Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some brief notes on books, at the start of a summer that hopefully will allow for more reading.
Monk and Robot (Becky Chambers); Mossa and Pleiti (Malka Older)Summer reading rec, and ask for more recs: “cozy sci-fi” is now a thing and I love it. Characters going through life, drinking hot beverages, trying to be comfortable despite (waves hands) everything. Mostly coincidentally, doing all those things in post-dystopian far-away planets (one fictional, one Jupiter).
Novellas, perfect for summer reads. Find a sunny nook (or better yet, a rainy summer day nook) and enjoy. (New Mossa and Pleiti comes out Tuesday, yay!)
A complex socio-technical system, bounding boldly, perhaps foolishly, into the future. (Original via NASA) Underground Empire (Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman)This book is about things I know a fair bit about, like international trade sanctions, money transfers, and technology (particularly the intersection of spying and data pipes). So in some sense I learned very little.
But the book efficiently crystallizes all that knowledge into a very dense, smart, important observation: that some aspects of American so-called “soft” (i.e., non-military) power are in increasingly very “hard”. To paraphrase, the book’s core claim is that the US has, since 2001, amassed what amounts to several, fragmentary “Departments of Economic War”. These mechanisms use control over financial and IP transfers to allow whoever is in power in DC to fight whoever it wants. This is primarily China, Russia, and Iran, but also to some extent entities as big as the EU and as small as individual cargo ship captains.
The results are many. Among other things, the authors conclude that because this change is not widely-noticed, it is undertheorized, and so many of the players lack the intellectual toolkit to reason about it. Relatedly, they argue that the entire international system is currently more fragile and unstable than it has been in a long time exactly because of this dynamic: the US’s long-standing military power is now matched by globe-spanning economic control that previous US governments have mostly lacked, which in turn is causing the EU and China to try to build their own countervailing mechanisms. But everyone involved is feeling their way through it—which can easily lead to spirals. (Threaded throughout the book, but only rarely explicitly discussed, is the role of democracy in all of this—suffice to say that as told here, it is rarely a constraining factor.)
Tech as we normally think of it is not a big player here, but nevertheless plays several illustrative parts. Microsoft’s historical turn from government fighter to Ukraine supporter, Meta’s failed cryptocurrency, and various wiretapping comes up for discussion—but mostly in contexts that are very reactive to, or provocative irritants to, the 800lb gorillas of IRL governments.
Unusually for my past book reports on governance and power, where I’ve been known to stretch almost anything into an allegory for open, I’m not sure that this has many parallels. Rather, the relevance to open is that these are a series of fights that open may increasingly be drawn into—and/or destabilize. Ultimately, one way of thinking about this modern form of power dynamics is that it is a governmental search for “chokepoints” that can be used to force others to bend the knee, and a corresponding distaste for sources of independent power that have no obvious chokepoints. That’s a legitimately complicated problem—the authors have some interesting discussion with Vitalik Buterin about it—and open, like everyone else, is going to have to adapt.
Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (James Romm)Good news: this book documents that being a thoughtful person, seeking good in the world, in the time of a mad king, is not a new problem.
Bad news: this book mostly documents that the ancients didn’t have better answers to this problem than we moderns do.
The Challenger Launch Decision (Diane Vaughan)The research and history in this book are amazing, but the terminology does not quite capture what it is trying to share out as learnings. (It’s also very dry.)
The key takeaway: good people, doing hard work, in systems that slowly learn to handle variation, can be completely unprepared for—and incapable of handling—things outside the scope of that variation.
It’s definitely the best book about the political analysis of the New York Times in the age of the modern GOP. Also probably good for a lot of technical organizations handling the radical-but-seemingly-small changes detailed in Underground Empire.
Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Nicholas De Monchaux)A book about how interfaces between humans and technology is hard. (I mean clothes, but also everything else.) Delightful and wide-ranging; maybe won’t really learn any deep lessons here but it’d be a great way to force undergrads to grapple with Hard Human Problems That Engineers Thought Would Be Simple.
A couple weeks ago I was playing around with a multiple architecture CI setup with another team, and that led me to pull out my StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC again to see where I could make it this time with an install.
I left off about a year ago when I succeeded in getting an older version of Debian on it, but attempts to get the tooling to install a more broadly supported version of U-Boot to the SPI flash were unsuccessful. Then I got pulled away to other things, effectively just bringing my VF2 around to events as a prop for my multiarch talks – which it did beautifully! I even had one conference attendee buy one to play with while sitting in the audience of my talk. Cool.
I was delighted to learn how much progress had been made since I last looked. Canonical has published more formalized documentation: Install Ubuntu on the StarFive VisionFive 2 in the place of what had been a rather cluttered wiki page. So I got all hooked up and began my latest attempt.
My first step was to grab the pre-installed server image. I got that installed, but struggled a little with persistence once I unplugged the USB UART adapter and rebooted. I then decided just to move forward with the Install U-Boot to the SPI flash instructions. I struggled a bit here for two reasons:
And then I had to fly across the country. We’re spending a couple weeks around spring break here at our vacation house in Philadelphia, but the good thing about SBCs is that they’re incredibly portable and I just tossed my gear into my backpack and brought it along.
Thanks to Emil Renner Berthing (esmil) on the Ubuntu Matrix server for providing me with enough guidance to figure out where I had gone wrong above, and got me on my way just a few days after we arrived in Philly.
With the newer U-Boot installed, I was able to use the Ubuntu 24.04 livecd image on a micro SD Card to install Ubuntu 24.04 on an NVMe drive! That’s another new change since I last looked at installation, using my little NVMe drive as a target was a lot simpler than it would have been a year ago. In fact, it was rather anticlimactic, hah!
And with that, I was fully logged in to my new system.
elizabeth@r2kt:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
hart : 2
isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb
mmu : sv39
uarch : sifive,u74-mc
mvendorid : 0x489
marchid : 0x8000000000000007
mimpid : 0x4210427
hart isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb
It has 4 cores, so here’s the full output: vf2-cpus.txt
What will I do with this little single board computer? I don’t know yet. I joked with my husband that I’d “install Debian on it and forget about it like everything else” but I really would like to get past that. I have my little multiarch demo CI project in the wings, and I’ll probably loop it into that.
Since we were in Philly, I had a look over at my long-neglected Raspberry Pi 1B that I have here. When we first moved in, I used it as an ssh tunnel to get to this network from California. It was great for that! But now we have a more sophisticated network setup between the houses with a VLAN that connects them, so the ssh tunnel is unnecessary. In fact, my poor Raspberry Pi fell off the WiFi network when we switched to 802.1X just over a year ago and I never got around to getting it back on the network. I connected it to a keyboard and monitor and started some investigation. Honestly, I’m surprised the little guy was still running, but it’s doing fine!
And it had been chugging along running Rasbian based on Debian 9. Well, that’s worth an upgrade. But not just an upgrade, I didn’t want to stress the device and SD card, so I figured flashing it with the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS was the right way to go. It turns out, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Raspberry Pi install.
I grabbed the Raspberry Pi Imager and went on my way. It’s really nice. I went with the Raspberry Pi OS Lite install since it’s the RP1, I didn’t want a GUI. The imager asked the usual installation questions, loaded up my SSH key, and I was ready to load it up in my Pi.
The only thing I need to finish sorting out is networking. The old USB WiFi adapter I have it in doesn’t initialize until after it’s booted up, so wpa_supplicant on boot can’t negotiate with the access point. I’ll have to play around with it. And what will I use this for once I do, now that it’s not an SSH tunnel? I’m not sure yet.
I realize this blog post isn’t very deep or technical, but I guess that’s the point. We’ve come a long way in recent years in support for non-x86 architectures, so installation has gotten a lot easier across several of them. If you’re new to playing around with architectures, I’d say it’s a really good time to start. You can hit the ground running with some wins, and then play around as you go with various things you want to help get working. It’s a lot of fun, and the years I spent playing around with Debian on Sparc back in the day definitely laid the groundwork for the job I have at IBM working on mainframes. You never know where a bit of technical curiosity will get you.