BC TECH
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

does bubble memory count as solid state?
I guess? I mean, it has no moving parts. but it requires preheating and involves movement of magnetic fields across a surface...

 it's kinda like a traditional hard drive where you don't spin the disc, you just trick all the bits to migrate off the edge
who called it "bubble memory" and not "lemming bits"
(obligatory "lemmings don't throw themselves off cliffs, that's an urban legend")
(obligatory "the idea that disney invented that urban legend it itself an urban legend, they just helped popularize it")
@quartizine has the good point that it's not just about movement. Vacuum tubes aren't solid state!
https://t.co/VG3XdoQ6OZ
in any case, that still probably means bubble memory is solid state.
It has to warm up, yes, but it doesn't melt. The crystal remains solid, and only the magnetic fields move.
interesting this sort of solid-vs-gaseous/liquid distinction means that for optical discs (which aren't normally solid state, because they spin) could conceivably be made solid state... EXCEPT for CD-R/CD-RWs when you're burning them.
because CD-Rs involve a (very brief) one-way state transition from solid->gas->solid, and similarly CD-RWs are solid->liquid->solid every time you write them.
and by "could be made solid state", there's no actual reason WHY a CD-ROM has to spin. It just means you don't need as complicated a laser arrangement
because if you think about how an optical disc works, it's really a 2D surface: you've got the in/out axis (towards the spindle hole or towards the edge) and the around-the-disc axis
and the laser head in your CD-ROM drive has a stepper motor or voice coil that's used to move the laser on the in/out axis.
The other axis is managed by spinning the disc, and waiting for it to rotate around.
but you could totally build a CD-ROM drive that works more like a plotter or 3D printer: you could move the head in two dimensions, and not have to spin the disc.
why would you do this?

there's really not any reason.
although the Lasercard format works this way.
https://t.co/JlCPyOXXzL
I've not opened up my lasercard drive (I was kinda hoping to find some media for it...) but I think it doesn't fully move the head. it's mostly a moving-mirror system.
although that brings up another point worth arguing about for a medium:
does it count as solid state if doesn't move while in use, but it's connected to things that do?
although if you want to get relativity-absurdist with that, you could then argue that, because there are no special reference frames, that technically traditional hard drives don't spin.
they're immobile, and the universe spins around them?
although now t hat I'm thinking about it I'm not sure rotating reference frames count as "normal", because you can feel forces from the rotation that wouldn't be the same if it was the rest of the universe spinning around you
it's too 6am for this physics bullshit
ANYWAY I think the point out vacuum tubes made me realize something:

solid state discs aren't "solid state" because they're not moving. not moving has nothing to do with if they're solid state or not
solid state disks are solid state because they use solid state electronics, and traditional spinning-rust media does not.
"solid state electronics", as a term, was coined to distinguish semiconductor electronics from vacuum tube electronics.
vacuum tubes use a (near) vacuum and a gas of particles/electrons/ions moving within it.
whereas solid state electronics use a semiconductor, which is a solid crystal. It's just currents being controlled by currents within the solid piece of silicon or germanium or whatever.
so "solid state" refers to things like transistors and diodes and integrated circuits.
and what are SSDs made out of?
integrated circuits. all the flash memory stuff happens inside a die of silicon.
whereas traditional discs are a bit circle of rust spinning around with magnetic fields on it, with a little electromagnet on an arm that moves around it to read off or write magnetic domains
which is a lot of things, but it's not transistors, diodes, or integrated circuits. So it's not "solid state" in the same way an orange isn't solid state: it's not made of remotely the same things.
so I think the answer to "is bubble memory solid state?" is both "yes" and "no".
it's "yes" in the sense of: the state of the memory storage medium is solid, and is always solid. at no point is it liquid or gas.
it's "no" in the sense of: when we say "solid state", we mean "solid state electronics", which it isn't.
It's a chunk of garnet, not anything semiconductory
btw, this also means that core memory isn't solid state either, since it's similarly electromagnety, even though nothing is moving.
so I'd argue that you could say it's something like "solid phase memory" but "solid state" has a pre-determined meaning in electronics and applying it to things that aren't made of "solid state electronics" is confusing and incorrect.
ANYWAY this reminds me of something I was talking to @gewt about the other day:
I want to make a rotating solid state disk.
the obvious way to do this is slip rings. I did a whole thread on these:
https://t.co/aVU1sri57P
but I think SATA might be too fragile and complicated to easily put through a slip ring, so I think I'm gonna go for USB.
basically take an SSD, a SATA2USB adapter, and then get a USB slip ring (I think Moog (not that one) sells off-the-shelf ones!) and a motor.
you see?

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.


Though this picture is a bit misleading.

Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.

So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.

In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.


And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF


And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?

about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"


I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL
CULTURE
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foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
FUN
foone
foone
@Foone
maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with


when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay


I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets


that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM


huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway

elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN

bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)

zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!
FOR LATER READ

More from Tech

ashkan soltani
ashkan soltani
@ashk4n
BREAKING: @CommonsCMS @DamianCollins just released previously sealed #Six4Three @Facebook documents:

Some random interesting tidbits:

1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition


2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:

Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.


3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.

4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.

https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.


When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

When this bug was developed, Wheel of Fortune hadn't yet aired. No one had seen Rocky Horror. Steven Spielberg was still a little-known directory of TV films and one box-office disappointment. SNL hadn't aired yet. The Edmund Fitzgerald was still hauling iron ore.

WHEN THIS STUPID MISFEATURE WAS INVENTED, THE GODFATHER PART II HAD JUST OPENED IN THEATERS.

So, why does this happen? So Unix (which was only 5 years old at this point) had the good idea of "everything is a file" which mean you could do things like write to sockets, pipes, the console, etc with the same commands and instructions.
TECH
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
TECH
Santiago
Santiago
@svpino
Here is a simple example of a machine learning model.

I put it together a long time ago, and it was very helpful! I sliced it apart a thousand times until things started to make sense.

It's TensorFlow and Keras.

If you are starting out, this may be a good puzzle to solve.


The goal of this model is to learn to multiply one-digit
TECH
sumitgarg.eth
sumitgarg.eth
@sumitupgarg
I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)


First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?
STARTUP , TECH

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Melissa (she/her)
Melissa (she/her)
@LiteraryMouse
In regards to the #CapitolCoup, I’m in a unique position. I monitored forums ahead of time and then was present for the coup itself.

These are my observations based on what I saw and the evidence that’s been collected so far. I reserve the right to adjust my analysis as needed.

Let’s talk about the organization of the coup first. Seeing some people insist that the coup must have been highly planned and coordinated.

Yes and no. This was a #StochasticCoup. We’ll see little evidence of direct communication between Trump and the insurrectionists.

Within the insurrectionists, there was not one group that executed the storming of the Capitol.

Rather, there were a number of smaller groups working independently towards the same goal. I expect you’ll see little evidence that these various groups communicated with each other.

What you will see is detailed planning and coordination within these small groups.

Then there were the joyriders, those Trump supporters who weren’t directly involved in any plotting but who were more than happy to go along for the ride once the coup was in motion.

After four years, the insurrectionists were carefully attuned to Trump’s messaging.

Every tweet and statement of his was treated as marching orders and carefully dissected for meaning.

It’s why shutting down Trump’s Twitter account was so important.
POLITICS , INSURRECTIONISTS
Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Srikanteshwara Temple,
#Nanjangud  #Karnatakatemples 🚩

Srikanteshwara Temple or
Nanjundeshwara Temple is a famous Shiva Temple located in Karnataka at the bank of river  Kapila. Temple is also called Varanasi of South. Nanjunda means one who has consumed poison.


Story is  related to the Samudra Mathanam when Paramashiva had to consume halahala.

Parashurama worshipped Mahadeva here to relieve himself from the curse of Mathru Hatya. While clearing the place to do poojas Parashurama's  axe hit the Shivalingam and it began bleeding, that


mark is still visible even today. Thus
it is also believed that Parashurama did Shiva Prathishta here

Sthala Puranam says that, once there was a demon named Keshi who disturbed the people in the area, after  getting blessing from Brahma Deva  and Mahavishnu. Mahadeva appeared


here and killed demon Keshi and blessed this place as Papa Vinashini. Whoever praying to Srikanteshwara or Nanjundeshwara, after bathing in the  Kabini River will be relieved from all sins.

Nanjundeshwaraya Namah
🙏🕉🙏
ALL
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Meet Shah
Meet Shah
@ms89_meet
Strong Monopolies:

IRCTC 100% Market share in Rail Network.

IEX >90% market share in power trading.

Zydus wellness >90% market share in sugar free product.

Eicher motors >85% market share in 250cc bikes category.

MCX >85% market share in commodity trading.

Coal India >80% market share in coal production in India.

ITC >75% market share in cigarettes.

Honda Siel >75% in portable power generators.

Hindustan Zinc >75% market share in primary zinc industry.

Asahi India Glass >70% market share in automotive glass.

NRB Bearings >70% market share in needle roller bearings.

Pidilite >65% market share in adhesives.

CAMS >65% market share in RTA within mutual fund industry.

Time Technoplast >65% market share in polymer based industrial packaging.

Concor >65% market share in domestic container cargo transport.

Exide >60% market share in lead batteries.

Naukri >60% market share in the Indian job market space.

Praj >60% market share in ethanol plant installing.

Indiamart Intermesh >55% market share in the online B2B Classified space.

Borosil Renewables >55% market share in Lab glass.

Vst Tillers >50% market share in
Power tillers.

Delta corp >50% in online poker games.

Vinati Organics >50% market share in IBB.
GENERICLEARNINGS , GENERAL TWEER , INTRESTING TOPIC
\u0932\u0916\u094b\u092c\u093e \u0932\u094b\u0916\u0902\u0921\u0947
लखोबा लोखंडे...
@LakhobaLokhande
Secrets of Ganapati (Author - Keshav Sitaram Thackeray)

This article is taken from Keshav Sitaram Thackeray's book 'Dharmachi Devale and Devalcha Dharma'. In it, Bal Thackeray's father is claiming how the Hindu deity of Ganesha is imaginary.
(1/20)

Buddha is Ashtavinayak and "Ganapati Bappa Morya" is "Chandragupta Morya".

In the era of democracy, the head of state is the President. But in ancient India, there was a Gana culture in the monarchy and the head of that Gana was called Ganapati
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In ancient India, a prince named Siddharth Gautam was born in royalty. He later became the king of Shakya Gana in this Gana culture. In time, Siddhartha attained enlightenment.

Let us now understand the difference between a real Ganapati and an imaginary Ganapati.
(3/20)

Some clever Brahmin manuvadis made the real Ganapati the imaginary Ganapati.

Buddha was the king of the Shakya Gana, so people called him Ganaraja. He founded Buddhism and became the head of the Shakyas. As the head of Gana, people used to call Buddha as Ganapati.
(4/20)

But the Brahmins Brahmanized Ganapati and created a false Ganapati. When Buddha used to give the message of Dharma to the people, two words would come out of his message. Chitta and Malla.

Chitta is the body.
Malla means waste
(5/20)
INDIA
Ferruccio Balestreri \U0001f308
Ferruccio Balestreri 🌈...
@0xferruccio
🕵️‍♂️ How Google's PageRank algorithm works

The PageRank algorithm gives each page a rating of its
importance, which is a recursively defined measure of importance, based on if important pages link to it.
It's recursive because the importance of a page refers back to the importance of other pages that link to it

Here's how it works in practice:
1⃣ We start with some pages and crawl them for links


2⃣ Each page has 1/N points (where N as the total number of pages)


3⃣ Add points to each page for the amount of links to it, divided by the number
of links emanating from the sources of these links
TECH