mikewarot

Joined 7 years ago

Karma
12,826
Submissions
6,583
Member since
Feb 11
I'm not an Engineer

I've been a programmer, and do have some actual Engineering education(Rose-Hulman, Purdue), but again, I'm not an engineer.

Odds are you aren't either. If you don't have a Professional Engineering License from your state, you're not an Engineer either, and you should stop claiming the title. It's stolen valor!

I'm currently deep into the territory of the crank or lone genius... more than likely I'm just a crank... but hey, I'm retired, and eccentric old man vibes suit me just fine. (I also look the part)

Socials: - bsky.app/profile/mikewarot.bsky.social - github.com/mikewarot - x.com/mikewarot

Interests: Hardware, Open Source, Programming, Research, Science, Technology, Writing, Travel

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No person should ever have to blindly trust a computer program to do the right thing.

Blog: mikewarot.blogspot.com

I've been programming since 1979. I have made spur, helical, and bevel gears in a job shop setting. I have assembled computers from scratch, selecting clock generators, CPUs, logic gates etc.

I can fix ANYTHING given sufficient time and budget. I've repaired cesium beam atomic clocks, magnetic amplifiers, and an assortment of undocumented industrial control systems.

I've written programs that track equipment inspection, monitor the calibration of large water meters, and control the gluing of cardboard boxes, to name the interesting highlights... I did all of that before 2000.

I was a system administrator for 15 years, as time went on, less and less broke, and they eventually didn't need me.

I made gears for 5 years, bevel, spur, helical, splines, etc. Now I'd like to get back into programming. I did the Advent of Code in 2020, in Pascal... you can see the carnage on my github account: https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal

Currently working on getting BitGrid, a vision of bringing Petflops to the masses, brought into the real world using LLMs to help get past analysis paralysis.

email: chezmike at gmail

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
Comment · 2 days ago
I was trying to emphasize that it's quite unlikely that traits from unrelated models will be consistent. Things learned about the internals of ChatGPT's weights are unlikely to help you with those of Grok, for example.
Comment · 3 days ago
Is there any chance that the plague of Flock sensors could be used to help track the radio tags?
Comment · 3 days ago
I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

Comment · 3 days ago
> following too closely

Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.

Comment · 3 days ago
AI is massively underpriced at the present time. That's what's driven adoption so hard, along with the hype.

Once that ends, the prices will rise, quite a bit, and this will cause demand destruction, possibly causing most?? of the big players to fail. The thing is, even if we end up awash in AI hardware and RAM, the power to run it is a major part of the cost, and that's not going to get cheaper.

So, in a few years, there will be far, far less AI in use. We'll all be fine.

Comment · 3 days ago
It seems to me that some of the complaints in the article were hardware related, not really software.

>Blue Screen of Death >Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood.

I was a Windows system administrator from 1997 through 2013. In the beginning, we had issues with the blue screen of death in Office Professional and Windows 98. It turned out that when HP wrote their printer drivers for the LaserJet 4000 printers, they used an optimizing compiler, and it dynamically loaded floating point emulation.... and let it get unloaded, thus when you needed to compute page layout to print.... blue screen of death.

Once I solved that, we never had problems again, for over a decade!

Once we got to Office 2000 Professional, we stopped upgrading, and enjoyed 12 years of stability.

The only real problems were with the gigabytes of email people kept around, most of it in their "Deleted Items" folder, used as a filing cabinet, and the Exchange server that was full. They wouldn't let me buy a spare machine for to test out the email server backups, which naturally turned out to be a prayer in the end. 8(

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>Nothing was secure Nothing has changed, it's still not secure, no matter your choice of OS. We're not running HURD or Genode on everything, or even Qubes. It's ambient authority everywhere, which is nuts in an era of persistent megabit internet.

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>Software came on unreliable physical media That's what backups are for. I had a folder of all my CDs, that was included in my system backups. So, I could restore the domain server, restore the backup filesystems, then reinstall everything, without using any media other than the Windows Server CD (actually, a copy of it, with the serial number written on it)

That Office 2000 install should still work today, without buying it again. It's unlikely to get memory holed.

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>Give me higher-level programming languages that abstract common pitfalls from C and C++.

Yep... Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and now Lazarus/Free Pascal have done that since the beginning.

Comment · 4 days ago
At least if I could still work, there's a chance I could hold on. It sucks being medically frail.

And yes, I do care about society in general, and societal collapse.... what worries me is that the right seems bent on taking away the social safety net that's keeping me alive, and the left seems to be worried about not making waves.

Comment · 4 days ago
I'm retired too, but I'm worried that if enough people end up unemployed that'll break social security, and the markets and everyone's retirement accounts.

I'm medically out of the labor market, if SS disappears, I will end up homeless.

The weird limit they put on Social security contributions is strangling the system.

Comment · 5 days ago
I object to the inclusion of mRNA based treatments into the category of Vaccine.

According to wikipedia, the mechanism they (the mRNA based treatments) use is:

  In contrast, mRNA vaccines introduce a short-lived[58] synthetically created fragment of the RNA sequence of a virus into the individual being vaccinated. These mRNA fragments are taken up by dendritic cells through phagocytosis.[59] The dendritic cells use their internal machinery (ribosomes) to read the mRNA and produce the viral antigens that the mRNA encodes.[4] The body degrades the mRNA fragments within a few days of introduction.[60] Although non-immune cells can potentially also absorb vaccine mRNA, produce antigens, and display the antigens on their surfaces, dendritic cells absorb the mRNA globules much more readily.[61] The mRNA fragments are translated in the cytoplasm and do not affect the body's genomic DNA, located separately in the cell nucleus.[1][62]
So, it's a short lived, self limited gene therapy, not a vaccine. It hijacks the patients own cells to provoke an immune response. If the cells hijacked happen to be in tissue other than the intended injection site, via blood circulation, for example... you can (and sometimes do) have things like heart tissue being attacked by the immune system, with health altering results.

We shouldn't let the category of vaccines include these treatments. It obscures informed consent in a manner that seems to border on deception for better marketing purposes.

Comment · 6 days ago
I'm building a data diode, with a pair of Raspberry Pi B+ computers for inside and outside proxy servers. I've got the first Pi booting, and am installing various Linux tools to get familiar with it.

I've been spouting off on the advantages of air gaps and data diodes from a theoretic perspective for more than a decade, I decided it's time to get my hands dirty.

I'll be open sourcing the whole thing, and writing code by hand in Free Pascal, the language I'm most familiar with.

Comment · 7 days ago
Controversial opinion: It's an operating systems design issue, not a language issue. It's what you get for using OSs built on ambient authority, instead of default deny and capabilities, for 30 years past the point it was obvious they weren't fit for purpose in the internet era.
Comment · 8 days ago
Back when I was still in the labor force, it looked fascinating, I'm not sure what I would actually do with an infinite supply of 1-2" poles, but it sure seems like fun.
Comment · 8 days ago
Why do you need to retrain? You've got a specific idea to test, just keep exploring the edges of what's possible on a low budget as a side project, and keep your day job. Cultivate friendships and knowledge of equipment at your local hackerspace, and you'll be quite surprised what can be done on the very cheap.

If you want to keep things private, you can get 5 axis desktop CNC machines for about $5000, really good 3d printers for $2000, electronics to measure/control just about anything dirt cheap thanks to jelly bean parts and super-powerful microcontrollers.

Comment · 8 days ago

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