L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Quanto contano i poteri pubblici nella corsa all'intelligenza artificiale? L'analisi di Alessandro Aresu
Recently [Colin Leroy-Mira] found himself slipping into a bit of a rabbit hole while investigating why only under Apple II MAME emulation there was a lot of flickering when using the (emulated) Apple II MouseCard. This issue could not be reproduced on real (PAL or NTSC) hardware. The answer all comes down to how the card synchronizes with the system’s vertical blanking (VBL) while drawing to the screen.
The Apple II MouseCard is one of the many peripheral cards produced for the system, originally bundled with a version of MacPaint for the Apple II. While not a super popular card at the time, it nevertheless got used by other software despite this Apple system still being based around a command line interface.
According to the card’s documentation the interrupt call (IRQ) can be set to 50 or 60 Hz to match the local standard. Confusingly, certain knowledgeable people told him that the card could not be synced to the VBL as it had no knowledge of this. As covered in the article and associated MAME issue ticket, it turns out that the card is very much synced with the VBL exactly as described in The Friendly Manual, with the card’s firmware being run by the system’s CPU, which informs the card of synchronization events.
We always enjoy [The History Guy], and we wish he’d do more history of science and technology. But when he does, he always delivers! His latest video, which you can see below, focuses on the Cold War pursuit of creating transfermium elements. That is, the discovery of elements that appear above fermium using advanced techniques like cyclotrons.
There was a brief history of scientists producing unnatural elements. The two leaders in this work were a Soviet lab, the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, and a US lab at Berkeley.
You’d think the discovery of new elements wouldn’t be very exciting. However, with the politics of the day, naming elements became a huge exercise in diplomacy.
Part of the problem was the difficulty in proving you created a huge atom for a few milliseconds. It was often the case that the initial inventor wasn’t entirely clear.
We were buoyed to learn that American scientists named an element(Mendelevium) after a Russian scientist as an act of friendship, although the good feelings didn’t last.
We wonder if a new element pops up, if we can get some votes for Hackadaium. Don’t laugh. You might not need a cyclotron anymore.
Everyone knows what its like to get a hankering for a specific food. In [Attoparsec]’s case, he wanted waffles. Not any waffles would do, though; he needed waffles in the form of a labyrinth. Those don’t exist, so he had to machine his own waffle maker. When computers were the size of rooms, these stood in where we’d use CNC today. Most of us would have run this off on a CNC, but [Attoparsec] isn’t into CNCing–manual machining is his hobby, and he’s not interested in getting into another one, no matter how much more productive he admits it might make him. We can respect that. After a bit of brain sweat thinking of different ways to cut out the labyrinth shape, he has the opportunity to pick up an antique Deckle pantograph mill.
These machines were what shops used to do CNC before the ‘computer numeric’ part was a thing. By tracing out a template (which [Attoparsec] 3D prints, so he’s obviously no Luddite) complex shapes can be milled with ease. Complex shapes like a labyrnthine wafflemaker. Check out the full video below; it’s full of all sorts of interesting details about the machining process and the tools involved.
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Questa volta Apple sembra essersi realmente arresa a Spotify, intenzionata a suggerire ai propri utenti di effettuare transizioni senza passare dall'App Store e dunque senza pagare il fio a Cupertino. L'ultima volta la Big Tech di Tim Cook aveva
[Martin Lorton] has a vintage Harmon 4200B selective voltmeter that needed repair. He picked it up on eBay, and he knew it wasn’t working, but it was in good condition, especially for the price. He’s posted four videos about what’s inside and how he’s fixing it. You can see the first installment below.
The 4200B is an RMS voltmeter and is selective because it has a tuned circuit to adjust to a particular frequency. The unit uses discrete components and has an analog meter along with an LCD counter.
The initial tests didn’t work out well because the analog meter was stuck, so it wouldn’t go beyond about 33% of full scale.
Since there are four videos (so far), there is a good bit of information and detail about the meter. However, it is an interesting piece of gear and part 3 is interesting if you want to see inside an analog meter movement.
By the fourth video, things seem to be working well. You might want to browse the manual for the similar 4200A manual to get oriented.
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Il remunerativo sodalizio che ha condotto Google e Apple insieme in tribunale per pratiche anticoncorrenziali potrebbe ora essere messo in crisi, oltre che dal verdetto, dall'integrazione dell'IA nei motori di ricerca
The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips. It’s easy to understand and program, so it remains a fixture despite much faster replacements appearing.
If you can’t find an original 40-pin DIP don’t worry, because [mit41301] has produced a board in a compatible 40-pin format. It’s called the single chip computer not because such a thing is a novelty in 2025, but because it has no need for the support chips which would have come with the original.
The modern 8051 clone in use is a CH558 or CH559, both chips with far more onboard than the original. The pins are brought out to one side only of the board, because on the original the other side would interface with an external RAM chip. It speaks serial, and can be used through either a USB-to-serial or Bluetooth-to-serial chip. There’s MCS-BASIC for it, so programming should be straightforward.
We can see the attraction of this board even though we reach for much more accomplished modern CPUs by choice. Several decades ago the original 8051 on Intel dev boards was our university teaching microcontoller, so there remains here a soft spot for it. We certainly see other 8051 designs, as for example this Arduino clone.
In Africa, nella regione dei Grandi Laghi, alla problematiche dovute alle ingiustizie socio-economiche e ambientali si aggiunge un livello di discriminazione ulteriore dovuto ad una sistematica persecuzione delle persone appartenenti alle comunità LGBTQI+.
Chiediamo aiuto concreto e immediato:
Salviamo vite nella regione del Kivu, in Congo. Persone LGBTQ+ fuggono dalle aree occupate da forze militari non governative, cercando disperatamente rifugio e sicurezza. Collaboriamo con Gay Christian Africa per sostenere queste persone e permettere loro di trovare riparo.
Sosteniamo chi lotta contro l’HIV in Uganda. Il progetto della Mbarara RISE Foundation fornisce farmaci salvavita per persone LGBT+ che vivono con HIV, ma i fondi sono stati recentemente cancellati dall’U.S.AID.
Agire ora può fare la differenza. Le persone colpite da queste crisi non possono aspettare. Il nostro contributo può significare la possibilità di una nuova vita per chi è intrappolato dalla persecuzione o dalla mancanza di cure. Qui, trovi la scheda informativa sulla raccolta "Focus sul continente africano e le comunità LGBTQI+". Samaria APS
👥 Fediverso e Livello Segreto: una palestra di libertà digitale
🕤 Martedì 13 Maggio, ore 21.30 presso Officina Informatica, via Magolo 32 Empoli
Una chiacchierata con @Kenobit , uno dei fondatori di #LivelloSegreto - un'istanza Mastodon - sulle potenzialità del #Fediverso e delle piattaforme libere, in ottica di libertà e resistenza digitale
This week, we discuss the death of Mr. Deepfakes, introducing kids to the Manosphere, and working on big, difficult, high-brain-power scoops.#BehindTheBlog
Ricardo Prada Vásquez was not on a government list of people sent to a mega prison in El Salvador. But hacked data shows he was booked on a flight to the country.#News
Il nuovo capo di Stato maggiore dell’Aeronautica militare è il generale Antonio Conserva, che subentra al posto del generale Luca Goretti. Lo ha deciso oggi il Consiglio dei ministri presieduto da Giorgia Meloni, che ha accolto la proposta del ministro della Difesa, Guido
Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the company's smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.
Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the companyx27;s smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.#News
Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the company's smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.
Buongiorno, non so se riuscirò a essere all’altezza di questa introduzione, è un vero piacere essere con voi all’Aerospace Power Conference per la seconda volta. Spesso la seconda volta è più difficile, perché devi ripetere il successo della prima, ma non
Alla guida della Direzione nazionale degli armamenti arriva l’ammiraglio Giacinto Ottaviani, che lascerà il posto di sottocapo di Stato maggiore della Difesa. Lo ha deciso il Consiglio dei ministri su proposta del ministro della Difesa, Guido Crosetto, che ha così
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Con un nuovo ordine del Pentagono e l'avallo della Corte Suprema, migliaia di soldati vengono esclusi dalle forze armate per il solo fatto di essere transgender: una svolta che riaccende l'allarme sui diritti civili negli Stati Uniti. L'articolo STATI UNITI. L’esercito espelle i soldati transgender
Julia Deck – Proprietà privata freezonemagazine.com/articoli/… Uccidere il gatto sarebbe stato un errore, in generale e in particolare. L’ho pensato quando mi hai spiegato cosa intendevi farne del cadavere. Era aprile, ci eravamo trasferiti già da sei mesi. Le case appena costruite risplendevano sotto il sole umido di rugiada, i pannelli solari scintillavano sui tetti e il prato cresceva fitto ai […] L'articolo Julia Deck – Proprietà privata proviene da
Oggi è il Giorno della memoria dedicato alle vittime del terrorismo interno e internazionale e delle stragi di tale matrice, istituito nel 2007 e celebrato ogni anno il #9maggio, giorno dell’uccisione di Aldo Moro e di Peppino Impastato.
Oggi è il Giorno della memoria dedicato alle vittime del terrorismo interno e internazionale e delle stragi di tale matrice, istituito nel 2007 e celebrato ogni anno il #9maggio, giorno dell’uccisione di Aldo Moro e di Peppino Impastato.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Escalation militare dopo raid indiani in Kashmir: droni, artiglieria e vittime civili lungo la Linea di Controllo. L'articolo India-Pakistan: accuse reciproche di attacchi lungo il confine proviene da pagineesteri.it/2025/05/09/asi…
Indo-Pacifico. Da qualche anno è questa la parola chiave di ogni agenda strategica, il cuore di ogni esercitazione militare rilevante, il baricentro di ogni riflessione geopolitica con ambizione globale. Ma non si tratta solo di un concetto geografico allargato: è lo specchio dell’era multipolare che
La cifra che metterà a disposizione è pari al 99 per cento del suo patrimonio
Gates, che ha 69 anni, ha motivato il cambio di programmi dicendo che il mondo si trova ad affrontare molti problemi urgenti e che lui vuole finanziare, e incoraggiare altri a farlo, nuovi strumenti per cercare di risolverli: «Ci sono troppi problemi urgenti da risolvere perché io trattenga risorse che potrebbero essere usate per aiutare le persone»
Gates ha indicato tre priorità della sua fondazione per il futuro: la mortalità infantile, le malattie infettive, principalmente poliomielite, morbillo e malaria, e iniziative legate all’istruzione
In un’intervista al Financial Times Gates ha esplicitamente attaccato Musk dicendo che «non è una bella immagine quella dell’uomo più ricco del mondo che sta uccidendo i bambini più poveri del mondo», spiegando che lo smantellamento di USAID potrebbe portare a una nuova ondata di morti e che va «ben oltre qualsiasi eliminazione degli sprechi»
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Starlink aggira le regole Agcom e conquista San Pietro: disparità di trattamento evidente. La lettera di Luigi Pereira.
Si è concluso il Consiglio supremo di Difesa, convocato dal presidente della Repubblica, Sergio Mattarella la scorsa settimana. Il massimo organo costituzionale responsabile per la sicurezza nazionale si è riunito per esaminare i più recenti sviluppi sullo scacchiere
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Distrutte 9 case, 6 grotte abitate, 10 cisterne d'acqua, 4 stalle, una cabina elettrica, l'impianto solare e il centro comunitario. Restano in piedi solo 3 strutture e la scuola L'articolo MASAFER YATTA. Le ruspe israeliane
Nuvole, sogni e antenne. freezonemagazine.com/articoli/… Il potere della musica. Potere della musica, potere della parola ritmata dalla musica. Potere demonico, maieutico, che può essere, allo stesso tempo, violento e consolatorio, spaventoso e accogliente. Nella musica, i contrasti sembrano talvolta ricomporsi e la verità, le nostra verità, offrirsi in un breve lampo di illuminazione: si accende, e subito, non appena l’eco […] L'articolo Nuvole, sogni Il
Ne sentivamo il bisogno, vero? Mi chiedo perché non esista una big tech che investa seriamente su Linux, che come in questo caso avrebbe potuto essere un'alternativa già pronta (e soprattutto appetibile) a Windows.
Già! Se le aziende statunitensi sono ben lontane da un paradigma più etico, figuriamoci poi una big tech cinese quanto può avere a cuore la democrazia!
Tecnologia, geopolitica e società si intrecciano sempre di più. Questa settimana parliamo della supremazia della Cina, dei problemi di Tesla, e poi NVIDIA e DOGE. La NL è uscita eccezionalmente oggi, e non perderla
Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
Independent Infrastructure news
Over the last week, the effort towards decentralisation and running independent pieces of ATProto infrastructure has sped up significantly. There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client.
Some of the updates regarding relays:
Blacksky has built their own relay, using their own custom implementation. This relay is publicly accessible, meaning that other people can use this relay instead of the relay that Bluesky PBC uses.
A writeup on how to set up your own relay by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, for some 34 USD/month.
Making relays cheaper has been due to the Sync 1.1 update, Bluesky PBC goes into more detail in a blog post what this entails.
And the updates regarding clients and AppViews:
Two clients now support the ability for users to set their own AppView, Deer and TOKIMEKI.
AppViewLite is another AppView for Bluesky that has been around for a while, that focuses on being cheap to run. It also heavily optimises for network data storage, with creator Alnkq running AppViewLite that contains full network data on a cheap 10 year old machine. So far, AppViewLite only worked with a custom frontend. An update this week now make it possible to use AppViewLite in combination with other clients.
Some further thoughts:
The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay.
For building features in a Bluesky client that Bluesky itself does not have, a different AppView is needed. Now that these are starting to become available, there is new space to experiment with clients that have features that Bluesky does not have. Deer has already started going in this direction by allowing people to set any account as a trusted verifier, for example.
There has been skepticism around Bluesky PBC’s claims regarding decentralisation, especially from people within the ActivityPub community. Part of this distrust has come from people applying a mental framework of how ActivityPub works to how ATProto works. In this framework, Bluesky being decentralised would mean that there are other software platforms that are interoperable with the Bluesky lexicon. I’ll be writing more about those different mental frameworks, and how that relates to decentralisation later. But for now these developments strengthen the claims of Bluesky PBC around decentralisation and building a network that is ‘billionaire-proof’.
In Other News
at://2048 is the game of 2048, integrated with ATProto. 2048 is a sliding tile puzzle game where players combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile, that has gotten popularity years ago and has been reimplemented a number of times. What makes the at://2048 version stand out is that the scores of the game are stored on your ATProto PDS. This creates new features and challenges: it gives the game a more social element, with features like leaderboards. It also creates a new challenge, of how to verify that a score on someone’s PDS is actually legit. at://2048 is experimenting with verified badges to authenticate if a score is legit. Integrating games with ATProto is one of the areas that is under-explored, and this reimplementation of 2048 is worth watching to get a sense of how the integration of games with ATProto will further develop.
Bluesky differs from other social networks in one significant way, namely that users blocking each other is public information. This creates new dynamics, from people being able to see who have blocked them, to leaderboards of the most blocked accounts on the network. A new paper, ‘Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky‘, takes advantages of data on blocks being public to study user behaviour. Some of their findings: “users who receive a high number of blocks exhibit distinctive behavioral traits that set them apart from the general user population. These patterns are not necessarily linked to toxicity or misinformation, indicating that block-worthy behavior is more nuanced and complex than traditional moderation markers might suggest. Second, these distinctive traits can be effectively encoded and leveraged by machine learning models, suggesting the feasibility of early-warning or flagging systems able to assist moderation teams by surfacing potentially problematic users even before issues escalate.”
Custom feed builder Graze is giving out 5 grants of 1k USD for other projects in the ATProto ecosystem. Explaining why the startup is giving out grants, Graze says: “First, we want to help accelerate growth in the ATProto / Bluesky ecosystem. Projects that help *others* are vital. Second, we want to empower communities to sustain themselves. Third, we want to help give people & orgs direct access to their audiences. Broadly, those are *our* goals as an org.”
Bluesky in the media
Time Magazine talks with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang after they both got recognised as rising leaders in the Asian Pacific Community by Gold House. On monetisation, Graber says “she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.”
Wired published an article on how digital archivists are racing to save Black History while the Trump administration is trying to erase it. Wired talks with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser, who describes “Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years”.
The two developers behind Git collaboration platform Tangled, the brothers Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, gave an interview on the devtools.fm podcast about Tangled. The platform also got various feature updates this week, and customisable profiles.
WhiteBreeze is a self-hostable frontend for WhiteWind, allowing people to build their own blog on ATProto.
ATProto Migrator is a tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS. It does so via a web application, without people having to touch the Command Line Interface (CLI). This makes account migration more accessible, as other tools until now (such as goat by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold) require people to use the CLI.
Flashes is a Bluesky client focused on images, and they are experimenting with some new ways to deal with the limitations that come from using Bluesky’s data. A Bluesky post can contain a maximum of 4 images and 300 characters. Flashes has upgraded that limit to 900 characters and 12 images. It works by actually creating 3 separate Bluesky posts in a thread, and displaying this as a single post in the Flashes app.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
Marco Siino
in reply to Marco Siino • •LGBTQI+ reshared this.