included the original verilog source ....
20.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really had to build something real - suddenly you could
21.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
Yes exactly, sure they need to know about "Pride and Prejudice" but they have no way to tell it didn't happen, nor any way to tell that all people of that age lived that way (most were dirt poor scrabbling for a living)
22.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
I think that one of the main problems with LLMs is that we're shoveling everything in to them, without any guidance as to what is "real"/"true"/"factual" - crazy anti-vaxxer-cooker stuff is is s
23.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
The article kind of misses out on the networking standards of the time - there were many of which TCP and IP were just one, most of the rest were either proprietary (DNA SNA BNA etc) and incompatible, or owned by telecoms who wanted to be a
24.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
On TinyTapeout you can add more tiles up to 16 times the size of this (at which point you likely jump to waferspace)
25.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
I'm in 2 minds, I'm strongly in the RISC camp these days, I know how hard it is to build a truly performant CPU and think that simpler is better as far as ISAs go. Adding segmentation hardware into the addressing path means more c
26.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
It was more than 40 years ago, before I had the skills to build chips, I'm afraid I've kept nothing of that design
27.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of them. I did a paper design at the time. What ate them up was &q
28.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
StarLAN was a 1Mb twisted pair networking system that was pre twisted pair ethernet
29.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one
30.
by Taniwha 2mo ago
Like Greenland,the Faroe Islands are a self-governing, autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. I'm sure this is highway funding from the mainland.

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