- I am a beast at movie and tv themes
- I’m very good at guessing boardgames from just very few clues (bu i think that part of that skill is that people who ask usually don’t ask for the deep knowledge)
- I have a triggerable wealth of knowledge about random trivia facts. During some conversations i will just randomly remember something related to the current topic and then spout it. My goto fact when someone asks me to give some random trivia is that alpaccas have a set of razor sharp teeth between their molars that they use mainly to bite off other alpaccas testicles
I’m very good at guessing boardgames from just very few clues (bu i think that part of that skill is that people who ask usually don’t ask for the deep knowledge)
Antique collectors stealing from other antique collectors. Go!
Oh hey i just discovered my lemmy app has notifications.
Uhm maybe “Hoity Toity” aka “Adel verpflichtet” in my native language and the name Tom Vasel prefers?
Haha spot on!
Its not a blessing, ITS A CURSE
Acoustic propagation. I design large format PA systems and as a result need to know both how to make sound and stop sound at a large scale. It is entirely possible and actually relatively easy to be super precise with where sound goes or doesn’t go. The problem is cost.
How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?
Just message me, you’ll get some!
So a lot of people are aware of active noise cancellation that you find in headphones nowadays, that works in large scale as well. The first time that type of technology was used was in the greatful dead’s wall of sound. The problem is it’s expensive to do large scale.
If you need an expert on the long-discontinued Motorola 96002 digital signal processor, I’m your guy! I wrote an entire graphical operating system in its assembly language and still need to maintain it from time to time, so my skills remain sharp.
thats insane and really cool! what got you interested in that specifically?
Well we built some instrumentation around it at work back in the 90s and still use it today. It was ahead of its time. It had hardware loops, a hardware call stack, hardware circular buffer addressing, and a DMA controller. In one instruction, you could do 2 FPU operations and a memory move with a DMA transfer going on in the background. It was an insane architecture. And it could handle 3 separate memory spaces, so even though it’s a 32-bit chip, you could access well over 4 GB of RAM.
The best thing about chips of that era though is you could tell ahead of time exactly how long your code will take to execute. Like you just type numbers into a spreadsheet and add up the instruction cycle counts. That kind of analysis is hopeless these days, but it informed the design of the instrument. More recently, we’ve been looking at RISC-V for a newer generation, but it’s harder to predict ahead of time how it will perform?
I know how you feel, I once made the Kessler run in under twelve parsecs myself.
Whatcha coding that needs to be so precisely timed? Something nuclear? I heard once that nuclear plants have something called real time operating systems that allow for that type of timing prediction.
I can’t say too much about it but we’re in the mining sector.
And yeah, if I had to do it all over again from scratch, I’d definitely be looking at a real-time OS. There just weren’t many options back in the day besides coding it all yourself. Even now, I’d have to benchmark the OS to see what its latency is actually like? We had it down in the microseconds range with our custom OS but if it’s more like milliseconds with an off-the-shelf OS, for example, that would change the whole ball game.
