This is great! And thanks for the link to stuff about Lenia - that was new to me and looks freaking awesome. Next programming side project for sure.

I’ve also been meaning to properly get into using Shadertoy, and I think this was a great introduction through an interesting use case.

Physical anti-tamper, while important for this type of device, wouldn’t have helped for this particular attack. It’s an electromagnetic side channel, so they don’t even have to be touching the the thing to collect data.

That’s probably a typo. From the site:

Currently, the usable performance envelope is approximately 150 bits per second to 40 megabits per second

I’ve been playing the new Solium Infernum with a friend - the first playthrough I did not particularly enjoy (partially my fault for not playing the tutorial first) but once I learned the mechanics my second game was more fun. The UI is not very smooth to use and there are some mechanics I don’t like, but overall pretty good.

I also picked up Mindustry again last night - it’s an open source Factorio + Tower Defense + RTS that is rather addicting… The new campaign they added a couple years ago is better than the original too.

Low-Tech Magazine shows up on here occasionally, I’ve enjoyed their articles.

I’d also recommend Kris Harbour Natural Building on YouTube.

Balor from Irish legend - who doesn’t love a giant with a frickin laser beam for an eye

Here’s a critique of another anti-degrowth Jacobin article, and the stance Jacobin seems to take on degrowth in general - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-04/a-response-to-daniel-driscoll-another-slice-of-degrowth-bashing/

The crux of the argument is

• Planetary boundaries are hard boundaries, so the economy can’t go on growing no matter what. We can either plan this ourselves or be faced with climate disasters planning it for us.
• Degrowth is not “everyone gets less” - no one will disagree with the goal of lifting the global south out of poverty. It means diverting the unnecessary consumption (and carbon budget) of the most wealthy people in the global north to help those who actually need the economic growth.

Now that the roads aren’t icy anymore I’m trying to bike to work more often. Did the trip in the rain for the first time today, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be!

Which launcher are you planning to use?

Small scale, but I just got a compost bin! My muicipality was selling them for pretty cheap, I’d recommend everyone check if your town has any similar programs

There is still a quantum attack against symmetric key crypto like AES, but it just reduces the effective key size by half. If you use long enough keys (256 bits) you’re still fine.

VCV rack is awesome, if not the easiest to start from scratch with. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a virtual modular analog synthesizer. You can build your own sound generating machines out of a huge selection of modules, including oscillators, filters, sequencers, etc. Some of the modules are based on real hardware modules that you can buy, but there’s a huge variety.

It’s fun to play around with, but if you’re new to modular synthesis then I recommend limiting your module selection to just the built-in ones to start because the full selection is pretty overwhelming if you don’t know a VFO from an ADSR evelope generator.

Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support

Lemon balm is my favorite!

Syncthing is a great way to sync an obsidian vault - not that hard to set up and requires almost zero maintenance. If you’ve got an iphone you might look into Nextcloud instead. For that matter, set up a Nextcloud server regardless! It’s your own personal Google drive plus calendar and contact syncing.

Pycharm debugger has been great for me recently, I love the feature where you can drop into an ipython repl and interact with your program state.

I really like this statement I heard recently, which I think came from the YouTube Adventurous Way - “Dumb Control, Smart Monitoring”. Make sure that any devices you install have failure models that make sense - you should still be able to control your appliances when the network is down.

That said, the option to remotely control lights, etc is fantastic. I also recommend setting up some temperature sensors in various places - I have quite a few ESP33 boards scattered around with sensors (and and one with an IR blaster) attached.

(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the [-] icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.