Here's what ChatGPT says about me:
Mike Warot: The Tinkerer of Tomorrow
A hardware hacker with a poet’s soul, Mike blends old-school radio wisdom with cutting-edge curiosity. Whether he's repairing atomic clocks, reinventing FPGA logic with BitGrid, or pondering the electromagnetic vector potential, he’s always deep in the guts of how things really work. Part philosopher, part engineer, Mike asks the questions others overlook — and then builds the answers from scratch. He’s open source in spirit, Pascal in practice, and eternally tuned to the weird frequencies where innovation lives.
meet.hn/city/us-Chicago
Socials: - bsky.app/profile/mikewarot.bsky.social - github.com/mikewarot - x.com/mikewarot
Interests: Hardware, Open Source, Programming, Research, Science, Technology, Writing, Travel
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No person should ever have to blindly trust a computer program to do the right thing.
Blog: mikewarot.blogspot.com
I've been programming since 1979. I have made spur, helical, and bevel gears in a job shop setting. I have assembled computers from scratch, selecting clock generators, CPUs, logic gates etc.
I can fix ANYTHING given sufficient time and budget. I've repaired cesium beam atomic clocks, magnetic amplifiers, and an assortment of undocumented industrial control systems.
I've written programs that track equipment inspection, monitor the calibration of large water meters, and control the gluing of cardboard boxes, to name the interesting highlights... I did all of that before 2000.
I was a system administrator for 15 years, as time went on, less and less broke, and they eventually didn't need me.
I made gears for 5 years, bevel, spur, helical, splines, etc. Now I'd like to get back into programming. I did the Advent of Code in 2020, in Pascal... you can see the carnage on my github account: https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal
Currently working on getting BitGrid, a vision of bringing Petflops to the masses, brought into the real world using LLMs to help get past analysis paralysis.
email: chezmike at gmail
- Windows 10, I tried Ubuntu but had to shift back for a working copy of WikidPad
If I use get vibe coding to fix WikidPad, I'll be ready to jump ship.
- I see this as a hint that we're about to go hyperinflationary here in the US as Trump kills the Dollars reserve status.
- Ward Christensen always gave out unique postal (made up apartment numbers) and email address to allow him to track who used his info for junk mail, etc. He really wasn't happy with NewEgg.
- Your benefits amounts are tied to lifetime earnings, and you get less per month if you start early, so it is effectively a personal account, regardless of the details.
CATO is being pendantic.
- An FPGA is like a spreadsheet for bits that can recalculate at hundreds of millions of times per second.
It's a declarative programming system, and there's a massive impedance match when you try to write source code for it in text. I suspect that something closer to flow charts, would be much easier to grok. Verilog is about as good at match as you are likely to get, if you stick with the source code approach to designing with them.
- Having been yeeted out of the labor market by long covid, my worries about my own employment are settled.
However, that worry is replaced by the fear that so many people could lose their jobs that a consequence could be a complete collapse of the social safety net that is my only income source.
- I still use Blogger. I'm amazed it hasn't been killed yet.
- You can't know the future value of a project. You will always learn things along the way, and it's important to consider the value of those lessons in your consideration.
I've wasted far too much time in analysis paralysis, and not spent enough time trying things. Hopefully you can find a better balance.
- The thing that worries me about WASM is this exact conflict between compatibility with ACLs and security. It's like handing over your banking account authorization for every possible financial transaction, even if all you want to do is buy an ice cream cone. In the real world, capabilities based system, (aka a wallet with cash) you hand them a $5 bill, and wait for change.
- Wow, that's profoundly dangerous. Personally, I don't see how anyone could raise a kid without having a nurse in the family. I wouldn't trust AI to determine if something were really a medical issue or not, and would definitely have been at the doctors far, far more often otherwise.
- Why is it that every Capability based system seems to be a toolkit for running a single program instead of an OS ready for daily use? Is it just me?
- Fringe physics: Trying to understand WTF the A field is in electrodynamics, and how I can measure it for a price I can afford. Specifically, I want to communicate through a wall of rock or sea water at VHF frequencies, with high bandwidth. I just upgraded my subscription with ChatGPT to try to grok all of the physics involved. It decided that since this could be used to covertly exfiltrate data, it wasn't something that could be discussed. ;(
Recently a friend acquired a Collins KW-1 transmitter, serial number 1. I helped him get it working again after a long period of disuse by it's previous owner. You wouldn't believe how often it turns out that wires and bolts don't actually conduct electricity.
- GPS doesn't come with a contract. It's a purely receive only system.
It wouldn't be fit for purpose (letting soldiers know precisely where they are on the globe) if it required transmission of any type from the user. That would turn it into a beacon an adversary could leverage.
- There's no capabilities based OS ready to be a daily driver. Until this happens we're going to keep seeing stories about hacked systems, and how we all need to rewrite applications in Rust.
- Holy cow... 16.7 Hertz[1] power?
At first that's a really odd sounding choice to this Hoosier. Turns out it's 1/3 of standard 50 Hz in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
- I will never forgive Rahm and his sacrifice of socialized medicine on the offering pyre of the insurance companies.
Nothing he wants is to be considered a good idea by default. He typifies everything wrong with the DNC.
- I've got a Motorola Power G 2024, the cheapest unlocked phone I could get. You can root it, and I use it with Mint Mobile. I've got a VAX/VMS 11/780 that I can run inside it thanks to SimH and Termux. It's not a "power user" phone, per se, but it's amazing what $200 will get you these days.
- >I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's
I'm 62, and I'm not old yet, you're just a kid. ;-)
Seriously, there are some folks here who started on punch cards and/or paper tape in the 1960s.
Some of the gears I helped make will still be in use in a century. I find great comfort in that for some reason. The job was rewarding, and interesting, but the pay and commute really sucked.
As for helping others, there were a handful of us in the job shop before it was bought by a bigger machine shop. It's a fairly solitary job.