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My Business Card Runs Linux

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Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#261

Post by erichocean »

ufmace wrote: post #249
hvasilev wrote: post #66

I wonder what world would we be living in if people like this fellow were actually focusing on automation and not on making business cards that run Linux. Maybe we wouldn't be living in such a lowly automated reality, using concepts from the previous centuries. Robotics might even make sense...

I have worked on some industrial automation stuff. In my experience, it's genuinely really hard to do in a way that's actually better than manual systems, or very narrowly-scoped and simple automation. The number of edge cases and failure modes is mind-boggling. I'm skeptical that there's much room for effective solutions between extremely simple and dumb automation, and near-human level AI.

> I'm skeptical that there's much room for effective solutions between extremely simple and dumb automation, and near-human level AI.

That's literally my job, and there's a ton of room actually. You just have to be able (and willing) to have the ability to fall back to humans at any point in the process. Like real world "fix-and-continue" debugging...

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#262

Post by cameronbrown »

lisper wrote: post #225
brantonb wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Microsoft, Windows took far, far longer than an hour to build from scratch. I remember walking a few buildings over to the burn lab to pick up DVDs of the latest build. I don’t have any hard data, but running a full build on your dev box was very rarely done.

The dynamics of commercial projects can be very different from open-source. You're much more likely to tolerate sitting through long builds if you're being paid to do so.

Definitely not. People are far more expensive than machines.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#263

Post by dredmorbius »

truth_be_told wrote: post #193
nl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedded systems engineers are (usually) paid a lot less than full stack engineers. Edit: I seem to be getting (a lot!) of downvotes on this. I thought it was quite well known, but apparently not. Full Stack Engineer salary: $93,598 [1] Embedded Software Engineer salary: $74,758[2] [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Full_Stack_Engineer... [2] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Embedded_Engineer/S...

True. This is what i dislike about the "market". There is no reward for knowledge, hardwork, solving complex problems etc. Just "commoditization" and "supply and demand dynamics".

The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.

-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, "Chapter 10: Of Wages and Profit in the different Employments of Labour and Stock"

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...

Information and skill aren't rewarded of themselves, for much the same reason that information wants to be free. If the skills themselve are both rare and valuable, that tends to change, effectively serving as a type of rent (in the economic sense). Effort in aquisition, risk in employment, trust, and the underlying attractiveness of the activity, all factor in.

Smith's analysis doesn't hold in all cases, but is a good first approximation. It's remarkably poorly known, even among market advocates.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#264

Post by davidzweig »

neurostimulant wrote: post #67

To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.

Any numbers on current consumption of F1C100s?

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#266

Post by detaro »

nabla9 wrote: post #172
neurostimulant wrote: post #67

To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.

Calling this embedded system feels like insult to the spirit of 'running light without overbyte', because it's so comically capable. My first PC had 66/33 MHz 80486 processor and 8 MB ram, 320 MB HDD. You could run AutoCAD, play Doom, Civilization, have dual boot for Linux, Windows 3.11 etc. It could compile Linux from source.

There's embedded devices with an order of magnitude more CPU and two orders more RAM, if you're being strict about what counts as "embedded". If you're not, probably another order of magnitude on each.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#267

Post by agumonkey »

nabla9 wrote: post #172
neurostimulant wrote: post #67

To me it's truly mind-bogging that a tiny $1.42 chip contains almost everything needed to boot Linux: a 500mhz cpu, 32MB SDRAM, 2D GPU, SD/MMC support, and USB controller, all packaged inside a 10mm x 10mm chip? It makes me really want to get into embedded development.

Calling this embedded system feels like insult to the spirit of 'running light without overbyte', because it's so comically capable. My first PC had 66/33 MHz 80486 processor and 8 MB ram, 320 MB HDD. You could run AutoCAD, play Doom, Civilization, have dual boot for Linux, Windows 3.11 etc. It could compile Linux from source.

'computing progress' seems mostly resolution increase.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#268

Post by efreak »

chrisseaton wrote: post #179
jimmaswell wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an absurd tragedy. Everyone was just fine with usb-A and ethernet ports and hdmi but no, now these laptops need dongles for literally everything.

USB-A is not 'just fine'. It's uni-directional. Which is an insane design for something being constantly plugged in and out. It's also low-bandwidth and low-power. Most devices these days have bluetooth, so it isn't really needed except for power and monitors. USB-C is a step-up in everything and I'm happy with only USB-C.

Not everything needs to be constantly plugged. My desktop doesn't even have Bluetooth in it. I'm quite happy with the USB A ports on my PC when it comes to plugging in mice, keyboards, USB storage, etc. If you use USB devices on a regular basis, you'll remember which way USB ports are oriented, and you can just look at the end of the USB cable to see which way it needs to go in.

Having said that, I will say the USB C connector on my phone is far superior, as I plug/unplug it daily.

Power and bandwidth aren't even related to connector type.

Re: My Business Card Runs Linux

#269

Post by Fronzie »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #207
CreRecombinase wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read somewhere that the time to compile Linux from source on high-end desktop hardware has remained remarkably stable over the years.

I'm convinced that compiler speed is all a matter of how it was initially designed. Take for example Delphi which can compile millions of lines of code in under a minute or something ridiculous. Then we have D, Go, Rust, and such, they compile rather large codebases that would take C++ a good 30 minutes on high end hardware of today in shorter spans of time (not as familiar with how fast Rust compiles, but I know Go…

The C++ language cannot be parsed with a context-free parser. A large part of the build times, however, is due to optimizations.

In the early days, clang was much faster in compilation than gcc. Over the years, it has improved on optimization output but as a consequence has lost the compilation speed.

There are many examples for https://godbolt.org/ to show how much work the optimizer does. As example, the http://eigen.tuxfamily.org library relies on the optimizer to generate optimized code for all sorts of combinations of algorithms.

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