John Ripley
jripley@mastodon.social
<p>San Francisco. He/Him. US/UK. Open to work. No "AI". No corporations.</p><p>Software/hardware/chip architecture, generalist from silicon to apps, somewhat InfoSec. Ex-Big Tech.</p><p>Alumni: empeg / Diamond Rio / SigmaTel / Google / Apple (15 years).</p><p>Mostly posting about building gadgets (PCBs, embedded firmware, etc), and snarking about big tech and politics.</p><p>Carrying water for “AI”, fashtech, or having an email address ending in ".ai", gets you blocked.</p>
Posts
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My hobby: Annoying people by deadpan, and relentlessly referring to "AI" (ai) as "Al" (al). So many billboards for Al along 80 and 101 in San Francisco. What's with that guy.
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Framework isn't really building you a better Linux laptop, and you might as well still buy a Dell/Lenovo. (Or an MNT if it fits your uses)
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I'm not the only one who gets kept awake at night about this, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg Not the graph itself—it's horrifying—but the misinterpretation of how urgent it is. At 500ppm, CO2 begins to have measurable impact on human cognition. We're almost there. But it also means there's *no margin any more*. Any closed room now quickly results in CO2 issues in humans. It...
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Holy crap I actually finished PCB layout and all the checklist. New phase: finding alternates for all the "Basic" parts JLCPCB has either replaced or stopped being "Basic" since the last time I checked.
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Oh grumble, so Linus Torvalds is pro-LLM then? I could draw a straight line from "NVidia binary blob module does not violate GPL" (2000s) to "LLMs are ok" but I'd come across as a very cranky old man.
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Will always remember Lindsey Graham mostly for his spitting, foaming defense of Brett Kavanaugh, because Kavanaugh got accused of being a predator.
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Group of SREs sat around a table at a bar, dishing about broken shit at work “I’ve got a teeeeeeext!”
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I was this >< close to buying a Framework laptop last year, until I found out their shtick is just social-justice-washing. They're still funding fascists, and still not doing any kind of backpedaling or restorative action. Heck, I even picked up a business card at one point, thinking that might be an interesting place to work... Personally, I've decided this is actively worse than, say, buying a laptop from Apple, Dell or Lenovo; because at least they're not pretending to be s...
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RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116399965854914021 The Galaxy-Capitalism-Brain level is where even the ultimate rent-seeking technology (fake AI) also has to pay rent.
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Managed to cram the radio board into 1x2&quot; with every pin routed to a header or test point, in just 2 layers. One more thing I don&#39;t need from adafruit. Now I just need to figure out the zone fills, and the silly RF trace impedance.
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The bothersome thing about the Cesar Chavez erasure is not that he got erased (well-deserved), but that everyone who was so very angry has now packed up and gone home, probably via a bunch of streets named after similarly awful, but white, people.
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Having dinner with Trump is harmless they said. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/31/iran-reportedly-warns-apple-potential-target/
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Home Assistant deprecating all installation methods except, essentially, &quot;entire (virtual) machine&quot; is not a good sign for the project&#39;s health. In general, it means you&#39;re about to lose the ability to bootstrap, and inevitably lose the ability to reuse any part of it, piecemeal.
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Every corporation tomorrow: “Hello, fellow jesters”
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I have very, very carefully resized, *LIVE*, the crypt (luks), LVM, and partition tables on my home server-in-a-cupboard. Which means either all went well, and I can finally fix a nearly decade-old issue with the boot partition size. Or... when I reboot it, I&#39;m going to spend most of a day making it bootable again, and/or recover whatever I corrupted. My wife, the voice of reason, has suggested I may want to wait until the morning before I type in the reboot command.
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Lol Anthropic are an Accidental Tech Podcast sponsor now? (Not an April 1 joke)
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Trying to stick Home Assistant OS in a simple Xen HVM, and it instantly reboots the moment it gets to linux kernel. Like, early enough that it doesn&#39;t even emit any debug on max debug settings. What the actual. This is why I *hate* projects which turn into giant fucking monoliths, especially when the monolith unit is a whole machine image.
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Phase: swearing at Home Assistant while trying to integrate a ratgdo, and occasionally saying &quot;sorry&quot; to my spouse who is getting random, weird notifications about garage doors opening in the &quot;Office&quot;.
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The thing that really gets me about how all these LLM prompts are written, especially Claude, is that they&#39;re *IN ENGLISH*. You would think that they might be expressed more precisely and effectively as something in a vector space, native to the model. Nope. Just in English, instructing a mindless, unintelligent algorithm to *hopefully* emit a different token sequence. None of this shit is coding. It&#39;s not anything. This is the upside-down hellscape inverse of coding.
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RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116250982563193049 Never been convinced that there&#39;s a _need_ for any effect to exist in that point in the graph, because there&#39;s always the simpler explanation: dumb people can still learn things, but they&#39;re still dumb.
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There is absolutely no reason, in any of the incarnations of age/person identification laws, for system services to get involved. There are no strong or specific requirements on vendors. This is *corporations* pushing their internal requirements to open, public repositories, and I suspect always because there’s a promotion involved to the authors.
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Like Republican administration, I also have the superpower of traveling in time and space. Sadly I can only travel in time forwards at a constant rate, and in space to immediately continuous space adjacent to me at normal speeds.
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Wanting to replace Cesar Chavez St with Chuck Norris St is just folks entering the room forgetting they’re still wearing their white robes and hats.
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All complex, large scale, system (software and hardware) design problems are _also_ a social (governance!) problem: * Conway&#39;s Law: software resembles the organization which put it together. but also... * Reverse Conway&#39;s Law: the organization ends up resembling the way the software was put together. If you&#39;re a &quot;senior&quot; engineer and you don&#39;t get this, you&#39;re still doing it, just by accident. But there&#39;s also people who _know_...
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@markgurman/116279537703079004 Among the many reasons I&#39;m slowly disentangling myself from the Apple ecosystem. The company today is still mostly recognizable as the company a decade ago, but the pace of transitioning to another Microsoft is picking up.
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Expecting any minute to hear how Dems have relented on DHS funding, thus making this entire action pointless, and centering the fault on Dems.
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Excited to hear that we’re going to rename all the Washington and Jefferson streets everywhere.
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Me: &#39;They see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from them on a meter&#39; Sam Altman: &quot;We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter&quot; They just went right out and said it. That much a psychopath that it feels _right_ to say it, on the record?
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I guess (marketing term) &quot;AI&quot; in the Linux kernel is a self-limiting disease, because at some point Clod will simply delete the repository, or create a branch of the first ever commit with a one line comment, and rebase the entire history.
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Putin was in serious danger of running out of money to pay his generals—the whole point of sanctions—and Trump (and the entire cowardly international community) just went and bailed him out.