Hello,

I am making an open source privacy-first fitness band for myself and I am writing the firmware now as someone relatively inexperienced at firmware development (I am an electronics engineer by trade). I get it done but sometimes I run into concept issues, especially when I start overthinking, like now that I need help with.

I have a macronix SPI NOR flash on-board that I want to use as offline activity saving, backup at low battery, etc... I am dreaming up the data structure for it. Here is the values I need to save to not lose information and what will be required for my supported features in the Bluetooth Physical Activity Monitor Service:

struct memory_map_nor {
    time_t timestamp;
    uint16_t sub_sess_id;
    uint32_t steps: 24;
    uint8_t bpm;
    float16_t spo2;
    uint16_t pulse_inter_beat_interval;
    uint16_t cadence;
    uint16_t speed;
    uint16_t activity_level;
    uint16_t activity_type;
    uint16_t temp;
};

So from this datastructure, it has a total of 28 bytes of data. This has to fit on a 256 byte page, which means 9 "rows" of data can be written per page, 144 per sector, 2304 per 64 bit block, and 147456 in total for a 32Mbit NOR.

But, I am getting confused while reading about memory structures in "normal" processors that need to read everything in 4/8-byte words via the parallel interfaces. This means that conventionally, everything has to be padded to neat structures that are divisible by 4 (32-bit) for QSPI reading. In that case, I would either have to add another 32 bits of data or pad 32 bits to every "row", making a neat 8 data "rows" per page.

OR, because I am only using single lane SPI, would this not matter and I could shove an extra datapoint in each page. The difference is 147456 data rows vs 131072 data rows. At 3s polling rate, that is 5.12 days vs 4.55 days. For my application, the difference might be useless anyway, but the band goal battery life is 2 weeks or so.

Again, maybe I am overthinking this and can just pad the data to make everything neat and fit well. Anyone have any opinions? Thanks!

I couldn't sleep last night and ended up working on a terminal-based recreation of the old Starry Skyline screensaver we had on our computers when I was a kid (part of the After Dark suite of screensavers). It's been a lot of fun to work on and I'm enjoying thinking of what else I can add to it beyond the simple office windows and stars. I just got finished adding fireworks and I'm real pleased with how they turned out.

https://github.com/Whelk/asciiskyline

This is my first time working with curses so it's serving as a useful learning experience. Hoping to throw together some TUI utilities once I'm comfortable enough with it.

Lessons from event driven architecture

IP tells you where the request comes from, that’s it. It doesn’t tell you what language the user speaks. It looks like Google thinks otherwise, and many programmers are blindly repeating it for Google with no idea how do it properly.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30253906

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30253851

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30253477

To admit frankly, l am a non technical person who would be tinkering with the task of creating a full fledged website for a travel company. For me, it's going to be a fun activity. There are a lot of nerds out here who can help me with their expertise. Many thanks to you all😊😊😊

I appreciate Simon's balanced take on how LLMs can enhance a project when used responsibly.

I'm curious, though—what are this community's opinions on the use of LLMs in programming?

Resource leaks, where resources like files, database connections, or streams aren’t properly released after use, are a persistent issue in Java applications. These leaks can lead to performance degradation, and system failures. While tools like SonarSource SonarQube™ effectively identify such leaks, the fixing process remains manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors. To address this, we developed FixrLeak, a generative AI-based framework that automates the detection and repair of resource leaks. FixrLeak combines Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) analysis with generative AI (GenAI) to produce accurate, idiomatic fixes while following Java best practices like try-with-resources. Deployed within Uber’s extensive Java codebase, FixrLeak significantly reduces manual effort, improves developer productivity, and improves code quality, showcasing the transformative potential of AI-driven solutions in large-scale software engineering.

An update from GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159123#discussioncomment-13148279

The rates are here: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api?apiVersion=2022-11-28

• 60 req/hour for unauthenticated users
• 5000 req/hour for authenticated - personal
• 15000 req/hour for authenticated - enterprise org

;; An up to date version of SICP

;; Also available in PDF and epub format

For the Crustaceans

Plebbit is a fully peer-to-peer, decentralized alternative to Reddit Built on IPFS that doesn’t rely on centralized servers or federated instances like Lemmy or Mastodon. Instead of traditional infrastructure, .No single point of failure, no global mods with ultimate control, no admin backdoors.

In theory, this should mean true censorship resistance and user ownership of content. Communities (subplebbs) are moderated locally with cryptographic keys, and moderation actions are transparent and accountable. It’s a different model than just “federated social media” this is more like BitTorrent for discussion forums.

Do you think a system like this can scale in practice?

Can it maintain quality discussions without centralized moderation?

Will regular users adopt something this technical?

Is it really more decentralized than alternatives, or just differently centralized?

https://github.com/plebbit/seedit

Biome is an integrated linter/formatter for JavaScript/TypeScript, CSS, HTML and GraphQL.

We are now in the process of implementing TypeScript-like inference (not full type checking!) that allows us to enable type-informed lint rules. This is similar to typescript-eslint except instead of using tsc we attempt to implement the inference ourselves.

This post describes our progress thus far, with a detailed overview of our type architecture.

Created a simple query language for JSON data.

Features:

• Basic query selection
• Fallback Mechanism
• Wildcard support
• Array Slices
• Multiple Key Selection
• Key Omission
• Single Key Omission
• Functions
• Comparison Operators
• Conditions
• Configurable

Here's an example to get the list of adult friends:

$.friends[?(@.age >= 18)]

Runs in browsers, and Node.js

Documentation site: https://jqlite.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/Jay-Karia/jqlite

NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jqlite-ts

⭐ Leaving a star on GitHub is much appreciated!

It actually uses a variation of LISP. I know old MIT college courses in Computer Science used to teach it.

The book, "How to Design Programs," is based on a variation of LISP, which I know used to be taught in college computer science courses.

I have zero programming experience, but I want to learn—not for a job, just to truly understand it.

A lot of modern advice says to start with Python because it’s easier or faster, but I’m not looking for shortcuts.

I want to go old-school. This book teaches programming with a 1990s-style approach. It may not use the latest tools, but I’ve heard it actually teaches how to think like a programmer and builds real logic skills.

Once I finish it, I plan to take the University of Helsinki’s Java MOOC. Again, sticking to fundamentals and learning the core ideas, not just trendy frameworks.

For context, I’m not naturally a math person either—I’m teaching myself beginning college algebra right now. That’s less about going old-school and more because I never had a college education, so I’m starting from scratch across the board.

So, does this sound like a solid strategy? My goal isn’t a career—just a deep, strong foundation to see if I can really do this.

What do you all think?

I'm wondering if anyone here has gone through this process, and what the experience was like. (I'm not asking for help with any particular error or anything like that. At least not yet).

I got put in charge of maintaining an old codebase that includes Xamarin projects for android and ios and we seem to have run into a situation where we need to update the framework not just for security, but to keep the mobile app fully functional as Apple and Google update their APIs.

I did see that there was a button in Visual Studio to automatically upgrade the project, but apparently "upgrade" means "break fuckin' everything" so I'm guessing I'll need to take a more manual approcach and also blow a bunch of hours on finding replacements for all the dependencies that required Xamarin and are no longer maintained.

My biggest problem is that I haven't even heard of Xamarin before this thing got dropped in my lap so I have some confusion about how it's supposed to work on top of my normal baseline amount of confusion.