paulsnar @paulsnar@mastodon.technology
Wrote up my thoughts on the recent Elasticsearch relicensing stir-up.
https://pn.id.lv/blog/2021/01/on-open-source
Two more things on RP2040:
• Many people are raving about the datasheet (https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.pdf), and I'll join them—it's amazing.
• I wonder whether it could've helped in Tom 7's "Reverse Emulating the NES" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0). Now that I'd love to watch again, but this time with a better synchronized GPIO :)
Sorry for the rant. This is my anti-npmization sentiment sticking out again. I should revive that rant feed, huh.
ESP-IDF is tempting because it's preloaded with useful stuff, but with that comes a cost in that you're constrained by the environment. It's a fair constraint and it's definitely not Linux, but I posit it'd still be fun to write just the bare minimum of code to suit your needs and not pull in the whole scaffolding.
This is the reason I was excited for Precursor (https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor) for a long time; it came with the premise of being hackable down to the lowest levels. Though I can't justify putting the money for it down now—I'm pretty sure it'll just collect dust, and a $500 dustpiece is not really a good investment, in my humble opinion—I still find it really really neat. If you wanted to implement Wi-Fi, you'd have to mostly do it by yourself.
Like, even though I haven't really written a line of code yet, I already can tell I'll be mildly irritated by the ESP32 because it comes with its own OS and you can't bore down into the bare metal if you want the Wi-Fi to work (which I do) because the driver is effectively written atop that. I mean, it's totally understandable, you'd need to work a scheduler either way, but it still rubs me the wrong way a bit.
Too bad I've already ordered a bunch of ESP32s for a side project. Would love to play with the Pico eventually.
Because there weren't enough Raspberry Pi puns to go around, "Raspberry and Chips". Thanks Arduino folk. https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-the-world-of-microcontrollers/
Nonetheless, for those who are still seriously using Github for anything that could run afoul of the law, better get off; the Capital Letter Associations have now learned how to use this in their favour, and I suspect this will only get worse over time.
So there's a new DMCA abuse on Github that's top of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836503
Hot take here: Github are in the right to take them down—that's what the DMCA requires them to do so that Github don't lose their safe harbor provisions, regardless of the validity of the claims presented therein. (Here the claim is absolute nonsense; they basically say that "the code is used for copyright abuse" but the code itself is not what enables that.)
This was on the horizon for a while already (I remember rumblings of this last year?) but such it comes to fruition. Not to be all "Google is not not evil anymore" but now they have even more data :^)
Fitbit is acquired by Google.
There go the last scraps of Pebble.
Tsundoku – buying books but never getting around to reading them.
The format specification is a bit loose but when has that stopped anyone.
twtxt is neat.
Democracy runs on Lotus Domino
Dadabots has crossed streams with OpenAI.
https://youtu.be/mbh3VAzrwh8
