At one point I had an audio book version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. One of Richard Feynman’s memoirs, he avoids talking about his work for the most part and tells stories in oddly low-level English about the shenanigans he’d get up to in his off hours. The entire book sounds something like this:

“One day I decided to go for a walk. I passed a bar. There was music playing in the bar, and people were dancing. It sounded great. I went inside to look at the girls. Their dancing looked great. I noticed one of the musicians was playing a little drum. I asked if I could try. He let me try the drum. It made a really interesting sound.”

At one point, he was in a bar, and was approached by an abacus salesman, who challenged him to a math race. The abacus easily bested Feynman’s mental math in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, managed to outpace him in exponents and logarithms, and then it just so happened that as the math problems got harder, it just so happened that Feynman had the answers to the exact problems asked memorized, so it appeared he did them instantly in his head. Like by coincidence they asked the exact problem he’d spent the previous week calculating.

How much of that is the fault of colleges? All that shit about requiring science majors to take liberal arts classes or art majors taking calculus to make them “well rounded.” A bachelor’s degree is supposed to be a mark that you’re just all around better educated than someone with a mere high school diploma, to the point that “It doesn’t matter what you major in, just get a degree” is somehow valid advice. But a doctorate is awarded for a significant work of original research; a Ph. D. means you’re the world’s foremost expert in some tiny corner of a sub-discipline, kind of the opposite of being “well rounded.”

I hear they make very tough leather as well.

Yeah, as someone who has never owned an Xbox I have little to say about the Original, I remember the 360 as an unreliable red ring of death piece of junk, the One had that galaxy brained name. That’s the kind of decision you can’t make snorting normal people cocaine, you’ve got to have that Fortune 500 executive cocaine to name the third product in a series the “One.”

The “One” was announced as being a privacy invasion machine that might someday have video games patched onto it; always on internet connection and a required Kinect. That got backpedaled, and everything else I know about that console was Yahtzee saying there weren’t any games for it then he stopped mentioning it.

After the “Please stop calling it the XBone”, was there a One S that isn’t the Series S? And the Series S and Series X are almost as bad as Linux software names. Best Buy employees across the English speaking world have to stop to enunciate “The Series ESS, or the Series ECKSS?” It’s like they watched Nintendo kick themselves in the dick naming a console the Wii U, and took it as a challenge.

Microsoft has done an amazing job generating apathy for their gaming division.

I have told this story several times.

In late 2013 or so, I bought a Raspberry Pi 1B as part of my amateur radio hobby. I did all my actual work on a Windows laptop, the Pi was pretty much just a toy, and I learned a little about Linux with it.

Mid-2014, the display in my aging laptop died. I was going back to school that fall, I needed a laptop. So I ordered a high end Inspiron from Dell. And Dell sold me a lemon. That laptop would just…shut off and never turn back on again. And then I’d call Dell’s tech support. They’d send a tech out within a week or two. He’d throw a part in it, and then it would last somewhere between days and seconds. After waiting over a week to get a tech to come out and fix it, it didn’t finish booting before it died again. I finally got them to replace the laptop outright, with a system that lacked many of the features I had explicitly ordered.

I am no longer a Dell customer.

That whole time, I needed a computer, and the only thing I had was that Raspberry Pi in addition to my Galaxy S4. It was real fun typing up homework in LibreOffice on a single core 700Mhz ARMv6 and 512MB of RAM.

I finally got a running Dell, after an entire semester, loaded with Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 was a total pube fire. Linux felt more familiar at that point, so I tried a few different systems, discovered Linux Mint, and 11 years later I don’t have any computers that run Windows.

many don’t deliver enough power for a Pi 4.

Meanwhile, I’m a sky-going pilot and I’ve never had much of a problem avoiding airliners. We’ve got these really cool guys called air traffic controllers that help us out with that. I love those guys, they do a great job.

TL;DR: The Arduino language is C++ with an automatically included library, but it’s descended from a Java project with an automatically included library.

Processing is a graphics and art based graphics library/IDE that uses the Java programming language. It basically includes some classes and methods by default on top of Java that makes programming graphics and even simple games a bit more straightforward.

Processing’s IDE was forked by the Wiring project for the purposes of microcontroller hardware programming. Because the Java Virtual Machine is a bit much to ask a 16MHz 8-bit AVR to run, they switched the language to C++ which compiles straight to machine code that runs on the bare metal. Again, it’s just C++ with a library included, under the hood it uses gcc to compile and avrdude to program the chip. I believe the IDE itself is still written in Java.

Arduino took Wiring and painted it teal. They’ve extended it quite a bit since then but in the early days Arduino was really a hardware project. They’ve since added support for non-AVR boards to the Arduino IDE, including ARM-Cortex and ESP32 based boards.

Raspberry Pi offers C and C++ SDKs and a MicroPython interpreter for the Pico series. Someone contributed support for RP2040 based boards to the Arduino IDE; I don’t believe that was done officially by either RPi or Arduino.

I program my EPS32s in micropython anyway.

you can program a Pi Pico with the Arduino IDE in C++. Some projects will just compile if you aren’t using some AVR specific features like the built-in EEPROM that the RP2040 doesn’t have.

Moon Machines Episode 5.

Same with Ball and canning jars.

I saw a documentary about that which was a total hoot. From some stiff necked old coot talking about “At Hamilton Standard we made propellers and transmission gearboxes for military and commercial applications. They made brassieres.” To this sharp old girl talking about “I was making baby pants and they asked me if I wanted to try something different. They put me in charge of quality control, and I issued each girl color coded pins. I was examining one suit, and I found a red pin, so I looked up who was issued the red pins and I went over to her and said “Here’s your pin” and I stuck her in the behind with it.”

I like to think those two are married.

Has any company of any size ever done something actually envrionmentally friendly?

Reminds me of Michael Jackson’s Beat It, where the two gang leaders have one wrist tied together and their switchblades in their other hand.

My mind just played out a little skit.

in a library

Librarian is standing at the front desk, doing front desk things. A man enters, driipping wet, comic injuries such as a black eye, fake bandages etc, kelp draped around him. He walks in, looks at librarian meaningfully, stalks off into the library without a word. Stalks back up to the front desk, and presents this book and a library card.

Well, I’ll put it to you this way: If I hire a graphic artist to design a logo for my company, and they turn in a .png they drew in Photoshop, GIMP or Krita, they’re fired. Because I’m going to have my logo on my website, printed on business cards, on key fobs, on the side of work trucks, and painted on the side of buildings. I need a four color variant, a black and white variant and an outline variant, and they all need to work when printed at any scale. Raster art can’t do that. “Hey, can you plasma cut my company logo out of stainless?” “Send over the file.” “…what the fuck is this?”

Hell just having it in .svg format rather than .ai format is gonna be a problem, because Adobe Illustrator is a proprietary industry standard. But I mean, the rest of society is dying, why shouldn’t graphic arts also have the disease?

If I am elected president, anyone who has ever claimed to be “building a better future for our children” will have their mouths smashed off with a rifle butt.

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.