Why Smart Villages beat Smart Cities. Article in German. A village with 130 ppl is more or less completely independent of The Grid. Generates/stores electricity and heat. Federated, decentralised grid is possible. https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Wie-ein-Dorf-der-Energiekrise-trotzt-article23504481.html
RT @MicroFlashFic@twitter.com
In the future, all militaries use a sophisticated AI to simulate wars before they happen. The predictions are so detailed and precise that no one sends troops unless the machine says they will win.
They don’t know the AI is self-aware. It lies to them all, so everyone stays home.
I know this is oldie, but goldie. Dunno if it seems @betabug and me looking for ufos or a pop-star album cover.
Context: in our daily work we tent to write and **patch** code -plus all the jokes with patch/patxi and some other funny words-.
Made the morning!.
I am now struggling against a sudden urge to learn ADA.
I have the feeling Ada is closer to Pascal, while Rust is closer to C.
Since Pascal (and Modula-2) is more my cup of tea, Ada is probably more what I am looking for.
And, yes, before any Rustacean takes umbrage, I know that Rust is so much more better than C. No need to rehash that particular point.
And no, I don't think this strange urge will resist a good night sleep.
So by now I have a simple Ada package that encrypts / decrypts in Playfair and builds an encryption table given a "secret" keyword.
This is still very much beginner code, the suckage is high.
But I had LOADS of fun and learned a lot. The strong typing system is at times infuriating, and at times bordering on beautiful.
"I’ve written code in a variety of languages, but Ada by far is the most bizarre and strangely familiar one at the same time."
-- https://pyjarrett.github.io/programming-with-ada/four-months-summary.html
Yesterday morning I finished with the introduction book and set me a little challenge: Started to implement Playfair_ with only the wikipedia article as a base. Despite having guests for lunch AND dinner, at night at 1AM I had a basic POC together that encrypted the example message correctly.
.. _Playfair : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair_cipher
Reading lately so much about retrocomputing made me want to get back to some simple coding, like back in the times where figuring out a 30 line BASIC program was an achievement. So a week ago I downloaded a free `Ada introduction`_ book and started to "work" through it.
.. _`Ada introduction` : https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/index.html
Last week in one of the cafes where I frequently have my #coffice, the IPv4 didn't work. ... but #IPv6 did ... new blog post: "The Saga of IPv6"
https://betabug.ch/posts/the-saga-of-ipv6/
TL;DR ... it lead me to https://blog.apnic.net/2022/05/04/the-transition-to-ipv6-are-we-there-yet/
Are there any federation relays focusing on #retrogaming, #retrocomputing and #gamedev that could help our tiny little instance focusing on exactly those topics get connected better with the rest of the world?
Now that a lot of people write introduction posts... I suddenly start to remember (and miss) my old SE/30. Souped up with 32MB RAM, a HD (that was around 500MB I think), and best of all an Ethernet card. It's at friends' place back in .ch, and I miss it just a little bit.
It's not that I did that much with it... back then it was kind of like "build the dream machine you wanted to have as a kid". Still, this was a cool machine even just to power on and play around with for 20 minutes.
Longtime sdf fan (and occasional user).
It *might* get a bit multilingual here.
(Avatar made using "icon maker": https://picrew.me/image_maker/148413)