Maya

Trans, quiet, geek, & humanist. Embedded software engineer and amateur roboticist. Still rediscovering self-expression. (she/they/ey)

Avatar: Pixel art of a note being slipped under a door at the bottom of some stairs.

Long-form Fediverse Account:: https://goblin.band/@Mayabotics
Cohost (RIP): https://cohost.org/Mayabotics/
Contact Card Website: https://mayabotics.me

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Last Notes

2026-10-11 01:31:11 UTC

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It's something I've unfortunately been introduced to working for a big company.
It's something we need to do before every major release to get sign-off from Legal.

2026-10-11 01:27:43 UTC

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Automated snippet scanning in software composition analysis tools makes this a non-trivial liability issue for software products, even if you don't see it as a legitimate ethical concern.
The tools to detect this sort of thing are becoming increasingly available to copyright trolls, so it's not something I would dismiss lightly, particularly if I'm releasing code open source.

2026-10-11 01:10:55 UTC

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That's a strawman. What people are concerned about are the extreme number of examples of LLMs reproducing text and code verbatim from the training set, and it's inherent to the way the models are trained and designed.
If LLMs actually produced "homeopathic plagiarism", far less people would be concerned about it.
https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/verbatim-memorization/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25941
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1789.pdf

2026-10-06 08:04:12 UTC

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If I understand what you want to do correctly, create a bridge between ULA islands, it sounds like you need an interior gateway protocol.
My instinct would be either RIPng or OSPFv3, but probably try RIPng first for simplicity.
See here for an example of using RIPng on OpenWrt/LEDE to bridge ULA islands: http://www.makikiweb.com/ipv6/ripng.html

2026-10-02 19:12:01 UTC

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I had no idea A&W still existed.
I thought it went out of business when I was a young child.

2026-09-23 03:49:10 UTC

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Yeah, Firefox is using too much system memory is to keep playing, and now I'm not getting any weird crashes, just disconnects.
Browsers are such memory hogs. (Fix your memory leaks!)

2026-09-23 03:30:27 UTC

Apparently you can manage to just crash Minecraft's chunk loading thread while flying with the elytra in modded 1.21.1, and then the void won't kill you, nor will you be able to teleport, but you can glide around forever.
I was at Y -100 chunks when I finally just killed the game.

2026-09-09 16:21:39 UTC

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Are you familiar with the versionfs experimental filesystem?
I kinda liked how they implemented retention policies, though I was a bit hot and cold on the VMS-esque syntax for working with other versions of files.
https://www.filesystems.org/docs/versionfs-fast04/index.html#sec:retention-policies

2026-09-09 15:44:55 UTC

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It looks pretty good.
Is the area to the right of the scrollbar on the selection list widget treated as part of the scrollbar?
The subtle alternating colors is a nice touch too. Always wondered why more tabular data widgets didn't do that.

2026-09-05 01:46:50 UTC

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Without the frontier models to distill, they'll lose usefulness and relevance.

2026-09-04 17:06:33 UTC

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It's a ridiculous rule, but extremely likely not to blame here.

2026-09-04 17:05:16 UTC

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So this is the actual temporary final rule that the Commerce Department as a result of Trump's EO:
https://assets.informz.net/rema/data/images/Member%20Alerts/2026-16078.pdf
More readable explainer:
https://resource-recycling.com/policy-now/2026/08/05/new-federal-rule-restricts-black-mass-tungsten-scrap-exports/
The Kotaku article is about an event that occurred on Auguest 6th before the rule even came into effect on August 27th, and it's extremely unlikely that a private export of a CRT had one of the schedule B codes impacted. (Tungsten waste or black mass, where "For purposes of this Directive Allocation Order, “black mass” means
any shredded lithium-ion battery scrap that contains cathode material (which may include
lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese), anode material (graphite, silicon) or other residual
battery cell materials.")
CRTs are controlled e-waste under the new Basel rules.

2026-09-04 16:27:52 UTC

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I was wondering why I hadn't heard anything about this.

2026-09-04 16:27:06 UTC

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Ah, so this isn't so much a US change, but the rest of the world adopting new rules governing e-waste imports and exports.
It sounds like the rules on old electronics from the US are stricter because we're almost never parties to treaties and conventions like this.
https://www.basel.int/Implementation/Ewaste/EwasteAmendments/EwasteAmendmentsFAQs/tabid/10107/Default.aspx
https://web.archive.org/web/20241021185837/https://www.epa.gov/hwgenerators/new-international-requirements-electrical-and-electronic-waste

2026-09-04 15:16:41 UTC

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My Dad loves racing in all its forms, and is a bit of a gadget freak, so while he was already racing cross-country motorcycles in the late 70s, he was also still playing with toys like this.
Participating in events like pinewood derby or raingutter regatta got a bit frustrating because he would forget that it was supposed to be a competition between kids, not an engineering competition between dads, though he would come up with some really cool stuff.

2026-09-04 14:54:20 UTC

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I remember my Dad talking about this, but I'd never actually seen one in person.
I'd only ever played with normal slotcars. Mostly the small home sets, but there were a few times I was able to run the larger ones at the hobby shop's track.

2026-09-04 13:45:02 UTC

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Ugh, I hadn't heard about this before.
What a fucking scam Ebay is running.

2026-08-31 23:01:38 UTC

Today I learnt what bacon jam was, and somehow it was worse than I imagined.
This is concentrated corn syrup regret.
My poor burger, you did not deserve this sickly-sweet fate.

2026-08-20 13:06:25 UTC

Oh wow, almost 1 in 4 US GenZ adults identities as LGBTQ+, while the rate is a bit greater than 1 in 7 for millennials.
That's quite a big jump. Makes you wonder if the percentages for GenAlpha is going to be even higher, or is it going to stabilize at 1 in 4.
My money is on higher, assuming the conservative backlash of the last few years doesn't scare more people into the closet.
https://www.them.us/news/lgbtq-people-united-states-population

2026-08-01 02:29:02 UTC

It just strikes me odd that there is so much creepypasta set in Ohio. It feels like there are way more than most other states, except perhaps Alaska.
Meanwhile, Florida doesn't have as nearly as you would expect from a state with a reputation for being a major weirdness magnet.

2026-07-17 21:26:53 UTC

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Feeding logs that are known to contain malicious prompts into an LLM feels like it should be an obviously bad idea, and yet they did it anyway.

2026-05-22 18:20:42 UTC

Funny how time can even make crappy S3 video cards and integrated graphics nostalgic.
Even the dreaded winmodems seem quaint now, instead of a source of rage and frustration.

2026-05-08 21:54:50 UTC

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I wonder if there were companies that did semi-customized injection molding for electronics cases.
Because that really does look a lot like an off-the-shelf project box, and I wouldn't be surprised if inserts were used with a standard enclosure mold to tailor it that way.

2026-04-25 18:04:47 UTC

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C64U (Starlite) with release firmware (SW 3.14, Ultimate core 121, C64U FPGA 1.47) & ArcadeR joystick.
Game played fine, seemed to lock up when I entered no name for the high score.
Felt like I had some unclearable tiles from the start, don't know if there is another way to clear them besides joining two powered nets together.
It feels like a fun once in a while game. (I'm not generally a fan of falling block games, so this feels more interesting than most to me.)

2026-03-13 04:44:20 UTC

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Hope you are able to get it, looks cool.

2026-02-06 03:21:08 UTC

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The one they currently sell is a two-axis, two-button one.

2026-02-06 01:27:55 UTC

Huh, I wonder what happened to the ChronicIllnessHumor account, it looks like they deleted their account.

2026-01-23 20:19:37 UTC

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Aww, what happened to the hummingbird?

2026-01-17 14:52:17 UTC

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I believe that was the NFT blog post incident, though it might have been one of the other incidents.

2026-01-05 00:27:33 UTC

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Were you the person who told me about *Epistory*?

2025-12-16 16:10:13 UTC

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Are there any other requirements to be kosher besides a clean burning flame?
I'm wondering if beewax candles with cotton wicks would work for you.

2025-11-30 16:08:47 UTC

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It's like if I called the Fischer–Tropsch process alchemy instead of chemistry.
Alchemy was a technical term back in the 16th century, but there is a reason why we use chemistry today.
Sure you can do it, but it's going to drive chemists and chemical engineers up the wall.
Now, like alchemy has the quests of turning lead into gold, and creating the philosopher's stone, artificial intelligence is the quest to create an artificial mind.
In the late 90s/early 2000s, SV tech utopians resurrected AI as a holy grail they could sell to credulous VCs, and we've suffered the consequences since.
There is a reason that the ancient joke "If it works, it ain't AI" exists (and it was decades old by the time I was a grad student), and why my "AI" coursework was called machine learning, computer vision, and robotics, and why "generative models" as a term existed but not "generative AI". See N-grams how it's a term that only begins to come into use in the 2010s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=generative+AI%2Cgenerative+models&year_start=1958&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

2025-11-30 15:23:34 UTC

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AI has a very specific technical meaning, and we have nothing that qualifies for its technical meaning.
Hence, why describing any present machine learning model as "AI" is wrong in the technical sense.

2025-11-30 15:17:37 UTC

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It does derive from the technical term generative model, but it is still started as a marketing term to sell services based on generative models.
I remember talking about generative models when I was in grad school studying machine learning.

2025-11-30 15:04:31 UTC

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The issue is that generative AI is a marketing term that came to have specific connotations in public discourse to be referring to models that mimic human creativity, and doesn't have the same meaning that the technical term "generative model" has.
This is why people like me are driven to distinguish between the two, despite certain companies wanting to put everything under the AI-marketing term umbrella.

2025-11-01 18:55:15 UTC

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The only injection I take is with an autoinjector, but I wonder how hard it would be to sterilize a blunt industrial dispensing needle tip.

2025-07-17 18:31:05 UTC

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Software-wise for either hardware implementation, I think I would do a GUI similar to Picotron, but built around CircuitPython rather than Lua.
I think the built-in code editor, tracker, and sprite/tile editor are just as important to have as the REPL.
To that, I would add a built-in documentation viewer with both tutorials and essential programming documentation, as well as a debugging monitor that's invokable with a dedicated key on the keyboard, which allows for examining hardware state and program execution, combined with the basics like watchpoints, breakpoints, single stepping, and so on.
Finally, I would take a leaf out of Oberon's book, and have the OS/GUI source code be introspectable and potentially modifiable by the user.

2025-07-17 17:53:55 UTC

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A potentially cheaper and easier approach would be to start start with the Amiga Hombre chipset and keep it's PA-RISC microprocessor, but bring back the sprite engine.

2025-07-17 17:48:00 UTC

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Since everyone so far are going the more realistic ARM/RISC-V route, I'm going to go with something more out there.
First, commission WDC to make some improvements to their 65C816 softcore design to pull in functionality of the never produced 65C832. The performance issues that killed the project 35ish years ago don't really apply to a "alt-history" machine, and since we care less about backwards compatibility, I would like a true 32-bit PC and databus, and a flat-address space(I'm fine with jettisoning banking completely). I think being having a relatively simple CISC was a large part of what made the 6502 so easy to pick up, so I think keeping that part of the lineage is important.
When combined with softcore implementations based on the specs and any remaining documentation for the Advanced Amiga Architecture chipset, I think it would result in a very interesting machine, albeit not backwards compatible with either the C64 or Amiga families.

2025-07-12 19:27:19 UTC

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Honestly I'm more excited for your Sentinel 65X since it is trying to be its own thing.
I'll probably get a C64U too, but that has more to do with some family stuff that is keeping my original C64 away from me.

2025-06-26 18:01:19 UTC

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It's really bad if you're tied into internal Dem politics at all.
Just constant scolding from the "centrists" that leftists are trying to be purity police when we try to beg the party to at least stand for something.
The lolsob feeling has gotten even worse lately, because the "centrists" keep telling us that leftists don't focus enough on economic issues and too much on social ones.

2025-03-21 03:40:17 UTC

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The size thing is the main reason why I like the SBC6120 and PiDPs so much, even though the latter is emulated hardware.
It's the fun bits of using old minicomputers without the backbreaking labor to move them, the painful power usage to run them, or the eyewatering cost to repair them.

2025-03-09 05:00:43 UTC

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To be fair, I don't think many did back when I was in university and regularly using Solaris and IRIX.

2025-03-09 04:58:19 UTC

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Who doesn't love overriding the styling on one specific widget in one particular application in their .Xresources?

2025-03-04 13:34:55 UTC

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The clarification that this was sarcasm was a good idea.

2025-01-01 15:48:45 UTC

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At this point, I won't begrudge anyone on the Left who feels they need a firearm for self-defense, but at the same time, it feels like another loss to the Right.

2025-01-01 14:53:43 UTC

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I fucking hate that this is normal for holidays in the US, and that these assholes are only going to be further emboldened by Trump and co.

2024-12-19 15:31:40 UTC

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Sorry, if that sounded like a criticism.
I understood why you simplified it that way, I was just making a comment about how training can make brains silly in a sometimes counterproductive fashion.

2024-12-19 14:51:17 UTC

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This is one of the things that I tend to forget, and I always hate it when I finally figure out what is going on.
We have an odd-parity gate symbol for a reason.
Also, the asymmetric path delay in that illustrative diagram makes my brain itch. My profs were always hammering us on that.