Is there a good resource explaining the current understanding of how it was working? Wikipedia has some diagrams and text, but at least to me very hard to understand.
Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
271–277 of 277 posts
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#272In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0... The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices.…
Did I miss that he finished the mechanism? From what I've seen he went into hiatus and has been only posting ClickSpring "clips" for a while now?
I saw the videos a long time ago, so I'm probably misremembering. He probably made a good chunk of it that is way more than what I could do [1], and after a few years I got confused.
[1] In the secondary school I made a dice of iron and two hammers (one with a lathe and one with a ¿planer?). My ability is not even close to his.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are actually getting quite behind on some of that stuff that you mentioned. Boeing is a shell of it's former self, having been hollowed out by the financial types, and can't launch a new aircraft without killing hundreds or a new spacecraft without an order of magnitude more time and money vs SpaceX. China absolutely leads the world in solar cell production, and of course most critical microchip production is offs…
It isn't myopia at all to think that near term conventional large-scale nation-state warfare is unlikely. I'm well aware that industrial giants of the last half century aren't as dynamic as they once were, but it hardly matters. We have tons of talent and capacity, it isn't unlikely for newer and better companies to be built. The only important thing where we seem to be at a serious disadvantage is in chip fab, but t…
Belt & road, ya, that isn't a big threat yet, but the ongoing relentless expansionism is a real threat. They have never stopped, and barely slowed down.
Sure, continued appeasement can 'keep the peace'. But it will be at the cost of sacrificing Taiwan and everythign in the 9-dashed line to the fate of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. And then whatever else nearby that they will decide to fabricate a claim for. And so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
That is the bargain that authoritarians always strike - constantly cheating around the edges - what's mine is mine and what's yours is up for grabs.
So, people not thinking strongly or long term can argue that "it's unlikely", "it's not worth a conflict", etc. Meanwhile more territory and people fall under authoritarian control.
If it is unlikely, it is because people want to keep their heads in the sand and appease instead of make current conflict. It's a fools game
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
VLC is bloated. Try mpv from https://mpv.io/
Thanks, looks like an interesting project, will definitely keep it on my radar. However, after compiling it and measuring it on an older machine (a Lenovo T430 running Arch) against the out-of-the-box vlc install, I can see no advantage in memory footprint or cpu usage, they are about the same. (I compared mvp running in terminal against vlc running with ncurses interface module) Since mpv doesn't offer an ncurses in…
Hm. Don't know how to respond to that. Let me explain how my usage began. Somewhen in the days of early Arch long before systemd...don't know how and why exactly I tried it. I mostly used mplayer before. Even with mplayer I've been wondering why I should use VLC over it, because anything I've thrown at mplayer just worked. While VLC had so many options for nothing I'd need. And it was bloated in direct comparison. Maybe that has changed meanwhile by change of toolkit, or whatever. IDK, not touching it. MPV feels like mplayer to me, with the difference of even less hassle for daily usage, and under active development, with the option of embedding it into several popular scripts to download/stream content from popular sites to watch it outside the browser/app or to archive it in the desired format and quality. Either from CLI or via several frontends. Which I have almost no use for. However, for my simple needs for local playing of downloaded stuff it just works for everything I throw at it, be it CLI, or click in some graphical filemanager. Instantly. Sometimes on even older systems than yours. With probably less RAM. Say 8GB, with something booted from USB, running 'live', so only 7GB, no SWAP. I wouldn't want to use VLC on that. If it's on the image, I remove it and exchange it for mpv during remastering.
Maybe you compiled yours with all the bells&whistles which aren't needed for sufficient local playback?
Furthermore I didn't cover (re-)streaming to chromecasts, TVs, or such. Don't have it, don't want it.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, looks like an interesting project, will definitely keep it on my radar. However, after compiling it and measuring it on an older machine (a Lenovo T430 running Arch) against the out-of-the-box vlc install, I can see no advantage in memory footprint or cpu usage, they are about the same. (I compared mvp running in terminal against vlc running with ncurses interface module) Since mpv doesn't offer an ncurses in…
Hm. Don't know how to respond to that. Let me explain how my usage began. Somewhen in the days of early Arch long before systemd...don't know how and why exactly I tried it. I mostly used mplayer before. Even with mplayer I've been wondering why I should use VLC over it, because anything I've thrown at mplayer just worked. While VLC had so many options for nothing I'd need. And it was bloated in direct comparison. Ma…
> While VLC had so many options for nothing I'd need.
This has next to zero impact on its performance, as the ncurses player talks exactly to the parts of libVLC it has to.
>Instantly. Sometimes on even older systems than yours. With probably less RAM. Say 8GB, with something booted from USB, running 'live', so only 7GB, no SWAP.
The system I tested this on has 4GiB of RAM. And I have used `VLC -I ncurses` from live systems-on-a-stick as well. It runs before my finger leaves the ENTER key, same as mpv.
> Maybe you compiled yours with all the bells&whistles which aren't needed for sufficient local playback?
I'd be happy to repeat the measurement with different settings.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also this implicit form of -ism built into it, in that certain groups of people were "obviously" less intelligent so it is unlikely they could ever build something magnificent or intellectually obscure. Whether it is a belief that aliens must have built Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids because of a bias that they were dumb savages, or whether it is dismissal of alternate forms of successful government and social o…
nobody thinks Einstein was beneath us because he didn't have an iPhone if something "shouldn't exist" in a time period it has nothing to do with judging those people as inferiors, its simply the timeline of the development of technology (or our misconception thereof)
For those of us who study culture, this is absolutely a thing. Its called pseudoarchaeology and it has always been very popular with White Supremacists.
https://entangledstates.org/2021/10/05/the-connection-betwee...
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pseudoarchaeology-racism...
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-r...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.364.6436.110
Also, Even today white supremacists think Einstein was a fraud:
https://christiansfortruth.com/albert-einstein-plagiarist-an...
But that is harder to believe than "Dumb Egyptians couldn't make pyramids, so aliens did it..."
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am guessing that [1] pointed to this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyX_EJQOIU I don't see the reference.
Indeed, thanks. I went hunting for the video, but then forgot to paste it in (and am long past the edit window). :/
Haha they’re classic!