Hope everyone is having a relaxing Sunday morning/evening.

I wanted to follow up from my previous post, as some of you have indicated interest.

About logistic considerations, I believe 8 weeks is a good time commitment for a hardware project. The goal is to learn more about silicon manufacturing, lower-level computer hardware details such as architecture, circuit design, fundamental condensed matter physics, and digital logic design. Other goals involve understanding firmware systems such as BIOS and the cascade of events that occur from power-on to user operation as well as conceptualizing the small timescales that these events occur on. My intention is not to dictate the philosophy of learning, but bring awareness to details that otherwise would have never been known or to draw a larger picture using the constellation of components that is a modern computing device. We then will delve into HDLs (Hardware description languages) and look specifically at the VHDL (Verilog HDL) for how to design a chip. This is where my understanding of what is out there becomes fuzzy.

We will need a repository to store documents. It is not my intention to use Google Drive. Is there a trusted platform that offers this functionality? I am also curious as to learning a VCS (Version Control System). Git seems to be the choice for this. Maintaining our codebase, resources/references, questions/comments, presentations, notes, and miscellaneous documents in some platform that does not infringe on user privacy. Any ideas in this domain?

Individual development environments are also crucial to a productive hobby/working session. I think it'd be fun to discuss IDEs, TUI environments, barebones software to accomplish simple tasks, CLI navigation, file system implementation, and drive partitioning. Some of you are adept TUI text editor users, which your expertise would be greatly appreciated.

Because this is Lemmy, I assume most of us are interested in FOSS software/hardware. Perhaps there are open source architectures for GPUs, RAM devices, and other fundamental computing units.

Is there a such thing as open source RAM architectures? Is that even the correct question to pose? I see that "OpenRAM" exists for ASIC design. Maybe we can have an ultra-specific computing task that we could optimize all the constituent hardware pieces to perform. Maybe a game engine for a programming project, but where we patchwork the pieces, or at least examine the guts of Godot together. I've found that discussing how one actually READS documentation, can be helpful in becoming more independent during information searching.

Apologies if some parts are still unclear. I'm just happy to see some of you are interested! As per the survey and what you'd like to get out of something like this, or if the idea needs other parts glued together, feel free to suggest them here. Looking forward to your feedback.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36326370

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36326370

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

Hey Everyone,

I'm very happy to see the engagement in my last post... Hoping to improve my communication skills and reduce my verbosity in the next couple of discussions.

I feel like it is due time to follow-up on what I posted on this board last year. That is, to follow through with "full-stack" hardware-software-application study groups.

If any of you still are interested, I'd like to open up this form for discussion of how that group should be run.

On the subject of HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), VHDL (Verilog HDL) could be fun for some of us to try together. Architecture is also a large concept frequently glossed-over, enciphered with too much jargon, or taught in a very "academic" fashion with very little discussion between students... The traditional classroom model, from what I experienced, is not too conducive to neurodivergent learning styles.

On that note, the RISC-V processor architecture could provide an amazing opportunity to gain a low-to-high understanding. Starting from the Silicon, where we delve into unit operations for chip manufacturing, fundamental solid state / condensed matter physics, and some mathematical models to describe the underlying phenomena. Then we will proceed to what can actually be configured in the ensemble of devices that constitute your "computer". What is a "piece of logic"? How do transistors actually operate? Why do certain design topologies make more sense than others...? And so forth.

We would conclude with some software projects like writing an I/O driver for a keyboard, or pool a fund together for some type of chip we design in EDA together. Overall, it sounds like a great idea for us all to increase our technology literacy, have a fun hobby group to hang out with, and to feel like you own every part of your computer.

On top of this, I feel that we should discuss FOSS tools with each other, as well as how they are best implemented to accomplish common tasks. I've punted the majority of my "Big Tech" stack to the curb the last 5-ish years.

TUI tools as well as CLI interaction is a paradigm of computer operation that I feel many of us have been sleeping on. It also has helped me understand how GUI applications can be better suited for the task at hand, versus when I should be using a terminal emulator to navigate the directory hierarchy instead. Many of you are more versed in programming than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts.

We could even come up with a project for mobile, who knows? Not sure about the format, whether or not this would be synchronous, and the time commitment and sustainment of motivation throughout a probably 8 week period. However, I feel like a realistic solution for us all to get something meaningful out of an experience like this exists.

Any thoughts on how to get this up and going? What would we need to do on our first meeting together? What things would you want to learn in this course? It seems to me that many of us are already quite literate in sub-domains of what we are interested in. Maybe a teacher carousel routine could be adopted? Where we adopt a general "roadmap" curriculum, and, in an ad hoc fashion, assign people to be the instructor for the desired lesson? Then that person could go and create a slide deck in Beamer, or prepare a presentation with an overhead camera or digital drawing device to use as a teaching medium.

Those are just some ideas. Really looking forward to hearing what all of you think about this.

Hey everyone!

Long time no post… The Cinny client for Matrix no longer functions even after updating, so I have lost access to the chat.

Anyways, I have been thinking a lot lately about the amount of awkward silences I’ve run into with others. It feels like some people are significantly easier to hold a conversation with, as they themselves are invested just as I am in our topics and dialogue. However, it almost feels like the other person is attempting a strange power dynamic with purposeful silences, staring, or otherwise conversations going downhill.

I’m not trying to be overly dramatic or to blame others, I just want to be as pleasant as possible for both the other person and myself. After all, good conversation can be wonderful!

Hoping to start a discussion with this nebulous afterthought and maybe get some ideas going for conversation skills and building social intuition!

Hi everyone, I've always had a special interest in linguistics and have informally studied a couple of different languages from all around the world. The different writing systems such as radicals in Chinese, Kurdish scripts and reading from right to left, to Inuit glyphs are all fascinating in themselves.

The IPA has been something fascinating, but I've yet to find a good resource that I could make sense of and hold my attention long enough to internalize the concepts.

I'm looking for books and authors that have a unique background. For example, seeing Chomsky's name in an automata formal language theory book was weird to think... But all the NLP stuff had foundation in older linguistic theory and ways people thought about the human brain, right?

Language and Information by Zellig Harris is an interesting read. John Sowa is another author I'd recommend for the whole way of ontology and computer systems. The particular book by him that I'm thinking is Conceptual Structures, I believe...? Would love to hear your thoughts, especially with all the AI hardware being released.

Hey everyone,

I've noticed this community is a bit barren. I'd like to add some posts myself but from a more ignorant POV.

It has come to my attention that there is not nearly enough software torture in my life. Hearing how companies are starting to add barriers to so-called "Translation layers" and other software pieces that give functionality to the underlying hardware...

What types of projects does the open source community need to pursue with respect to RISC-V drivers, firmware, or other necessary pieces to somewhat guarantee that the processor is compatible with GPUs, RAM, I/O, and other low level functions that hardware components perform?

Where should I start in my RISC-V journey? Is there a beginner computer or developer kit that I can purchase that won't incinerate my wallet? I don't expect to game or train LLMs off of a RISC-V-based computer, but am curious as to what a fully free hardware setup would consist of.

Love the idea of RISC-V!

Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It's fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I'm curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

Hi Everyone,

I've gotten a lot of older books on mathematics, physics, chemistry, and dabbled a lot in computational simulation with programs like LAMMPS and GROMACS. I am interested in learning how to make a GUI application that I can use to automate graphing functions, understanding how sensitive a model may be to perturbations in particular parameters, and different ways of visualizing data to help me get an "intuition" on subjects. Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib.pyplot, numba, glob, and os, are libraries I like to use. See Gibbs'/Maxwell's original envisionment of thermodynamic surfaces from the late 1800s.

However, I am a moron with respect to software development. My interests are in the FOSS-sphere of things, but I have never made a piece of software other than botched code to calculate averages, perform PCA, and typical statistics visualizations with distributions, Monte Carlo simulations, and see how this effects the properties of the underlying system of study. I've also glanced at design patterns, know the different paradigms of computing to a basic level, and am willing to suffer for long-term educational gains.

The language I'm most comfortable coding in is Python, but I found it discouraging to start writing a software project, as I assume writing something entirely in Python isn't the best way to ship quality software.

Julia and Matlab are other languages I've written programs in. I've tortured myself with the whole gamut of toolchains/editors like Neovim (and my inability to get my lua.init file to ever work properly), and prefer to use FOSS tools. I can navigate in a clunky sense around a terminal, but whenever I try to configure my .bashrc or modify the behavior of my editor, it results in me chasing down a particular filepath for an hour just to change the color of the text, or rearrange how the text is displayed to the terminal so that I actually can read what is saying. Without color-coating, it's hard to distinguish between directories, file extensions, and so forth, and even more frustrating when you can't get the changes to work.

Essentially, I am a confused orangutan given a mallet.

When I ditched Word for LaTeX several years ago, it inspired me to take my FOSS journey one step at a time, rather than what I did a year ago, where I chucked every proprietary tool into the trash.

I need to actually be able to do work, as one would prefer to drive their car, rather than get out every 5 feet to fix another busted part.

I would like to eventually develop software that ends up in the FOSS sphere, and write programs that do not take up 100GB of space, or have 100s of bandaid layers, countless dependencies, and the whole gamut of issues that plague certain software packages.

Libraries that I've looked at are...

1. Tkinter
2. PyQt5
3. Dear PyGui

I don't particularly care about modern esthetics for the interface. All I care is that the program functions, uses a relatively low amount of resources, and can educate me further about how to rip open a widget, modify the code associated with that particular button, and get a greater control of visualizing concepts taught in math/physics books.

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

Recently, I've found myself bogged down in sending off resumes that seem to never to be read by anyone other than myself.

I'll go through the whole gamut of picking keywords that match the job description, showcasing my previous experiences, projects, skills etc... But it just seems to never result in a call-back or even an email to tell me I wasn't selected.

Given that I'm tired of screaming into the hills and hearing it echo back, I want to write a program that streamlines this whole process. I have a couple of resume templates written in TeX script that I can populate with content. Alongside this, I have all of my relevant bullet points in assorted text files labeled appropriately.

The idea would be to feed the program the job description, relevant qualifications, and other miscellaneous text files. These would be processed to give an idea on how my resume should be modified to suit their requirements. Perhaps that could aid in creating a strong resume in a more streamlined fashion. I have no clue what metric should be used to quantify how "good" it is, so that's to be figured out as well.

I saw "nltk" and "spaCy" are two NLP libraries for Python, but I wanted to open up discussion for those of you who have worked on projects similar to this. I have read mixed comments about the two. Which one seems better suited for this task?

Obviously I'll review the resume before I submit it, but I want to see if I could get something like this working.

I'm a giant noob when it comes to NLP, but have used Python for the past couple of years for data-science applications. I'd be open to learning a different language if there is a library that has some of these functions already coded, but I'm not a developer.

Thanks for any help! I love the community over here on Lemmy. Many of you have been very helpful and encouraging and it makes me want to keep learning more :)

Hey everyone,

Last night a rabbit hole took me to an unexpected place. Gwern is undoubtedly the most comprehensive website adorned with vocabulary, statistics, programming, and a strong bias towards the Haskell language.

I found myself sucked into the site and got lost in what seemed like an endless stream of text. One page about nootropics would lead to another about properly designing scientific studies, the "Dual n back" method for increasing IQ and countless more.

From a previous post I mentioned interest in LLM inferences, but at the time I kind of only nebulously wanted an AI tool better than GPT-4. Some of so kindly brought the Georgi Gerganov Llama.cpp to my attention, for which I finally have adjusted to Linux well enough to feel comfortable downloading software in myriad ways.

Returning to the topic at hand, I have an itching feeling that some sort of ML model could be made to serve the purpose as a brain extension. I can see the uses being for picking up and maintaining technical vocabulary for an interview in pharmaceuticals, chip manufacturing, chemical processing, 3D manufacturing, and legion others.

I imagine it could be an absolute super tool for learning. I mean past the usual Ebbinghaus forgetting curve that Anki seeks to ameliorate, combined with active recall, memory palace techniques, and Anthony Metivier's lovely curated channel. He led me to Gwern in the first place. His story is very inspiring and I would recommend his book "The Victorious Mind: How to Master Memory, Meditation and Mental Well-Being".

I think this is a great place to begin discussion on this topic. Given that we are neurodivergent and many of you have also resonated with the monotropic brain theory, what are your thoughts about having a "Brain Inference" or "Brain Buddy"? Here are a couple of questions to chew on:

• What features should a program do that has the Brain Buddy incorporated in it? Could this be analogous to orgmode in Emacs? Some sort of an fzf-esque program to globally search for something you vaguely recall?
• How would we design it? What facets do we need to consider?
• What training sets could we use? How do we clean up the set to ensure the model doesn't digest falsehoods?
• How large do the models need to be w.r.t. parameters?
• How much computing power would we need?

Hey everyone, I've been parsing through the Huggingface website and am having a bit of trouble picking out an LLM inference to help me parse through legal documents. I am not a lawyer, but I would like to understand my rights and how to search for answers to legal questions with concrete answers using an inference.

I have heard a multitude of things around Llama being a privacy nightmare and something about Gerganov ML files? GGMU is also a nebulous term to me and I understand the basics about how a model is trained and validated, but not how to pick one for personal use that isn't GPT-4.

Any suggestions or things to add on to the discussion?