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"A striking example of his forward-thinking occurred years ago on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where George-sitting on the sand with a laptop connected via his cell phone-became one of the first people to read email over a mobile connection to a computer at Purdue. As a friend noted, "This was a real bit of history… At the time Apple had a whole engineering team trying to do this and here's George on the beach making it happen.""

Amazing. RIP.


The archived copy of his old website has a picture from the beach: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511210957/http://ghg.ecn.pu...

That's the page mostly dedicated to BBQ lighting: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511170940/http://ghg.ecn.pu...


Thank you!

Dear god how do I get these jobs? I'm 35 yo and would work with you and accept your work, not jam crap code into things. I'm open minded and realize when someone's idea or code is better than mine.

Hypothetically what would happen if China took over Tawain and TSMC?

It will incredibly hard for China to conquer Taiwan. One hundred kilometers across the straits introduces a brutal geographic hurdle. If anything, the fabs will probably be severely damaged in the war. Plus most senior execs and elite engineers would be moved to US offices in Arizona.

I’m not a military expert, but I’ll bet my left nut that if push comes to shove Taiwan will go scorched earth and just blow up the chip factories

Which will put the whole world back for a decade while we rebuild the factories from scratch.


All modern technology becomes unobtainable.

We are going to have that now in a couple of months regardless. So it won't matter if Taiwan's manufacturing base gets disrupted, the hardware will have already effectively stopped.

Wow, I wasn't aware Samsung, Intel, SMSC were unable to produce "modern technology." Not everything needs to be on a 3nm TSMC process, believe it or not.

TSMC makes a lot of stuff besides the EUV-scale parts that all the YouTube videos talk about.

Almost everything you own that runs on electricity has some parts from Taiwan in it. TSMC alone makes MEMS components, CMOS image sensors, NVRAM, and mixed-signal/RF/analog parts to name a few.

Also, people seem to assume that TSMC is an autonomous entity that receives sand at one loading dock and ships wafers out at another. That's not how fabs work. Their processes depend on a continuous supply of exotic materials and proprietary maintenance support from other countries, many of them US-aligned. There is no need to booby-trap any equipment at TSMC; it will grind to an unrecoverable halt soon after the first Chinese soldier fires a rifle or launches a missile.

Hopefully Xi understands that. But some say it's a personal beef/legacy thing with him, and that he doesn't even care about TSMC.


There would be a brief, or possibly extended depending on how much damage the fabs took, outage, then it'd be back to business as usual.

Russia weren't able to take Ukraine even when they were able to just drive their tanks right up to Kiyv. Modern warfare tech just favors the defender too much. China has ninety km of sea to cross before they even get to Taiwan. Missiles and drones have already taken out the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. China will be losing a lot in the same way if they ever attempt the crossing.

It is public knowledge that the critical equipment has "kill switches".

I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough damage that building a new fab from scratch is easier.


To the people who downvoted my comment: Are you doing that because you know it's not correct or because you really hope and wish it wasn't correct?

I wonder if the vale of Pixel phones that run GrapheneOS will rise dramatically?

Graphene is not a contender here, it's too niche. LineageOS is, otoh, going to become more popular.

Malware could still use DNS records for storage and access to bootstrapped payloads correct?

Yes, but it's not a problem, any more than downloading any arbitrary text is. You'd still have to have something execute the binary.

If anything, this would be more of a way to act as a command and control server

Does this work?

I almost switched back to Fedora Bazzite to get a working gamescope, but realized I can get HDR in sway and its actually more stable than Valve's mess of gamescope. Even though I have to use "--unsupported-gpu" flag, my Nvidia card works wonders in Sway, where as gamescope gives me a blinking cursor and segfaults.

Some things are not that simple and nix options come in handy automating other packages and services needed.

also the AI hallucinating nix options. I have to constantly check https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable

oh yeah AI realy does not seem to actually know which packages exist. I once asked AI to create a devenv for some Julia development and it pulled some packages out of its ass that just plain did not exist.

I'm overwhelmingly surprised about Claude's ability to know the package.

But the cut-off point in model / harness quality before it hallucinates everything but the general Nix syntax is staggeringly low.



I've been trying to get nixd LSP to work with Claude Code but I got stuck as they gatekeep it behind their "plugin" system and you can't just configure it in settings.json to point to a nix store path like mcps :(

My usual solution is to just clone whatever I need. e.g. in this case just clone nixpkgs and put in your instructions that it should do a git pull to make sure it's up to date and then refer to that whenever doing anything with nix. Agents are really good at using grep to explore repos even for something completely internal. Then you don't need any config or special tools. e.g. for work I just have a directory with like 30 repos cloned and my base AGENTS file I use says to refer to either them or live system state for ground truth. I basically never encounter hallucinations.

Same goes for the harness itself. Want to know how Codex works or whether it can be configured in some way? Clone it and ask it to look at itself.


There’s a NixOS MCP, it’s pretty good

I recently fixed the pipewire audio stutters by just giving gemini my flake and asking how to fix it. It suggested a few fixes and low and behold they were gone! Here's my flake with impermanence + yubikey login: https://github.com/leonewt0n/nixos

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