I read this comic and ended up having this chat with ChatGPT. My idea was basically that our fear of “monsters” was really just a fear of predatory animals which are to be genuinely feared.
Atavistic
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Um, America?
I was reading the Obituary for Don Lancaster (RIP K3BYG) and I noticed the two ads, shown below. I wasn’t sure at first if this was satire, or not… ah, crime and commerce in the land of the free.
IDC ribbon cables
ChatGPT tells me about Insulation-Displacement Connector cables, such as these.
California Sunshine – Midian
This makes me happy. <3
RTL
The initialism “RTL” can stand for both “Register Transfer Level” and “Resistor-Transistor Logic” as explained by ChatGPT.
Critical Path != Critical Section
I always get the concepts “critical path” and “critical section” confused.
The “critical section” is the part in your algorithm which you must hold a lock for; whereas the “critical path” is an idea from hardware design which relates to the time taken for the longest combinatorial logic that needs to be processed during a clock cycle, thus limiting the frequency you can run your clock at.
Although the terminology “critical path” came from hardware, the same terminology is used in software. ChatGPT has a fairly good write-up on the two uses of the term “critical path”.
I learned a little more about this in Introduction to VHDL for FPGA and ASIC design.
Oplus
ChatGPT is too good!
CRC
I watched Ben Eater’s videos How do CRCs work? and Checksums and Hamming distance (the full course is Learn about error detection) then found the Wikipedia page: Cyclic redundancy check.
Also of interest:
Keyspace on the back of an envelope
One question that always plagues me: should I use 32-bit or 64-bit keys. I can never make a firm decision on this point. But I’ve just done some back of the envelope calculations in thinking about it.
If you issued one identity per second, every second of every day, it would take 136 years to exhaust the keyspace.
If you issued one thousand identities per second, it would take 50 days to exhaust the keyspace.
BPS BB830
These BB830 breadboards are the ones Ben Eater uses in his videos.