Great! I alctually always wanted to hack one to turn it into a home weather/calendar screen. It would be great for the purpose as it's battery efficient.

When I moved to the USA for a few months from Europe, I was surprised by the fact that you simply can't walk to places. There are so huge spaces between things except for maybe city centers. (I was mostly in CA and FL)

Yes, this is very true. That is how European cities from US cities. In Europe cities are built for pedestrians, in US for cars. All these US suburbs areas with one-store buildings are making transportation ineffective because the US city is often more spread. However, there are some positive things happening, like walkability studies in US cities. Hopefully, that will help in the near future.

I've been in Houston this year and it shocked me how difficult is to move there without a car.

I was saved by Uber and Lyft many times just because both my hotel and the office were really far away from public transport.

I wouldn't be surprised if Houston is the worst city in the nation when it comes to "walkability". It's so spread out.

This is a big problem in modern society especially for young adults. We're not meant for this. I know it's a bit "Hararish" to look it this way but really: "Yesterday" we were just living in small tribes together and being lonely was hard to imagine. Now you can end up having everyone you call a 'friend' on the other side of some screen and end up totally friendless in your 20's.

What exacerbates it is that modern venues for finding someone to connect with, are all heavily controlled and/or monetized.

Services like OKCupid actually actively hinder relevant matches unless you pay them and keep paying them. Places like Reddit are hit and miss, heavily dependent on the time you post, and you not only have to risk your privacy to find good matches, you have to gain the approval of everyone else who could remove your post from visibility.

I miss IRC, but of course even that was far from perfect, and had its own risks.

This isn't just about dating, but finding friends with similar interests at all.

With 8 billion people on the planet and all the connectivity, you'd think this would be easier for everyone by now.

For some of us IRC never went away. It’s my primary social outlet, and I’m closing in on 30.

Maybe I’m a bit special as I moved countries a fair bit in my 20s, and making friends in adulthood is difficult.

Shameless plug; if you want to join us (we are roughly 400 people) then the network is ircs://irc.drk.sc:6697/#darkscience

Please be careful! Posting links to these kind of small communities on much larger ones has a way of diluting what makes them so great in the first place - or at least severely irritating the regulars.

I understand where you're coming from, but the concept of "regulars" is one of the things that can hinder newcomers from fitting in, adding to the loneliness and isolation epidemic.

Feeling like an outsider is hard to overcome and requires effort from both parties, but it's better if a community does not make a distinction between "outsiders/newbies" versus "regulars" to begin with.

One of the saving graces of IRC is that the technical barriers to using it (compared to discord, etc) are high enough to keep out the riff raff.

As much as I love IRC, and as much truth as there is here. I can’t help but feel it’s quite elitist to put it this way.

If it's elitist to want your favorite communities to stay focused and full of friendly, like-minded people, then I'm an elitist.

> making friends in adulthood is difficult.

That's the issue. And it's exponentially harder if you weren't able to make friends in childhood either.

Can we make it a little easier through tech?

Exactly, applications like Tinder or OkCupid are made to push you to spend money. Social websites like Facebook or Twitter show personalized ads or monetize your data.

If you're someone with difficulties to meet new people, you're an easy target.

An educational question: If this is a tcp/ip implementation where is it run? On a router? Or on a network interface controller? Both?

> It is used in embedded systems such as the ARTIQ core device and ionpak. [1]

and

> ARTIQ (Advanced Real-Time Infrastructure for Quantum physics) is a leading-edge control system for quantum information experiments. [2]

[1] - https://m-labs.hk/smoltcp.html

[2] - https://m-labs.hk/artiq/index.html

The org developping smoltcp makes embedded systems, so the point of smoltcp is probably to use it there.

smoltcp is also used by Redox, an OS written from scratch in Rust.

"smoltcp is a standalone, event-driven TCP/IP stack that is designed for bare-metal, real-time systems."

My understanding based on that description is that it is meant for applications that run directly on the hardware, without an OS in the middle. I'm thinking embedded applications.

So I'm thinking that this is meant for IoT-style appliances and the like. Maybe I'm wrong :)

I'm using it in my toy OS as my TCP/IP implementation. It's meant to be run in a wide variety of contexts, from embedded IoT-style appliances to userspace Linux. In fact, it has instructions for Hosted Usage[0] in the README.

[0]: https://github.com/m-labs/smoltcp#hosted-usage-examples

I think IoT devices run a lot more OS than you're expecting. Even the wifi chip on one might have a real OS.

This could be useful for a userspace TCP stack; sometimes it's better to do the whole thing in your process than the kernel.

Ah so, it can be something like a "network platform" on my (let's say) smart home thermostat? :D

Exactly, it can be the bit that allows your smart-home thermostat to talk to the app on your phone (or the cloud).

I think it would be run on a network interface. Isn't this or an equivalent implementation that comes packaged with every OS so that you can connect to a network?

I may be wrong here and others are more than welcome to correct me.

EDIT: Added "or an equivalent"

This is definitely not the implementation that comes packaged with every OS. Every OS has its own TCP/IP implementation that usually lives in the kernel - though most are derived from BSD's TCP/IP stack.

SmolTCP could (in theory) replace the implementation packaged with an OS, or even be used completely from userspace by taking over the raw network interface.

Apologies.

I didn't mean that this exact implementation is shipped with every OS. I meant an equivalent of it being shipped with OSes.

It's awesome. Though I prefer my Bronshtein :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronshtein_and_Semendyayev

Interesting - I've had the German version from my university days (every ME student had one) and it's spelled "Bronstein". The English spelling makes me a little dizzy.

Bronshtein is excellent, but a bit dated. For me in particular it's lacking coverage of modern ideas on function approximation.

Also, it isn't free ;)

IIRC it does not cover probablity and statistics, a strange omission considering the Russian heritage.

Russian version?

What does the implementation language have to do with anything? Sure one could complain that the program is slow/buggy but I don’t think that has much to do with whether one likes the implementation language or not.

I feel like this is like complaining about tex being written in web or hg being written in python (hg being slow seems a more reasonable complaint).

I think with a program, the proof of the pudding is in the eating

I guess, it would be kinda harder to adapt Haskell to the client-side-only interactive web (but of course, people are trying [1]). Nowadays the availability in the web directly impacts its acceptance so it is not a separate concern.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/The_JavaScript_Problem#Haskell_-.3E...

That's kind of outweighed by the more relevant fact that the people who had the time and inclination to create the software preferred one set of tools, and the preferences of some after-the-fact passerby would obviously not factor into this kind of decision.

You are the man. Took the advice. :D