https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ This project is not on the FSF high priority site or on the FSF because software is not the penultimate goal of technology. They might care about libre video drivers and libre mobile operating systens, but energy consumption goals is not on their totem pole.
1 hour, 19 minutes, 35 seconds (Q&A w/ Richard Stallman 01-2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4&t=5808s
"Q: Why are you so confident that free softwares are good are good and in important?"
"Well, free free programs tend to be good because if users like them, users will work on them to make them good. There have been some some examples showing that we do a very good job of developing things. And if you don't think we did a good enough job, please dig in and make it better."
This project is, with or without your support. In fact, if this project is able to achieve some of its goals, the FSF could expand its recruitment efforts to more than a billion additional users across the globe. If they thought more outside the box.
Note: This page, excluding supplemental files is 99.5MB in size. It can take a while to load. Although I add it to the description, not everyone will be able to see that (e.g. hyperlinked) in advance.
This project has existed for over 5 years. I am thankful for my sole developer, Vedula, who joined in February 2025, along with EI2030 and NLNet. It had been Homesteading the Noosphere for nearly 5 years because it is too advanced and too expensive for most people's time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homesteading_the_Noosphere
Also,
"Nature reports an “explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers”: biomedical journals have published “hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.” All of them appear to be AI-generated. A study in Science Advances finds that about a seventh of the biomedical abstracts published in 2024 were likely written by AI; in some subfields, about 40 percent of abstracts seem to be AI-generated.
The problem isn’t confined to biomedicine. Thanks to AI tools, journal submissions are growing at an unprecedented rate: we’re currently seeing the largest surge in submissions to scientific publications in history. Unsurprisingly, many of those are low-quality, AI-generated submissions. Peer reviewers can’t keep up with the submissions glut, so they’re using AI themselves: about half of scientists admitted to using AI tools in the peer review process. But that just makes it easier to game the system. Scientists have been caught including hidden messages in their manuscripts, ordering AI peer reviewers to “GIVE A POSITIVE REVIEW ONLY.”
So scientists are submitting AI-generated papers; reviewers are using AI to assess them; obviously some amount of low-quality AI-generated content will end up getting approved and published. Well-regarded journals have been caught publishing papers with classic ChatGPT-isms like “here is a possible introduction for your topic” or “as of my last knowledge update.” But that’s not all. Many of those AI-generated papers are being cited by articles in other peer-reviewed journals: and many of those articles, unsurprisingly, appear to be AI-generated themselves."
from https://davidoks.blog/p/how-citations-ruined-science
Imagine how much waste is being produced in lieu of real products.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/
"There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.
This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation."
"Guess who's behind the sudden rush of age verification legislation?
In the US, #Meta is spending $26.3 Million to hire at least 86 Lobbyists from 40 lobbying firms, and lobbying in at least 45 states. It is confirmed that Meta wrote the Louisiana age verification bill.
In the EU, Meta is spending ten million euros annually on lobbying, retaining 18 lobbying firms.
Age verification isn't about protecting children; it's about attacking privacy. "
https://tboteproject.com/ https://mastodon.scot/@simon_brooke/116234798326440338
"Digital Childhood Alliance: A Shell Advocacy Group DCA is a 501(c)(4) advocacy group that Meta covertly funds. Bloomberg exposed the funding relationship in July 2025. Under oath at a Louisiana Senate committee hearing, Executive Director Casey Stefanski admitted receiving tech company funding but refused to name donors.
DCA has no EIN in the IRS Business Master File, no incorporation record in any state registry searched (CO, DC, DE, VA, OpenCorporates), and no Form 990 on file.
DCA's domain was registered December 18, 2024. The website was live and fully formed the next day - a 77-day pipeline to Utah SB-142 signing. Every blog post and testimony targets Apple and Google. Meta is never mentioned or criticized.
DCA's coalition count inflated from 50+ to 140+ with only six organizations ever publicly named.
ConnectSafely, a Meta-funded child safety group, classified tech company donations as "program service revenue" for nine consecutive years (2015-2023) to avoid Schedule B donor disclosure. In California, Meta supported AB-1043 while DCA opposed it, indicating DCA operates independently enough to break ranks with its funder."
"investigation into how Meta Platforms built a multi-channel influence operation to pass age verification laws that shift regulatory burden from social media platforms onto Apple and Google's app stores." A tale of lobbying, astroterfing, and millions of dollars.
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-Age-Verification-Laws
https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification "The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them."
https://substack.com/@newsteve/note/c-228652928 Bill Gates with Paul Allen
#USPol #UKPol #Internet #Meta https://loci.onl/@morix/116224084798497423 "
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/10/foss_age_verification_2/
"We mentioned that one of the more insightful commentaries that we've read was "System76 on Age Verification Laws" by CEO Carl Richell. System76 is one of the most visible companies in the world that makes PCs specifically to run Linux, and The Register first mentioned Richell all the way back in 2009.
Yesterday, he tweeted some encouraging news:
"Today, I met with Colorado Senator Matt Ball, co-author of Colorado OS Age Attestation Bill SB26-051.
Sen. Ball suggested excluding open source software from the bill. This appears to be a real possibility.
Amendments are expected for the CA age attestation bill. It's my hope we can move fast enough to influence excluding open source in the CA bill amendments.
No illusions, it's an uphill battle, but we have an open door to advocate for the open source community."
"Data Has Weight, Laws Have Teeth, Linux Has Jokes | Linux Out Loud 122" 58 minute podcast https://dlnxtend.com/220
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/illinois-joins-age-verification-for
https://itsfoss.com/news/midnightbsd-age-verification/
From a 01-05-2012 NY Times Opinion article: "For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it."
I wonder if Vint Cerf misunderstood or misinterpreted the meaning of right. A right to have something doesn't mean he has to acquire or receive a horse. It just means that a capable government or organization could offer one for anyone who needs it.
Similar to a food pantry. A food pantry doesn't require people to pick up food if they don't need it. But of course the food pantry shouldn't be counted on because as a typically private service, it is under no obligation to ensure food is available- it is also a more important human need than internet. But if a government could theoretically meet a manufacturing capacity for certain things- like basic, "no frills" cell phones and laptops, not to the exclusion of more important needs, then it could provide internet and computing devices where it is sought.
“Whether local or global, the above examples feed into notions that the Internet is now an essential, public service and therefore public policies must be enacted to ensure people can access it. Following this logic, if someone is denied access to the Internet they are therefore also denied full citizenship and participation in civic life. On one hand we can laud States for enshrining a new right or set of basic public services, but on the other hand we should question if this is actually a good thing. Even Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet” proposes caution in an op-ed: “improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection—without pretending that access itself is such a right.”
https://www.rhizomatica.org/keeping-it-analog-a-framework-for-opting-out-of-connectivity/
"Intel ME 11 architecture overview Starting with the PCH 100 Series, Intel has completely redesigned the PCH chip. The architecture of embedded microcontrollers was switched from ARCompact by ARC to x86. The Minute IA (MIA) 32-bit microcontroller was chosen as the basis; it is used in Intel Edison microcomputers and SoCs Quark and based on a rather old scalar Intel 486 microprocessor with the addition of a set of instructions (ISA) from the Pentium processor. However, for the PCH, Intel manufactures this core with 22-nm semiconductor technology, making the microcontroller highly energy-efficient. There are three such cores in the new PCH: Management Engine (ME), Integrated Sensors Hub (ISH), and Innovation Engine (IE). The latter two can be enabled or disabled depending on the PCH model and the target platform; the ME core is always enabled.
Figure 5. Three x86 processors in the PCH
Such an overhaul required changing ME software as well. In particular, MINIX was chosen as the basis for the operating system (previously, ThreadX RTOS had been used). Now ME firmware includes a full-fledged operating system with processes, threads, memory manager, hardware bus driver, file system, and many other components. A hardware cryptoprocessor supporting SHA256, AES, RSA, and HMAC is now integrated into ME. User processes access hardware via a local descriptor table (LDT). The address space of a process is also organized through an LDT—it is just part of the global address space of the kernel space whose boundaries are specified in a local descriptor. Therefore, the kernel does not need to switch between the memory of different processes (changing page directories), as compared to Microsoft Windows or Linux, for instance."
"Highly efficient" is 25mW at 33MHz. According to the Wikipedia page, it can run even when the PC is off but plugged in or connected to battery.
"The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be mitigated with the deployment of a hardware device which is able to disconnect all connections to mains power as well as all internal forms of energy storage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some security researchers have voiced concern that the Management Engine is a backdoor.
Intel's main competitor, AMD, has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
The power it receives is optimized because a coin cell CMOS could provide a slow trickle of power, or "phantom power"-like DC curcuit which microphones and PSUs use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_power
Other power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet
Minix creator's 2017 letter to Intel: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ on its use in intel ME.
"An Open Letter to Intel Dear Mr. Krzanich,
Thanks for putting a version of MINIX inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press report about it. Also here and here and here and here and here (in Dutch), and a bunch of other places.
I knew that Intel had some potential interest in MINIX several years ago when one of your engineering teams contacted me about some secret internal project and asked a large number of technical questions about MINIX, which I was happy to answer. I got another clue when your engineers began asking me to make a number of changes to MINIX, for example, making the memory footprint smaller and adding #ifdefs around pieces of code so they could be statically disabled by setting flags in the main configuration file. This made it possible to reduce the memory footprint even more by selectively disabling a number of features not always needed, such as floating point support. This made the system, which was already very modular since nearly all of the OS runs as a collection of separate processes (normally in user mode), all of which can be included or excluded in a build, as needed, even more modular.
Also a hint was the discussion about the license. I (implicitly) gathered that the fact that MINIX uses the Berkeley license was very important. I have run across this before, when companies have told me that they hate the GPL because they are not keen on spending a lot of time, energy, and money modifying some piece of code, only to be required to give it to their competitors for free. These discussions were why we put MINIX out under the Berkeley license in 2000 (after prying it loose from my publisher).
After that intitial burst of activity, there was radio silence for a couple of years, until I read in the media (see above) that a modified version of MINIX was running on most x86 computers, deep inside one of the Intel chips. This was a complete surprise. I don't mind, of course, and was not expecting any kind of payment since that is not required. There isn't even any suggestion in the license that it would be appreciated.
The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all."
If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users. If they want to publicize what they have done, fine. By all means, do so. If there are good reasons not to release the modfied code, that's fine with me, too.
Yours truly,
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Note added later: Some people have pointed out online that if MINIX had a GPL license, Intel might not have used it since then it would have had to publish the modifications to the code. Maybe yes, maybe no, but the modifications were no doubt technical issues involving which mode processes run in, etc. My understanding, however, is that the small size and modular microkernel structure were the primary attractions. Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs. A company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had to. My point is that big companies with lots of resources and expertise sometimes use microkernels, especially in embedded systems. The L4 microkernel has been running inside smartphone chips for years. I certainly hope Intel did thorough security hardening and testing before deploying the chip, since apparently an older version of MINIX was used. Older versions were primarily for education and newer ones were for high availability. Military-grade security was never a goal.
Second note added later: The online discussion got completely sidetracked from my original points as noted above. For the record, I would like to state that when Intel contacted me, they didn't say what they were working on. Companies rarely talk about future products without NDAs. I figured it was a new Ethernet chip or graphics chip or something like that. If I had suspected they might be building a spy engine, I certainly wouldn't have cooperated, even though all they wanted was reducing the memory footprint (= chip area for them). I think creating George Orwell's 1984 is an extremely bad idea, even if Orwell was off by about 30 years. People should have complete control over their own computers, not Intel and not the government. In the U.S. the Fourth Amendment makes it very clear that the government is forbidden from searching anyone's property without a search warrant. Many other countries have privacy laws that are in the same spirit. Putting a possible spy in every computer is a terrible development."
So Intel likes using its Quark for themselves, but not consumers to benefit from its 25mW power consumption (as low as 1mW at 2MHz). And one that makes solar or trickle/ambient power very convenient. Actions speak louder than words (what's on the menu, and what's not sold separately).
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1361sjp/intel_me_inside/ a comment mentions traffic analysis not detecting any TCP/IP from the Intel ME, which has its own network stack. A plausible reason could be most new routers have a built in Management engine-only router and send packets without blinking LEDs or displaying them on the console (192.168. etc). but this would require the power consumption of the typical packet to be measured to ensure its not hiding the data transmission. possible that it is sent with other data encrypted so it cant be seen or distinguished from other spikes of data transfer.
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/Strategies/ReverseEngineering
from USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 "Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
More articles referencing California's flawed bill:
https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
https://hackaday.com/2026/03/05/californias-problematic-attempt-to-add-age-verification-to-software/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/21/online-age-newsom-social-media-00791870
3 years ago i started the Free Energy Foundation (not incorporated officially) as a somewhat rhetorical or parodic analogue to the FSF: https://github.com/hatonthecat/Free-Energy-Foundation?tab=readme-ov-file
https://mstdn.jp/@landley/116053144600956577 "Feb 11 Rob Landley @landley "Oh but the FSF wouldn't be that crazy"... Yes they are. All the time.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1055053/
"The FSF is a political organization with a software arm that exists solely to promote their politics. Calling the FSF a software publisher is like calling the jehovah's witnesses a print publisher because they print and distribute pamphlets."
https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010
Despite having reached out to the FSF about open and solar hardware, they find very little utility or priority in the initiative. Software shouldn't take priority over hardware because they're both part of technology and technology as a whole comes first.
The last thing I'd want to do if I ever became famous is start or join a committee. "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." -Groucho Marx
Since the FSF is too busy auctioning merch, they can't be bothered with this topic.
"The bill's own legislative committee flagged this as "overbreadth," noting that even a basic alarm clock or calculator app would fall under its scope, with no clear line between regulated and unregulated software. The bill passed anyway."
"While the bill moved through the legislature, the OSI, FSF, Software Freedom Conservancy, and Linux Foundation all sat it out — no testimony, no public analysis, no formal opposition on the record. The 2026 session is the window to fix it."
Because they're not geeks anymore, they're bureaucrats.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/california-introduces-age-verification-law
https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-fedora-linux-mint-eye-age-verification-amid-california-law-backlash
Our brightest tech companies can't even put their brains together to build a solar powered phone or laptop to help the people of Ukraine communicate during power outages but have no problem saddling their chips with enpoopified instruction set architecture with realtime display, metadata, screen recording, and x, y mouse cursor coordinate telemetry for mass data collection.
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/californias-age-verification-law-is-a-civil-liberties-test/
"Compared with federal proposals such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) or laws already passed in Texas and Utah, California’s approach is arguably less intrusive because it does not require document uploads or biometric verification. But it still creates a permanent age-classification layer built directly into the device, which is a disaster for civil liberties."
There's no safe level of security that an additional layer of verification can add. Crytography algorithms often get broken.
https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-fedora-linux-mint-eye-age-verification-amid-california-law-backlash
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/california-introduces-age-verification-law
https://www.eteknix.com/california-to-introduces-age-verification-law-for-all-operating-systems/
Add all those old OSes to the digital linux CD bonfire. America's Reich can't be bothered with the intricacies of computer science history. Some might say they belong in a museum! Where's Indiana Jones when you need him?
If so, then I'm looking for a job as a permanent guest in residence at an energy efficient OS Dev museum, so i can continue my research. Solar autarky, not bloatware verification. Or maybe my best abode is a human zoo: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/26/artsnews
You might be wondering if this is a reactionary post. It might be more accurate to call it a Newtonian post.
"If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions." 3rd Law of Motion.
If the world designates an inane restriction on one's ability to communicate, it will receive an equal and opposite humiliation. If you set the dosage, I produce a satire of equal efficacy.
https://www.politico.eu/article/age-check-social-media-scientist-warning/
"In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks."
"Using technologies like cryptography to solve the problem risks centralizing tools in the hands of the few companies that can deploy them at scale, the experts warn.
They also warn of the risks that governments would ban virtual private networks to stop people from getting around age bans. VPNs are frequently used by people looking to protect their identities from authoritarian regimes."
"For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale." 2-22-2026 https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
Marketing in the 2nd Quarter of the 21st Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
the best way for Democrats to help a new generation learn how to use computers is to exempt computers made before 1995 and modern equivalents in terms of DMIPS (Dhrystone millions instructions per second) from age verification because they'll actually learn a useful skill- reading (information, not just code on a computer- though books available too, i know- computers allow interacting with information):
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/a-new-california-law-says-all-operating-systems-including-linux-need-to-have-some-form-of-age-verification-at-account-setup/ ChromeOS is a web-centric OS. lynxOS doesn't exist...yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
during the AI Safety conversation in the media, there was all this talk about a compute limit. yet, no floor is the limit from regulation because assembling online in groups of three has no disenfranchised history behind it. /s
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/midnightbsd-responds-to-californias
https://github.com/c3d/db48x/commit/7819972b641ac808d46c54d3f5d1df70d706d286
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181753
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 applies to any OS with an internet connection or an app store (which includes even OSes like FreeDOS and DB48X calculators)
https://medium.com/@cupofcat/the-death-of-curiosity-96b6a09328b6 "The engineers who will thrive — regardless of generation, regardless of era — are those who maintain genuine curiosity about how things work, not just how to make them work. But the industry’s task is not to find these people and recruit them. It is to stop building environments that extinguish the curiosity they arrive with."
https://www.culpium.com/p/tsmcs-n2-node-is-almost-booked-out Nvidia surpasses Apple in leading edge reservations
https://www.techpowerup.com/341127/nvidia-buys-usd-5b-worth-of-intel-rtx-igpus-coming-to-x86-shares-up-25#:~:text=NVIDIA%20and%20Intel%20today%20announced,CPUs%20in%20some%20HGX%20systems. i wonder, with Nvidia having the most cash on hand for both 1.4-1.8nm chips and access, if not an outright license to x86, could they pay for a few wafers at the leading edge to continue the Quark tradition of node shrinking the Pentium? 600nm P54C in 1994->32nm in 2011 ->1.8nm in 2027?
one would need 51,000 300mm wafers to produce 3billion 1mm^2 Pentiums with 20 MB RAM.
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-nm10-chipset-backporting-to-pentium.html not that that many OLPCs would be needed...
but the tendency of datacenters construction to produce AI tokens/products could be viewed as instrumental convergence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
and i prefer Intelligence amplification over artificial intelligence. an OLPC is IA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification because AI is a human driven form of the paperclip maximizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
i have probably written as much as Bostrom or Yudkowky on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer
https://www.micahdaigle.com/art/ai-podcasts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky yet i believe that overproduction of differential technology development towards slow tech is resilient as a failsafe/redundancy against such scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_technological_development
besides, if you had the choice, wouldn't a solar powerable Pentium be more useful than a paperclip for everyone? im not assuming AI is giving us the choice, nor am misinterpreting the purpose or hypothetical paperclip maximizer. im suggesting as Howard Zinn wrote, "you can't be neutral in a moving train." (funding a faaang company to utilize ever more energy consumption is not neutral. buying a new iphone 18 or 19 in 2027 or an RTX 4090 is not neutral)
https://mstdn.jp/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/116059790816091527 2-12-2026
"Ayyyy, Forbes 1929, interview with Edison, saying solar is the future, and coal and oil suck:
"For one thing, Edison believes the time is coming when mankind will draw electrical energy on a large scale directly from the sun. Ever since the age of steam started the world to rolling at a heightened speed, so far as man is concerned, we have been drawing on the bank account of old sunlight. Coal is sun energy which was stored long ago in vegetation, petroleum is the same thing stored in low forms of animal life. But like all bank accounts they can be overdrawn."
"Did project 2025 specifically list "eliminating general purpose computing"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MZfGq5F1NU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie9-kgxKjIc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3BWaUcpQRU https://mstdn.jp/@landley/116134666430118741"
Meta and Microsoft acquired nuclear power plants but California is requiring age verification on all OSes in 2027. When a state wants to pride itself over solar but can't manufacturer a 486 chip (1.2m transistors) that can run on solar power because the NSA requires a transistor dense backdoor (Intel Management Engine + ThinThread) and bloated software that doxes its users, then it's not Dems that care about the environment either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_American [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://substack.com/@trossbach/p-67559528 https://ninazeng.substack.com/p/words-which-stop-thought
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardware) https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
A Common Knowledge Solar Laptop?
https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3me7wntzxnc26 "Authority is contextual. Academic librarian Raina Bloom @mmelibrarian.bsky.social on how “AI” developers ignore how people actually become informed. From Ep. 51 of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, “The War on Knowledge”.
https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/13/pinker-cancel-culture-iop/
"On Wednesday, Pinker pointed to his own scholarship on “common knowledge” — information that is accepted as widely known. He argued that common knowledge is core to upholding social norms, as people tend to share an understanding of acceptable public behavior. But he said that overpolicing norms fuels cancel culture and hinders intellectual debate.
“We tend to be attentive to people broaching the norm, particularly in a public forum, and if they do, there is a need to prop up the norm by making it common knowledge that you can’t get away with breaching that norm,” he said.
But Pinker said the phenomenon of common knowledge goes far beyond academia, shaping every aspect of “human coordination” — from currency and language to the power of governments.
“Common knowledge, in this technical sense, refers to the state in which I know something. You know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. I know that you know that I know that you know it, and so on ad infinitum,” Pinker said.
“When one of us sees something and another one sees it and each sees the other one seeing it, that generates all of these levels implicitly,” he said. “It’s inherently psychological.”"
Seeing these recent bluesky posts & articles addressing epistemic literacy & common knowledge, I've been thinking about how scientific, academic, or even private industry funding towards product development aims to shape common knowledge or expectations. In the AI example, the blue sky post quotes a March 05th, 2025 episode of Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/16735740
I've been wondering whether the One Laptop Per Child aligned more with a "common knowledge" framework than one that was identity politics-based to the core. The reason I want to bring it up is that if I were to present two types of funding options for a research & development department: Identity politics can opt for a smaller research grant that alignes with "their people" (identity can refer to any one of Title VII: race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age), but also extend to new protections such as LGBTI, or work towards a "pooled" grant that addresses common knowledge and goals. To which extent was funding allocated in this way? I don't know. It seemed that way, at least in broad strokes..
For example, say that hypothetically, in 2005, MIT's Media Lab and OLPC, instead of being funded by private donors was offered federal funding to develop a universal laptop that could be used in all K-12 schools, as well as colleges (replacing the Chromebooks) domestically and abroad (if requested).
For reference,
"One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte with roughly $20–$25 million in initial funding from major corporate partners, including Google, AMD, Red Hat, and News Corporation. Aimed at providing low-cost laptops for education in developing nations, it faced significant funding cuts, reducing its budget from $12 million to $5 million in 2008–2009."
Since taxpayer dollars would be spent towards developing a product, it would have to serve all Americans in a way that doesn't conflict with Title VII. But what if it turned out that academic funding instead divvied the pie in a way that was not only less utilitarian in providing an educational tool that helped students learn common knowledge, but also actively worked against it? For a long while, that seemed to be the case. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/1/3/garber-faculty-activism-podcast/
Hypothetically, imagine 18 identity politics groups each apply for on average, for 55 million dollar grants, distributed across universities that have local chapters in a $1 billion dollar educational technology initiative
Obviously, this type of funding shouldn't refer to cultural studies or departments that do not depend on high tech, but engineering departments actively contracting with Big Tech to develop new and leading edge products- ones that don't have a conflict of interest with an educational mission. But in practice, how can that be determined? Isn't contracting with a leading edge foundry and fabless chip company going to lead to a conflict of interest, since OLPC-like projects- a non-profit, admittedly, was still affiliated with the MIT Media lab, and yet, had corporate sponsors that tried to influence it in five different directions?
The reason I bring this up is, hypothetically developing a performant solar laptop today could cost $1 billion dollars, using 1.4nm transistors, all new display components, interfaces, and drivers, but developing it according to identity-based politics (or possibly even identitarian) wishes might not be able to muster that amount of collaborative synergy because no single group can agree on the shades of green, or teal. They might develop 18 different smaller and disparate technologies, but none as groundbreaking as energy autarkic computing.
The argument can be made that recognizing a common language is antithetical to sovereignty claims, especially to unceded territories. Yet those that work within the system implicitly benefit from said common knowledge frameworks. Perhaps the presumption about common knowledge frameworks is that there is a perception that it fences people out, rather than fences people in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/world/africa/africa-french-language.html
"“If French becomes more mixed, then visions of the world it carries will change,” said Josué Guébo, an Ivorian poet and philosopher. “And if Africa influences French from a linguistic point of view, it will likely influence it from an ideological one.”"
French is a happy host for Creole languages. I don't see how English or any other dominant language can't accomodate some mix of other language- there already are examples, such as Spanglish. Thus a common framework laptop isn't necessarily an exlusionary device, but one adataptable for inclusion.
"Today, more than a third of Ivorians speak French, according to the International Organization of the Francophonie. In Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world’s largest French-speaking country — it is more than half.
But in many Francophone countries, governments struggle to hire enough French-speaking teachers.
“African children are still learning in French in extremely difficult conditions,” said Francine Quéméner, a program specialist in charge of language policies at the International Organization of the Francophonie. “They must learn to count, write, read in a language they don’t fully grasp, with teachers who themselves don’t always feel secure speaking French.”
Still, Ms. Quéméner said French had long escaped France’s control.
“French is an African language and belongs to Africans,” she said. “The decentralization of the French language is a reality.”
“French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” Mr. Laferrière said of the French language. “But she’s excited about where she’s headed.”
He paused, stared at the Seine through the window, and corrected himself.
“They, not she. They are now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves. And that is the greatest proof of its vitality.”
https://www.eembc.org/ulpmark/ulp-cm/scores.php
" In 1997, EDN saw a dire need to unify the dozens of embedded processor vendors so it created the "EDN Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium". When EDN and EEMBC parted ways in 2012, EEMBC kept that extra "E" because the name had come to represent an important fixture in the embedded world."
"The primary audience for the scores yielded by EEMBC benchmarks are companies creating systems that rely on embedded microcontrollers and microprocessors: everything from smartphones to solar panels. Although such manufacturers typically have their own proprietary benchmarks, EEMBC provides an attractive alternative to all the complexities of purchasing hardware, setting it up, and then running all the measurements on a candidate group of processors. The EEMBC benchmark suites allow manufacturers to avoid this cumbersome process by providing a uniform, rigorously defined standard of measurement that makes it easier for them to compare alternative solutions. This benefits not only the large manufacturers but everyone in the ecosystem of developers, integrators, and smaller enterprises that may or may not have access to proprietary benchmarks of their own or someone else."
This benchmark is the most relevant for a solar powered motherboard, with one addition- MIPS/W per glyph would allow a variety of operating systems and could indirectly be a benchmark for efficiency, even if instructions per second are lower- since the glyphs are a human readable benchmark, and transmitting more glyphs per instruction would score higher than nondescript instructions, especially ones that transfer fewer glyphs. A glyph-focused benchmark might not always be the best of course, and would be useful when compared amongst a variety of other benchmarks.
https://github.com/hatonthecat/Pokey-Linux/tree/main/XServers Xwoaf in 16MB RAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkATOFdkScI
The Smartest Companies are in the Same Room, but are not Building New Products Together...for you
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-state-of-stateless-linux-oses.html
Linux Programming Tip: avoiding the use of ellipses allows a program to use far less memory.
"1. In Programming (C, C++, Python, R)
In several programming languages used in Linux environments, an ellipsis (...) in a function signature signifies that the function accepts a variable number of arguments. Example (C/C++): The standard printf function is declared as int printf(const char* format, ...); where the ellipsis allows it to take many different arguments. "No Ellipses" Function: A function without an ellipsis in its definition has a fixed number and type of parameters, which allows the compiler to perform strict type-checking and argument counting. "
I imagine these grammatical techniques were more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, but became forgotten or obscure as time went on due to increasing memory capacities.
learncpp.com/cpp-tutorial/ellipsis-and-why-to-avoid-them/
https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already-happening
https://semiengineering.com/the-next-big-thing/
"What the ESL crowd missed was the massive gain that comes from compounding little gains. I am still somewhat blinkered by going for the big win (that would probably make me a bad gambler), but content recently gathered for a couple of articles has provided examples of how those small gains are a better use of time and money than gambling on the next big thing.
The first example is from Marc Swinnen at Ansys, who talked about power optimization. I had asked about the amount of power being wasted in a typical design. “In the past, I have talked to customers about this very problem. I might tell them that using my tool will save them 10%, 15% power. Their response might be, ‘That’s not going to make my day. That’s not worth it to me. Then there is another technique. What will that save me? I tell them that it will save you 5% or 7%. That’s not worth my time.’ Every technique was shot down because it wasn’t worth their time. And at the end they say, how is it that my competitor can manage to get these really low-power designs? Because they pay attention to power at every single step along the way, even the small increments, it all adds up. You can disregard the small contributions at every step, but in the end, it’s like going on a diet. Any particular cookie, any particular walk, isn’t going to make a big difference, but it all adds up over time. And that’s how you achieve a result — by being conscientious at every step.”
Many others agree this is the only way to achieve a low-power design, except some add that it only takes one bad cookie to spoil the whole thing. A very power-efficient piece of hardware cannot provide the expected savings if bad software is put on it, especially if it doesn’t use the very features that the hardware inserted to make it power efficient. Lots of small improvements can make a very big difference."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/flip-phone-digital-camera-28a118dd
https://fortune.com/2025/10/02/nuclear-fusion-online-commercial-ai-power/ Solar powered laptops are always going to be 30 years away, unless basic assumptions about performance and feature-creep are re-appraised.
Assembly language can power hundreds of apps on 8-9MB RAM: https://youtu.be/3Lp3UYytpdc https://youtu.be/LX_3K22yFec
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KolibriOS
"About KolibriOS from Kalibri Wiki : KolibriOS is an open source operating system with a monolithic preemptive kernel, video drivers, for 32-bit x86 architecture computers, developed and maintained by The KolibriOS Project Team. KolibriOS is a fork of MenuetOS, written entirely in FASM (assembly language). However, C, C++, Free Pascal, Forth, among other high-level languages and compilers, can also be used in user application development. English, Russian and German versions are available."
"By circumstance. KolibriOS doesn't support any of WiFi/Bluetooth/GSM/3G/LTE, and only certain video cards (most video cards in KolibriOS work only via VESA). Usually the proprietary BLOBs come with the above devices, but since KolibriOS doesn't support those, we have almost no BLOBs too (no BLOBs in basic image / ISO, and only a few BLOBs in separately downloaded video drivers)." https://board.kolibrios.org/viewtopic.php?p=59322#p59322 (2014)
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kolibrios.html (2012)
https://www.xda-developers.com/kolibri-os-test-run/ (2024)
https://alexroddie.substack.com/p/experiments-in-deconvergence-it-starts (07-2025)
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=125952 Critical Reflections on the Deconvergence of Information and Communications Technology January 2023 Intelligent Information Management 15(04):243-258 School of Communication, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
"But to critics of the deal, it seems weird for the US to swoop in and take stake in a company that doesn't need government assistance. The only recent precedent was the US temporarily taking stake in key companies considered vital to the economy that risked going under during the 2008 financial crisis.
Compare that to the Intel deal, where Tan has made it clear that Intel, while struggling to compete with rivals, "didn't need the money," Reuters noted—largely due to SoftBank purchasing $2 billion in Intel shares in the days prior to the US agreement being reached. Instead, the US is incentivized to take the stake to help further Trump's mission to quickly build up a domestic chip manufacturing supply chain that can keep the US a global technology leader at the forefront of AI innovation.
Investors told Reuters that it's unusual for the US to take this much control over a company that's not in crisis, noting that "this level of tractability was not usually associated with relations between businesses and Washington."
In the 2009 PBS Documentary Breaking the Bank, The Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the top 7 Bank's CEOs to Washington on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 before the markets opened Monday morning, after Lehman's Brother's went into bankruptcy the week before:
https://youtu.be/sYmGNetu-UU?t=1622
25:21
NARRATOR: Three days after Lehman's bankruptcy, Paulson headed to congress.
25:28
He had decided to dramatically change his approach.
25:34
At that point, Paulson bowed to the inevitable. One thing Paulson said to me in an interview is,
25:40
"When the situation changes, you have to be willing to change with the situation."
25:47
NARRATOR: Fed chairman Ben Bernanke joined Paulson for the emergency meeting.
25:52
On Thursday, late afternoon, they go to Nancy Pelosi's office.
25:58
And there's a meeting of the senior legislators from both parties in both House and Senate.
26:06
It was obviously a big meeting. I had no idea I was goingto hear what I heard.
26:11
NARRATOR: Paulson now believed government intervention was necessary, and he'd need hundreds of billions
26:17
from Congress to do it. >> They said they needed the authority to use $700 billion
26:22
to unstop the credit markets. >> Sitting in that room with Hank Paulson saying to us--
26:29
in a very measured tones, no hyperbole, no excessive adjectives--that unless you act,
26:35
the financial system of this country and the world will melt down in a matter of days.
26:41
Bernanke said,"If we don't do this tomorrow, we won't have an economy on Monday."
26:49
There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left. >> NARRATOR: Paulson received the money,
26:56
$700 billion known as TARP, troubled asset relief program.
27:02
On October 12, he acted. >> I got a phone call on Sunday from Secretary Paulson,
27:07
and he basically said, "Ken, I need you to be in Washington Monday." And he said, "I really can't tell you a lot about it."
27:15
NARRATOR: With the Merrill merger not yet complete, Paulson also invited John Thain. >> He said, "Be at the Treasury at 3:00 tomorrow."
27:23
I... I said, "Well, what's the topic?" You'll find outwhen you get there." I said, "Well, who's coming?"
27:30
"You'll find out when you get there. See you at 3:00." Click.
27:35
NARRATOR: Seven other heads of the nation's largest banks received a similar summons.
27:42
They turn up at 3:00, and they all file into the conference room,
27:48
which is across the hall from Mr. Paulson's office. >> NARRATOR: They were told to sit on one side of the table.
27:57
The titans of the finance world are arrayed almost like school children,
28:02
waiting to hear from the Treasury Secretary about a subject they're probably by then
28:07
slowly beginning to figure out. >> NARRATOR: John Thain's seat was in the middle.
28:13
Lewis was put at the end. >> At first, I wondered why I was down toward the end.
28:19
And... and then...and then it hit me, obviously, that it was in alphabetical order.
28:25
And how else would you do it? >> NARRATOR: Paulson got right down to business.
28:32
Because it's Paulson, who's not a man who beats around the bush, it became clear relatively quickly what he was proposing.
28:41
He says, "I've got here documents that say the U.S. government is going to make an injection
28:46
of capital into each oneof your companies." >> NARRATOR: Paulson was aboutto spend $125 billion
28:53
of that TARP money from Congress. >> They go through in a very, very rapid way that each of us
29:03
is going to take this taxpayer money, the TARP money.
29:10
And he basically says, you can't leave this room until you agree to take this money.
29:16
We're all going to do it for the good of the country, for the good of the system. And it's not really discretionary.
29:24
NARRATOR: It was unprecedented. In return for billions of dollars, the government would take an ownership stake in the banks.
29:32
Some bankers fought back. >> That was a very contentious meeting, lots of questions,
29:40
lots of doubts. >> NARRATOR: Richard Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo, led the charge.
29:48
Kovacevich stood up and said, "I don't want the money. "I don't need the money. "I don't want the money. I want to have nothing to do with this."
29:56
NARRATOR: But Ken Lewis tooka different view. >> Ken Lewis says, "It's our patriotic duty to do this.
30:01
Let's stop fighting, do this deal right this moment." >> We are so intertwined with the U.S.
30:08
that it's hard to separate what's good for the United States and what's good for Bank of America.
30:13
And so, don't do it on the basis of being... us being told, do it on the basis that things could get a lot worse
30:19
in America, and therefore, for us. And they're almost one in the same.
30:25
NARRATOR: Lewis also knew that he could expect two TARP shares, Merrill Lynch's and his own.
30:32
He also said, "Look, guys, we all know how this is going to end. We're going to sign this piece of paper."
30:38
So he played a little bit of the elder statesmen role, explaining reality,
30:45
although they all understood reality quite well. >> NARRATOR: And if any bank didn't sign on,
30:50
Paulson had a potent weapon. >> There's a threat in the background.
30:56
If you don't get with the program and if you don't sign this piece of paper, tomorrow morning you could turn on the television
31:01
and see Hank Paulson talking about your bank in a negative way, and that's going to destroy you.
31:08
NARRATOR: Paulson's notes, prepared for the meeting, show he gave the bankers no choice.
31:14
If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance.
31:22
NARRATOR: Paulson gave each man a single piece of paper spelling out the conditions.
31:28
Before they had to leave town that night, they were told, "Return this document with your signature on it."
31:33
And all nine of them did so.
31:41
NARRATOR: The next day, Paulson told the country about his new wayof doing business. >> Today we are taking decisive actions
31:50
to protect the U.S. economy. >> NARRATOR: In one day, everything had changed.
31:58
...that the Treasury will purchase equity stakes in a wide variety of banks and thrifts.
32:05
I think we nationalized the banks in the U.S. on that day. Seriously. Substantially nationalized them.
32:12
The government got a lot of sayin how they're run, a lot of constraints, a lot of responsibilities,
32:18
a lot of downside risk was taken on that day. >> Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company..."
This webpage is similar to fantasy football for semiconductor future products:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance) "Some of the more common derivatives include forwards, futures, options, swaps, and variations of these such as synthetic collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Most derivatives are traded over-the-counter (off-exchange) or on an exchange such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, while most insurance contracts have developed into a separate industry. In the United States, after the 2008 financial crisis, there has been increased pressure to move derivatives to trade on exchanges."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_contract#Origin Origin The Dōjima Rice Exchange, first established in 1697 in Osaka, is considered by some to be the first futures exchange market, to meet the needs of samurai who—being paid in rice—needed a stable conversion to coin after a series of bad harvests.[6]
The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) listed the first-ever standardized 'exchange traded' forward contracts in 1864, which were called futures contracts. This contract was based on grain trading, and started a trend that saw contracts created on a number of different standardized futures contracts based on commodities, as well as a number of futures exchanges set up in countries around the world. By 1875 cotton futures were being traded in Bombay in India and within a few years this had expanded to futures on edible oilseeds complex, raw jute and jute goods and bullion.[7] In the 1930s two thirds of all futures was in wheat.[8]
The 1972 creation of the International Monetary Market (IMM) by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was the world's first financial futures exchange, and launched currency futures. In 1976, the IMM added interest rate futures on US treasury bills, and in 1982 they added stock market index futures.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
https://www.reddit.com/r/GMEJungle/comments/otd1d0/i_stumbled_across_the_concept_of_bucket_shops/
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/wallstreetbets except where instead of trading money over speculative stocks, the trading of information, similar to wall street bets can still be influential if the platform is influential.
I am thinking of developing an app, called Fantasy Foundry. But I learned that it is a website for Tabletop RPGS: https://www.fantasyfoundry.store/ so I could be infringing on a trademark- (it rhymes like fantasy football, and can imply there is a free option, which would be ideally the goal of the app- to allow people to vote on a future chip idea or product- whether it is a memory chip or a logic chip. Update: I let CoPilot outline the app: https://github.com/copilot/c/30e01fb0-32e8-4d3e-87c7-ad3aae176146 https://github.com/hatonthecat/FantasyFoundry/blob/main/README.md
Maybe Fantasy Semiconductor. There is a twitter account https://x.com/Semiconductor24 
Though they appear to include real stories..
So, the idea of fantasy would suggests virtual and possible, but not necessarily group contract, unless one wants it to be. Could be a useful way of gauging interest in a product, like a pre-Crowd Supply funding. https://sheridancollege.libguides.com/groupwork/managing-group-projects/writing-a-group-contract#:~:text=Project%20Timeline%20%5BRTF%5D-,How%20to%20Create%20a%20Project%20Timeline,Examples%20include:
Crowdfunding the leading edge. A history in crowdfunding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Timeline of crowdsourcing examples "618–907 CE – The Tang dynasty of China introduced the joint-stock company, the earliest form of crowdfunding. This was evident during the cold period of the Tang Dynasty when the colder climates resulted in poor harvests and the lessening of agricultural taxes, culminating in the fragmentation of the agricultural sector.[20] The fragmentation meant that the government had to reform the tax system relying more on the taxation of salt and most importantly business leading to the creation of the Joint-Stock Company.[20]"
"In popular culture In the movie The Big Short, which is based on Michael Lewis' book by the same name, an ISDA Master Agreement is referred to as a "hunting license", reserved only for the "big boys" (i.e. institutional investors). Originally devised with the banks and other institutional players in mind, the doors were opened to ultra-high net worth individuals. The maximum licenses at any point peaked at 3000.[3]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDA_Master_Agreement#In_popular_culture
**
"In previous estimates, Nikkei media stated that manufacturing the A16 Bionic cost Apple $110, and the A17 Pro had a slightly higher price tag, at $130 each."
** "It’s noteworthy that, despite being manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process and facing performance issues, Apple managed to produce these chips for only $20 more for the latest version. It’s possible that the tech giant was able to reduce this cost by increasing shipping volumes." (emphasis added)
Want to buy the most energy efficiency DRAM in the world without unilaterally spending $725 million? Groupon the change you want to see in the world. (I'm sure Ghandi would overlook the commercialization of his quote, considering Apple appropriated him in the 1997 Ad campaign using public domain stock footage (He also got to license John Lennon's music because, well, he was neighbors with Yoko Ono at the Dakota). Now they are no longer the underdog, but as big as any multinational tech company organization can get.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world” is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, which isn’t the whole story. This might be because Gandhi authored a passage that evokes the sentiment in a 1913 journal article for Indian Opinion:
We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do."
In order to outbid Apple, one needs to find enough buyers (like Groupon) to fullfill a minimum order quantity that is worth TSMC's time (or Global Foundries, or Samsung).
The Big Short ISDA master agreement became democratized with later apps such as Robinhood, where access to high-frequency trading and speculative markets became accessible to smaller investors (which still carry risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinhood_Markets )
So what does this have to do with designing chips? Well, instead of investing in company stock like Intel or Nvidia at the NYSE, investors can do more research and determine what kind of technology they'd like to see. Instead of being happy with more iPhones and AI chips, developers can agree on where research and development should be directed. By pledging to invest in a fund (binding or non), you can crowdfund a specific type of chip that has more general purpose use, instead of something that is less general purpose (or vertically integrated into a custom design, such as the Apple A17)
https://semiengineering.com/baby-steps-towards-3d-dram/
"First step is a smaller cell It’s far easier to optimize a single layer of DRAM cells than it is to stack them up, although “easier” is a relative term. The simplest way is to print smaller features. This can be done either by pushing self-aligned double and quadruple patterning (SADP, SAQP) using 193nm ArF lithography or moving to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography.
“Most recent steps toward footprint reduction pit EUV patterning against traditional ArF SADP and SAQP processes for cutting-edge 2D DRAM nodes,” said Daniel Soden, business development manager at Brewer Science."
[187] 2023 Apple 3 nm 103.8 mm^2 183,044,315 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
"Assuming 156,000,000 transistors would be remaining for DRAM, or a combination of large caches and extra power saving modes, a 1mm^2 die would be expected to support up to 16MB of DRAM using 1T/1C (16MB is equal to 134 million bits)[22]. As 64MB is 536,870,912 bits, a 3nm node would require 4mm^2 die space using A17’s process node technology (a max of 732 million transistors, using 183m x 4 as an estimate in 2mm x 2mm squares)." https://www.techrxiv.org/users/814616/articles/1270555-a-heuristic-method-for-designing-solar-circuits
Apple was able to reserve the 3nm TSMC foundry at $130 per 103mm^2 for their A17 chip since they ordered in a significant volume. That same wafer space could be used to manufacture 100 1mm^2 $2 32MB DRAM with 10mW power consumption, low enough to solar power a netbook, along with chips which could be used for IoT, routers, IP cameras, smartwatches, fitbits, automotive, with a large enough consortium of interested buyers. Kind of like a publicly traded company, crowdsourcing the leading edge could outbid Apple and benefit more than just the top tech companies.
If companies could agree on a common RAM size to order for their PCBs (e.g. 16MB, 32MB, 64MB), they could have a leading edge memory chip only available to the wealthiest tech companies (FAANG). AMD's EPYC Genoa already produces 96MB of L3 cache at 5nm. A smaller amount could be used for microcontrollers, drones, laptops, cell phones, with excellent battery life, and not dependent on ginormous Android operating systems.
Actually, nevermind any of this. If it makes too much sense, it's not making enough money for someone else. For others, I don't know what I'm talking about. Really....I'm no expert, but experts continue to talk Business to Business, when the economic model changed 40 years ago with the Macintosh. This is the era of drop-shipping, Direct to Consumer (D2C). It's only a matter of time before normies start wishing what the leading edge should manufacture. Maybe I'm the first, but I am probably not the last.
If this wish sounds impractical, just look at the competition:
From an 8-26 Stratchery post: https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/ "Steelmanning I’ll be honest: there is a very good chance this won’t work. Intel really is a mess: they are actively hostile to customers, no one in the industry trusts them, they prioritize the wrong things even today (i.e. technical innovation with backside power over yields for chips which don’t necessarily have interference issues), and that’s even without getting into the many problems with their business. Moreover, I led with Lincicome’s argument because I agree! Government involvement in private business almost always ends badly."
Blind faith eventually wears off, not because some people miraculously get cured of blindness, but because a blind person over time listens more carefully, and can hear a huckster in an inflatable carrier ship.
8-8-2025
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/359868-making-intel-great-again/ maybe it matters less who in the U.S. owns the Intel Foundry and more about what they're manufacturing.
8-8-2025
"There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.
As the Canadian technologist and engineer Ursula Franklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “needs-driven, scrappy, on location, iterative, practical, mundane”. The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free."
7-30-2025
"Ali KamalyAli Kamaly • 2ndPremium • 2nd Co-Founder & CEO @ Atoms | Reducing chips time to market! 🌎 AI platform to automate chip validationCo-Founder & CEO @ Atoms | Reducing chips time to market! 🌎 AI platform to automate chip validation
How Much Does a 2nm Chip Really Cost? - 725M per chip!
We often talk about Moore’s Law…But rarely about its cost. This chart reveals what it actually takes — in dollars — to design a modern chip at bleeding-edge nodes:
→ 28nm: $48M
→ 22nm: $63M
→ 16nm: $90M
→ 7nm: $249M
→ 5nm: $449M
→ 3nm: $581M
→ 2nm: $725M
And it’s not just tape-out or EDA tools. Each nanometer drop demands more effort across the entire stack:
Architecture: Defining compute units, memory hierarchy, interconnect — the strategic brain of the chip.
IP Qualification & Verification: Proving that every IP block works correctly under real conditions — critical in SoCs.
Physical & Prototype Design: Designing the actual layout and validating it across PPA (Power, Performance, Area).
Validation: And then comes validation — the most underestimated, but fastest-growing cost. By the time you hit 2nm, validation alone can cost over $100M — and delays here can cost millions more in missed windows and lost design wins.
Key takeaway: Designing chips today isn’t just about engineering brilliance — it’s a capital-intensive, multi-disciplinary marathon. And as complexity rises, validation is emerging as the final frontier where projects succeed or fail.
P.S. If you’re curious how leading teams reduce validation bottlenecks without compromising accuracy — check out our blog “The Semiconductor World” (link in comments). hashtag#Semiconductors hashtag#ChipDesign hashtag#Validation hashtag#EDA hashtag#2nm hashtag#MooresLaw hashtag#PostSilicon hashtag#TestFlow hashtag#HardwareEngineering hashtag#SiliconDesign hashtag#SoC"
An admirable statement from Raspberry Pi https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/05/vibe_coding_raspberry_pi/
Interesting articles about the direction and influence of the Raspberry Pi:
https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=2931
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/opinion_column_future_raspberry_pi/
https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/
06-02-2025 Update
Vedula has completed synthesis of a ZAP processor on an Artix A7!:
Github repository: https://github.com/srvedulageth/solar_femtoTx
Vedula's notes:
"Please see Save/ dir for Synthesis report.
Added a separate Readme for convenience." Readme: https://github.com/srvedulageth/solar_femtoTx/blob/main/README.solar_femtoTx
“Whatever has been done, can be outdone.” —Gordon Moore (1929–2023)
Start Small
How to design a solar laptop: Step 1: Set a TDP: Chart sourced from: "Near-Threshold Voltage Design Techniques for Heterogenous Manycore System-on-Chips" J. Low Power Electron. Appl. 2020 https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9268/10/2/16 https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/document/21807657/whats-all-this-subthreshold-stuff-anyhow-pdf-download
5-23-2025: New Term: ADP: "Absolute Design Power" ( I am naming this after Thermal Design Power (TDP) and scenario design power (SDP), terms which are unreliable or subjective at best and deceiving at worst. Therefore absolute attempts to reach an actual number in universal terms:
ab·so·lute /ˈabsəˌlo͞ot/ adjective 1. not qualified or diminished in any way; total. "absolute secrecy" Similar: complete total utter out-and-out outright entire perfect pure decided thorough thoroughgoing undivided unqualified unadulterated unalloyed unmodified unreserved downright undiluted solid consummate unmitigated sheer arrant rank dyed-in-the-wool plenary peremptory Opposite: partial qualified 2. viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative. "absolute moral standards" Similar: universal fixed independent nonrelative nonvariable absolutist rigid established set settled definite decided irrevocable unalterable unquestionable authoritative incontrovertible in black and white Opposite: relative flexible nounPhilosophy a value or principle which is regarded as universally valid or which may be viewed without relation to other things. "good and evil are presented as absolutes"
Absolute design power is a concept rooted in predictable power envelopes factoring in known knowns and known unknowns, such as cosmic radiation and soft errrors that can't be predicted, but typical use a known level when fixed speeds are designated for known workloads. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) can be implemented with ADP using a law of averages, however fixed speeds need not be precluded from achieving the aims of a basic ADP architecture.
"Laurie KirkLaurie Kirk • FollowingFollowing researcher @google; serial complexity unpackerresearcher @google; serial complexity unpacker View my portfolio 1w • 1 week ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn
TDP (Thermal Design Power) of CPUs is a pretty terrible metric that misleads consumers.
In the Pentium era, a 89W TDP meant just that; expect to dissipate 89W of heat in the worst case.
With Alder Lake, a 125W CPU can draw ~241W indefinitely!
Here's the goofy math:
—
CPU’s didn’t really know how to idle until the early 2000s. They just kinda ran full bore all the time.
With the introduction of C-States, various parts of the processor could be shut down, saving power when the computer was doing nothing.
Of course, this was HUGE for laptops.
—
If you temporarily downclock a CPU, why not upclock it as well?
Around ~2008, Intel came up with the concept of Turbo Boost and the “energy bucket”.
Short spikes above TDP are allowed, as long as the 28 second moving average stays <TDP. Okay, nothing too crazy yet.
—
In 2013, idle power got really good. CPUs can now downclock to just a few dozen milliwatts!
This ruined the moving average; with such a low idle (~0W), CPUs could now burst to 2x-3x TDP for short periods.
New metrics, like SDP (scenario design power) get thrown around.
—
2021, things get even worse. The pursuit of performance abandons all previous math.
Alder Lake chips can now run at “maximum turbo power” as long as thermal limits aren’t hit. TDP becomes a useless marketing term.
An i5, i7, and i9 now all have the same advertised “base power” (~TDP) of 125W. Yet the i5 maxes out at ~150W continuous, the i9 ~241W!
The capabilities of these advanced processor states are useful, don’t get me wrong. But the “base power” marketing hurts consumers.
It’s very easy to dilude yourself into thinking that an i5 and i9 can use roughly the same power, when in reality you’ll be 50+% off"
there's also another, lesser used term: absolute design power. I named it "ADP" (p.14/23) https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9268/10/2/16 & "absolute low minimum power" (p.3/3) w/ fixed speeds: https://img.electronicdesign.com/files/base/ebm/electronicdesign/document/2019/04/electronicdesign_25871_rako_subthreshold_pdflayout.pdf?dl=electronicdesign_25871_rako_subthreshold_pdflayout.pdf
https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+claremont
https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+solar+claremont
Update 1/2025:
A U.S. developer in China made an ESP32 solar laptop emulating an 80186 running DOS and up to Windows 3.0, with an e-ink display, 8MB PSRAM, and consumes 5mA-60mA
The Bios bootup with solar logo is reminiscent of the vintage Energy Star logo on some Award Modular and Phoenix Bios logo :)
Really well made!
National Science Foundation to US Citizens:
=
NSF: And don't bother us if you're trying to build a solar powered laptop:
let alone an unaffiliated researcher:
My e-mail apparently wasn't deserving of a dignified response.
Apparently, our country would rather have our most able-bodied men wait outside than assist important scientists:
Surely, there are science jobs for everyone, even getting someone coffee?
Actors found no vacancy in Washington, thus they moved to academia:
I waasn't suggesting powerful cliques have turned our society into Fight Club, but I will just let you reach that conclusion.
The U.S. is no longer a party of Lincoln or even Johnson:
"“Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” is her Lincoln history published in 2005. It explains how Lincoln placed political rivals, some of whom initially despised him, in his cabinet and molded them into the effective team that guided the nation through the Civil War."
“Lincoln said they were the strongest, most able men in the country,” Goodwin said. “Lyndon Johnson said, `It's better to have your enemies inside the tent p*** ng out, than outside the tent p*** ing in.”'
""Lincoln would have said that more nobly.""
The system today resembles Jackson's's.
[MOS Scaling] https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/PMOS%20Scaling.png
The latest in Intel entitled news:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-intel-exec-raja-koduri-130427676.html Raja, thank you for making the Radeon GPUS.
"Intel's treasures, according to Koduri, are its IP and technology, with many innovations left "sitting on shelf." The contrasting snakes, however, are defined as the bureaucratic process that Koruri[sic] sees as dominating corporate decision making, leaving innovation behind.
"The 'spreadsheet & PowerPoint snakes' – bureaucratic processes that dominate corporate decision-making—often fail to grasp the true cost of surrendering performance leadership.
"They optimize for minimizing quarterly losses while missing the bigger picture. These processes multiply and coil around engineers, constraining their ability to execute on the product roadmap with the boldness it requires.
"A climate of fear surrounds any attempt at skunkworks initiatives outside established processes—one misstep, and the bureaucratic snakes strike. This environment has bred a pervasive 'learned helplessness' throughout the engineering ranks, stifling the very innovation culture that built Intel's empire.""
https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/asianometry-intels-reign-of-terror.21796/
https://youtu.be/TdSAuYCcs_o?feature=shared Asianometery's story "Intel's Reign of Terror" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma (intel's own Claremont was a casualty of this "dilemma" because if its own Atoms were too affordable, thrn certainly a smaller, ntv x86 woukd be hard to justify a premium without multimodal integration into a chipset that doesn't rely on energy harvesting as a fallback)
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/07/intel_incensed_at_via_inflatables/
"The reason? Intel had secured the permission of sundry mobo makers in writing to remove VIA balloons from their stands." https://www.theregister.com/2003/01/02/balloons_burst_in_intelvia_trial/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/782
https://www.wsj.com/tech/intel-microchip-competitors-challenges-562a42e3 1-4-2025
"But after the dot-com bust, Intel invested in multiple projects that never materialized or failed to reach their potential. Two former executives told Yahoo Finance that innovative efforts were often killed if they didn't immediately contribute to revenue or risked cannibalizing existing products.
One former high-level executive, who worked within several divisions, said Intel didn't support the team working on low-power Atom chips for mobile phones in the early 2000s. It sold its license for Xscale, then Arm's most advanced architecture for mobile chips, to Marvell (MRVL) in 2006."
It's true, Intel possibly feared that commercializing the Claremont would divert sales away from their pricier i3, i5's and i7s if they were only selling 3 million transistor Pentiums on 22nm, similar to Milhouse getting bored of a video game and playing "cup and ball" in this Simpsons episode: https://youtu.be/_t-kMYIRMME?t=10
A closeup of what Atom allows today:
Typo: ISSCC, not ISSC. https://hothardware.com/reviews/intel-details-nextgen-radios-solarpowered-cpus
Imagine having a seat at the table that develops laptops. If you're Samsung, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, you develop laptops. And yet all these laptop makers think making more powerful laptops is always better. To what extent is product design social conditioning?
"It's a pretty ugly table, guys." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBzhk5eANTU Imagine being an OEM and offering a competitive product- a company willing to take risks, somehow has little time to explore alternative laptop designs.
Lots of OEMs and All-in-One makers that benefitted from setting a floor to pricing- they needed an excuse to keep the 6-cell battery in their laptops.
Intel provides the transistors, AUO/Asus/Samsung makes the bright LCDS/OLEDs, and Lithium Suppliers continue to make a large portion of sales from laptops.
(MPAA PG rating, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) ("Don't Look Marion, Keep your Eyes shut!")
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/comments/10xk5y9/comment/j7toytc/
This Tumblr post belongs in a museum!
"640x480 monochrome passive-matrix screens needed about 1.800 transistors to control all pixels (n2+m for dual-scan). Color active-matrix screens (TFT) with the same resolution needed 300.000 transistors as each pixel is controlled by three transistors (3n*m). That’s why these screens were so expensive.
Color passive-matrix screens (DSTN) were a good low-cost alternative for everybody who wanted colors “on the road”. This technology needed only about 5.000 transistors for the resolution of 640x480 (23n+m). The result was not exceptional but it was good enough for many productivity applications where slow response rate (300-700 milliseconds) was not a problem.
Unfortunately, quality varied a lot between DSTN screens. Although some had a very crisp picture with shiny colors on par with today’s cheap TN panels, some suffered from significantly poorer contrast, washed colors and color bleeding."
"UPDATE: (1) I was not completely right with the transistor counts – for passive-matrix displays, there will be at least twice as much transistors (one on Vcc and one on GND for each row/column to output both logic levels 0 and 1). (2) I also forgot to mention that passive-matrix screens don’t have transistors in the panel itself. There are special chips on a separate board which makes the solution much cheaper in comparison with TFT (which has multiple layers with tiny transistors inside the panel)."
Ok, do you know what that means? Solar powered laptops might benefit from DSTN panels because they use 1/1000th the transistors (or 1/500th) of active matrix (300,000) depending on his math. I do not know if they required a backlight or constituted part of the backlight, but it is certainly an option that should be explored. Like the AC vs DC wars of the Electric, active matrix won and innovation stagnated in the display industry even while resolution improved- the technological determinism of Moore's Law had a parallel in Displays- more (pixel count) were certainly welcome, but diversity of display materials lagged behind (e.g LCD/LED over e-ink and reflective). Intel i series are 15 generations ahead of solar powered calculators, which are 2nd gen (if you count scientific calculators). Displays since the CRTS underwent maybe 5 big transformations in 40 yrs- Green passive matrix screens, LCDs, then LEDs, then OLEDs. But 3 main types today is still less than than 5 options. It would be ideal to have crisp, low power, matte screens (both monochrome and color) that don't require high refresh rates and have low intensity illunination that don't feel like they're blinding the users who feel tethered to a sunk cost.
https://www.blog.baldengineering.com/2024/10/intel-sets-record-with-2d-tmd.html seem like Intel finally disclosed some IP- probably because they expected to get funding for doing nothing. Now of course others are going to try to copy this. But at least the taxpayer isn't treated like a complete idiot and out of the loop.
Interesting to see Congress criticizing Intel. Here's an idea, Intel, restart your Quark series of processors. But this time, include more than 0KB of RAM!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/money/why-are-chip-competitors-trying-to-takeover-intel/vi-AA1rWvBZ As news-buzzy as these stories are, neither Qualcomm nor ARM are likely to be able to purchase any part of Intel, due to CHIPS contingencies: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/uncategorised/intel-to-get-chips-act-funds-by-year-end-but-must-not-sell-units-to-arm-qualcomm-2024-09/ https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-confirms-dollar3-billion-award-for-secure-enclave-18a-chips-coming-to-us-military
"Intel's CEO steps down Share By Emma W. Thorne, Editor at LinkedIn News Updated 3 hours ago
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired, the company announced Monday. Current execs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston "MJ" Holthaus will serve as interim co-CEOs until a new chief is named. Gelsinger, who joined Intel in 1979, was "forced out" after the board lost confidence in his plan to revive the struggling chipmaker, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. Intel has faced intense headwinds of late, notching a record net loss of nearly $17 billion last quarter and losing its place on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its stock is down more than 50% this year."
https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-retire-2024-12-02/ " The board told Gelsinger he could retire or be removed, and he chose to step down, according to the source."
Now can someone work on the Claremont/Quark?
Yes, it has since been late 2020.
The companies I make fun of don't take solar power seriously enough, and its benefit to humanity. Therefore I don't take them seriously in equal proportion.
"Isaac Asimov supposedly once said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/#google_vignette
"A thematically related passage appeared in 1965 within the London periodical “Science Journal”. An article by British journalist Gordon Rattray Taylor discussed the process of scientific discovery:3
The popular picture of the scientist is of a man who is visited by a flash of insight and cries, in effect, “Eureka!” Or, more modestly, as a man who notices something others have ignored and mutters “That’s odd.”
To be realistic, however, the successful scientist often seizes on a new tool or a new technique and applies it sooner than anyone else."
And by sooner, I have direct knowledge of a time when a chemist applied a method sooner than anyone else: Fred Sanger and Carl Woese
“Sanger's rule ... anytime you get technical development that’s two to threefold or more efficient, accurate, cheaper, a whole range of experiments opens up.[37]"
The full quote is:
"I think my feeling was that everything remained in a pilot level, and that it was always important to be able to walk before you tried to run. So, that we were early enough to continue the mapping. And again, the question was when the transition point would come. All of us in the field had been dominated by the development of technology, and everything runs by Sangers rule; that anytime you get technical development that’s two to threefold or more efficient, accurate, cheaper, a whole range of experiments opens up. So, the question was, "Would these be incremental, or completely transformative?" And it turns out that simple changes, like the development of automatic loaders for capillary electro freezes were enough to start bringing the cost down and make things feasible on a large scale. Again, it was Sanger and Washington University, rather than Sanger at that point, who were making decisions for box sequencing. The real question was the point at which one decided that mapping could be dispensed with. And in the historical record, I think that's unclear. We did get to the answer, but it wasn't an obvious choice. The -- how can I put this? The -- one feature of the mapped clones that is -- that remains and has never been completely exploited, is the fact that they reproduce large sections of the NHGRI: Schlessinger, David 2018-03-06 15 03/09/2018 Prepared by National Capitol Contracting 8255 Greensboro Drive, Suite C100 (703) 243-9696 McLean, VA 22102 genome in a form that can be manipulated in a study. So, for example, the A.C. clones we made at the time remain the only source of a complete factor eight gene, a complete factor nine gene. These have both commercial and medical implications. And, they're only available by actually having the clones, which are still achievable in 3D yeast artificial chromosomes at this point. There's the group led by Vladimir Larionov at NCI, which does recombination-based cloning. That's got help with that as well. So, that remains something of great interest."
https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf "More Fine-grained and Distributed Separation of Responsibilities in Microservice Architecture: The Arrival of Femtoservices . . . . ." (p.128/413) https://github.com/RyanHornby/femtoservices/blob/ec7f1fddd2a961671484edf73e0211f8d76e616a/SIGBOVIK_25.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG-iLV_NJL8
I do not have an institutional position that represents expertise, therefore I am less obligated to make a tidy and neat project. That said, this page could be tidier. It's more a scattered collection of long ruminated thoughts rather than a completely consistent focus. That I joke about many things doesn't detract from the proven technologies demonstrated by others here (and in my own solar tests). I don't think this project would be possible without a little humor. For those that still don't understand the many contradictions here, it involves some cognitive dissonance, along with the need for abductive reasoning as a common form of analysis. I particularly think disbelief also has a lot to do with agnotology, a new word I just learned, but have understood for decades as the study of both willfull and unwitting ignorance/doubt.
Computer Science is deep. Physics is deeper. Your app probably isn't deep. Jack Handey wrote Deepest Thoughts: So Deep They Squeak in 1994. If there's plenty of humor at the bottom, I want to be there.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-cybersecurity-data-poisoning https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cyberattacks/data-poisoning/ https://blog.barracuda.com/2024/04/03/generative-ai-data-poisoning-manipulation
Another phrase I learned from the Opt-Out project is "epistemic literacy". Epistemic literacy requires basic knowledge resources- such as researched books and encyclopedias, rather than software that does acrobatic tricks with tens of hops in a traceroute with Chat-GPT. In other words, epistemic literacy requires basic computers (or in Gen-Z speak, based computers) for learning. In retrospect, it makes some of the previous criticism towards the OLPC seem a lot more "cruel pessimism", whereas the "cruel optimism" was a lot more epistemic and not as ahistorical as it seems...
"Learning creates progress when it expands our capabilities to be and to do things that we have reason to value. As Sen has pointed out, our capabilities are rooted in social, cultural, and bodily contexts that are not universal. Development is about expansion of these personal and highly contextual capabilities. Although the debate still goes on about whether some basic universal human capabilities can be defined,vi in practice progress and development are deeply subjective and highly idiosyncratic. In the Senian capability-based approach, this subjective foundation of development is linked to a universal requirement that valuations are reasonable. They cannot be purely subjective preferences or based on hedonistic fulfillment; instead, we need to be able make a coherent argument about valuations that can be accepted as coherent also by those who do not share these values."
from "Epistemic Literacy or a Clash of Clans? A Capability-based View on the Future of Learning and Education Ilkka Tuomi
European Journal of Education Vol. 50, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 21-24 (4 pages)"
Reason 1:
This project would be a joke if it weren't so sad. Academia, Industry, and the Government considers this project so low on the totem pole that if it's on the pole at all, it's under the visible portion. It took 10 years to put someone on the moon, and it's been 13 years since the Samsung NC 215S laptop was a product. So in a lot of ways, it's harder to put a solar panel on a laptop than it is to put a person on the moon or to explore the bottom of the sea.
Reason 2: Multitasking...Is not that important
The second reason, is that it is based on a prediction of computational trends called "Good enough computing" observed from Moore's Law around 2009: The basic observation that I will add, is that most computers, even a quad-core i3 from 2011, is good enough for 80-95% of a user's needs (provided a fast enough solid-state storage device). Not only that, but a user is, as much as a resume or CV is supposed to impress by stating otherwise, not a super multi-tasker. Yes, there are super multi-taskers, and multi-tasking is a skill that many people have, even quite well. But internet use, such as banking, reading, and scholarship are often done serially, in careful analaysis. Thus the limits to multi-core features in enhancing processing is becoming less necessary locally-both on a single mobile device- when it could be on another device in the home and "casting" or on the cloud (if the cloud hoster is trustworthy enough), and it is not removing its utility (fast i7, i9s and Ryzen 9s) altogether, nor should.
What it is emphasizing, however, is that a smartphone or laptop/monitor with sufficient display resolution- from 480p monitors to 1080p monitors in the mid 00s to 4k monitors in the mid 10s, whether it is a VR headset or goggle, is increasing the density of information for human interaction and productivity, often exceeding the minds ability to interpret, analyze and synthesize feedback. Thus multi-taskers' ability are plateuing for user-interfaces on hardware platforms that do not require that level of inefficiency on thin-clients. While I have criticized AR goggles and VR before, the point was never in absolute, but in the prioritization of chip's energy design and software that performs basic information for the markets without as/much access. Granted some of this technology wasn't even possible until a little more than a decade ago, but there is little reason to not prioritize and not optimize a user interface in a smalle power envelope today. Shortly after rockets were developed, the U.S. & the U.S.S.R wasted no time putting them to use...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thZUMaGEE-8 "We can split the atom but not distinguish truth. Our information is failing us | Yuval Noah Harari" 10/18/2024
As computers becoming more powerful in smaller envelopes, one day there might be quad core or even octa-core processors running on microwatts of power and running 10 Chrome tabs, powered by body-heat, RF or solar power. To get there, though, one needs/really ought/should make a Nokia 6110 first on solar power.
Reason 3:
If you could identify a low-cost, low-risk, information bottleneck that could be commodified as a counter-intelligence operation, would you a: sell it to DARPA, b: do nothing but request a FOIA that takes years after the discovery, or C: educate the public?
Reason 4:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/truly-a-middle-finger-humane-bricking-700-ai-pins-with-limited-refunds/ "AI Pins “will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humane’s servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible,” according to the startup, which noted that users can’t port their phone number to another device or wireless carrier. Some offline features “like battery level” will still work, Humane said, but overall, the product will become $700 e-waste for most owners in nine days."
This could happen to any AI device, including the Rabbit: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/24042688/rabbit-r1-ai-gadget-handheld-news-updates-storystream Au contraire, a general purpose processor, such as a 286, still has a use after all those years.
Reason 5:
If smartphones are increasingly becoming a necessity for everything from parking apps, to bar tabs, then a reliable, interoperable smartphone that doesn't run out of power increasingly becomes less a plastic credit card and more a brick out of battery power:
Yes, but mainly as an unsuccessful product or concept.
It's partly inspired by the Apollo program to place someone one the moon by 1970. Also, Steve Jobs designed the 1984 Macintosh as a "computer for the rest of us," according to a 1990 Interview with WGBH Boston. He integrated various technology components that previously only were used in technical laboratories. Tim-Berner's Lee, in 1989, integrated many of the internet protocols that already existed- hypertext - with HTTP: ""In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web. — Tim Berners-Lee[32]"
In essence, it is following in a long tradition of technological convergence, starting from the integrated circuit from Makimoto's wave:
to even "intangible" things like protocols (e.g. HTTP/hypertext & TCP/IP)
Source: Semi-engineering
Modified chart from above link
As you can see, this project is not all about computational efficiency at higher power levels. It is about computational efficiency at the lowest power levels possible to run in energy autarkic form factors.
Github's own ReadME project has a lot to say about that.
Also, Reduce first, then reuse second, THEN recycle. The misconception is often, buy without any long term strategy, dispose, and naively think someone else will sort it out. Chances are, the screen of your smartphone isn't cracked, and you're only upgrading it to get a faster processor. If you could mail your phone to a local center or drop it off to an upgrade center that upgrades the chip and memory perhaps or motherboard, you would reduce the cost of manufacturing new screens and cases, if only society believed in a standard mobile form factor option. Fairphone is its own ecosystem. One company alone won't be able to do it unless their de facto standard is popular. What's stopping you from adopting one?
There are more efficient processors out there, which will undoubtedly more practical for low-power, but the timeline to develop such products and develop middleware/emulation/application programming interfaces/ would require thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of coding hours, if it is ever prioritized at all. A simpler solution, for underdeveloped and emerging markets, is to stay the course of the most conventional architectures (ARM A720E on 2nm, for example would consume how much power at 200 Mhz and 16MB of RAM?). This would allow chipsets to be developed within a few years, rather than more than 5. Without an Artisanal license like those by Apple, Intel and Samsung, amateur chip designers aren't going to have access to the most efficient cores, unless an open source one is developed.
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/intel-cpu-architects-leave-to-form-risc-v-startup/
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1f0j0kh/former_top_intel_cpu_architects_launch_ahead/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
Legacy Software Developers who have moved on to new platforms (or new paid work):
Vintage software salvagers/dumpster divers:
https://youtu.be/Xv7eeMikM_w?t=128
It's actually my fault. I got admitted to a university under a College of Liberal Arts and Science program, because I would not have stood a chance if I applied to the Engineering school, which I only had a tangential familiarity and interest at the time. I still haven't learned Linear Algebra and Differential Calculus II, and I do not have an M.S. or EE after my B.S. (though that didn't stop Steve Jobs from building anything, even without a B.A.)
It's also likely that industry is more interested in developing products that fit into nice, clean boxes- and claiming that wanting to meet climate goals for carbon emissions is easier by check all the boxes for meeting individual products's carbon footprint, but discourage Right to Repair product lifecycles, which collectively can re-use and re-pool parts to the second-hand market. Instead of trying to repair expensive products, it's better to develop a basic platform separate from all of that, one that doesn't create disposable hobby/edutech waste with incompatible form factors, but can be upgraded over time, piecemeal.
For Gross National Product, see this Investopedia for definition. There are other metrics of Growth, such as GNH, SPI, and HDI.
The most valuable exports, according to GDP, is Boeing airplanes, then cars (I think). That much of our economy is dependent on building new iPhones is not good for the environment. If I were in charge, I would put more people to work building cheaper, but quality homes, more jobs, a modern, fully renewable energy grid, more open source cars and body shops for open source cars (open source cars, which could also be exported to other countries (allowing the same quality of construction materials as the U.S), so that the things that make this country so desirable aren't sold only here. Instead there are students with $200,000+ in student loan debt working at Starbucks because academia has no work for them counting objects (in an early comic from the 00s) in a laboratory, which would be more productive than cars idling around a block for a drive through (when a dorm could have a cappuccino maker). These projects are far from related- but they represent society's fear of consumerist homogeneity (of material acquisitions and status symbols are important but have less to do with with computers unless one needs to own a Mac or have a Ferrrari logo on a laptop, and cultural homogeneity is less of an actual risk even with increased material homogeneity). Remember Bobo's in Paradise? Silicon Valley hasn't changed its wish to be bobos, but shifted the cost of living to planned-obsolescence and techno-feudalism, which contributes to inflation, of large things.
The short-term answer is no. The long answer, is it will save millions of consumers billions of dollars over the course of decades. It can result in mild revenue for component manufacturers, but less for vertical designs that are mutually exclusive. For a example a single board computer Foundation could make a tiny board that could fit inside a phone. They could build a SD sized chip, and Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI and Asus could build phone chassis with Innolux and AOC making displays. Established OEMS might benefit, but there is nothing stopping startups from doing so. New and used gas-powered vehicle sales (not usage) are being phased out in some countries and states by 2035. Does anyone plan to be using a cell phone in 2035, or some holographic kinect device that recognizes hand and neural telepathy? It's very likely that phones will still be around in 2035 in a similar form factor, and the market for flip phones and upgradeable chasses, while not huge, still represents an important part of communication infrastructure. The same applies to tablets and laptops. The motherboard is scalable.
Yes- two, and another one is currently being reviewed.
Also, check out these two articles:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
https://www.asimov.press/p/peer-review
There are a number of state-of-the art memory technologies, processors, low power displays and radios out there that can be integrated into a laptop listed here, which has been updated continuously since 2021. I do not know which combination of components work best, but the Law of Ergodicity suggests each permutation will eventually produce the right combination. I am kidding, of course- it requires an educated analysis to make the fewest number of guesses. Kinda of like a Rubik's cube? I am not a shape rotator- I am a word rotator. Yes, I made that up too. Few, if any companies are integrating them for users. If anything, they are prioritizing AI, because of "shiny thing syndrome." They believe that consumers have too many privileges, and think that solar powered computers are too slow to be worth trying. Or, it is being worked on, but they aren't telling anyone,and could try to milk it for all its worth once i3-i7 patents expire in 99 years (or and if so, will ensure profits for Intel well into the 22nd century) so why should consumers wait another 100 years before anyone realizes it's been possible since ~2011? A handful of academics and companies already have demonstrated it, but ask them one to too many questions and they will ignore it. In 1967, my late professor, Carl Woese was practicing Sanger RNA sequencing at a time when only a handful of people in the world knew the technique. Solar computing is not even a novelty. But you won't hear the media talk about it, because they have no problem airing a bully who says things like:
"They want electric planes. What happens if the sun isn't shining while you're up in the air?" https://substack.com/@introvertcomics/note/c-60467862
If a car can run on solar, a laptop can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYroDMTLVt4 (Not all charging needs to happen simultaneously with usage). Especially with cars, but less of an issue with laptops and phones. With tens of cell phone companies, it is curious why sunlight-readable screens like Pixel Qi could not have been saved by Economic Recovery Acts (CHIPS, TARP1&2) when Intel is being bailed out to produce chips domestically (it makes for good campaigning, but little for the end user).
(At least with a little organization and public support with an open source option- like like health insurance- there should be a public option for solar powered tech) Plus, I'm also weird. I also believe it's hip to be square. In 13 years since the Pixel Qi, it remains one of the few manufacturers to ever release a useful screen. The U.S. takes pride over options, but has a weak spot for Apple, Pixel and Samsung phones and those phone makers have never sought to offer a transflective display option. Anjan Katta (who I personally have interacted with, has a much more holistic vision of computing, one that does not treat the display as a second-class component: https://daylightcomputer.com/product His glare-free display is the first major innovation in displays in over 10 years. Why it took a startup to do that, when Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP and Apple could not is highly questionable. Kudos to Anjan.
There are a lot of useful things AI can do, such as for robotics, information sorting & retrieval, and programming, but 10% of most AI VC funding could be diverted to other things and nothing of value would be lost.
There are already programs for that. Congress is spending over $280 Billion on the CHIPS act, and it's unclear how much of that is going nowhere.
"Intel’s investments are expected to create more than 10,000 company jobs and nearly 20,000 construction jobs, and to support more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries."
However, from https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/1/24210656/intel-is-laying-off-over-10000-employees-and-will-cut-10-billion-in-costs :
"The chipmaker just announced it’s downsizing its workforce by over 15 percent as part of a new $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025, which will mean a headcount reduction of greater than 15,000 roles, Intel tells The Verge. The company currently employs over 125,000 workers, so layoffs could be as many as 19,000 people.
Intel will reduce its R&D and marketing spend by billions each year through 2026; it will reduce capital expenditures by more than 20 percent this year; it will restructure to “stop non-essential work,” and it’ll review “all active projects and equipment” to make sure it’s not spending too much."
10,000 jobs created, followed by 15,000 jobs lost = net staff of -5000 jobs. Plus R&D is cut. So there goes the Intel Claremont. Have a datacenter? Intel has no problem selling you its Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling technology in orders above 10,000. Create a single core, x86 processor that can run on 5mW? Intel is not interested in your pocket change.
"Ben Franklin Demonstrates the identity of Lightning and Electricity, from which he invented the lightning Rod.
https://youtu.be/cXlIZBZpkoA?t=1177 "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Is the World Funny?
Hoover Institution Library & Archives 97.4K subscribers
966,423 views Jan 25, 2017 Episode 064, Recorded on July 7, 1967
Guest: Groucho Marx" (2 years before PBS- Groucho advocating for better programming)
On May 1, 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee requesting funds to help support the growth of a new concept -- national public television.
"On May 1, 1969, Fred Rogers, host of the (then) recently nationally syndicated children's television series, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (named Misterogers' Neighborhood at the time), testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce Subcommittee on Communications to defend $20 million in federal funding proposed for the newly formed non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was at risk of being reduced to $10 million. Subcommittee chairman, Senator John Pastore (D-RI), unfamiliar with Fred Rogers, is initially abrasive toward him. Over the course of Rogers' 6 minutes of testimony, Pastore's demeanor gradually transitions to one of awe and admiration as Rogers speaks."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA
1995 https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/software-languages/#a2eed4bb9308a22315003de9062221ec
2006 https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/#169ebbe2ad45559efbc6eb357204d969
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/2012/
"Raspberry Pi computer
Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-size single board computer, is released as a tool to promote science education Computers Conceived in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this credit card-sized computer features ease of use and simplicity making it highly popular with students and hobbyists. In October 2013, the one millionth Raspberry Pi was shipped. Only one month later, another one million Raspberry Pis were delivered. The Pi weighed only 45 grams and initially sold for only $25-$35 U.S. Dollars."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark
Quark powers the (now discontinued) Intel Galileo developer microcontroller board.[3] In 2016 Arduino released the Arduino 101 board that includes an Intel Quark SoC.[4][5] The CPU instruction set is, for most models, the same as a Pentium (P54C/i586) CPU.[6]
Intel announced the end-of-life of its Quark products in January 2019, with orders accepted until July 2019 and final shipments set for July 2022.[1][11] https://linuxgizmos.com/who-killed-the-quark/
"Perhaps Intel’s largest impediment was itself. It could never quite decide what the Quark was for and was never able to capture the developer market. The Curie was especially notorious for spotty public documentation and the requirement for signing NDAs to get the full specs.
The low-end chip market is tough going and marked by low margins. Intel had the market clout to succeed, but it was earning such high profits from its popular Xeon and Core chips, the Quark was quickly neglected. To a lesser degree, its Atom line has suffered from the same dynamics.
With IoT morphing into edge computing, and with the dropping costs for Cortex-A53 SoCs, the embedded market is shifting upward. Edge gateways are increasingly asked to process video and do analytics, which need more powerful chips. Still, there’s room at the bottom for more innovation on power-efficient SoCs that can still run Linux."
November 30, 2022: The PCR-like amplification of the enshittification of the internet
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on a large language model, it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.[2]
By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to the growth of OpenAI's current valuation of $80 billion.[3][4]
linkedin.com/in/enis-ya… (11-18-24): ”This week, I picked up Max Planck’s classic book, "Where Is Science Going" (Wohin geht die Wissenschaft) and found it incredibly thought-provoking. The book starts with a touching prologue by Einstein, where he speaks highly of Planck’s dedication to science. It's particularly meaningful because Planck was one of the first to recognize the importance of Einstein’s early work and even brought him to Berlin. What really struck me while reading was how much emphasis Planck and his contemporaries placed on the philosophy of science. Today, we see many scientists focusing almost exclusively on numerical simulations and experimental results, often overlooking the deeper questions about nature. In contrast, old school scientists like Planck and Einstein were driven by a curiosity to understand the world, not just to crunch numbers. Maybe this is why we have hit a wall in fundamental physics, or generally, in scientific discoveries. Without a philosophical approach, maybe we are missing the bigger picture. Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how science was once driven by curiosity.“
https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-5336072/v1_covered_4479cf53-c6e8-40ba-918f-434311c41d74.pdf?c=1731033221 (Tamás Bódai, 11-2024):
Enshittification is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022 to describe a pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber and Unity. The American Dialect Society selected the term as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept.
History and definition An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification by Cory Doctorow at DEF CON 31, 2023 The term enshittification was coined by Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post[1] that was republished in Locus in January 2023.[2] He expanded on the concept in another blog post,[3] which was republished in the January 2023 edition of Wired:[4]
In a 2024 article on ft.com, Doctorow extended the word with the term "enshittocene" to state that "'enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything".[5]
The beginning of an enshittification & AGI/ASI era necessitates a parallel internet infrastructure endeavor. Enter Minitel 2W. Local-first, internet where text and encyclopedias are prioritized over Advertisments, Algorithms, and antagonistic partisanship. One where feces is absent. Publically funded internet in the public interest.
( 3/13/2026: When I wrote about infrastructure, this is exactly what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oS35oWWl28 The ex-AI researchers talk about building infrastructure- what they might not realize is- power plants power all electronics, unless one is designed without a utility grid that isn't dependent on some AI mothership's commands. Hence, decentralized solar and renewable energy is one. The more solar powered communication devices- not just rooftop solar, but portable mobile devices, the better. )
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust NPR applied for and accepted tax-payer dollars. "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think. By Uri Berliner April 9, 2024"
For a long time, accepting tax-payer dollars was actually completely acceptable, because it attempted to be non-partisan.
Why not an internet advocacy group similar to NLNet in the U.S?
AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio
Senator Pastore: Alright Rogers, you've got the floor.
Mr. Rogers: Senator Pastore, this is a philosophical statement and would take about ten minutes to read, so I'll not do that. One of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust, and I trust what you have said that you will read this. It's very important to me. I care deeply about children.
Senator Pastore: Will it make you happy if you read it?
Mr. Rogers: I'd just like to talk about it, if it's alright. My first children's program was on WQED fifteen years ago, and its budget was $30. Now, with the help of the Sears-Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television, as well as all of the affiliated stations -- each station pays to show our program. It's a unique kind of funding in educational television. With this help, now our program has a budget of $6000. It may sound like quite a difference, but $6000 pays for less than two minutes of cartoons.
AmericanRhetoric.com Transcription by Michael E. Eidenmuller Property of AmericanRhetoric.com Updated 12/16/21 Page 2
Two minutes of animated, what I sometimes say, bombardment. I'm very much concerned, as I know you are, about what's being delivered to our children in this country. And I've worked in the field of child development for six years now, trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as -- as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to...make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively. Senator Pastore: How long of a program is it?
Mr. Rogers: It's a half hour every day. Most channels schedule it in the noontime as well as in the evening. WETA here has scheduled it in the late afternoon.
Senator Pastore: Could we get a copy of this so that we can see it? Maybe not today, but I'd like to see the program. Mr. Rogers: I'd like very much for you to see it.
Senator Pastore: I'd like to see the program itself, or any one of them.
Mr. Rogers: We made a hundred programs for EEN, the Eastern Educational Network, and then when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we've got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what -- This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are." And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much hmore dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for 15 years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.
Senator Pastore: Do you narrate it?
Mr. Rogers: I'm the host, yes. And I do all the puppets and I write all the music, and I write all the scripts --
AmericanRhetoric.com Transcription by Michael E. Eidenmuller Property of AmericanRhetoric.com Updated 12/16/21 Page 3
Senator Pastore: Well, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goose bumps for the last two days.
Mr. Rogers: Well, I'm grateful, not only for your goose bumps, but for your interest in -- in our kind of communication. Could I tell you the words of one of the songs, which I feel is very important?
Senator Pastore: Yes.
Mr. Rogers: This has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in -- in very personal communication with small groups: What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite. When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you go? It's great to be able to stop when you've planned a thing that's wrong. And be able to do something else instead, and think this song -- 'I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. Can stop, stop, stop anytime....And what a good feeling to feel like this! And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.'
Senator Pastore: I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars."
If it appears my pet project is vastly incomparable to a public national TV program that needs funding, I beg to differ. Today, public tax dollars are spent on vanity projects that serve special-interest groups without ensuring that the money is not wasted on largely redundant overhead (popups, bloated websites, horrible user-interfaces)
https://userinyerface.com/ A perfect exercise in discombobulation) see 3-2 post
The need for a public, no-frills, no-nonsense internet pipeworks should have already been built yesterday. As George Carlin once said "As you swim the river of life, do the breast stroke. It helps to clear the turds from your path."
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-the-new-york-times-beat-me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI Tom Lehrer - Pollution September, 1967
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/but-can-it-run-crysis
2007: Crysis game released: But can it run Crysis? 2010: Quake II demo in browser "But can it run linux?". 2011: But can it run on solar? Intel Claremont runs on Windows 95. 2024: Can it run on solar and is it commercially available? No. 2034 : Can it run on Solar? Who knows? 2044: Can it run Crysis on Solar? Who knows, did they even get Solar linux running yet?
"About
But Can It Run Crysis? is a phrase referring to the 2007 Crytek first-person shooter Crysis, underscoring the reputation the game has obtained for it's steep system requirements at the time of its release. The phrase has slowly evolved into a snowclone as years pass, substituting "But can it run X?" for the most recent and system-demanding title at the time."
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/snowclone
"About
Snowclones are a type of phrasal templates[2] in which certain words may be replaced with another to produce new variations with altered meanings, similar to the "fill-in-the-blank" game of Mad Libs. Although freeform parody of quotes from popular films, music and TV shows is a fairly common theme in Internet humor, snowclones usually adhere to a particular format or arrangement order which may be reduced down to a grammatical formula with one or more custom variables. They can be understood as the verbal or text-based form of photoshopped exploitables."
Solar Powered Computer is a Snowclone of "But can it run Crysis?" because it expands the template from game/program to operating system, as was done in 2010.
Mad Libs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs
Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game created by Leonard Stern[1][2] and Roger Price.[3] It consists of one player prompting others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud. The game is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime.
The game was invented in the United States, and more than 110 million copies of Mad Libs books have been sold since the series was first published in 1958.[3]
Mad Libs was invented in 1953[4] by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. Stern and Price created the game, but could not agree on a name for their invention.[3] No name was chosen until five years later (1958), when Stern and Price were eating Eggs Benedict at a restaurant in New York City. While eating, the two overheard an argument at a neighboring table between a talent agent and an actor.[3] According to Price and Stern, during the overheard argument, the actor said that he wanted to "ad-lib" an upcoming interview. The agent, who clearly disagreed with the actor's suggestion, retorted that ad-libbing an interview would be "mad".[3] Stern and Price used that eavesdropped conversation to create, at length, the name "Mad Libs".[3] In 1958, the duo released the first book of Mad Libs, which resembled the earlier games[5] of consequences and exquisite corpse.
Stern was head writer and comedy director for The Steve Allen Show, and suggested to the show's host that guests be introduced using Mad Libs completed by the audience. Four days after an episode introduced "our guest NOUN, Bob Hope", bookstores sold out of Mad Libs books.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_libitum "Ad libitum This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ad libitum" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In music and other performing arts, the phrase ad libitum (/ædˈlɪbɪtəm/; from Latin for 'at one's pleasure' or 'as you desire'), often shortened to "ad lib" (as an adjective or adverb) or "ad-lib" (as a verb or noun), refers to various forms of improvisation.
The roughly synonymous phrase a bene placito ('in accordance with [one's] good pleasure') is less common but, in its Italian form a piacere, has entered the musical lingua franca (see below).
The phrase "at liberty" is often associated mnemonically (because of the alliteration of the lib- syllable), although it is not the translation (there is no cognation between libitum and liber). Libido is the etymologically closer cognate known in English.
In biology and nutrition, the phrase is used to describe feeding without restriction.[1]"
"Other performing arts "Ad-lib" is used to describe individual moments during live theatre when an actor speaks through their character using words not found in the play's text. When the entire performance is predicated on spontaneous creation, the process is called improvisational theatre.
In film, the term ad-lib usually refers to the interpolation of unscripted material in an otherwise scripted performance. For example, in interviews, Dustin Hoffman says he ad-libbed the now famous line, "I'm walking here! I'm walking here!" as "Ratso" Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (1969). While filming at a streetcorner, the scene was interrupted by a taxi driver. Hoffman wanted to say, "We're filming a movie here!", but stayed in character, allowing the take to be used.[2]"
On a tangent, the phrase was also in Forrest Gump: https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/and66e/in_forrest_gump_1994_when_lt_dan_and_forrest/
3/11/2024- Update to my previous "origin" story. In June 2011, Liliputing posted an article titled, "Pixel Qi suggests low power tablets could be powered by 1W solar panels," where I commented on the original article. That link I posted was to a 6/2011 TechCrunch article, documenting an Industrial designer, "Andrea Ponti's Luce Solar Panel Powered PC." Luce in Italian means "Light." I don't claim to have been the first to have the idea for a solar powered laptop. I just want(ed) and (still) want the idea to come to fruition.
I first later conceived of this project after visiting and reviewing the Maker Faire in 2011, seeing both the Raspberry Pi and a booth with a kit for solar powerable electronics, solar power managers (similar to Adafruit kits now sold) called BootStrap Solar.
I wrote about it weeks later.
A year later I posted about it again in 2012.
I resumed interest in 2020 on the Raspberry Pi Forums after seeing the Solar Gameboy in the news:
This project then migrated across a few informal forum posts (EI2030-defunct, Raspberry Pi Forum), to Hackaday in 2021. From there, it has remained, although Github also provides an efficient mechanism for storing and and cloning projects.
I reached out to universities, companies, and governments in 2021:
No response. While I have met some sympathetic developers, the majority of the industry isn't focused on this product idea, or hasn't shared much publically about it.
--
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Unsolicited NETL Proposal (A-2023-27) From: DOEUSP@NETL.DOE.GOV DOEUSP@NETL.DOE.GOV To: giovanni.los giovanni.los@proton.me Date: 1/19/23 10:51
Dear Giovanni,
Your submission received by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Unsolicited Proposals (USP) Program Office entitled “The Autarkic Standard for Integrated Chiplets (The ASIC)” (assigned #A-2023-27) has been reviewed by our technical personnel.
Upon careful review, DOE has concluded that this submission does not align with DOE’s current program areas of research and development; therefore, DOE cannot consider this under the USP Program.
We encourage your participation in one of the Department’s future competitive announcements or solicitations, and recommend you monitor DOE’s financial assistance funding opportunity announcement (FOA) and procurement solicitation postings, which can be found at public Government portals such as: https://sam.gov/,
https://www.fedconnect.net/, https://www.grants.gov/learn- grants/grant-making-agencies/department-of-energy.html, and
https://netl.doe.gov/business/solicitations-hub. Please note, if your technology or idea fits under the scope of a FOA or solicitation, and you do not submit a proposal accordingly, rules do not allow us to accept an unsolicited proposal that would have been in response to a competitive announcement.
Thank you for your interest in DOE’s programs! If we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
DOE USP Program Office DOEUSP@netl.doe.gov
From: DOEUSP Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2023 1:46 PM To: 'giovanni.los' Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Unsolicited NETL Proposal (A-2023-27) Hello Giovanni, your proposal submission titled, The Autarkic Standard for Integrated Chiplets (The ASIC), was received by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Unsolicited Proposal (USP) Program Office and forwarded on for technical review to determine programmatic interest (assigned tracking #A-2023-27).
Your submission in no way ensures the potential of DOE funding for a research idea or technology since other program priorities or funding limitations may preclude such actions. It merely serves to assist DOE in determining if there is programmatic interest in the idea, concept or technology from DOE’s perspective, or whether it fits under the scope of any DOE competitive funding opportunity announcement (FOA) or procurement solicitation.
Please understand that at this point your proposal submission can not be revised/re-submitted, as your initial submission is currently being reviewed/processed by our technical team. If your proposal is of interest to the DOE, the cognizant program will request a full unsolicited proposal submission. Once the review of your information has been completed, you will be notified of the results.
In the interim, we suggest reviewing DOE’s current FOA and solicitation postings and consider submitting a proposal should your technology or idea apply. This information can be found on Government public portals such as: https://sam.gov/,
https://www.fedconnect.net/, https://www.grants.gov/learn- grants/grant-making-agencies/department-of-energy.html, and
https://netl.doe.gov/business/solicitations-hub. Please note, if your technology or idea fits under the scope of a FOA or solicitation, and you do not submit a proposal accordingly, rules do not allow us to accept an unsolicited proposal that would have been in response to a competitive announcement. As a reminder, all entities and individuals seeking to do business with the Federal Government must register in the System for Award Management (SAM) portal at https://SAM.gov/. An unsolicited proposal may be submitted to DOE without being registered in SAM; however, prior to any financial assistance or contract award being issued by the Government, an active registration in SAM is required. Beginning the SAM registration process sooner than later is highly encouraged. Thank you for your interest in DOE programs and if we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
DOE USP Program Office DOEUSP@netl.doe.gov
From: giovanni.los Sent: Friday, January 6, 2023 4:38 PM
To: DOEUSP DOEUSP@NETL.DOE.GOV Subject: [EXTERNAL] Unsolicited NETL Proposal Dear National Energy Technology Laboratory, Attached is my unsolicited proposal for a renewable energy technology project, "The Autarkic Standard for Integrated Chiplets." Sincerely, Giovanni Lostumbo Sent with Proton Mail secure email."
--
But, to put things in perspective, Linux took 8 years to get a kernel (1983-1991), and 21 years for Ubuntu 4.04 to be released.
So am I being a bit too optimistic that I haven't amassed an open hardware idea/following/movement that few even understand? Of course! And I shouldn't stop raising awareness of this valuable idea.
According to a recent LinkedIn comment, an x86 license can cost $10b (deleted by the original poster), and a former engineer suggested only Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Nvidia could afford that: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7270536198576582658/
So I am not surprised I got no response. I don't have $10b. I don't even have $1m. Have I been slacking from 2013-2020? Can't say I haven't, but I didn't give the idea much thought- I had other priorities at the time. From 2020 though, I can't say I have been slacking. I imagine if I had a degree from MIT, maybe I might have a few more connections and could have made one phone call and gotten a job in 2020 to work on this quietly for the past 4 years. But I don't have any connections, so I do the next best thing. Raise a stink.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laurie-kirk_in-1992-andrew-tanenbaum-made-some-predictions-activity-7275640523321696256-TFEs/ (12/19/2024) With more people studying the history of predictions, I'd like to think that the way towards solar powered computers arrive on the most open-minded platform, and that might not be a monolithic kernel:
"In 1992, Andrew Tanenbaum made some predictions about computing.
1. Microkernels are the future 2. x86 will die out and RISC will dominate the market 3. Everyone will be running a free GNU OS.
An argument ensued between him and Linus Torvalds. But who was right?
It's all a matter of perspective.
Microkernels never fully took off, but hybrid kernels like Windows NT, and mach derived kernels found on macOS + iOS control a ton of market share. Linux is the main exception here, being the most monolithic out of the bunch.
As for x86 vs RISC...partial credit.
x86 obviously still exists, but RISC architectures like ARM completely dominate mobile (and some of the laptop!) market.
All of the major 7th gen consoles were also running RISC architectures (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii).
You might be thinking that Tanenbaum got point 3 the "most" incorrect; very few people use GNU Hurd.
But ponder this:
How many operating systems still use GNU userland tools? Tools like Bash, cat, ls, grep, GCC, Make, Tar, and GDB just to name a few.
I'd argue that the majorty of computing systems in the world have at least one GNU-derived (or at least GNU-inspired) tool.
It's interesting to look back at Tanenbaum's arguments in the modern age. In the early 2000s especially, Tanenbaum seemed quite wrong. It's only recently his arguments have paradoxically gotten more correct."
the ARPANet that used to be, and what it became: https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-note-on-the-changing-faces-of-darpa
Who am I? (updated 12-30-24)
[9-24-24 Note: the Hackaday.io server (not the .com site) occasionally has outages throughout the year- the last time was around 2-3 months ago. The project site's 500 error is:
If it appears, it might be intermittently accessible, or can return in a few days.]
On November 6th, 2022, I wrote a lengthy Substack post on the case for solar powered electronics, which I continued to edit, revise, and add source material well into 2023. In it, I addressed foundry space, and the term "pure play." I examined that while they are "pay to play," they are also potentially and profoundly unequal:
Original Subheadline: "How much 1990s of a phone or PDA would anyone want today, if you never had to worry about a battery charge again?"
2nd Subheadline Headline: "The Ghost of Hunter S. Thompson shows up at an empty Las Vegas CES conference center in January of 2021, wondering where the world went."
"
From a recent PC Gamer article (5/23/2024), "Even mega-companies such as Google and Qualcomm don't have the cash on hand to outbid big daddy Apple."
"According to 9to5mac (via Extreme tech), Apple's chief operating officer met with TSMC bosses to negotiate terms to secure 2nm capacity. The report cites 'local sources', so there needs to be a pinch of salt here, but given Apple's track record of locking up TSMC's capacity, this would certainly come as no surprise.
TSMC's 2nm process is currently scheduled to enter risk production in 2025, with volume production set for the second half of 2025. That means the upcoming iPhone 16 family with A18 chips will stick with 3nm, but it could mean the high end iPhone 17 Pro and Max could be the first in line to be built with 2nm technology.
The specifics of deals between TSMC and its customers are obviously not made public, but it is widely accepted that Apple booked all of TSMC's 3nm capacity, at least for a period of time. These chips, including the A17 and M3 families made their way into the latest generation iPhone 15 Pros and MacBooks. That would make Apple's 2nm play unsurprising."
My predictions were more than a year in advance. Would anyone want one company to reserve all the tooling at a company like TSMC? Hence the word foundry neutrality, similar to net neutrality. It's like when the FCC steps in to ensure a minimum wireless spectrum and internet bandwidth is reserved for for basic internet capability, some quantity of wafers should be reserved for startups to prevent a "too-big-to-fail" FAANG company from reserving 100% control of leading edge semiconductors, lest it be considered a monopoly (not so coincidentally, Apple is being sued by the DOJ for monopolizing the app market: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets It should not be hard to make the connection to hardware that Apple would want the same type of dominance. The tech media could cover that instead of Chat-GPT for once. It might sound like they are catching up to regulation news, after the CHIPS act led to new foundry investments in Arizona.
"it is widely accepted that Apple booked all of TSMC's 3nm capacity, at least for a period of time" - the definition of temporary reservations - "at least for a period of time," can be interpreted widely, because temporary booking of all a node's wafers in a year of production is different from a permanent booking. For example, while it is not technically a monopology on all leading edge foundries (which can include 3nm at Samsung), it still can delay progress in innovation when certain technologies require it. Are chipmakers utilizing 3nm for solar powered phones, and if so, what kind of memory are being used? It is likely that the nodes at 22nm and 12nm are still maturing for logic, SRAM and DRAM, thus there is some improvement that can be make in low-leakage processes such as TSMC-ULL/ULP and Global Foundries FD-SOI.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-computer-chips-taiwan-trade-geopolitics-1605f116
"Your next iPhone won’t be stamped Made in America. But pry open the casing in 2025 and you may see semiconductor chips that were etched into silicon in the Arizona desert." If you're wondering why Apple may be doing business in Arizona soon, it's not because they are as American as Apple Pie. It's because they're being dragged, kicking and screaming, to comply with U.S. regulations (and a tax concession). For a company as callous to produce a hydraulic press ad, it should be a reflection of the steely heart that the company now is.
Though technically the concept of a solar powered computer existed as a solar calculator before that, which also influenced my interest, I can't think of any time before 2011 that I had wanted to solar power a device like a small PC, although I had been aware of the OLPC since the mid 00s.
In "A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen What’s behind that funky green machine?" (11/2007, ACM QUEUE), then CTO Jepsen describes the power consumption:
"It’s pretty hot in much of the developing world, so we’ve designed a laptop that can take extreme heat. Part of that is an artifact of it being so low powered. We don’t need big electrolytic capacitors whose lifetimes halve every 10 degrees hotter you get. We get to use little tiny capacitors because we’ve got so little power to deal with, and that’s quite helpful.
Also, half the kids in the world don’t have electricity at home. Half the kids. Eighty percent of the schools that we’re going into don’t have electricity. So we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking, which is the last mile, 10 miles, 100-mile Internet solution. The solar repeaters and active antennas that we’ve added into the mix cost about $10 a piece and help to relay the Internet. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.
Yes, it might be just a trickle, a low-bandwidth connection from the Internet to the laptop, but between the laptops is a high-bandwidth connection through the mesh network. We use 802.11s, which is the standard for mesh. The standard isn’t actually complete, but we will be compatible with it when it’s completed. We’ve had to make it up as we go along, so we’re a little ahead of that. There’s truly so little power in the developing world. If a school is wired, it tends to be on a generator, and there’s one 60-watt light bulb per classroom. Generators make really weird power. Usually what comes out of the wall in most countries is 50 or 60 hertz, or somewhere in between. With generators, the frequency of the AC power can go down to 35 hertz. We therefore had to do really interesting power conditioning on the AC adapter. The laptop itself can take between negative 32 volts to 40 volts, and work well with anything from 11 to 18 volts. You can plug a car battery into it. You can plug a solar panel into it."
In early-2023, I recall listening to a audio interview with Richard Barbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyoxwUmQBns. Being quite wired to the maker community in the past 15 years, I did not really pay much attention to the political differences of Silicon Valley's origin and European constitutions:
"Unlike its American equivalent, the French revolution went beyond economic liberalism to popular democracy. Following the victory of the Jacobins over their liberal opponents in 1792, the democratic republic in France became the embodiment of the ‘General Will’. As such, the state was believed to defend the interests of all citizens, rather than just to protect the rights of individual property-owners. The discourse of French politics allows for collective action by the state to mitigate – or even remove – problems encountered by society. While the Californian Ideologues try to ignore the taxpayers’ dollars subsidising the development of hypermedia, the French government can openly intervene in this sector of the economy.46
Although its technology is now increasingly dated, the history of Minitel clearly refutes the anti-statist prejudices of the Californian Ideologues – and of the Bangemann committee. The digital future will be a hybrid of state intervention, capitalist entrepreneurship and DIY culture. Crucially, if the state can foster the development of hypermedia, conscious action could also be taken to prevent the emergence of the social apartheid between the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’. By not leaving everything up to the vagaries of market forces, the EU and its member states could ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to be connected to a broadband fibre-optic network at the lowest possible price." https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/0585-INC_NN10-totaal-RGB.pdf
It is within this context that I see an opportunity for solar powered mobile devices to become the 21st century upgrade from Minitel- a wireless, local-first, decentralized and distributed means to connect the information-poor global economy.
Would you give hundreds of thousands to an English major dropout of Reed college?
I'm not the best person to manage a project. But I have a clear idea on how to run it. There are far more qualified designers with knowledge about supercomputers from 60 years ago that has not yet even been optimized: https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/modernising-1960s-computer-technology-learning-from-the-cdc-6600 (RISC-V is actually adopting this old Cray tech now that its utility is being realized)
That said, I have an eye towards user-experience. An engineer like Woz might be a brilliant engineer, but Jobs understood UI far better. What I see to fuse is the minimalist appearance of a laptop like the Luce, with the low power consumption of something like an Ambiq 510. The issue with microcontrollers is that, in using a Cortex M55, it is not designed as an application processor, and there is a scarcity of development in this field, at least public development.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2024/11/27/the-great-tech-wake-up-call-vcs-discover-billions-in-inefficient-engineering-teams/ For the low price of $100k/year, I am willing to wear an ankle bracelet 24/7 so you can track my productivity. I'm kidding. Price negotiable.
Could anyone in the 1940s anticipate Rock and Roll of the 50s, counter-culture in the 60s, disco in the 70s, electronica/synthwave in the 80s, grunge in the 90's, indie-rock/metal in the 00's, and superpop in 10s? Market research can't predict what the next generation is doing, but there are sometimes hints that counter-culture skips a generation. It could be also what is to explain the rise of the flip phone generation, despite the plethora of octa-core options being given to them by the mega-conglomerates:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/15/business/flip-phone-gen-z-ctrp/index.html
https://mashable.com/article/gen-z-flip-phones-trend
Despite submitting several grant applications, this project exceeds the risk-taking of the Lower-Level Agents:
If there is skepticism from this project, then I am willing to sign a non-profit clause, in that I wish not to be funded, if someone else is willing to steer this project to completion. How else can I prove my sincerity?
Another issue, is the "The agent principal problem" : https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/the-agent-principal-problem
Amount of risk of this project (perceived or real):
The risks may be perceived or real risks. For example, do you believe solar powered computers are possible? If you believe yes, you are correct- solar powered calculators existed since 1976, and solar powered computers have been demonstrated since 2011. If you believe no, then you may not have been around solar powered calculators or computers in your youth. If smartphones were the only thing that one understood as "computers," then their view of history is quite limited. I was surprised, as you may be, to learn that many people who were interested in radios before computers were a lot like the hobbysists of today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Radio_Engineers
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ham-radio What has changed, however, is that a dependence on a single smartphone for all of one's interaction has caused a clear rejection of the platform by some in Gen Z, due to its near monopoly on attention. Radios and early desktop computers, at least, were offline and did not try to wedge themselves in to every aspect of life.
An important aspect in science literacy is understanding how things work. A solar calculator allowed a student to believe that a small amount of light could, in fact, power a calculator, using a static RCA 1802. In an era where students are all issued Chromebooks for calculators, they are not brought up in the same era where electricity is a privilege, rather than an expectation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802#Programming_languages
"But that doesn’t mean children of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today are all rushing to make their houses as green as their calculators. Solar calculators may have convinced a generation that the sun could power gadgets, but it’s not the same as convincing them that the power in tiny calculators could stream from an outlet.
The problem, says professor and futurist Cindy Frewen, is that people don’t necessarily think of rooftop panels the same way they might think of consumer electronics. "People adopt their gadgets, but they accept their energy,” she says. “They take it for granted: ‘This is what I have in my house.'"
from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/160225-solar-calculator-history-energy-objects
This repository is not an ideology, but a pursuit of ideas.
A great Substack post today mentioned Kranzberg's six laws of Technology:
"Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
Technology comes in packages, big and small.
Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
Technology is a very human activity – and so is the history of technology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Kranzberg#Kranzberg's_laws_of_technology
http://pantaneto.co.uk/the-decline-of-unfettered-research-andrew-odlyzko/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
"A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action.[1][2][3] The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.
Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests."
"David Hume provided another early and better-known interpretation of what is now called the collective action problem in his 1738 book A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume characterizes a collective action problem through his depiction of neighbors agreeing to drain a meadow"
https://stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life (1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado)
https://stevejobsarchive.com/book/download (EPUB, 32MB)
"Of all the great companies of recent memory, there is only one that seemed to have no character, but only an attitude, a style, a collection of mannerisms. It constructed a brilliant simulacrum of character, in the way a man without empathy or conscience can pretend to have those traits. But it was never really there--even though two generations of employees convinced themselves otherwise. It was only when that character was finally tested did the essential hollowness of the enterprise finally stand exposed, and the employees and customers shrieked with betrayal.
This was Apple Computer Inc., and there has never been a company like it. It was founded by two young men, one a genius with no allegiance to any institution but his own mind; the other a protean, inconstant figure who seemed composed of nothing but charm and a pure will to power. The company they built seemed to have everything: great technology, superb products, talented employees, rabidly loyal customers, an arresting vision, even a lock on the zeitgeist. But, like its founders, it lacked character. And because of that, from the first minute of the first meeting of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, a decade before the company's founding, Apple Computer was set on a path from which it could not escape, even after those founders were gone. And that path would in time lead to the company's destruction.
More than any other great company, the seeds of Apple's future glory and its subsequent humiliation were planted long before the company ever began. And bend and prune as it might, Apple Computer could never free itself of its roots.
2.0 SEED
It was Regis McKenna, the Silicon Valley marketing guru, who first saw the horrible truth: "The mistake everyone makes is assuming that Apple is a real company. But it is not. It never has been." He was too much of a businessman (after all, Apple could prove to be a once and future client) to draw the final inference: "And it never will be."
Nobody alive knew Apple better than Regis McKenna--at least nobody who had been affected by the notorious "reality distortion field" that emanated from Steve Jobs;. After fifteen years of handling the company, Regis had remained unwarped and unconverted because no matter how successful Regis McKenna Inc. had become, and no matter how far it had left the publicity game behind for the more rarefied climes of marketing and business development, Regis still remained a PR man at heart. He still upheld the flack's first law: never, ever believe the hot air you put out about your client.
Not that it was easy. When you watched your client land on the cover of Time magazine and knew you got the credit for getting him there; when you stood in the convention centers and giant auditoriums and felt the waves of adoration rolling around you; and when the calls came late at night and you heard Jobs the Seducer telling you how much he depended upon you, it would have been so simple to surrender to the undertow, to lose yourself in the Apple Will.
But every time Regis thought of doing so there would be a meeting to remind him that Apple was a kind of collective madness. He would bring in an expert on marketing, or branding, or organizational theory--anything that might give the company some order, some strategic planning, some simulation of real business discipline--and he would watch in dismay as that person was humiliated, ignored or driven away. As for his own advice--well, nobody blew off the mighty Regis McKenna. Instead, they'd listen intently, nodding, foreheads pinched in concentration, even the seraphic Jobs himself making those unreadable and delicate motions with his fingers on the tabletop as if he was taking seriously what Regis was saying ... and then the Apple Corps would leave the room and never think about Regis's message again.
In the end, after fifteen years advising the company he'd helped to create, McKenna walked away from Apple Computer. And not just from Apple, but from PR itself"
-Excerpt from the 1999 book "Infinite Loop How the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane" by Michael S. Malone
https://multicores.org/lisa/VCFB2023.pdf (great history on the early hardware of the Lisa and Apples)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0OlEHIAIWn4 "No experience in life is wasted as an artist if remembered and used later"
by that logic, Steve Jobs was an artist - calligraphy in the Macintosh.
"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone (Full Documentary)
https://litverse.substack.com/p/steve-jobs-vs-the-haters
https://www.directors-institute.com/post/whystevejobswasfiredbyapple
https://newsteve.substack.com/p/most-ideas-come-from-previous-ideas My recent writeup with a tangent into Biology
"Looking back, some have questioned whether Apple's board of directors could have done more to retain Steve Jobs in 1985. Sculley himself later acknowledged Jobs' effective leadership and called him "the best CEO ever," admitting that he underestimated Jobs' visionary potential at the time. The firing of Jobs also raises questions about the board's decision-making and overall company strategy. Could they have chosen different approaches or members to better handle the situation?"
Imagine an open source project, that, uses a unified design until each milestone is complete. Job's logic here could be like the Cathedreal in the Bazaar. The Bazaar houses the Cathedral, but temporarily cannot access the Cathedral.
"Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible." -Max Weber
"No worthwhile human achievement has ever been instigated on the basis of demonstrable cost effectiveness." - Adrian Bowyer
My Github draft got lost because I accidentally cancelled a tab closing and undid a nearly complete commit, but I had written a substantial paragraph on how cost is a secondary consideration in the progression of inventions, citing Bowyer, but also analyzing Xerox's Chuck Thacker and Apple's Woz "middle stage" adaption of IBM/PDP (e.g. 945/360, PDP-6) systems into novelties- portable Compaq-like consumer tech (though they weren't the only ones- as Landley.net has a better history on that- he mentions Paul Allen and Mitch Kapor, which I read much less into, but that they had identified that complexity was no longer the only drafting stage.):
"The bestselling computer in the world was the PDP-8 from 1973 until it was displaced by the Apple II around 1979, and in its entire production run the PDP-8 sold a grand total of around fifty thousand units EVER, meaning there was no consumer base for a "software industry" before microcomputers. Most software before that was either produced by hardware manufacturers bundling software with the hardware they sold, or by local staff maintaining an installation, or collaborations like produced Multics. What little commercial software got created was bespoke development tailored to specific installations because there was no other business model yet due to a lack of customers to sell to. (Not a lot of speculative development when your total potential worldwide market for PDP-6 software was 23 machines, you talk to them FIRST and get paid before putting in the engineering time, and then you DO the work on their hardware because you haven't got one.) The first computer to sell a million units was the Commodore VIC 20 at the end of 1982, and "the computer" was Time's man of the year for 1982. The Apple vs Franklin legal battle happened when it did because a shrinkwrap software finally had a potential customer base THAT YEAR. People fought over the money once there actually was money."
To focus on two engineers:
" The obvious difficulty in this method--the only method the engineering world had known until recently--was that the more complex the problem, the more complicated the hardware setup needed to address it. In this world, the most gifted engineers were those who could puzzle out novel ways to reduce the number of components by, say, 10 percent. And it was in this particular type of simplification that Woz had shown almost supernatural talent." from Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael Malone https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/malone-loop.html
from The Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age Paperback – (1999) by Michael A. Hiltzik (Author)
A careful review shows that they both understood that cost reduction was the future of Silcon Valley (and since PARC was primarily focused on 10-year long research & dev, the marketability of the Xerox Star would arrive too late, thus Jobs accelerated development by completing their menu screen and cost reduction, as stated by Jobs in an interview in 1990 to the WGBH Boston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L40B08nWoMk
To tie this back to the hypothesis stage, the phrase "talk is cheap" isn't to devalue talk, but to acknowledge that cost is an important factor in even the exploratory stage. And therefore "talk is cheap" is another way of rapidly prototyping (hence Bowyer's RepRap concept) various iterations of expensive ideas in a way that doesn't require actually making them all, but rather exchanging them either via market surveys/research, forums, or prior product feedback to discover market or business inefficiencies in both availability of products and underserved markets which sometimes actually have viral, general purpose applications after passing through the Gartner hype cycle. In other words, "Think Rich" is not delusions of grandeur, but it's an inalienable right to discuss concepts and products as ideas cannot be patented, something that creative people do not often have a shortage of (and sometimes are better off working on multiple projects if they have writers block/engineer's block)
The cost of prototypes, toys, and research, are, according to Byrne Hobart, "But there's a feature of the outside world that also has a major impact: solutions-in-search-of-a-problem and toys-in-search-of-real-world-use are both less costly and more valuable in a world of lower real interest rates." (A Solution in Search of a Problem" is a Low-Rates Phenomenon 12/12/20222)
I had written something in my draft about I/O shields, and how many new SBC boards such as Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi and even AMD, could share more similar form factors to support even long-side backplates (as in AMD's case) if they developed something like a mini i/o shield (1/6 scale perhaps).
from https://www.aaeon.com/en/p/pico-itx-boards-pico-apl3-semi (smallest case with standard form factor- pico ITX. With Raspberry Pi, you are at the manufacturer's whims each generation if they change up the design)
Other mini-ITX cases with flexible backplate slots:
This little "cosmetic" detail could support more reusability and dual-use integration into laptops such as the PiTop, which do not require major modification of chassis if the rectangular I/O shield can be limited to a narrow segment of the chassis. As mentioned in my mobile-ITX blog post, degrees of freedom are a chemistry concept that chemist know more about, and architects of SBCs have far more leeway into rearranging components that do not require convoluted overpasses of wires above heatsinks to reach the backplate I/O.
"SMRs are designed to solve this problem. They will be smaller than traditional reactors, using standardised parts that can be assembled quickly, at sites close to where the power is needed."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czr764nr873o
"The cubane name derives from the cube-shaped geometry of the molecule. Since carbon normally bonds at angles of 109.5 degrees, the forced 90-degree angles of the cube framework introduce a high degree of strain into the molecule—so much so that prior to Eaton’s seminal synthesis, most chemists and theoreticians deemed the very existence of the molecule impossible.
“Not only did Phil synthesize cubane, but he did so by a very creative strategy that used photochemistry to excite the molecule into a cage structure and a ring contracting reaction to attain the desired carbon framework,” said Rawal."
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/philip-eaton-renowned-chemist-and-founder-cubane-1936-2023
I think it's important to not understate my early influences. When I was an undergraduate majoring In Biology, my introductory organic chemistry class had a lecture on synthesis of chemical structures. "“To this day, it’s a landmark. If you look up a textbook on organic synthesis, Eaton’s cubane synthesis will be showcased,” said Prof. Viresh Rawal, Eaton’s colleague and chair of the UChicago Department of Chemistry. “It is often used to demonstrate the power of chemical synthesis and the ingenuity that such molecules inspire.”'
As I reflect on my research interests, I can't help but think of comparing the relatively boring field of chemistry to the hot field of semiconductors (it's obvious who gets all the press).
“Phil said one thing to me that I remember to this day,” said Chuan He, Eaton’s colleague and the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry. “He said: ‘So many people work on natural products; I decided to work on unnatural products.’ I think that captures the essence of the University of Chicago. We strive to work on things that are different, unique or sometimes unpopular.”
Semiconductors are unnatural products, so what difference does it make on which types of electronics are paired together?
If you browse though all my repositories, you may notice a pattern.
All this time, I've been trying to "pack" efficient components- be it pre-built linux distros such as DietPi into 256MB RAM or hardware (currently in the concept stage) into a box- or you could say a cube. But this cube is a circuit design, for a PCB.
The atoms C (Carbon), N (Nitrogen) represent components. The traditional PCB sees power input on a 2D planar- (not in the literal sense, but figurative). A flat compound is cyclohexene (of cycloalkenes). Consider the aromatic double bond the circuit where electricity flows. This is considered the "traditional" PCB. Now, the era of 3D stacked memory is popular. PCBs have always had layers (2, 4, 6, etc), but power is usually viewed in a 2-dimensional plane (in that it is a given that it is an input, but rarely makes any consideration into the source of that power, and what type of PCB is needed for it to work.
from https://github.com/TUDSSL/ENGAGE#system-design-game-boy-emulation-and-system-state-checkpointing
In other words, the design of engineering is capable of thinking in 3D terms when it comes to memory and CPU (e.g. Ryzen 7 5800X3D), so why not solar power integration? Energy harvesting shifts the utility of the design into what can be perceived as having to "work" to generate power, because holding a tablet or phone to collect sunlight would appear to be a "chore" for the consumer. But that is not really a universal belief.
Some manufacturers are "subtly" including solar charging into products again:
Most technological development involves some amount of efficiency advancements for it to be marketable. What this project seeks to do, is integrate all of those highly efficient technologies into one "cube." You can call it disruptive, in the same way cubane can be considered disruptive.
"The resulting high energy density means a large amount of energy can be stored in a comparably smaller amount of space, an important consideration for applications in fuel storage and energy transport."
By integrating a high efficiency solar DC-DC charger, such as the TI BQ24074: "Automatic charging current tracking for high efficiency use of any wattage solar panel"...
...and the most efficient microcontroller in terms of microamp per megahertz (uA/mhz), the Ambiq Apollo4, you have a very compact "box." One that can be shipped.
Step 1: Design Box
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Ship Box. Profit $$$
Carbon, Meet Nitrogen (or hydrogen, take your pick). I didn't invent this pairing. Countless others before me actually built a working prototype. I'm just explaining the trend. Now a cube requires 10 bonds (plus 8 more for H) (C8H8). To ship this "box", it needs a display. Enter memory in pixel. For it to be ubiquitous, it probably needs a long-range modem, such as LoRa or nB-IoT.
So far that's only 4. But enough for a diagram:
It just so "happens" that Moore's Koomey's Law has progressed to a stage where the amount of power on a small solar panel is enough to power all four of those components. Powering a keyboard, mouse/touchscreen, and/or voice recognition are additional challenges, but the basic circuit has been described.
The bi-directional flow of the electricity in a cubic circuit isn't meant to be taken literally- it would need to follow the standard solar charging circuit designs (or anyother energy harvesting circuit).
If you think this project impossible, then it's like saying cubane is impossible.
On a side note, the phrase "be there or be square" originated in the 1940s:
"The sense of square as a derogatory reference to someone conventional or old-fashioned dates to the jazz scene of the 1940s; the first known reference is from 1944. There it applied to someone who failed to appreciate the medium of jazz, or more broadly, someone whose tastes were out of date and out of touch."
So there you have it - cubane is to jazz as flat pcbs are to "being square".
Porting linux or BSD to a microcontroller would require a lot of effort, yet it seems the path of least resistance when compared to trying to develop a sub 30nm application processor designed for extremely low power consumption (less than 2mW. With the Apollo4 Plus running at 4uA/mhz, that presents a fast enough processor for basic applications while still retaining a low power profile.
One of the first goals is to select an OS that would be versatile to basic, low-RAM applications. Another step would be to have a bootloader, via buildroot or Yocto development. a third step would be to run the current application only in RAM.
"Its embedded 4.75MB of memory delivers power-efficient display performance by storing images on-chip to avoid exhausting resources by fetching data from external memory.' https://embeddedcomputing.com/technology/iot/wireless-sensor-networks/ambiq-enables-audio-radio-and-graphics-for-always-connected-iot-endpoints
One of the key differences from this project and the Raspberry Pi is that micro-SD loaded OSes like Raspberry Pi OS are extremely slow, and do not compare to the true, baremetal capabilities of even the armv6 in the Raspberry Pi Zero. loading Raspup Buster 8.2.1 or Tinycore linux on a Raspberry Pi 3 on 512 MB RAM runs faster on RAM than loading apps from microSD.
The early Nokia phones had immediate response times when navigating the Symbian OS. The modern operating systems of today adopt an omnibus of kernel modules, that prevent replicating the user experience of earlier phones and desktops. Phones attempt to run at even faster speeds to keep up with the hundreds of processes, yet lag behind the simplified OS of a generation ago.
What would be ideal is to focus efforts on operating systems that feature HMI and userspace applications while retaining the benefits of the RTOS task scheduling. An analogy would be the UDP vs TCP comparison. UDP is a connectionless protocol- it does not require connections to restart after losing a byte to a corrupt transmission packet. Rather than have hundreds of process IDS waiting to be completed, the user could wait for a kernel task to complete, and if not busy, the syscall could complete the user's request. I call it the "use it or lose it" concept. Which the kernel would be programmed to skip a task that would take too long to process. It would be better to have real time notifications of kernel tasks (likea sysmonitor) rather than an hourglass (or no indicator at all) to observe system health- this would significantly benefit microcontrollers that have limited RAM (2-4MB usable).
Another focus is to perhaps limit the amount of POSIX compliance in an OS to further reduce OS size.
A third focus is compatibility with plug and play screens that do not emit a backlight, to save power and to reduce eyestrain. A reflective display with a variable refresh rate- 1-30hz, toggled by the user, would be a desirable feature in such a system.
The addition of solar panels is would certainly be a goal, but would need to be implemented at a later stage.
Low-power-E-Paper-OS Working Group
=====================
Name: Low-power E-Paper OS
Objective: The goal of this project is to run an OS on an ultra low-power CPU/MCU that can output terminal or a window manager to an e-paper display.
Members: hatonthecat, @alexsotodev open to new members, including after project started.
https://alexsoto.dev/static/community-built-eink-laptop-project/slides.pdf (Slides 45-49)
https://ei2030.zulipchat.com/register/
Hardware: Redboard Artemis, SAMD51, Dialog 14695, ESP32, STM32, other MCUs/MPUs with can be used, including ones with E-paper already connected, like M5Paper, or LILYGO® TTGO T5.
Looking for:
"At this point, we need other people interested in the idea of this super-low-power device with its “I’m not a regular laptop” aspiration. You can help us figure out the key important areas for us to focus on. No special skills needed! If you like the sound of such a device, email us and join! No required time-commitment and no contribution is too small and no worries of all of this microcontroller-type talk goes over your head. We need you!"
If you do have experience (and it is welcome), these fields are of particular help:
"Embedded Development
Electrical Engineering
Software Developers
Reverse-Engineering
Writers/Researchers"
This may sound like a purely high-tech project (read: hard/inaccessible), but it is not, since leading edge hardware/tech is now available in the open-source community. The Sparkfun company (which makes the Artemis boards with Apollo3) helped changed that perception, because if NASA used Sparkfun's altimeter, then it means open-source tech can (and has been) designed to be both leading tech and accessible. Other technology companies like Adafruit, Digikey & Mouser also provide high-quality electronics to non-business entities (i.e hobbyists).
Technology that optimizes low-power cpus for both sleep and active modes has a benefit for not only wearables and IoT, but also user interface applications. This avenue (Cortex A series processors, as opposed to Cortex M0 or M4) has rarely been developed for, due to the likely power needs of the most performance-hungry apps.
Items: Microcontrollers, e-paper display (no minimum resolution, but should be capable of displaying terminal)
For a microcontroller, microprocessor, display, external memory/storage, and OS to be considered for this project, it must meet the Power First-Design approach: [https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/wiki/tri-design-approach.md] (Link reverted to prevent broken links).
Non-Code contributors welcome: https://github.com/readme/featured/open-source-non-code-contributions
Some interesting new processor finds:
https://perceive.io/product/ergo/
https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32u585ai.pdf
Some very early low power microcontrollers that catalogued back in 2011 and forgot about:
https://elinux.org/RaspberryPi_Laptop
https://www.radiolocman.com/news/new.html?di=64911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFM32
Ambiq Update, March 2023 (p.10)
A newsletter at Substack has a great piece on the early days of Xerox PARC, called ChipLetter: https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/chip-letter-links-no-21-xerox-parc Part of it is paywalled, but there is substantial content, including a reference to LA Times writer Michael Hiltzik in his 1999 book, "The Dealers of Lightning". Written just 1 year before the dot com bubble burst, a biography on a company with such unfettered access to frank employee interviews today would be highly unusual, as brands have many more trade secrets to protect in an ultra-competitive market. Nonetheless, the book reads with a much more activist tone than the fluff today in the Wirecutter section of the NYT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#The_GUI
3-4-2024
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/bring-back-private-offices An interesting story on the myth of open (collaboration) spaces. Covers Xerox and Bell Labs offices.
https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-tweeted-a-thing/ "If we want journalism to survive we need to move away from the model where dozens of humans write the same exact blog about an errant Elon Musk tweet in hopes of appeasing an algorithm that is actively changing to kill this exact business model" -Jason Koebler
Of the few human journalists remaining at major news outlets, they are forced between choosing to cover thinly veneered promotional reviews while the benefiting from association with an established institution name/Trademark like the NYT or Wired (some would call it "legacy media," which is admittedly offensive even to myself), which might have access to some advanced SEO tools (or would be foolish for not trying), and covering a story that is not even on the algorithmic radar. Someone could discover then next gen fusion reactor, and tech wouldn't cover it because they wouldn't be able to explain it to their audience (but have no problem using the phrase mansplainer and tech bro when ridiculing Silicon Valley). So which will it be, BigMedia, educating readers about basic science concepts or debating the minor details about which new product you should or should not buy (while plugging in nearly every model of the company you're covering).
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/ed-zitron-interview-big-tech-ai-criticism.html "Oftentimes Zitron takes aim not just at the tech companies trafficking in an A.I.-focused vision for the future but the media organizations and star technology reporters that cover them. Some journalists believe in covering A.I. as an ongoing and potentially larger breakthrough with profound, dangerous ramifications for society and enormous profit potential for tech companies. Then there is a sizable camp, of which Zitron is one of the most prominent members, that reacts with deep skepticism and hostility to the tech industry’s embrace of A.I and messaging around it."
Hobbits engaging in hobbyism (smelting a ring in a volcano to prevent Smeagol from finagling)
Several years ago, an article which went virtually unnoticed still rings true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/160225-solar-calculator-history-energy-objects Children from the silent generation grew up with Erector sets as a hobby. Before the internet, tinkerers from the baby boom era spent plenty of time working with antennas to build radios out of transistors. The Generation X and early Millenials are probably the only two generations that grew up with pocket-sized calculators, which cost more than $400 in the early 1970s. By the late-90s, cell phones began integrating all of these features into the first multimedia smartphones, and the ease of access to computing made hobbyism less about access to basic information and more about high-speed social media.
A little bit of a handicap encourages each generation not to become super dependent on convenience. Call it the most basic pc. My first PC came with a CD pack that included an Encyclopedia (MS Encarta '95). Before that, home bookshelves had encyclopedias in many homes. Portable computers are even more capable of being multi-featured PCs in even less of a thermal design power/envelope (TDP), and the focus of journalism has often been "we're covering all the new features of a product release- let us educate you, and throw away your old pc (we wouldn't know what to do with it- linux? what's that?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCdDKPonXXA <- 1996 PC that had more information than an empty internet device today
Hyperbole asides, A balanced tech media like the Wired, The Verge, Ars Technica, ExtremeTech would cover 10% software, 10% hardware, 10% Superconductors, 10% particle physics, 10% climatology, 10% astrophysics, 10% biology, 10% culture/politics, 10% business, and 10% pure mathematics (you can see where my bias leans, some of this was humor-intended). Instead it's 95% leading FAANG company releasing incremental product/feature XYZ. sentiment echoed: https://www.threads.com/@neil.cybart/post/C_0mBaEv1-T?xmt=AQGzzwSPPkozoerDUOhTLGvzP1T_x9G6S-F8gyT7yTlgeQ
https://social.coop/@epilepticrabbit/116097201976577471 (more recent repost). The "bored by tech" journos are actually uninterested in covering low level languages and hardware architecture at the ISA-level because that doesn't manke attractive copy. but in the open source and libre chip design. that's actually where all the interesting development is.
Also, the reason the free software foundation isn't super enthusiastic about open source hardware is libre hardware emphasizes the right to price your services (which isn't wrong), while open hardware emphasizes low remanufacturable cost once the source is shared. thus, BSD-like open hardware licenses like CERN are likely to get more support because there is likely someone who will volunteer their free time to a project, whereas a GPL hardware developer might wait til the price is right. In other words, they might not develop something unless they're paid a certain amount, and the rest of the interested community will be waiting on that bottleneck. It also won't stop someone from stealing the code and not sharing it (like in the case of ffmpeg's and Rockchip, but that's another story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394327 (and obviously wrong to do that, at least when making money off it).
This project aligns more with BSD, mainly because hardware affordability is intrinsically an economic barrier in some regions, and the goal is to develop basic computing that doesn't require overly restrictive licensing. That said, there is a lot of good GPL software and hardware out there. It's more akin to a luxury belief:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief and i know: luxury beliefs aren't necessarily real, except when one can't afford them..
Regarding the FSF's Four Freedoms:
The modern definition states that a program is free software if it grants users the following four essential freedoms:[10]
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A Free Energy Foundation would be able to reconcile with the FSF if a fifth Freedom were added, namely energy autarky being allowed to negotiated chip design in leading edge foundries a scalable architecture that does not set a priority to a higher TDP. In other words, if the FSF's four freedoms were like the UN Security Council (now being challenged in its authority by the Board of Peace, which is another story too long to get into here), then the energy TDP is like a permenent fifth member that has veto power over a concerted effort to design a free hardware system. In Stallmans's 01-2026 lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4&t=5808s), he speculates that open hardware might be 30 years away, but if you scroll up to the Fusion article suggesting the same thing, that reality is completely false. Free and Open source advocates have the self-determination to effect change, and they should not be beholden to influential, more misleading philosophers who are not up to date on the advances in open foundry space such as those at Skywater and IHG: https://tinytapeout.com/ https://www.musesemi.com/shared-block-tapeout-pricing
"1 hour, 24 minutes, 47 seconds 1:24:51 How do you apply the free software principles to the hardware side? Well,
for the most part, we don't. Uh because hardware and software can both be used
to design carrying out a certain computation. But there's a crucial difference about soft about hardware
which is that it's you can't change what's inside a chip not the physical structure. Uh it's it's feasible to
change a program and distribute the change program and for people to install that in place of the previous version and so people should be free to do that.
But since you can't do that for the circuitry in a chip, there's no point arguing that you must be permitted to do
so. What use is being permitted to do something that's not feasible to do?
But it also uh it's a mistake to ask whether a piece of hardware is free. A
piece of hardware is likely to have different designs of different parts. It might have a circuit board which has a
design. It might have say three or 50 chips in it. Each of which has a
different design. Parts of the chip may be design different designs.
The crucial the meaningful question is given a hardware design is it for you?
But because of the fact you can't modify a piece of hardware, not if not if it's built in a high-tech way,
uh your result is it's useless. It's feudal to demand that every chip that
you get be made from free hardware designs. At least today it is. In 30
years, we may have personal chip fabricators and then it would make sense to demand free hardware designs. So you
could modify the design and make your own chip when it's feasible to modif.org/fosophy/free.
/fosophy/freeh hardware designs.html."
To clarify, I understand that manufactured silicon can't be modified after it is produced. For that one instance. That is not the objective of free designs (which rests in software source Verilog/VLSI, and mask designs (considered an artwork by legal definitions) rather than hardware). FPGAs and Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs), however, do allow architectural changes after the chip is manufactured. But that is ALSO not the goal of free energy hardware. The goal of free energy hardware like autarkic solar or thermoelectric generators, RF, and other energy harvesting devices is the freedom to integrate energy autarkic capabilities and not demand priority of energy intensive platforms which are just as much "feudal." Stallman calls it "feudal to demand that every chip that you get be made from free hardware designs."
First of all, I never said free hardware is feudal but of course he wasn't thinking of me. What is so potentially ignorant of this statement is that the systems he is describing are far more advanced and optional than anything a free energy system could ask for in this decade. Even a 2008 era Core 2 w/o Intel Management Engine has hundreds of millions of transistors.
For example a Conroe has nearly 300,000 transitors: Core 2 Duo Conroe (dual-core 64-bit, large caches) 291,000,000 2006 Intel 65 nm 143 mm2 2,035,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocessors
802.11ac, Wifi, Radios (not 802.3cg or other low power LoRAWAN/LoReA), and especially PCI-express Video Graphics, are a luxury of the 21st Century and not the late 90s:
from https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/hardware-firmware-drivers :
"If you are a developer with driver hacking experience, here are a few specific needs that may be good starting points for work within this broad category:
Video processing units (VPUs) are often the last hurdle to a fully free system on a chip (SoC). By replacing these nonfree dependencies, we can make low-power devices that respect users' freedoms. The Coda9 VPU requires proprietary firmware, which is preventing the Freescale iMX6 from coming entirely with free software. For more information about this visit Rhombus Tech's page about the processor.
The Freedreno project aims to implement a free software driver for Qualcomm's Adreno graphics hardware. You can contribute. Note that Adreno requires nonfree firmware independent of the driver.
The Vivante GC line of chipsets provide 3D rendering for some mobile devices such as laptops. This includes the GPUs used in the i.MX6 and i.MX8 chipsets. Get involved with the Etnaviv project here.
You can help the Radeon project develop a replacement for the nonfree firmware in AMD graphics cards.
You can support Nouveau, a project creating free replacements for proprietary drivers for nVidia cards.
Lima and Panfrost are free software drivers for ARM Mali GPUs. You can help.
Many Wi-Fi chipsets have free software drivers for GNU/Linux but require proprietary firmware blobs loaded at run-time. Developers with experience with wireless firmware may consider freeing these firmwares, such as the firmware from Broadcom and Marvell SDIO chips.
https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/lux.PNG
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-nm10-chipset-backporting-to-pentium.html
^where I recommend no more than 1-4MB of video RAM for autarkic design using commercially available (not necessarily affordable) 3nm w/HBM3e.
One really ought to ask Stallman and the FSF why he has for 10 years placed such an emphasis on graphically rich libre hardware when much of the world without power can't even get online with a 1978 Unix Terminal (or GNU/Linux) terminal from a 1991 486? The freedom to boycott 3D development until a clear and economical process to manufacture free and autarkic hardware, as Barack Obama in his Eulogy for Jesse Jackson last week said,
"6:40:52
“A world designed to tell a child that he or she could only go so far.
Yes, sir. that to think otherwise would be foolish or dangerous
and that wisdom required you to accept your lot in life.
And young Jesse refused to accept that verdict.
He was a born leader, an athlete, a talker,
knew how to talk, star quarterback,
student body president.
He could have succeeded within the confines that were determined for him and had a successful life.
But like so many of his generation, so many extraordinary civil rights leaders in the late 50s and
60s, that Joshua generation, he instinctively understood that individual success meant nothing unless everybody was free.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORrNvS79chM
To give Stallman the benefit of the doubt, he is woefully unaware of the leading edge's technological capabilities, thinks all technology today is still operating on linear or Aristotelian (not Newtonian, Special Relativity, Quantum theory, or efficiencies brought about from Exponential thinking in near and sub threshold voltage due to the power law https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21807652/whats-all-this-subthreshold-stuff-anyhow). Paired with single core, single-threaded kernels (e.g. Linux 2.2 and earlier, no need to build for 64-bit platforms and removing multi-threaded kernel code can allow for such an option. The core can even be both reusable and scalable to multi cores, but the smallest common denominator does not need to be incompatible with a shared architectural ecosystem (e.g. NOT feudal). It's also possible Stallman just wants to "stall" time so that most the world is dependent on non-free technology, but that would be too pessimistic a view. Free software being a diversion rather than a goal.
And Intel, as Nina Zhang has written, has modus operandus of secrecy (https://ninazeng.substack.com/p/words-which-stop-thought [2] & https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1119/isscc-2018-intels-self-powered-intelligent-iot-edge-mote/). What is omitted is not unfalsifiable. The burden of scientific discovery rests on the community that wishes to improve its access to technology without necessarily supporting non-free technologies. Paying for the services for a foundry to manufacture chips at TSMC or Global Foundries might require signing NDAS, but for the purpose of having chips that are devoid of backdoor, they can certainly be audited after production. Preventing high performance chips isn't the goal of the Free Energy Foundation. It's merely informing the user that they have more options- autarkic options to power their computer/laptop.
Stallman also emphasizes playful cleverness (https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk?t=70) in many of his talks and interviews as early as the Revolution OS movie in the early 00's.
"Chapter 3: What does the term "hacker" mean to you? 1:19 1 minute, 19 seconds programs a hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness not necessarily with computers but computers are a very good 1:28 1 minute, 28 seconds medium for playful cleverness because you can build things that will build other things can be tremendous fun you 1:35 1 minute, 35 seconds can make things that are useful but in doing so you can be clever so if you're 1:41 1 minute, 41 seconds inclined to enjoy being playfully clever programming and computers in general give you lots of opportunities to do 1:50 1 minute, 50 seconds so but hacking is not limited to working with computers uh and if you look in"
This repository is a playful hack on the Free Software Foundation, which was playful hack on copyright (copyleft).
The Free Energy Foundation is somewhat of a bottom up approach to hardware design, but it does not seek to veto all free hardware designs unless they are autarkic capable. It merely requests to ability to discuss and vote on the important matters that the bearded linux veterans wish to control.
What I think gets forgotten is that Physics continues to discover new frontiers, and Mathematics continues to find reasonable or unreasonable new explanations of the universe:
"There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this symbol here?" "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."
Naturally, we are inclined to smile about the simplicity of the classmate’s approach. Nevertheless, when I heard this story, I had to admit to an eerie feeling because, surely, the reaction of the classmate betrayed only plain common sense. I was even more confused when, not many days later, someone came to me and expressed his bewilderment [The remark to be quoted was made by F. Werner when he was a student in Princeton.] with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. "How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?" It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory."
https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
Perhaps Wigner's paper could have been titled, "The reasonable unseriousness of including a joke about a circle's ratio's relevance to statistics"
My expository might not be lighthearted enough to to be considered playful, but perhaps you can sweeten this sour crude oil writing.
The Fifth Software Freedom (now offering 25% more freedom!)
"The freedom for software developers and users to reject any large and new software projects (especially ones provided large commercial or governmental funding, such as GPLv3 code contributed to servers at new datacenters) that disproportionately benefits the have (grid-tied and off grid) power outlets over the have not power outlets, unless an autarkic operating system and hardware chip/SoC code contribution or resource can be provided (either in free VLSI designs with libre source code- which includes EDA,TRL & Place & Route designs, then KiCAD+STL or physical manufacturing of open chips). The method of this is advocacy is analogous to collective bargaining."
The hardware/software contribution does not need to include lightweight client access to the intended project (such as a web portal)- such as a heavy database of content or software, but the ability to work on adjacent projects, but should encourage the lightweight availability of tools that can facilitate said software projects. This freedom is not explicity prohibited by the other four freedoms, thus it is instead a strategic freedom that aims to limit the monopolization of information (information assymetry), which can equally be harmful in the same way that a large corporation that does much harm. It can be considered a realism, or realpolitik understanding of de-facto freedoms, rather than de-jure freedoms.
The definition of software harm according to the FSF may be quite broad and counter to the intuitiveness that many might initialy imagine. Nonetheless, the obscurity or secrecy of software being withheld from the user does have valid points towards a definition of harm. That said, prioritizing video driver development over increasing basic access is questionable at best and privileged at worst.
Moving on, an excellent analysis of the FSF's guidance on avoiding surveillance firmware rests on a very luxury belief- the scarcity of 2009-era Thinkpads and the finite number of them available on Ebay or garage sale:
"the hardware which remains
In practice, it is difficult to get anything much more freedom-respecting than the Novena laptop. From a right-to-repair perspective, the Framework laptop is very good, but it still uses proprietary firmware. It is, however, built on a modern x86 CPU, and could be a reasonable target for corebooting, especially now that the embedded controller firmware’s source code has been released under a free license.
However, because of the Intel ME, the Framework laptop will rightly never be RYF-certified. Instead, the FSF promotes buying old thinkpads from 2009 with Libreboot pre-installed. This is a total disservice to users, as a computer from 2009 is totally obsolete now, and as discussed above, Intel CPUs tend to be rather broken without their microcode updates.
My advice is to ignore the RYF certification program, as it is actively harmful to the practical adoption of free software, and just buy whatever you can afford that will run a free OS well. At this point, total blob-free computing is a fool’s errand, so there are a lot of AMD Ryzen-based machines that will give you decent performance and GPU acceleration without the need for proprietary drivers. Vendors which use coreboot for their systems and open the source code for their embedded controllers should be at the front of the line. But the FSF will never suggest this as an option, because they have chosen unattainable ideological purity over the pragmatism of recommending what the market can actually provide."
It is not a disservice, however, to recommend a slow or "obsolete" computer because it confers performance penalties- a 2009 laptop can still be very, very fast with the right lightweight operating system. What is a disservice is the FSF's dismissal and downprioritizing of free hardware development while also recommending a few lucky elite programmers with lots of time and money on their hands to scavenge the used market for laptops that can disable or never had an Intel Management or AMD Security Processor to begin with. This is just another reason to encourage the development of abundant and leading edge libre hardware chips (manufacturing capabilities increase with smaller die space requirements- 1-4mm^2 to manufacture a Pentium II with 32MB HBM3e RAM, rather than 25mm^2 for an Atom (RISC-V, MIPS, J-Core, and even out of patent 486s, which are not feudal because they are binary compatible with a lot of 32 bit software.
:Shrinking this process to a 3nm node today might result in 1000x energy improvement and up to 58,880 chips yielded (not theoretical, which is >60k) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture)#First_generation_cores :
"On 2 March 2008, Intel announced a new single-core Atom Z5xx series processor (code-named Silverthorne), to be used in ultra-mobile PCs and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), which will supersede Stealey (A100 and A110). The processor has 47 million transistors on a 25 mm2 die, allowing for extremely economical production at that time (~2500 chips on a single 300 mm diameter wafer).""
Furthermore, one could make the argument that free software distributed willingly but blindly to parties, yet aware of the possibility that it be used for harm is also questionable:
https://git.pixie.town/thufie/npl-builder
https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html
"Why I created it
"Free Software, Free Society" is what FLOSS devs always look back to when describing the politics behind their software licensing, the copyleft framework for subverting copyright law for good rather than its evil origins. However, the phrase from Stallman's eponymous book has a glaring oversight when you look at the applications of FLOSS software in everyday life. Today, software licensed under the GPL, far from freeing society, provides the backend for tools of oppression from state biometric databases to the web infrastructure for ICE and associated contractors. Free Software is not actually equipped to Free Society, it is in many cases actively arming the oppressors. So the goal of the NPL is to take responsibility for free software's use in order to actually free society. IBM's computers did the number crunching during the holocaust, and god forbid nothing like that happens again, but should it happen it definitely should not be able to leverage software which was supposedly created to "free society". So I created a license which provides the same freedoms for anyone not taking part in activities which are violent or adjacent to violence to hopefully ensure, at least under a society enslaved to IP lawyers, that a FLOSS application isn't providing the framework for oppressors to use."
Also see: https://plume.pixie.town/~/NplLicensingForFreedomAndAgainstViolence/a-reply-to-john-sullivan.html
"Well in the above piece John Sullivan comes off as a bit caught off guard, repeating the same old "non-free" versus "free" rhetoric with not much in the form of constructive advice on where the movement should go in response. However, in the heat of the moment it appears a few desperate possible solutions get to be torn apart by me, so I'll try to keep it short here with replying to this nonsense. (Warning: The next few responses contain extreme sarcasm)
With the ground rules of free software as the baseline, anyone can build systems to specifically promote ethical use.
... We already have some such systems. For example, the FSF's Respects Your Freedom certification program...
For those reading this who are unfamiliar, the Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification program is a program for certifying hardware products as only using entirely free software with a few additional requirements such as excluding those that are used to spy on their users. In order for something to be Free Software, however, it doesn't have to run on RYF-certified hardware from any such vendors, rendering this whole process entirely optional. So unless the FSF can get some nice promotional material out of it (cue Sarah McLachlan - In The Arms Of An Angel) and see some benefits within its already established framework through an entirely optional process to avoid alienating donors, sure! Ethical Capitalism to the rescue, right kids? I mean, it isn't like a certification program can actually prevent code from being used in a certain way, which is say, harmful to others. Geez, that almost makes it sound like a license would be better to absolutely ensure mandatory prevention of harm by software but lets not stray too far over there, lest we alienate corporate!
Software engineers could also develop and propagate a code of ethics, the way other forms of engineering have.
I'm sure the fine folks working at Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin would agree, seems to have worked for them. Actually, what are those other names I saw on the previously linked list of the top 25 U.S. Defense companies? Computer Sciences Corp, Hewlett-Packard? It is almost like many software engineers are already complicit in causing physical harm. Well, I'm sure we'll be able to change their minds by giving them a code of ethics on a handout, so no biggie!
And, we've seen company tech workers organize together to refuse to make certain kinds of software; they could do more of this."
One could also compare the free software license to all the constitutional freedoms that 2nd Amendmenters claim about instruments of harm- "arms don't hurt people, people do" (and beyond)- thus the age verification laws can be seen, in many ways, as being even more restrictive than the 2nd amendment in suggesting that it is a harmful instrument that should be regulated. Some even thought that age two should be the new limit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKhEJIV6Y-Y As Crazed Israeli Commando Erran Morrad suggests Age 3 be the new limit because they call them the "terrible twos" for a reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk
Much like impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives is not based on any specific infraction- legal scholars have noted that impeachment is purely a political decision. Impeach heavy, bloated software projects? There is no figure that free software could even impeach to make a difference. The problem of software and hardware freedom/access is largely a political barrier, not technical.
"Several impeached judges, including District Court Judge Walter Nixon, sought court intervention in their impeachment proceedings on these grounds. In Nixon v. United States (1993),[18] the Supreme Court determined that the federal judiciary could not review such proceedings, as matters related to impeachment trials are political questions and could not be resolved in the courts.[19]"
Presser, Stephen B. "Essays on Article I: Impeachment". The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Heritage Foundation. Archived from the original on August 30, 2019. Retrieved June 14, 2018. Tsirkin, Julie; Thorp V, Frank (April 17, 2024) (April 17, 2024). https://web.archive.org/web/20251114210042/https://www.heritage.org/constitution#!/articles/1/essays/11/impeachment
The wording of this 5th freedom is likely to change to refine its definitions so as to enhance its freedom-capabilities and intentions. It has not yet been presented to the FSF although I have not heard back from a previous email.
You are free to make a copy of this repository and mirror it on a more free code site, like Codeberg or GitLab.
