This picture (among others) has been circulating around WeChat and other social media today.

Thousands of retirees protested in Hankou today, the second such protest since the one performed one week ago, over the government's sudden and arbitrary reduction in health benefits.

You can tell this is a protest in China because of the violence as the authoritarian state grinds those who dare speak out against its policies under tank treads and truncheon blows in clouds of tear gas and worse.

Oddly missing from this picture, given the image people have of Chinese governance:

• Tear gas.
• Truncheons.
• Tanks.

Oddly missing too from this picture for those who are familiar with protests of equivalent size in the USA or the UK or other such places:

• Protestor violence.

You have to give credit to the survivors of the February 8th carnage. It must take some serious courage to come back a week later to be ground under tank treads and smashed under truncheon blows again.

In which Business Genius™ Elon Musk Ox's brilliant Soopah Dupah Business Plan® is documented for future generations to marvel over.

Back in 2017 I stumbled over this on the Chinese crowdfunding site Modian. They were asking for 50,000RMB (~US$7000 today) to translate the FATE Core rulebook into Chinese.

They got over 215,000RMB (~US$30,000).

As a result of this almost all of the then-extent supplements for FATE were translated and published in China. FATE, as a result, is now actually quite a popular game in China: about #3, from eyeballing Taobao. (#1 is Call of Cthulhu, of all games, and #2 is D&D/Pathfinder.)

This is exciting all by itself already, as far as I'm concerned, but even more exciting to me is this:

There is a native ecosystem of FATE world books and adventures that seems to be popping up. (I'm assuming these aren't translations because "Bilibili" isn't a thing outside of China as far as I know, and the other two are about a very Chinese semi-mythical figure that most people outside of China won't have heard of.)

This is so capitalism at all levels that it hurts to watch.

• Corporation peddles snake oil that kills people.
• Corporation doubles down on that snake oil at a time of a global pandemic when lives are doubly on the line.
• A scientist speaking out against the technology with verified studies and measurements is sued by said corporation.
• Said scientist has to beg for money to get even the smallest chance in court in the face of the corporate juggernaut.

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you CAPITALISM!

Elon Musk's child wants a legal gender change for reasons of gender identity and because he's embarrassed by his father.

Too good not to share! My two favourite scams: Elon Musk and Bitcoin, merged together into a joint scam!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/221845

This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In this post I will expand on that underlying construction giving reasons for some of the design decisions, as well as providing some example use cases for this.

Protests are all well and good but they're not helping the Ukrainians on the ground. Governments aren't helping Ukrainians on the ground either. Maybe it's time to help them help themselves.

With coroutines and their use cases at least reasonably well established, the event queue mechanism of COROS is introduced to tie them up into a convenient architecture.

The first piece of COROS explored was the coroutine system, but coroutines are not a well-understood facility in programming circles for some reason. This article builds up some use cases for coroutines and their application in preparation for the next major component of COROS.

Scientists and linguists, working day and night for month after grueling month finally decoded it: "SHUT UP! THEY'RE LISTENING!"

The first in a series of articles that builds up a coroutine-based RTOS for use primarily in memory-constrained embedded systems. Future articles will expound on other pieces of the RTOS after which the full, production-ready source will be published under my usual choice of the WTFPL2 license.

Dynamic SRAM allocation is the device-killer …

… but it doesn't have to be.

Oh look! A straw man communism "joke"! This is totally fresh and new and not at all tired and dated! Ha ha ha!

I think this is one of the more disturbing snack food photos I've ever seen. Source: https://pixelfed.social/p/zhang.dianli/384136325581485643

A. Zonenberg's "antikernel" project was an interesting take on eliminating the entire notion of a kernel from an operating system. It is like an extreme version of an exokernel with the kernel spread around everywhere up to and including peripheral devices.

When thinking "beyond Linux" perhaps we should also be considering the possibility of "beyond OSes as we know them" instead of swapping in one Unix-alike for another.

Following-up to my post about LuatOS yesterday, this is the underlying RTOS that LuatOS builds upon. The English language site is not as complete and all-encompassing as the Chinese site, but it's more than enough to get a taste of the system and even put it to use.

One of the things that projects like LuatOS and RT-Thread highlight is that the days of China just consuming western technology are over. Homegrown software is rapidly spreading through the country's engineering world (RT-Thread is in a bewildering variety of products now!) and even homegrown hardware, down to home-grown ISAs like the XuanTie XT804 cores, is starting to supplant imports.

The future is looking decidedly interesting.