73
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by wtry@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I've been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 20 points 10 months ago

I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.

I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.

[-] fred@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

I am interested in the physics divination bot. How's it work?

[-] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 5 points 10 months ago

There's a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.

The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That's amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It's not a 'safe' way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.

Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D

Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.

I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.

I can't imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we'll talk about it :P

Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I'll gently beat it into submission so it works again.

this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
73 points (73.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43499 readers
1559 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS