Mark Shane Hayden @msh@coales.co

@squeakypancakes you could run anything you want as pid1 I suppose, even if it's a cursed idea

@FssOfDeath

I am probably not a typical mastodon user. I started my instance 2.5 years ago having never been in the fediverse before, so my timelines were completely blank and I basically bootstrapped them by following gargron and a couple others found outside of mastodon, then following anyone who was interesting in the mentions and boosts!

That might not work for everyone but boy it sure makes moderation less of a burden when the instance is small

@ink_slinger

@FssOfDeath I think maybe not only being in Canada but also the same province and mutual followers with the admin was a factor (any other mastodon instances hosted in Alberta? I'm not sure)

My server is small and not hooked to any big relays so the timelines are pretty sedate and chill for the most part. I like it that way, though people chasing engagement with a very large audience might like bigger instances...

@ink_slinger

@ink_slinger Not a problem! My server can handle more users just fine as long as I provision enough resources to the Mastodon containers lol

When you were importing your follows there was a bit of a backup on the queue but nothing that it couldn't handle eventually. There have been bigger disturbances in the fedi-force

@FssOfDeath

@vertigo this post has a strong Inmos Transputer vibe.

@cstanhope @djsundog

@deejoe @lightone @masterofthetiger

@switchingsocial friendica account is still alive but hasn't been active for awhile. Nothing else seems to be there anymore.

This makes me sad!

@aschmitz

Yup.

PC started off with dumb peripherals and eventually added some smarts back in when the need came. Like USB, plug n play BIOS/UEFI was inspired by those 8 bit era systems.

@djsundog

@cstanhope relative to the main computer's CPU peripherals have gotten dumber. Like, Commodore put 6502s in their peripherals and Coleco put 6801s in theirs. Processing power on the same order of magnitude as the main CPU.

Can you imagine a hard drive with like a 64 bit 4 core hyperthreading CPU and a gig of RAM all to itself on today's computer? That's what it would be like relatively speaking lol. Anyways it would be fun to herd a bunch of microcontrollers into a cohesive system.

@djsundog

@bhtooefr
... but the start drives had other benefits to make up for it. The computer didn't need to constantly control the drives. So you could do background file loading and so forth. Coleco supergames for example loaded the next level off disk or tape in the background while you were playing the current level. Little to no waiting just like ROMs!

Much more work to achieve that with dumb apple/ibm drives. Though I must say apple IWM is an elegant, genius design.

@djsundog

@bhtooefr of course apple and IBM had the advantage of parallel bus for speed, so it wasn't the intelligence that slowed down peripherals it was the bus.

IIRC, plain old 1050 drive ran at 19.2kbps (approx 2kB/s, double density and double speed of 810), this was set at that speed because it was the fastest rate Atari engineer's protocol analysers could operate at for QA/QC. I know third party drives and hardware hacks could go 5+kB/s and SIO2SD can do 10+...

@djsundog

@bhtooefr that was only really true relative to the Commodore 64, which despite having smart peripherals had a janky serial bus kludge that limited throughput to about 20kbps (and normally ran at a paltry 3kbps or so). The Coleco ADAMNET operated at 65kbps and Atari SIO could be pushed to over 100kbps!

Fun fact: Joe Decuir, who created the Atari SIO bus, also helped develop the USB standard, and used his earlier Atari design as the basis for the USB protocol!

@djsundog

@wxcafe @djsundog

I think if printers weren't designed by sociopaths then their intelligence could be used for good.

@djsundog home computing was heading in that direction. Like, an Atari 810 disk or 820 printer had pretty much equivalent processing power as the 800 computer they attached to. They had driver code in their firmware that they sent to the computer when it booted up. It was like a little desktop cluster over a common, or "universal", serial bus.

Commodore 8 bit and Coleco computers... almost the same thing. Truly smart peripherals.

Then the PC came and kind of ruined the party

@lumi

Coming soon: pull request will only be accepted if they are submitted as posts to the official Facebook™️ page

Just gonna chill with a big ol' bowl of popcorn and watch the Canadian general election campaign unfold. 🍿

Ooooo...Justin...not a good look, even back in your days as a high school teacher 😬

@taweret you bestowed the name Loki upon this creature.

Seems you reap what you sow

@mal

@squeakypancakes in that case, as was mentioned by others, it could be a good conversation starter to get people introduced to new ideas. Also if you live in a place that permits and accepts relatively free expression in public why not use that expression for good?

@squeakypancakes I would have to say it depends on there you are and what the particular symbols are, to avoid potentially dangerous hostile reactions from others and preserve personal safety.

As far as symbols go, the hammer and sickle has a strong association with an oppressive authoritarian regime in many places and might offend. Most other symbology, however, is not problematic in this way.

@hhardy01 @cj

...the next step to restore the original ideals of personal computing is to expand the scopes of F/LOSS and OSHW into a unified philosophy of "Free computing". The traditional software freedoms such as freedom to modify are only truly meaningful if the users of computing devices have an accessible and approachable way of programming them.