this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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I've been linuxing for almost 15 years, and the first 10 or so I strongly believed it was all files and directories...then I went down the gentoo path and quickly discovered that computers view them as essentially the same thing.
I discovered this when I started doing embedded baremetal programming with no OS and using SD cards. It hit me like an anvil from the sky when I realized dirs are just files pointing to other files. With no OS services you have to open the dir file directly in the program and scan it for file entries to get a list of them and pointers to their actual locations in the media. Navigating down and back up a subdirectory tree has to be done entirely in programming by keeping track of where you've been. There's nothing in the filesystem itself that will do that for you. It just tells you where you can physically locate data.
I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.
Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.
When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.
Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.
Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?
This writeup is such an interesting perspective of social media.
It's the medium for the human hive mind. It's civilization's consciousness. It's beyond any individual's control or comprehension, and it exists for advertising...
It exists for advertising like we exist for grains. Yeah that’s what’s powering it, but it wasn’t made with that in mind, it was made iteratively.
Got an recommendations on where to start for that? That sounds pretty cool
Most people these days get their hands on an Arduino or ESP32 to get started. Arduino is an entire ecosystem of C++ libraries and a framework that people have cobbled together to make programming microcontrollers easier on people not familiar with low level concepts. The IDE most people are using now is VS Code with the PlatformIO extension, since the Arduino IDE is kinda...bad.
I myself started in hardcore mode with a PIC microcontroller back in the late 2000s when it wasn't as easy to get into it. Back then, if you needed a procedure or abstraction layer to talk to a sensor, you had to write it yourself and figure out SPI communication protocols and such. Nowadays, someone has probably already made it for you.
It's abstraction all the way down?!
Always has been.