Very interesting. My new hearing aids support Auracast and there's a complete dearth of transmitting equipment.
I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) still excels at. (The properties of baseband tends to mimic how sound itself travels, including overlapping transmissions and fading with distance and blocked by walls.)
Auracast feels a bit like a compelled "improvement" for patent portfolio purposes. Though at the rate deployment is going, by the time it's widely deployed I guess the patents will have been expired.
In some ways there has been a significant step backwards for accessibility with tech progress. Traditional speakers function as inductive loop transmitters. Anything with a traditional coil speaker I can just put my head near it and switch my hearing aid to T-mode and I get a direct signal from the electronics with no speaker/microphone intervening.
Piezoelectric speakers (like in a cheap smartphone or TV unit) do not have this property. No coil.
How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupted by almost anything. Oh, I forgot to send that message. Oh, I forgot to check for the parcel. Oh, I need to go to the store today still. And I will walk away and forget to come back and finish.
Pretty good. I don't find I get derailed by other tasks but I do find others related to what I'm doing like "Oh, dishwasher's done, let's empty it, but oh wait let's clean the counter first" and then end up cleaning the sink and emptying the garbage as well
I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of non-human intellect and potential to impact the world through its non-human decision-making. It seems to me the essence, whatever it is philosophically speaking that we seem to "concentrate" into an AI model, may have first been distilled to a limited extent, when writing was invented.
> Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward.
Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable exception on illegal instructions.
So one option is to just issue the FPU instructions as if the FPU exists, and then catch and emulate.
This is how operating systems emulated FPUs on processors like the 68020, the 386 and early RISC machines, if they didn't have an FPU.
Focal length. In a phone camera the lens is smooshed right against the sensor. Such cameras have fisheye-type lenses, and the image is cropped in the centre and dewarped in software. But it's just not the same. That said convenience is above all. If I just need to photograph something I use my phone camera.
With photography as an art I have gone back to film. The cost in money and time and space involved with taking an impression of light gives it gravity that is lacking with a phone camera. It's a different kind of process. One thing I've noticed is that developing is like taking the photograph anew. It can be weeks before I finish a roll and get around to developing it, and I surprise myself.
Yes. It has Unix style processes. The basic memory model is similar to ancient Unix on the PDP-11 without paging. A process gets a flat memory space. Processes are swapped out in the background as necessary.
How it is implemented varies by platform. On the 8-bit micros it takes advantage of bank-switching memory hardware if there is any. On the MMUless 68K a flat single address space can be used with position-independent code for the processes. On platforms with paging or relocation hardware that is used. Most of the host platforms do not have hardware memory protection, but there's room in the design to support it.
It has been ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico [1] (ARM Cortex-m0+ based) and could be ported to other microcontrollers which have enough RAM.
Toolchain is the biggest problem. It's hard to get a good cross toolchain that works. FUZIX's creator has been writing a portable C compiler but it's not done yet. The code does compile with Clang and GCC but a working toolchain is a steep knowledge cliff to climb.
I have got the kernel to build and link for a riscv32i target. Just need some real riscv32 hardware to test it on. And free time.
Thank you, that fully answers the question. I suppose for the moment there is then a limitation for the size of processes to be run and we need to be generous on reserving the memory depending on the device.
True, though some old processors would be able to implement pretty impressive tricks. A Z80 with an 8 bit latch can bank switch 8MB of SRAM with 32KB chunks.
Alan's currently putting most of his energy into the compiler. It's a C compiler in C which can compile itself, and compile FUZIX, for 8080 and Z80 targets. The goal is to make it compile itself on all the platforms it can run on eventually. :)
Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.
I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.
No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.
If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.
> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change.
I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) still excels at. (The properties of baseband tends to mimic how sound itself travels, including overlapping transmissions and fading with distance and blocked by walls.)
Auracast feels a bit like a compelled "improvement" for patent portfolio purposes. Though at the rate deployment is going, by the time it's widely deployed I guess the patents will have been expired.
In some ways there has been a significant step backwards for accessibility with tech progress. Traditional speakers function as inductive loop transmitters. Anything with a traditional coil speaker I can just put my head near it and switch my hearing aid to T-mode and I get a direct signal from the electronics with no speaker/microphone intervening.
Piezoelectric speakers (like in a cheap smartphone or TV unit) do not have this property. No coil.
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