There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.

Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your “loop” becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.

Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.

If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don’t get tasks treading on each other’s toes.

FreeRTOS is in the Arduino libraries so you can just add it to a blank project and then have a play running two tasks at once.

Only systems that have framebuffer console enabled at boot I guess.

Recovery mode booting would probably be normal 80x25 text console in case there was something up with framebuffer initialisation.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

but are normal plebs going to be arrested for having Signal on their phone or with a Meshtastic/Meshiliscious device?

Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse?

The “criminal encrypted communications device” - whatever the hell that actually is ¹ - is the very small cherry on top of the firearms and whatever other investigative legwork needed to identify, locate, and then arrest these people.

So no, unless you’re also often nipping off in a taxi with a few guns to do a job for another crime group, I think you’ll be relatively safe fooling around with meshtastic.

¹Maybe it’s one of those CrimPhones™ that had their security protections quietly broken in the last few years.

It can be a Cron job that runs every minute. Run a script that:

• Checks for the existence of a file, if it exists, exit.
• (Optional) ping your end, if it’s up, continue, otherwise exit
• Touches said file.
• Runs SSH to try and connect to your end. If the connection is made everything halts here until the connection drops.
• Cleans up said file.
• Exits.

If you can arrange a fixed IP address externally (or dynamic DNS that follows your IP around) you can set up a reverse SSH connection instead.

Basically your server connects to your external computer via SSH and then sets up port forwarding so that when you connect to localhost:2222 or similar on your PC, you’re actually connecting back to the server.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

Ditto on the QuietComfort headphones. I’ve had a pair of QC35’s for 10 years now with heavy use on weekly flights.

Runs off a AAA battery which is good for like 18 hours or so. Works as regular headphones when the battery goes flat. 3.5mm cable with media controls and a mic in it.

Still in its original hard case, have replaced the ear pads a couple of times, decent pads are cheap enough on eBay and etc.

I also bought a Bluetooth insert for it for ~AUD75, it plugs in where the cable goes and has it’s own rechargeable battery with only about 6 hours life which is a bit of a nuisance.

Edit: regarding audio quality, I can say that if you’re using headphones in any sort of urban environment, noise cancelling absolutely trumps audio quality. But the QC35’s aren’t too bad in the quality stakes, especially if you’re using them on the move.

Small edit: The major thing that stops portable electronics from lasting 5+ years is the little rechargeable battery inside that dies. Removable batteries like the AAA battery in the QC 35 solves that, and as a bonus it’s “instant charge” when it goes flat, as long as you keep a tiny packet of AAAs in your bag. 4 x AAAs lasts me about 3 months.

I know, instead of folders, we could use “shelves” and the Dewey Decimal System.

32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it’s just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.

Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there’ll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.

How does a person get this far down a rabbit hole?

I don’t know. Software engineering is tangential to my field but I have to wonder, is software efficiency even a consideration these days?

It seems that maybe a week of just solid thinking about what they have and what they need - WITHOUT touching a keyboard - could have put them in a better position. But move fast and break things doesn’t seem to accommodate that kind of approach.

Ok there’s a whole lot of wtf going on here.

AI codebots in the cloud doing your code for you, cool, I guess.

So you need to watch them? And presumably intervene if necessary? Ok.

So then:

They decided that they’d stream a video of the AI codebots doing their thing.

At 40Mbps per stream.

For “enterprise use”.

Where presumably they want lots of users.

And then they didn’t know about locked down enterprise internet and had to engineer a fallback to jpeg for when things aren’t great for them. Newsflash - with streaming video peaking at 40Mbs per user, things will never be great for your product in the real world.

How, in any way, does this scale to anything approaching success? Their back end now has to have the compute power to encode and serve up gigabits of streaming video for anything more than ~50 concurrent users, let alone the compute usage of the actual “useful” bit , the AI codebots.

For say, 5 users out of a site of 200, IT departments will now see hundreds of megabits of streaming traffic - and if they’re proactive, they will choke those endpoints to a crawl so that their pathetic uplink has a chance to serve the other 195 users.

All of this for a system that is fundamentally working on maybe 5kB of visible unicode text at any particular moment.

I use MX Linux because it provides a simple way to use both the NVIDIA 340 drivers and the latest kernels with my 14 year old laptop.

because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.

Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks. You start with nothing and you need to prove why you need a hole poked in the firewall. Some IT departments are better at actioning those requests than others. You clearly have had the joy of working with IT departments that are on the worse end of the scale.

the killswitch is in about:config

Ah yes, the easiest place to put a kill switch for the average user, as opposed to the complexity of a toggle in settings.

I just got GPU temp monitoring working on my old dell laptop. “Heat management” for the GPU is pretty much just an extra chunk of steel tacked onto the heat pipe halfway between the CPU and its radiator, so GPU temps are always in the red.

I might as well just turn off monitoring and remain ignorant 🤷

entirely separate and much more sophisticated technology

Or some math nerd will come up with an algorithm for general AI that is embarrassingly simple, and before you know it the “but can it run Doom?” crowd are implementing AI in toasters and watching them have existential crises for the lulz.

promises improved support for Wayland users by raising the minimum supported Wayland version to 1.20…

What a nice fluff piece for NVIDIA. How does ditching users below 1.20 and fixing an issue in their own UI improve support for Wayland exactly?

I do wonder if ditching < 1.20 support just so happens to fix the drop down issue they were having in their UI…

Some of the biggest jumps in house prices were when interest rates were less than 2 percent and you could get a million bucks from the bank just by asking to see the manager and giving them a firm handshake.

I can agree Pauline Hanson is a problematic individual

So problematic individuals shouldn’t be punished by the collective? You know what happens then? A few problematic people muddy the waters and generally make it very difficult to actually get shit done.

just for that one stunt with that burqa

There are rules in the senate. They allow for structured and robust debate, but there are limits. You don’t become a “problematic individual” with just the one stunt.

Ms. Hanson is - in my humble opinion - a shit-stirrer presenting views stuck in the 1950s that do not mesh well with 21st century geopolitics. Those views are popular with a small segment of the population and she knows it. Stunts like this give disproportionate attention to that small segment at the detriment to everyone else.