Bernie @[email protected]

“Excuse me hooman, it's been past 06:00. We have an appointment to boop your face in exchange for pets and scritches. Now plz.”

I don't understand at all why anyone thinks singularities exist. Here's the problem:

A singularity is a point where spacetime has infinite curvature. This is not the problem. The problem is that as the curvature of spacetime increases, it causes time in that region to appear to slow down relative to an outside observer. To anyone in that region, the rest of the universe appears to speed up.

KnightOS is a Unix-like operating system for Texas Instruments calculators that I started 10 years ago. It had a Unix-like filesystem, preemptive multiprocessing AND muliththreading, assembly and C programming environments, and supported 8 different calculator models based on the 8-bit z80 CPU.

Some of the constraints it worked within made for interesting challenges:

- There were 64KiB of usable RAM. The kernel stored *all* of its state in just 1024 bytes of statically allocated memory. Many subroutines had overlapping storage areas and everything was carefully planned to consider this. The userspace memory allocator was a very simple linked list, with minimal storage overhead to maximize available memory for userspace programs.

- The filesystem was stored in (worst case) 128 KiB of NOR flash, which was shared with the kernel - whose core code was <4KiB. The filesystem was carefully designed to maximize space and Flash wear cycles (unlike modern SSDs, our kernel directly managed our Flash storage), which meant designing all everyday filesystem operations to only RESET bits in the underlying storage medium. It also used minimal metadata, to maximize usable storage space for the users.

- When writing to the filesystem, the kernel code resident in Flash became unreadable - so we had to copy bits of the driver code to part of our 1024-byte statically allocated RAM and execute them from there.

- We had some basic networking working based on the I/O port, which is a 1.5mm jack similar to audio jacks (we also had a music player if you had a 1.5mm -> 2.5mm adapter, btw. MIDI and WAV). We directly controlled the voltages on the ring and tip of this port and had to design a and implement very low-level Layer 1 protocol for it.

One thing KnightOS couldn't do is math - once you installed it you basically gave up using your calculator as a calculator.

So the Coronavirus was probably passed from animals to humans at a wild-animal-market.

Why is it that I haven't read a single take on the animal rights aspect of this? Can we not just leave animals alone? Both animals and humans would clearly profit.

#Corona #Coronavirus #vegan

A Common Sailer (Neptis hylas) spotted at Coney Island, Singapore, on 26 Jan 2020.

It is part of a group of butteflies commonly known as Admirals and Allies (Subfamily Limenitidinae) which can look like each other and can sometimes be hard to ID to species level without a guide to identifying marks

On iNaturalist [ https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37981532 ].

#iNaturalist #Nature #Singapore #Insects #Butterflies #Lepidoptera

https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]2/49366696251

https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]3/46317064545

https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/49169596313

Meanwhile, the electron guns are active in basement...

#retrocomputing