Once I used an old MIPS debian in qemu to test big endian. I thought since LoongArch has its root in MIPS it may be big endian. It turns out "LoongArch bit designations are always little-endian".
Readit Newsinfinet commented on Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture lists.debian.org/debian-d... · Posted by u/cbmuser
Documentation https://pkuhpc.github.io/CraneSched/en/index.html
infinet commented on Interview with Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs) [audio] linuxunplugged.com/644... · Posted by u/teekert
Since bcachefs no longer mainlined (DKMS) and therefore sits in the same class as ZFS, why would/should I migrate from ZFS to bcachefs?
One reason is to use the Linux page cache instead of dedicating RAM to ZFS, given how expensive memory is now. I am very happy with MGLRU and won't miss ZFS's ARC.
infinet commented on An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine positive.news/society/fla... · Posted by u/ohjeez
I love it. I used to work for a company targeting markets in the developing world. It's really easy to take for granted the supply chains that exist all around us. I always like to see the creative solutions people come up with when resources are constrained.
PS: As an example, note the sheet-metal construction. In an industrialized country we would laser-cut all these parts. If you wanted to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut out the large shapes, then a hand punch to make the screw holes. More labor intensive, but still doable.
> to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut
Metal work seems very expensive in some places. In a 2025 paper [1], a cooking pot looks like several aluminium rings welded together, about 50 cm tall and 70 cm in diameter, is 416 USD in Ghana, which is one of the destinations of this hand-crank washing machine.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266711312...
infinet commented on An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine positive.news/society/fla... · Posted by u/ohjeez
Your heart is in a better place than the NGO-contraption market, but what you also need to understand is that when you change a local optima in minimal ways, you also disrupt the rest of the local economy inadvertently.
Take the rocket stove as an example. It's an "improvement" over three stone and hearth fires, right? Less particulate in the air, less smoke, less ash, and more efficient use of fuel, all good things, right? Everyone has to work less to gather fuel, everyone's lungs are happier, and so on.
But not quite.
The rocket stove reduces ash yield, reducing one universally useful by-product. The rocket stove minimizes smoke production, so instead of creosote deposits on the walls acting as a general biocidal agent and lowering air humidity, there's now high humidity with exposed walls, an ideal climate for mold growth. Ever wonder why traditional pit-houses and earth-lodges rarely had issues with mold and damp and typically annually fumigated their entire homes with smoke? Or why women in some Northern and Eastern Europe peoples gave birth in saunas even prior to the advent of germ theory? The answer is smoke is useful, not only for creating relatively sterile environments, not only from molds, but also bugs.
Chronic smoke exposure imposes real respiratory costs, but traditional societies tolerated those costs because smoke simultaneously provided insect control, food preservation, fumigation, and moisture regulation. Interventions that remove smoke without deliberately replacing those functions often trade one health burden for several others. And the simplest way to achieve all of those functions is the same way humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.
The rocket stove minimizes fuel use, so instead of heating and cooking, you just end up with cooking (and note that the rocket mass heater doesn't solve this problem, which is just banking heat rather than using it more efficiently). This separation "works" in hotter climates, but at that point, why are you cooking indoors to begin with? And again, the reduction in smoke makes insects (namely mosquitoes) much more likely to discern where breathing humans are and able to reach within biting distance.
Generally, traditional practices often encode systems-level knowledge that modern interventions ignore. Diffusion of traditional practices will generally be better than trying to invent a better mousetrap.
As far as cleaning goes, as in the saponification and misculation of fats, the gist is to treat a fat with an alkali with agitation and time. Heat speeds up the process (hot process), but enough time completes the reaction (cold process). Soap and detergents are just rapid versions of this process, but aren't at all necessary, so long as you have water and ash.
This understanding is called the sinner's circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinner%27s_circle
It's the same reason when washing your hands you're "supposed to" sing happy birthday twice while agitating your hands. The soap is engaging in a chemical reaction with the fats on the your hands that takes more time because the human body can only tolerate so hot a temperature of water. You can use cold water and wait longer and have the same effect. The same thing is true of washing clothes, dishes, or whole bodies.
The Romans understood this. The baths were alkaline. They rubbed themselves with olive oil, used a stirgil (something like a frosting knife) to squeegee off the oil, then went in the pool. The alkali in the warm water combined with the residual olive oil and basically creates soap on your skin that is then rubbed off.
It's the same reason that Romans were able to have lily-white togas despite not having modern enzymatic cleaners and chlorine-based bleaches. They had lant and wood-ash alkali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant
In short, my experience is that I've improved my own life by observing what the time-rich resource-poor peoples of the world do rather than the inverse.
Sticking head into a barbecue oven for 10 minutes might get rid of lice, but expecting cooking smoke kill bugs is absurd. People use the three stone and hearth fire not because they want the smoke, but because they do not know better. Combustion is a complicated process, it generates CO2, H20, CO, H2, CH4. The higher the temperature, the more thorough the burning. It requires the right amount of air, enough to burn all the biomass, but not too much that carries heat away thus lowers the temperature. Higher temperature also transfer heat more efficiently to the cookware. Only a well designed stove can do that. These are not things that can be figured by meditating in front of an open fire.
Saving fuel is a matter of life and death in the ancient world. Winter is brutal to the poor largely because gathering fuel is difficult, especially in areas that have supported large population for centuries.
infinet commented on An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine positive.news/society/fla... · Posted by u/ohjeez
I love it. I used to work for a company targeting markets in the developing world. It's really easy to take for granted the supply chains that exist all around us. I always like to see the creative solutions people come up with when resources are constrained.
PS: As an example, note the sheet-metal construction. In an industrialized country we would laser-cut all these parts. If you wanted to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut out the large shapes, then a hand punch to make the screw holes. More labor intensive, but still doable.
I am interested in unit cost for mass production. It needs to be significantly cheaper than an old style top-loading washing machine to be affordable. The design of old style washing machine is mature and priced at around $100 for 8kg model. I suspect it can be stripped down further, remove water pump, remove program controlled inlet valve et al. to reduce the cost to below $50. Granted, washing machine like that needs electricity, but solar panel may be cheap enough.
One more thing, the water is not always easy to get in poor places. It is often much easier to carry laundry to a well, creak, or river than transport water to home. The path to the water sources may be a narrow trail often going up and down hills, so even with wheels on the machine, it is impractical to drag the machine to the water.
If the Starlink satellites all collided, the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years) and wait a few years to launch more into LEO. The debris deorbits automatically due to atmospheric drag. And in the meantime we would still be able to launch through the cloud to higher orbits or escape velocity as it wouldn't be dense enough to hit something that only passes though for a couple of minutes.
IMO now that LEO communication satellites are feasible we should ban launching satellites into higher orbits. Collision debris up there is much, much worse because it's essentially permanent. It will not deorbit by itself for thousands of years or more, and there is no plausible way to clean it up even with technology much more advanced than ours.
> the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years)
There is more than one Space Station up there. "Tianhe space station module conducted preventive collision avoidance due to close approaches by the Starlink-1095 (2020-001BK) and Starlink-2305 (2021-024N) satellites on July 1 and Oct. 21 respectively." [1]. Wikipedia also has a long list of planned and proposed space stations.
1. https://www.n2yo.com/satellite-news/Chinas-space-station-man...
For completeness, the job in the article is not strictly parallel, instead, they are separable tasks, which fall under high-throughput computing. HTCondor is a popular choice and is widely used in physics. If the cluster has a shared filesystem such as NFS, it does not even need ssh to each node. Moreover, nodes can share the same R installation on NFS, remove the complexity of installing same set of R packages on all nodes. HTCondor is available on Ubuntu.