hot metal oxide @cda@m.hzrd.us
- horrorbird
- https://twitter.com/cdaylward
sensor networks, embedded systems, space engineering. he/him. CS/EE. Will mentor freely via DMs. Center for Advancing Chronotype Awareness. Unresolved marching band issues.
Spent two hours or more trying to update a vendor's long running unholy Linux kernel fork before realizing it was quicker and simpler to take mainline and patch in the vendor files from the unholy fork. Why are vendors like this? [sigh]
Started on a board layout today. Last board was this multi-rail power supply in... January? Jeeez.
Oh right, I can just change the way mastodon looks. There are like a billion mastodon css classes though so this will take some time.
I have just discovered https://uazu.github.io/stakker/about.html, an Actor implementation for #Rust. While there are very many of such, Stakker is *exactly* what I've been looking for and I'm very excited.
BTW, if you love #Rust and OoO microprocessor implementation, come work with me Esperanto, post haste! We have full time positions. Reach out for more details, full discretion guaranteed. Please let me know how to reach the right audience.
Alright, I guess I need to get off my dusty rusty and figure out the best way to get raw RGB video frame data out of a hardware mpeg decoder in Linux...
3) Without the interconnects, the neurons could be arbitrarily located, say, outside a skull, distributed around a lab. Something is still having a conscious experience are they not?
Kicker:
4) If 4 is true, then the state being replayed by a computer falls under the same deduction does it not? Cannot it be said that the conscious experience is occuring in two places?
Know:
I) We can record and playback neuronal activity in mice and show they behave as if reliving the recorded experience (overwrite activations)
Imagine:
1) Do the same on a human, recording all state (say 10 minutes), replaying it. A lived experience.
2) Remove the connections between neurons (you are overwriting the activation anyway) and do the replay. This should still be a conscious experience.
Been thinking on this thought experiment a bit recently:
Assume:
A) whatever consciousness is occurs in the matter in your skull
B) consciousness is emergent from the state of neurons and their transitions (even if we don't understand the neuron types or "map")
C) "substrate independence": consciousness is memory and computation regardless of whether it is occuring in silicon or meat.
Okay, it's time to tell new users a secret about Mastodon.
Mastodon is (whispers) part of a much bigger network 😮
Mastodon servers use an open standard called ActivityPub to talk to each other. That's how you interact with people on other Mastodon servers.
But, dozens of other federated networks also use ActivityPub, so (this is the good bit!) you can follow people on these other networks from your Mastodon account!
For example:
PixelFed (https://pixelfed.org) is a photo sharing network, here's a random example account @Iancylkowski
PeerTube (https://joinpeertube.org) is a video sharing network, with a p2p system that allows videos to go viral even on small servers, here's a random account @craftykat
BookWyrm (https://joinbookwyrm.com) is a social reading site, an open alternative to Amazon's Goodreads, here's a random account @mouse
Together, Mastodon and these other services form... The Fediverse 
(whispers) Click on the link...
https://framatube.org/w/4294a720-f263-4ea4-9392-cf9cea4d5277
I've started poking at a SMPS-the-hard-way project. Fully custom controller gateware. So far have: spread-spectrum PWM, zero-cross / sync. rectification, H/L gate control with min-deadtime / shoot-through protection, sigma-delta feedback. Will run it on a completely overkill FPGA because that's what I can get with the supply issues.
I design software and hardware systems. I've worked on orbital launch vehicles and satellites. I can talk about "space stuff" all day. I design sub-sea ROV systems for fun.
One day hacking on gateware, the next a byte-code interpreter, the next a PCB, the next a Linux kernel driver, etc. I wrote game engines for a time.
I'm recurrently obsessed with artificial general intelligence (Goertzel-like formulations), artificial life, computational behavior (not ML).
...at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then...
- horrorbird
- https://twitter.com/cdaylward
sensor networks, embedded systems, space engineering. he/him. CS/EE. Will mentor freely via DMs. Center for Advancing Chronotype Awareness. Unresolved marching band issues.
