(Justin)

Tech nerd from Sweden

  • 0 Posts
  • 92 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • Coops are still about the money. They’re about saving money by sharing resources with fellow workers/consumers, and maintaining democratic control over the company. You’re not going to get rich from a coop (without embezzlement), but you and your coowners will be cutting out the middle man. Obviously, it only makes sense for industries that you’re heavily invested in.











  • 1, These days the machines used to etch chips (flash light onto the chips to carve them out) are mostly made by ASML. The most modern machines are the ASML Twinscan NXE and Twinscan EXE. The raw silicon is coated with different chemicals that react to light, and when the light patterns are flashed onto the silicon, it carves physical arrangements of atoms on the silicon that forms complex electrical circuits.

    1. CPUs were literally drawn by hand, and then the drawing was shrunk down with a magnifying glass back in the day. Programs could be written into electrical memory with physical switches (think 100 light switches), punch cards, or electric typewriters. You could pause the computer so that it would wait for you to type in the next program for it to run. By the time we had kernels, we already had large memory banks in the kilobytes that could store the OS between program runs. So you’d type in the OS once when you turned on the computer, and it would keep in in memory until you turned the computer off again.

    2. The internet is different computers connected together. This website is just data sitting on a server somewhere, and your computer connects to the server over the internet and asks for the data.

    3. Everything is built on the shoulders of giants. There is plenty to learn, but there will always be something you don’t know.

    4. There’s tons of information online if you know where to look. There’s also some good courses out there to understand more specific things like cpu design, networking, programming, etc. In university these sorts of questions fall into the field of Computer Engineering, if you’re looking for a university program to get into.

    With regards to the limits of programming: Making websites is already challenging enough, but the cutting edge can be rewarding too :) Software Engineering is a massive field with infinite opportunities. Start small and work your way towards more complex projects with larger teams.

    Here’s a good 20 minute video about the history of making microchips: https://youtu.be/Pt9NEnWmyMo





  • The first step in security is to answer who you’re defending against. Someone stealing your phone? A cop with a STINGRAY device? All the security decisions you make are based on your initial threat model.

    Generally, home internet, wifi, and cellular data are considered safe against passers-by (assuming your wifi password is strong). However, they are also assumed to be eavesdropped on by your ISP and government. Details of your internet traffic can then also be revealed by your ISP to other people during legal action, such as if you’re being investigated for piracy.

    There are ways to further protect your internet traffic from being snooped on, even from your ISP and government, by using things like HTTPS, DNS over HTTPS, and of course, VPNs.





  • This is a really important principle of making APIs that people don’t really talk about. There’s a fine balance between hardcoded literals and full-gui options menu.

    Every piece of data in your program has a different level of configurability, and you need to make that trade-off to decide how hard or easy it should be to change. You could hardcode the data as a literal, or you could hoist it to the top of your source file as a const. You could have a separate static const configuration class, or you could have a runtime configuration file. You could even go for an interactive configuration editor/ options menu. It’s all a tradeoff based on offering your users choice but not overburdening them with it, as well as balancing development cost.