Testing Blogger's Automatic Google Search Term Insertion Option

Compare with the original  Curious Marc - HP LED Display Programmer.

This is about Computer Security and large tech companies. 

Made in the USA. Broadcom still make these 8 character displays and you can get them here for £47.35 each. They draw 250mA per display and have 16 user-definable characters stored in flash memory. This is the programmer for them, so the military can hack their own fonts, I guess. The datasheet has the built-in character definitions, artistically laid out:

See Hitachi HD44780U LCD Display Fonts.

Here's their HP 9825 Repairathon.

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I've been thinking a lot about abstraction in documentation recently. It is really frustrating to me that companies like Intel and ARM insist on producing typeset PDF files of their manuals. These are all in some metalanguage that has to be translated. The metalanguage is English because these were originally American and British companies,  respectively, but the actual data the manuals contain is language-neutral. The task of the technical authors is focussed on producing information in the form of English text and diagrams in Portable Document Format, and making sure that this aligns with the actual physical devices produced in the manufacturing process, i.e. the data.

Take web sites for example. These are systems that are self-documenting, because the world wide web is meant to be a way to represent data in different clients that connect to the different servers. So a web site is a program that generates information in the form of an HTML representation of the data on the server. In the case of the web sites of Intel and ARM, for example, that information includes an HTML representation of the same data that the PDF files describe. The web server generates the HTML and sends it to the clients, which are web browsers, and the web browsers display the data and allow the user to interact with it in some way. These interaction events go back and forth between the servers and the browsers. An enormous amount of people's time is spent in this system of action/reaction events, and it is crucial that the information presented to the user corresponds to the data present on the server.

It seems obvious to me then that what we, as developers of information and communications systems,  should be focussed on is the process of translation of representations of data, not the data, which is continually changing as the world develops, nor the information, which needs to be presented in different ways to different people at different times and in different contexts. For example, someone writing an assembler/disassembler for ARM and Intel CPUs needs to take abstract descriptions of the instruction encoding and map those to assembler syntax. These mappings clearly must be the same as the ones described in the documents available from the web site. So generating the code for an assembler/disassembler is just another representation of the same data. This goes on right through the whole process, because ultimately the chip tapeout needs to be mapped to that same data.

See Peter Wang on How to Democratise AI.

So Google's automatic search term insertion did turn up some interesting stuff. I learned about an Object Oriented "Design Pattern" called Abstract Document Pattern when I clicked on the "abstraction in documentation" link. That might be quite interesting if I can just figure out what they're actually taking about! It didn't generate a link to Robin Milner's pi-calculus tutorial in response to the action/reaction [https://www.brics.dk/LS/98/4/BRICS-LS-98-4.pdf]. See Joan-Emma Shea - The Link Between Proteins, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases and Don Cupitt on Wittgenstein's Mystic Concept of Religion. But it did produce an interesting AI summary of Intel and ARM which turns out to be quite apposite:

Intel and ARM are major players in the semiconductor industry, but they operate with different business models. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells its own chips, while ARM focuses on designing chip architectures and licensing those designs to other companies, who then manufacture the chips. This difference in approach leads to distinct competitive landscapes and strategic priorities for each company.

Intel is a well-established, vertically integrated company. It designs, manufactures, and sells its own microprocessors, primarily using the x86 architecture. Intel's chips are widely used in personal computers, servers, and other computing devices.

ARM (formerly ARM Holdings) takes a different approach. It designs chip architectures (primarily based on the ARM architecture) and licenses those designs to other companies, who then manufacture the chips. This means ARM doesn't manufacture its own chips but earns revenue through licensing and royalties. ARM's architecture is popular in mobile devices, and increasingly in other areas like servers and laptops. 

It's apposite because of the tapeout verification issue and manufacturing independence.

It seems to have done multiple passes. On the first pass it found four, then it found another three and then another three. Let's see how it develops. This is just Google desperate for me to log in to Gemini. I will, but you have to pay me, and you have to find a way to treat me like a human being rather than a robot with a credit card, you fuckers!

Here's me talking about this experiment:

See Documentary - Narco Jungle: The Darien Gap and Guatemala: Under the Mayan Sky. Also see Karl Popper on Induction and Knowledge as a Greatest Fixpoint. 

Here's the Coffee Compiler Club:

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