Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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2 yr. ago

Yes, I suppose so! Technically with child labor too!

We just call them factories here though, not sweat shops. They have varying levels of working conditions, and child labor has been more or less eliminated.

Some are awful, and others are quite OK! I've personally had worse jobs than the OK ones. Some have integrated housing too, I knew someone that designed it. The ones they designed looked quite reasonable, at least -- I've unambiguously lived worse places. You won't save much money working for an OK sweatshop, but you will accumulate a small pension, eat, have a place to live, and get 2 weeks vacation a year (usually accompanied with a bonus equal to a month's pay). Most people I know see them as a sort of always-available job that's the closest thing we have to a social net right now.

I run a small tech company though, not a sweat shop. Just recently, an opportunity to help open one did come up though!

A client is looking at setting up backoffice work in the countryside, so far it looks like we'll be able to offer decent working conditions and wages. I'm slowly building the management software -- fewer managers means we can pay workers better as well as be more profitable. If it works out, it would probably pay about double the regional minimum wage, which amounts to a decent job, certainly better than a lot of people have currently.

It's not perfect, but it's progress. There's still a hundred ways it can go wrong and fail. So far we only have 10 staff, but it's going steady.

For about 3 years though, I earned less running my company than the workers in the worst sweatshops. Even with all my video game experience! That was hard. Still, video games were my first experiences with management, accounting, economics and so on. It was better than nothing.

Anyway that's a slice of life for you, fresh from Southeast Asia.

Oh man, that brings back memories. All my Dwarf Fortress games were horrific dystopias. Full-on police states optimized for the production and export of lead children's toys (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).

Then new unskilled arrivals would wait in a room with retractable spikes before they met anyone. It was someone's job to pull a lever all day. Then the clothes would be exported (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).

Everyone left was either in the army or a skilled worker confined to a 2x2 room containing a bed, table, chair, and statue of the mayor. The doors locked from the outside.

Newer versions have made this strategy less productive I think -- I haven't really kept up. At the time a single death could send your fortress into a fatal spiral of depression and it worked pretty well though.

Eve Online taught me that math + leadership are effective ways to win. Also the importance of thinking strategically and weighing risks.

World of Warcraft taught me that many people are willing to craft items all day, if it earns more in-game gold than actually doing anything fun in the game (actually in hindsight this was true of Eve, and real life for that matter). I sort of... ran an exploitative in-game sweatshop producing things for the in-game markets (e.g. not involving real money or anything that violated the rules of the game).

These two groups of realizations made me pretty good at online games for a little while! My gaming hobby came to an abrupt end when I realized I could just... start a company IRL and be paid non-virtual money.

When space, time, or power it requires is no longer a good trade in exchange for the task it completes.

I live in Asia, so the space something physically takes up is often the biggest cost. The footprint of my house is like 25 square meters, so if I want to keep a bunch of older computers around, I'm going to need to rent a bigger house.

My time has also grown more expensive over the years.

No worries! I'm just glad to share a neat thing :)

Oh one more thing I just remembered -- ancient bronze coins were made with a fair amount of lead. If you go to a dealer, sometimes it's a huge pile of dusty coins... that dust is like 10% lead. So resist the urge to lick your fingers, and instead go wash your hands :P

You know, that's an interesting question. It looks like the answer is probably 1, but it might be 2.

It's not entirely clear to me, but it looks like Ulysses S. Grant may have been arrested in 1872, while he was still in office. For speeding. On horseback. The practice of taking mugshots on arrest began in the 1850s, but the officer apparently did not take the president into the station, so while I bet no mugshot was taken, I haven't been able to completely rule it out either.

Then after traveling for some time, Grant did attempt to run for office again, but failed to obtain the number of required number of votes for nomination, and a compromise candidate was chosen (Garfield, who got assassinated), but he did technically run.

Apologies if I've used the wrong terms or gotten some bits wrong. My knowledge of the US political system is vague at best, I'm nowhere near you guys, I'm just having a terribly slow day and work and wondered if this particular situation actually had happened before. Then I found an unexpected rabbit hole of weird historical half-truths.

This is genuinely good advice for growing up in the modern world.

Oh damn, that is now isn't it. I always lose track of the Lunar calendar. And also the Gregorian calendar. Actually come to think of it, it's 50-50 that I know what day of the week it is.

Anyway, I don't observe it personally, but I better bring something to the in-laws this weekend. Normally we construct houses with a room on the top floor for the family shrine -- it's a bit like a balcony, I guess! We use that room for this kind of thing. I see people put things out on the street too.

I think last night I saw someone offering a whole boiled chicken. That's a common one. You eat it after -- so it's very practical :)

Cigarettes and rice wine are pretty common things I see too. Or beer -- you pour a glass and leave it. Then you drink it after too, if you don't mind flat beer that smells like incense :)

Ok, I'm having a slow day... so I'll try and summarize some possibly useful knowledge!

You can find them on eBay and various sites. Search for "Chinese cash". I wouldn't pay more than 5$ a coin. Here in Vietnam, 2-3$ for Chinese coins in good condition is normal (Vietnamese ones cost extra). In Singapore, maybe 5$.

Be advised that online vendors probably buy in bulk from antique shops who have picked out anything actually rare from their stock. So claims of "rare" are almost always false, and claims of "ancient" are irrelevant -- so many hundreds of millions of these coins were produced that anything less than about 2200 years old is super common. There are a few exceptions, like coins produced by weird factions and rebels and stuff.

There are a lot of fakes. Some of the fakes are also ancient -- those are interesting. Some depict "fantasy" dynasties from legend that never existed. Like if it reads "dragon phoenix eternal dynasty" or something, it's fake, but might still be hundreds of years old. Also some temples and whatever issued coins for visitors. This type of fake often goes on family shrines (at least they do with my in-laws).

Then there are modern replicas (I won't call them fake as they are not produced with the intent to sell as the real deal). These are mostly for divination (e.g. I Ching), feng shui good luck charms, or for religious use. These are usually pretty obvious as they lack any real patina.

One way people collect these coins is to try and get one from every emperor. Or to create N-emperor charms, I think the most common is the 5-emperor charm (Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing). These are used in traditional feng shui -- since China was prosperous under those emperors, their names bring prosperity or something like that. You hang it somewhere specific.

Personally, I'm an anti-feng-shui practitioner. I optimize my life for the worst possible feng shui, so I get cheaper stuff superstitious people don't want. It's worked pretty well. Can maybe apply to these coins too -- the coins for 5-emperor charms are probably more in demand. By this logic, I would make a 5-worst-emperors charm to save money (I am notoriously shrewd in matters of finance).

Next, to date the coins, you normally read the text from top-bottom-right-left (there are a few exceptions that are clockwise too I think). These symbols form the historical period when the coin was minted, which usually won't be an exact date, but often will be within a decade or whatever unless it's one of the ones that was produced for centuries. Sometimes there are mint marks on the verso you can use too.

You tell which part of the coin is up, by looking for the character "Bao" (寶). This is almost always the leftmost character. The character 'Tong' (通) is a common right-hand character, but there are several others.

Complicating matters is the occasional use of old imperial seal script instead of traditional Chinese characters. You'll know it when you see it :D Some coins have a version in both. Knowing these things, you should be able to ID a coin on Google within about 30 minutes if you can't read Chinese (I know this because I can't read Chinese).

All the above applies to the Tang dynasty (say 621 CE and later). These are the more interesting and diverse ones. Earlier coins are harder to assign dates to. Wu Zhu coins (going back to 118 BCE) have some small differences over time you can sometimes use. Then before that, you've got knife money -- little dull bronze knives that were used for trade as they could be melted down into real knives and tools. These get more expensive though, if you stick to Wu Zhu and Tong Bao coins it's pretty affordable.

If you get a coin you can't ID, or think you're getting ripped off, ping me and I'll give it a go!

Also as a shameless plug, if you message kong_ming on my instance, a Byzantine maze of technologies will set into motion, resulting in a I Ching reading sent back to you. Unless some part of the Rube Goldberg machine is down :D

(It's a prototype hardware random number generator sitting on my desk, sending data over MQTT to the cloud, where a python script calculates yarrow-stick divinations, that then get sent to a Lemmy bot)

Yeah, I've tried that! It was more of a journey making my work more presentable, than it was making it more functional, if we're being honest.

I invested some proceeds from an early client work to buy an SLA printer. It uses acrylic, with good dimensional accuracy, but it's very brittle. It was a painful expense at the time, nearly 800$.

I considered it a marketing cost -- I can't present things to clients with wires hanging out. Prototypes have to look awesome. I also sometimes use it to print basic clockwork, board game pieces, whatever I might personally consider fun. Mostly client cases though. I've had very good success with black plastic, which I polish down to a very smooth matte finish using fine emery paper soaked in water. I also emboss the client's logo on the case. I rarely paint it, but do sometimes add labels.

Another good investment was a decent used DSLR (135$) and some antique lenses (because they were very cheap and better than midrange modern ones). When I deliver physical prototypes, I also deliver product shots good enough to use professionally e.g. for marketing or to show the CEO / investors. A high-end ancient macro lens cost me 10$ and has paid itself off many times.

Finally, I also bought a rugged waterproof plastic suitcase filled with foam. Similar to a "pelican case". These are used to deliver prototypes to meetings and demonstrations.

I would classify this as 'theater' more than 'technology' -- but generally the management understands the former better, and they are the ones making purchasing decisions. So I give them a show, and the detailed documentation goes to the engineers only.

For my own stuff, I design it to fit in standard engineering enclosures. One of the local retailers has a quite good selection of aluminium and ABS ones. This is much more robust than any form of 3D printing I have access to (and it's cheap -- a nice ABS box starts at like USD 0.50). FDM printing would be OK, but I don't have the budget or space (actually space is the expensive thing in Asia) for a second printer.

The other thing I like doing for my own stuff is using solid and thick brass sheets, for no reason at all. Family ancestral shrines use a lot of brass here, so it's less expensive here. It's heavy, and chromed industrial buttons on brass panels looks glorious. Makes for great robots too. At least when I have an extra 15$ to spend (I'm quite stingy -- being poor in the past will do that to you).

If we assume a malicious intelligence simulating a universe with goal of not being detected, all bets are off -- this technique only works in a few cases, and that's probably not one of them. Also if it's true, I think we have bigger problems :D

There are a whole bunch of other assumptions too -- like the universe running the simulation has entropy and time that work the same way as ours. It's no magic simulation-detecting bullet -- but it's the only technique I could think of to make any progress whatsoever on the underlying philosophical question! A mote in the eye of a fictional God, so to speak.

In the hard sense, there are no such thing as random number generators on computers. With sufficient starting entropy and computing power, you can generate a mostly reasonable approximation. However, this must use more computing power than not doing it, which is the "signal" we're sending out to be detected by a fictional observer in the scenario the OP presented.

Interestingly, this technique is used to exfiltrate data from secure computers -- e.g. by making the CPU do slightly more work sometimes and modulating that to send data e.g. by radio emission, hard drive noise, power LED brightness changes, and so on. Here's a generic one for you, if you're curious: https://thesai.org/Publications/ViewPaper?Volume=9&Issue=1&Code=IJACSA&SerialNo=25

Also, there are sometimes interesting and strange artifacts even with our everyday "random" number generators. I read a really neat paper about that ten years ago, comparing the artifacts of random number generators across operating systems, which sadly I can't seem to find for you presently. There's an OK example for you here though: https://www.random.org/analysis/ under "simple visual analysis".

That kind of weird pattern is pretty typical of most 'random number' functions used in software that aren't security-facing (and sadly sometimes even ones that are). For cryptographically secure random numbers (more like the image to the left than the image to the right on that site), they are more computationally expensive to produce.

Oh, I've got something unexpected for you. I got bored listening to people going on and on about the Universe being a simulation, so I built a machine that can check if you're in some (but not all) classes of a simulated Universe. Take that, Plato!

It works using Bell's Theorem and the limitations of Turing machines. The former shows that for some types of measurements, the outcomes are purely probabilistic, and do not contain hidden deterministic variables (seems like a dumb way to design a Universe for simulation!). Then Turing machines are capable of computing anything that can be defined as an algorithm (but only things that can be defined in an algorithm!).

Since the former provides a non-deterministic measurement that the latter cannot model, you make a machine that produces those measurements, and ties them to something on a bigger scale (stock market purchases, social media posts, whatever). Then you keep the measurements, and attempt to determine whether they were actually generated with an algorithm (this is very hard but possible in theory -- sort of like reversing a hash). Meanwhile in the Universe upstairs, for the results to appear random enough so that analysis is nontrivial, it must consume extra computation in whatever device is running the simulation. In short, I'm doing a thing that consumes extra processing power.

So logically, if this Universe is being simulated, and someone is observing the machine closely that is doing the simulating, I can pass messages encoded in CPU activity. Just like in computer security where you can extract encryption keys by looking at a video of your power LED!

So if I'm not actually typing this on my laptop right now -- but really am sleeping/dreaming with some equivalent to an EEG monitor or MRI or whatever in some other Universe -- someone may be able to conclude whether this Universe is being generated by my mind or not. In the former case, they may have their answer, but have not woken me up yet. At that time, regrettably, your continued existence is not guaranteed. Sorry about that, but there was science to do!

If you would like to use the device I have built, you can do that. Because of course it's sitting on my desk, connected to a server via MQTT, and subsequently connected to a Lemmy bot. If you message kong_ming on my instance (with a non-blank message), it will use the device as an entropy source to generate an I Ching reading. You know, to help you answer personal questions with only a vanishingly small likelyhood of causing the Universe to cease existing. Sometimes it is down for maintenance, although I just checked in on it now and it seems OK.

I also have a second such device, at an undisclosed location, that is designed to work with a coffee machine. You know, for those times you want coffee that's simultaneously caffeinated and decaffeinated until you drink it.

Anyway, there you go. I've added a feature to the fediverse, I guess.

Ah, some context -- I live in Vietnam. We don't get tools or books from the 70's and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn't afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That's why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.

AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.

I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That's usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I've just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.

The main cost is time, overall. I'm not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I'm in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.

Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools -- no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I'm legitimately using it for client work though).

Anyway that's a little slice of my life :)

Yeah, but not for anything Unix-like or Windows. More like small operating systems for some piece of specific hardware. One that comes to mind is some custom OS for a small robot that maps rooms.

Probably the longest technical document I know very well is the datasheet for AVR microcontrollers (the full one, not the summary). Those are 170-300 pages long, depending on the exact chip. They detail how every feature of the chip operates and is accessed. It's pretty normal in my occupation to know one or two chips really well.

One neat thing is ancient Chinese coinage has a square hole in a round coin, I always thought that looked cool. Civilization is old in this part of the world, so there are tons of old coins. Song dynasty coins are about 50k VND locally (2.50). Want something older, from the Three Kingdoms period (over two millenia old)? That will be... the same price. They are so common that no one cares.

Ancient Vietnamese coins are a bit harder to find, and look pretty similar too. I have one of the first coins minted in the country, found it in some scrap metal recovered while dredging a river or a shipwreck or something. It's worth... about 50 cents.

Great coins to collect for someone on a budget. Watch out for fakes -- but they are pretty easy to spot.

I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you've got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you've got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least -- or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.

I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you're the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.

Neat, free backups! Thanks!

Hey! I'm in a similar boat. I also do electronics design and can't deal with the 100% pay cut that a PhD would incur. At least not yet.

My current solution is just to research things on my own, without a university. I design things I think might be interesting, then get the boards made at a factory (cheap these days), then populate them and test it out. Cost tends to be quite low per project (under 100$ even for fairly advanced things like particle physics). Then I write it up online or do a conference talk if people think it's interesting enough -- and if they don't, I really don't care: I'm already all about the next project!

If I strip away all the "publish or perish" nonsense as well as grant applications and teaching requirements, it turns out I can do a satisfying amount of research in my spare time. Equipment costs are not a disaster either -- maybe a 1000$ oscilloscope (which I need for work anyway), but very ordinary other stuff otherwise.

A good side effect is the stuff I work on keeps me sharp at work, and on rare occasions produces something commercially useful. It also forms a body of work that I use to advance my career, as examples of neat stuff I know how to do. I'd have a hard time putting a number do it, but I'd estimate my research has a negative cost.

Right now, I'm trying to do audio processing in 16 bytes of RAM and under 500 bytes of program. So far, it looks like it will work, but I don't know yet!

Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn't a super fun few years.

...and if we're being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn't so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I'd surely be considered mentally ill -- but it's just one subject instead of another.

It's weird where we draw the line, isn't it?

The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it's almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn't too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.

It's not something I can do for another person. You'll have to adopt yourself.