gronjo45

Hope everyone is having a relaxing Sunday morning/evening.

I wanted to follow up from my previous post, as some of you have indicated interest.

About logistic considerations, I believe 8 weeks is a good time commitment for a hardware project. The goal is to learn more about silicon manufacturing, lower-level computer hardware details such as architecture, circuit design, fundamental condensed matter physics, and digital logic design. Other goals involve understanding firmware systems such as BIOS and the cascade of events that occur from power-on to user operation as well as conceptualizing the small timescales that these events occur on. My intention is not to dictate the philosophy of learning, but bring awareness to details that otherwise would have never been known or to draw a larger picture using the constellation of components that is a modern computing device. We then will delve into HDLs (Hardware description languages) and look specifically at the VHDL (Verilog HDL) for how to design a chip. This is where my understanding of what is out there becomes fuzzy.

We will need a repository to store documents. It is not my intention to use Google Drive. Is there a trusted platform that offers this functionality? I am also curious as to learning a VCS (Version Control System). Git seems to be the choice for this. Maintaining our codebase, resources/references, questions/comments, presentations, notes, and miscellaneous documents in some platform that does not infringe on user privacy. Any ideas in this domain?

Individual development environments are also crucial to a productive hobby/working session. I think it'd be fun to discuss IDEs, TUI environments, barebones software to accomplish simple tasks, CLI navigation, file system implementation, and drive partitioning. Some of you are adept TUI text editor users, which your expertise would be greatly appreciated.

Because this is Lemmy, I assume most of us are interested in FOSS software/hardware. Perhaps there are open source architectures for GPUs, RAM devices, and other fundamental computing units.

Is there a such thing as open source RAM architectures? Is that even the correct question to pose? I see that "OpenRAM" exists for ASIC design. Maybe we can have an ultra-specific computing task that we could optimize all the constituent hardware pieces to perform. Maybe a game engine for a programming project, but where we patchwork the pieces, or at least examine the guts of Godot together. I've found that discussing how one actually READS documentation, can be helpful in becoming more independent during information searching.

Apologies if some parts are still unclear. I'm just happy to see some of you are interested! As per the survey and what you'd like to get out of something like this, or if the idea needs other parts glued together, feel free to suggest them here. Looking forward to your feedback.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36326370

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36326370

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

Hey everyone!

Long time no post… The Cinny client for Matrix no longer functions even after updating, so I have lost access to the chat.

Anyways, I have been thinking a lot lately about the amount of awkward silences I’ve run into with others. It feels like some people are significantly easier to hold a conversation with, as they themselves are invested just as I am in our topics and dialogue. However, it almost feels like the other person is attempting a strange power dynamic with purposeful silences, staring, or otherwise conversations going downhill.

I’m not trying to be overly dramatic or to blame others, I just want to be as pleasant as possible for both the other person and myself. After all, good conversation can be wonderful!

Hoping to start a discussion with this nebulous afterthought and maybe get some ideas going for conversation skills and building social intuition!

Hi everyone, I've always had a special interest in linguistics and have informally studied a couple of different languages from all around the world. The different writing systems such as radicals in Chinese, Kurdish scripts and reading from right to left, to Inuit glyphs are all fascinating in themselves.

The IPA has been something fascinating, but I've yet to find a good resource that I could make sense of and hold my attention long enough to internalize the concepts.

I'm looking for books and authors that have a unique background. For example, seeing Chomsky's name in an automata formal language theory book was weird to think... But all the NLP stuff had foundation in older linguistic theory and ways people thought about the human brain, right?

Language and Information by Zellig Harris is an interesting read. John Sowa is another author I'd recommend for the whole way of ontology and computer systems. The particular book by him that I'm thinking is Conceptual Structures, I believe...? Would love to hear your thoughts, especially with all the AI hardware being released.

Hey everyone,

I've noticed this community is a bit barren. I'd like to add some posts myself but from a more ignorant POV.

It has come to my attention that there is not nearly enough software torture in my life. Hearing how companies are starting to add barriers to so-called "Translation layers" and other software pieces that give functionality to the underlying hardware...

What types of projects does the open source community need to pursue with respect to RISC-V drivers, firmware, or other necessary pieces to somewhat guarantee that the processor is compatible with GPUs, RAM, I/O, and other low level functions that hardware components perform?

Where should I start in my RISC-V journey? Is there a beginner computer or developer kit that I can purchase that won't incinerate my wallet? I don't expect to game or train LLMs off of a RISC-V-based computer, but am curious as to what a fully free hardware setup would consist of.

Love the idea of RISC-V!

Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It's fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I'm curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

Hi Everyone,

I've gotten a lot of older books on mathematics, physics, chemistry, and dabbled a lot in computational simulation with programs like LAMMPS and GROMACS. I am interested in learning how to make a GUI application that I can use to automate graphing functions, understanding how sensitive a model may be to perturbations in particular parameters, and different ways of visualizing data to help me get an "intuition" on subjects. Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib.pyplot, numba, glob, and os, are libraries I like to use. See Gibbs'/Maxwell's original envisionment of thermodynamic surfaces from the late 1800s.

However, I am a moron with respect to software development. My interests are in the FOSS-sphere of things, but I have never made a piece of software other than botched code to calculate averages, perform PCA, and typical statistics visualizations with distributions, Monte Carlo simulations, and see how this effects the properties of the underlying system of study. I've also glanced at design patterns, know the different paradigms of computing to a basic level, and am willing to suffer for long-term educational gains.

The language I'm most comfortable coding in is Python, but I found it discouraging to start writing a software project, as I assume writing something entirely in Python isn't the best way to ship quality software.

Julia and Matlab are other languages I've written programs in. I've tortured myself with the whole gamut of toolchains/editors like Neovim (and my inability to get my lua.init file to ever work properly), and prefer to use FOSS tools. I can navigate in a clunky sense around a terminal, but whenever I try to configure my .bashrc or modify the behavior of my editor, it results in me chasing down a particular filepath for an hour just to change the color of the text, or rearrange how the text is displayed to the terminal so that I actually can read what is saying. Without color-coating, it's hard to distinguish between directories, file extensions, and so forth, and even more frustrating when you can't get the changes to work.

Essentially, I am a confused orangutan given a mallet.

When I ditched Word for LaTeX several years ago, it inspired me to take my FOSS journey one step at a time, rather than what I did a year ago, where I chucked every proprietary tool into the trash.

I need to actually be able to do work, as one would prefer to drive their car, rather than get out every 5 feet to fix another busted part.

I would like to eventually develop software that ends up in the FOSS sphere, and write programs that do not take up 100GB of space, or have 100s of bandaid layers, countless dependencies, and the whole gamut of issues that plague certain software packages.

Libraries that I've looked at are...

1. Tkinter
2. PyQt5
3. Dear PyGui

I don't particularly care about modern esthetics for the interface. All I care is that the program functions, uses a relatively low amount of resources, and can educate me further about how to rip open a widget, modify the code associated with that particular button, and get a greater control of visualizing concepts taught in math/physics books.

Thank you!

Hey everyone, I've been parsing through the Huggingface website and am having a bit of trouble picking out an LLM inference to help me parse through legal documents. I am not a lawyer, but I would like to understand my rights and how to search for answers to legal questions with concrete answers using an inference.

I have heard a multitude of things around Llama being a privacy nightmare and something about Gerganov ML files? GGMU is also a nebulous term to me and I understand the basics about how a model is trained and validated, but not how to pick one for personal use that isn't GPT-4.

Any suggestions or things to add on to the discussion?

After chatting with some of you on this forum and seeing that we all are on Lemmy rather than Reddit, I think it would be a good idea for us to have some study groups to improve our technological literacy and competency.

During my time on Lemmy, I've been able to increase my digital literacy and overall knowledge surrounding my system. I've loved the nearly endless rabbit holes Wikipedia has pulled me into, as well as the resulting happiness that comes from finally fixing a broken Linux system or piece of technology.

But what exactly does technological literacy encompass, one might ask? I'd like to illustrate via anecdote. When I first got into Linux, I was told to "Get a terminal emulator to SSH into the HPC so that you can run computational jobs". To most of you this sentence is completely normal, but to my unconditioned mind, I felt like a big bright light was flashed before my eyes while my PI spoke martian to me. After the initial disorientation, I downloaded what I thought was my only option for a terminal emulator (MobaXTerm), and found myself sitting in front of a pitch black terminal screen with a blinking prompt. Not knowing what a host was, how to manage a network, any Linux commands (coreutil, never heard of her...), or really do anything past opening up WoW and Google Docs. The only things more advanced than the plug and play Google/Microsoft software solutions I'd use, was my botched LaTeX setup. I used it to typeset math equations for my students, homework, and lab reports from how much faster I could type in the TeX format than click on every Greek letter/symbol I needed. Overall, it really messed with my ability to do the research I was tasked to do. I was supposed to learn how to use Vim as my IDE when the only IDE I had ever worked in was Spyder from Anaconda! VSCodium, CodeBlocks, Emacs, etc, I did not know that any of these existed.

Needless to say, this was extremely discouraging to be thrown head first into a difficult scenario with very little assistance whilst trying to juggle coursework and outside responsibilities. Humble beginnings reinforced in me that if I experimented with my computer and messed up on the OS side, that I'd brick my hardware and have some variation of Homer Simpson holding up the "So you Broke the Family Computer" book.

I'm sure that we all come from varying origins of computer literacy, which IthinkI've proposed a couple of possible areas of study, that we could set up in small or large groups depending on interest. The frequency, literature references (textbooks, white papers, blogs, forums, etc.), and the project goal (could be concrete or abstract) should be drawn up and worked towards to keep the topic focused. I've come up with a couple of fields for us to start with, feel free to add to the list or modify what I've written.

1. Cryptography with a rigorous mathematical foundation applied to both classical and quantum computing paradigms (AES, RSA, Hash functions deeper than just the surface, information theory (We love our boy Claude Shannon), Cryptographic primitives, Shor's Algorithm, etc.)
2. A hardware agnostic study of firmware (What are some unifying principles about firmware that can empower the user to understand why certain aspects of the device are not functioning)
3. Hardware architectures (GPU, NPU, TPU, CPU, RAM, DIMM)
4. Form factors (How geometry can impose certain design decisions, and so forth
5. Fundamentals from First Principles, i.e condensed matter physics theories to understand the classical computing systems. The group can also choose to segwey into topological states of matter (Dirac fermions, Weyl semimetals, Mott insulators, and a myriad of other cool matter states that aren't really discussed outside of physics / graduate engineering classes) Qubits (Bloch sphere representations) and loads of other things that I'm sure exist but am unaware of.
6. LLM Inference technology and how it can be applied to case law, accounting, stocks, and various other fields where the solution to the problem lay somewhere in an encoded technical language.

I'd like to begin the discussion with this as our starting framework, does anyone have any interest in the topics listed above or suggestions for other subjects? How should we manage these groups? Should we add some chats to the Matrix instance?

Hey everyone, I've been using an Arch system for the past 2 months and I've had an absolute ball learning more granular details about my hardware. Never in my life did I think I'd be looking at kernel modules and contemplating swapping out init systems and trying different kernels.

I write this post somewhat open-endesd because I'm clueless as to where Gentoo can take me in terms of hardware acceleration and help me learn development of software/firmware deeper. To my understanding, everything must be compiled from source code, which I'd like to learn more about as well. Ive dipped my toe in a myriad of programming languages too and found a more terminals focused work flow was ideal.

My major use cases for my computer are to benchmark hardware and pick more features in software that I'd have to compile from source anyways. I do work in molecular dynamics from time to time and have used software distributions like GROMACS and LAMMPS. Any advice that could be wouldbbe greatly appreciated. The thoroughness in the Gentoo Wiki's documentation is amazing, but its a overwhelming lol

My foundation is a little like swiss cheese though. Don't know what I don't know! Looking forward to becoming a part of the Gentoo community. I'd love to develop software like DWSIM someday.