Charles Stanhope @cstanhope@social.coop

Out of nowhere the warnings flashed red on his screen. David cursed as he ripped his oxygen mask from his sweat drenched face. He couldn't get timing closure on the design.

He was barely hitting 1.1GHz, and his goal was 1.5GHz. It was likely going to take weeks to untangle the longest paths causing the delays. They might even need to re-architecture some pieces.

1/n

The alien noisily screeched as it broke into TV broadcasts and video streaming the world over. "TZAG!" the alien continued, baffling the stunned audiences as it waved appendages in a friendly, but slightly unsettling, manner.

#introduction

Hello, fediverse. I'm Charles from the USA in the #Portland, OR area. I'm excited to be on #SocialCoop as I'm hoping it will prove a viable alternative to the "free" social sites.

I make #hardware and #software for a living, and I dabble in #art for hobbies. Other interests not limited to: #freesoftware, #plt, #diy, #science, #indieweb, and #justice.

I've been joking that Xilinx should just provide VMs with their tools preinstalled. Turns out Xilinx actually did this with ISE, so I guess the joke is over:

"The ISE is a huge many-gigabyte download, but when I finally finished downloading 14.7, I discovered two things:

The software is actually a virtual machine image containing Linux and the Linux version of the ISE."

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/25/shiny-new-computer-setup/

There's going to be a Kung Fury 2?! o_O

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/all-hail-the-chosen-one-schwarzenegger-and-fassbender-to-star-in-kung-fury-2/

He has apparently been able to write some short letters, which are being published on the web.

https://freeolabini.org/en/

Then there's the whole "AI will write our software from a high level description." But we already have that, they're called people. If you don't or can't program, you describe what you want to a person who can. They write the program and then you're done.

(I've heard a joke that grad students are the highest level language there is.)

Every time I see people promoting the idea that the future of programming will be visual or graphical diagrams, I think that person probably has not actually tried using the visual programming tools that currently exist, let along tried maintaining programs produced with those tools.

https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/toward-the-next-generation-of-programming-tools

I have over the years, I always prefer text over the graphical views. People are even working on textual representation for electronic schematics. It's not just a matter of habit.

I'm glad that summer in Portland was delayed a little bit longer. It was just a bit too warm earlier this month for my tastes.