evranch @ evranch @lemmy.ca

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2

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465

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nibbles are still a thing in embedded programming and in ultra low bandwidth comms like LoRa. For example you can pack 2 BCD digits into a byte, one for the high nibble and one for the low nibble. This results in the hex representation of the byte actually being directly readable as the two digits, which is convenient.

Datasheet for sensors will sometimes reference nibbles as well, often for status bits on protocols like Onewire where every bit counts. i.e low nibble contains a state value 0-15 and high nibble contains individual alarm flags.

Give it some time, user count is still tiny compared to Reddit so obviously niche content will be less common at first. But it's growing rapidly, I've not even been here a week and every day it feels more alive.

Another good example is the still ongoing Raspberry Pi shortage, a cheap SBC made with legacy processes that was too capable for its low cost and ended up integrated into all manner of commercial and industrial products.

Raspberry Pi is made by the non-profit Pi foundation with a very low target price, but the inability to get cheap legacy silicon made drove extreme scarcity, panic buying and hoarding/scalping behaviour. They have greatly scaled up production, but suppressed demand and continuing scalping are chewing up all production.

However at some tipping point there will suddenly be a vast oversupply of Raspberry Pi.

I agree that messengers are a superior product in most cases and I do use several myself for different use cases. It's just that we always fall back to SMS when out in the field or as a quick point of contact, because it works.

My main issue with the modern crop of messengers is that they are back to walled gardens again, which does cause tribalism. Back in the day I ran multi-protocol clients to talk to my friends on every platform, and then migrated to mostly XMPP for many years as most of those protocols faded away. It had extensions to handle signing and encryption and most other use cases, and ran on every device. Then all of a sudden people started using WhatsApp and Line and Snapchat etc. and now we have a whole bunch of different messengers again, but without the option to run a multi-protocol client anymore. Even Google Chat migrated to a proprietary protocol instead of XMPP.

Here we are discussing it on a new federated Reddit equivalent, but they killed off federated messaging years ago leaving SMS as the only truly open option with broad adoption.

SMS is far more reliable in rural conditions with marginal signal. Often I can't make a call, but I can send and receive SMS. Fat chance I can get any data-driven messaging app to work. Also, with SMS I don't have to worry about what the recipient is using - it always works.

Here in rural Canada we all use SMS because it's guaranteed interoperable and more likely to be deliverable in poor service conditions. A text can be life or death or mean the difference between hours of walking and getting quick help in the case of a vehicle or tractor breakdown. I don't know what phone the recipient may have and most of us have something ruggedized, there are even some flip phones and candy bars out there. So I actually use an aftermarket SMS app (Pulse) to avoid the chance that my phone's native app will attempt to send the message through an incompatible protocol.

We had terrible reliability issues in the last few years when iMessage and RCS started becoming defaults and most people I know have switched to 3rd party messaging apps or attempted to disable messaging (not always successful). It's gotten better with the default apps falling back to SMS more reliably now, but we are still all happy with SMS.

Same issue on Fdroid 0.38 today. Just getting started on Lemmy but it's practically unusable as it keeps telling me to log in first when I try to do anything. And there's no easy access to accounts/config so you have to back right up to the login screen. For a new user it's hard to tell if issues are a Lemmy issue or a Jerboa issue because there are multiple servers involved. This is my third try with this comment so fingers crossed.

Edit: sorry Jerboa, but I have switched to Connect. No complaints with it. I'm sure I'll give Jerboa another try when it's more mature, but not being able to log in is a deal breaker!