Monthly Archives: April 2024

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars — still amazing 30 years later

Posted on 2024-04-21 by pappp

Article note: I haven't done a lap on KSR's Mars trilogy in a while now, it was one of those "Change how you think about the world" books for me the first time around. People whine about the amount of exposition, but the whole point is that it's a detailed/realistic/plausible world and that means it's complicated. (Also it's sort of incredible how well the science held up).

Okay, so finally, more than thirty years after it was published, I got around to reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, the first book in an epic trilogy about the first attempt to colonize Mars. I've really loved several of his books, particularly Aurora, from 2015 but Red Mars is the one that put KSR on the map. — Read the rest

The post Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars — still amazing 30 years later appeared first on Boing Boing.

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End-Of-Life for Z80 CPU and Peripherals Announced

Posted on 2024-04-19 by pappp

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Kind of sad, Those were one of the last good choices for little breadboard computers. Though not surprising that what must only be the "Observable, comprehensible, human scale hobbyist machine" (and occasional "Repair this piece of ancient equipment") market isn't enough to make it worthwhile to keep the line running.

In a Product Change Notification (PCN) published on April 15, Zilog (now owned by Littelfuse) announced the End of Life for a range of Z80 products, specifically virtually all of the Z84C00 range. This also includes the peripherals, such as the Z84C10 range of MPUs. These are currently already marked as EoL on stores like Mouser, with Littelfuse noting that the last orders with them can be placed until June 14th of 2024. After that you’ll have to try your luck with shady EBay sellers and a lucky box of old-new-stock found in the back of a warehouse.

What this effectively means is that after just under 48 years since its launch in 1976, the Zilog Z80 will no longer be available for sale as discrete components, which is likely to primarily impact hobbyists and people who are trying to keep retro systems going. This does not mean that it’s the end of the road for Z80, however, as the eZ80 will be produced for the foreseeable future.

These new chips will of course not come in easy to drop in DIPs, making the challenge of breadboarding your own Z80-based microcomputer that much tougher. Yet one thing that definitely won’t happen is any of us witnessing the end of the era of the Z80, 6502 and 8051 architectures.

Thanks to [Techokami] for the tip.

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Dnsmasq wins the first BlueHats Prize

Posted on 2024-04-18 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This seems like a really good program for nation-states to support critical software infrastructure. Apparently fairly no-strings-attached mid-sized grants to people maintaining projects, selected by a process that has a public nomination and an expert board selecting. And dnsmasq is a great choice to pilot it.

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Capilouto’s plan to dissolve UK University Senate is naked power grab and should be stopped | Opinion

Posted on 2024-04-18 by pappp

Source: Latest News

University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto is photographed at the administration building on the UK campus in Lexington, Ky., on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024.

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Coding bootcamp Lambda School — now BloomTech — is finally getting punished

Posted on 2024-04-17 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Lambda School/BloomTech is, was, and always has been the most obviously predatory fuckin' thing, sitting right at the intersection of rampant fraud-adjacent startup behavior and rampant fraud-adjacent higher ed behavior. They had their bogus "Don't pay unless you get employment in the field" shtick, which was so loosely defined they always won. Their "income sharing" agreement is ... a loan with particularly unfavorable terms. Their startup douche/VC buddies love them because they trivialize programming to depress wages in the nerds they try to exploit in other valley bro endeavors. $164k fine and some debt reduction? Execs should be in jail. Their fake-loan and VC lucre should be getting liquidated out in the settlement. At least they're basically banned from handling education money now, though they've already one greasy regulator-avoidance restructure so it may not be adequate to put them down.

In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist — it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.

Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years — rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.

But those Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs)...

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Personal VPN Services are Snake-Oil

Posted on 2024-04-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: They're for consuming arbitrarily geo-fenced content, torrenting, and other "someone will personally or legally harass you for trying to consume content without subjecting yourself to the middlemen's increasingly outrageous terms" applications. Most of the privacy marketing on VPNs is like a "For tobacco use only" sticker on a bong.

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The DDoS attack of academic bullshit

Posted on 2024-04-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I feel this in my bones. That said, I'm not sure the author's prescription of "we need fewer more elite academics" is helpful or even relevant - we need to evaluate academics in ways that don't incentivize spraying high-volume bullshit or the behavior will exhibit regardless of numbers. Their premise also seems to imagine that luminaries are preordained geniuses rather than products of their circumstances (both in the sense of "people whose conditions permit them the latitude them to become intellectuals" and "as our overall understanding of things improves, the opportunity for new fundamental ideas shrinks"), which seems hard to defend. Maintaining our escalating technological society requires a larger group of specialists, and that makes space for a growing number of PhDs both for higher-education and niche subject expertise ... but the majority of people filling those roles are being competitively evaluated on their ability to publish and hype papers and attract research funding, which incentivizes each and every one of them to spray or be out-competed by someone willing to spray, until we're left with a population of academics made entirely of game-playing sociopaths. This isn't unique to academia, we're further along watching the same shit play out in a wide assortment of industries (See: every time you hear about Boeing in the news in the last several years.).

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Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI

Posted on 2024-04-10 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Holy shit that's a terrible idea.

Illustration of a robot brain. — *The TEA expects to save between $15 and $20 million per year by using its new “automated scoring engine.”* | Image: The Verge

Students in Texas taking their state-mandated exams this week are being used as guinea pigs for a new artificial intelligence-powered scoring system set to replace a majority of human graders in the region.

The Texas Tribune reports an “automated scoring engine” that utilizes natural language processing — the technology that enables chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and communicate with users — is being rolled out by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. The agency is expecting the system to save $15–20 million per year by reducing the need for temporary human scorers, with plans to hire under 2,000 graders this year compared to the...

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Genesis of the “Golfball” Selectric

Posted on 2024-04-08 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's a 2011 article, and the start is a little screed-y, but it is a _fascinating_ look at the various convergent type element designs. I was aware of the Blickensderfer and TTY cylindrical style, and that IBM licensed the Marx toy for some of how it manipulated the cylinder, but there are a number of details I hadn't seen elsewehre, and I'd never come across the various precursor convex type element designs.

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