Diego Cabello currently works as a software engineer on embedded systems in Ann Arbor, MI.
Barry Lyndon and the Sins of the Father
A God compassionate and gracious, Slow to anger, Abounding in loyal love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal love for thousands, Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sins. But he won’t declare innocent the guilty. He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the third and the fourth. Exodus 34:6-7 By what means Redmond Barry acquired the style and title of Barry Lyndon Opening Title Card of Barry Lyndon It was in the reign of George III that the aforementioned personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now Closing Title Card of Barry Lyndon MINOR SPOILERS The sins of the father live on with the son. Recently I watched Barry Lyndon written by Stanley Kubrick. It came up on my recommended, I didn't realize it was a Kubrick film immediately, and I decided to watch it because I have always been intrigued by the ways of life of Old Europe. There seem to be some "unwritten rules" of what to do in life. Things that I do not know whether they are taught and handed down through the generations, or are instinctively encoded in the genomes of each person. I suspect these things are not things that are easily "called forth" or spoken directly, and to do so requires much study and self reflection. I am not going to try and mention them here in hopes that the reader can read the subtext of what I could be talking about. But Stanley Kubrick, if any director, was one who could "call f...
Mechanical Terminal Update 2
If you haven't listened to their discography yet, I highly recommend checking out Crystal Castles, specifically their songs Vietnam and Empathy. This post is a high-level overview touching on mechanical and product design facets for the mechanical pixel/terminal. All technical specifications and calculations will be included in a TDS which will take a couple weeks to write. Motors Previously the last couple days I have been designing a motor for a pixel. Last Design I made a previous prototype which did not completely work but convinced me that a working mechanical pixel was possible. It used electromagnets to spin magnets around on a track, pulling the faces in with an oval-shaped cam track and flipping them. Next Design This design will have magnets on the pixel faces pulled inwards and spun around on bearings by a single electromagnet that alternates current. Cost Limitations CNC machine time Different gauges of wires Bearings Different springs according to different specifications Cam Mechanism No matter how thin you pull in the pixel faces, there will still be some lateral protrusion when spinning. The spinning profile needs to be as small as possible so all the pixels can spin in sync without colliding into eachother. The abov...
Levels of Anonymity on the Internet
Full name (“facename”, “orthonymnous”) – Posting with your real name. First and last, or just first. Difficult to engage with developing fringe ideas or systems of thought, but is quite a good way to signal which emerging systems of thoughts or behaviors are on their way in. Frequently only used for births, deaths, significant career milestones, and signaling for your favorite political candidate, due to the gravitas behind statements made with your name. This post is published under my real name. Pseudonymous – Posting with an assumed name that can easily be traced to you. This is one layer of protection and allows you to entertain more unorthodox points of view get them seen and feedback. References to one’s job or career, research, university, geographical region, or life experiences would be made on a pseudonymous account. This is the type of account one might share with their friends or coworkers. Prevents complete strangers from finding you but not the NSA Anonymous account – Posting with a name that would be near impossible for anyone determined to find you. Topics touched on can be commentary on any subject, but should have no or very minimal reference to the author’s personal life Note that if someone wants to find the holder of an anonymous account, any stories from the author can be easily traced by broadcasting them loud enough until someone the author knows in real life who was there or has heard about the anecdote receives broadcast ...
Mechanical Terminal Update 1
I am going to post updates on my mechanical terminal project on this blog twice a week. A couple weeks ago I was somehow able to get the ear of David Hotz, the CEO of Midjourney, on a Twitter space. I pitched my idea for a mechanical terminal, and he said to me that if I was to be successful with it I would have to find a way to significantly undercut LCD screens via price point. He also gave me some tips on how to give a good pitch. So, I am designing this with price point in mind. The design of the mechanical pixel has also simplified significantly since I published my initial piece on it. As I 3D print and draft blueprints for prototypes, I am becoming more and more convinced that a mechanical pixel is feasible. However I will no longer be publishing the specifics of the design for now. Previously I was considering "open sourcing"1 my design, in the spirit of helping others, but I have since decided against it, since building a full computer will take a lot of time to design anyways, so I might as well patent my design so that no one else, or at least no other American-aligned company, can pull it from under me (I don't know anything about manufacturing) and I can then license the patent and get money that way. Potential use cases I hadn't mentioned before for a mechanical pixel include e-readers and signage. It would also sell well in computer hobbyist circles. ...
Mechanical Terminal Initial Plans and Records
Why Publish? Publishing helps me organize my thoughts, so for the early stages of the "mechanical terminal" project I will be publishing records. I considered using a pseudonym for this but I decided to use my real name instead because if I drop the project I honestly don't think anyone else will pick it up and these plans I am publishing are not dangerous or prone to being sabotaged at all. Previously + Scope I realized the need for a mechanical terminal when I was writing this essay in November 2024, and spent the next couple months designing a prototype, mostly keeping it in my head except for 3D modeling and printing a few pieces. It started when I was thinking of ways to secure semiconductor production, but I quickly realized if the thousands of John von Neumans at ASML and TSMC and Nvidia can't find ways to do it then there is no possible way I could as well, but I had a crazy idea for simplifying displays instead. In one sentence, manufacturing an LCD screen requires a lot of specialized equipment, specialized knowledge, and complex international supply chains, and would be prone to going out of production in any number of catastrophic scenarios (power grid failure, competence crisis, COVID-like supply chain collapse, geopolitical instability, et. al.), and since LCDs are our main interfaces with computers currently, and since computers are integral for man...
Why the Terminal
In this post I detail why simplicity with computer applications must be an ideal to be held - computers are immensely complicated machines, and are crucial for many aspects of modern society to run, and so software must be kept to a minimum to retain functionality. Scenario 1: Catastrophic Infrastructure Failure You can do anything with a computer. But the usecases that I specifically want to be preserved, in the event that humans can no longer manufacture computers or lose that knowledge, is instantaneous person to person communication and document retrieval. Bar some strange discovery like mechanisms behind inter-brain telepathy or intra-brain telepathy (how is it that different regions of the brain are able to communicate with eachother instantaneously, and know what is going on in the other region, without sending a nervous signal over there? paper), there are only two ways to do this. Wired - sling a cable from you to your buddy. The United States already has networks of underground cables laid out, maintained by companies like AT&T. In the event of catastrophic infrastructure collapse, these networks could no longer be maintained or functional. So, on the local level, such as a town, network engineers will have to be present to set up a network with everybody there in alignment. These networks can scale all the way down, to your small band of friends ...
Build Your Own Computer
Being smarter than anyone else about important but narrow issues of software design didn't prevent us from being almost completely blind about the interactions between technology and economics that were happening right under our noses. Eric Stephen Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2001), p. 75 Presently Trump won the 2024 election and this is a good thing for America. To be completely honest I was not expecting this to happen until the very end - I always had known he was always going to be the more popular candidate, and his campaign strategies were very well made this time around, but, with the fraudulent votes from 2020 to be repeated, I figured, the other party could make up as many fake votes as they want and there is nothing Trump can do about it. My mind was changed about this the last two weeks before the election. "Too big to rig" came about, thankfully. I was worried greatly about the future of the world before Trump got elected. A more geopolitical able China, a less geopolitical able America, possibility of war in the Pacific, finished goods from Taiwan and Japan and South Korea being cut off... An internally destabilized America, with an unskilled, uneducated, illegally immigrating population ravaging America's resources and funding... Having seen myself and lived near the destabilization already rampant in the inner cities in America, and worried about that "escaping containment"... I was worried about a scenario whe...
To the Publisher
To the publisher: I have much to write. I suppose the best approach is to simply write what I am thinking about. It is the end of the year. Last year (not the year ending today, the one before that) was a pretty crazy year and I had some pretty crazy thoughts then. Thoughts about good and evil and spirituality. These were all things that I thought everyone knew, more or less... things that I thought everyone went about life not talking about it, because it wasn't the type of thing you were supposed to talk about except in moments of birth and death, or falling in love, or making a blood oath of friendship or marriage, or betraying a friend, or taking a life, or attempting to resurrect the dead. Because these were all things that everyone knew, on some baseline deep instructions on what to do, that are kind of a requirement for being alive, for the whole rest of being a human to follow afterwards. The type of thing that everyone knows, and goes through life aware of, but not really talking about, because they are reserved for those sacred moments. I haven't really shared thoughts of those things to other people very much. Kind of because I am scared of the reaction I might get, of speaking the unspoken, and awake some kind of terror in them that I had articulated the things they knew all along, and thereby putting myself at risk from them; and on the other hand, getting a response of, "yeah, of course, everyone knows that, why are you thinking so much about it? Everyone kno...