• she/her 🏳‍⚧

26, cartoon and video game liker.


Occasional NSFW rechosts, ask me to tag if necessary.


You can find art I made under #bvart!


A low resolution website banner depicting a close-up of Xenia, the Linux Fox's face against a red background. To the right is large, bolded text reading "LINUX" accompanied by smaller text underneath reading "the choice of a GNU generation."

A deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of an elderly person's face to the right of white text reading "I'm thinking about those beans" with grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. The background is a photo of baked beans.A deviantART styled stamp containing a screenshot of Mario from Super Mario 64, edited to be giving the viewer a realistic middle fingerA deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of a hairless pet rat next to a toy keyboard with rainbow-colored keysA deviantART style animated pixel stamp featuring cropped artwork of femtanyl's mascot. "FEMTANYL" is spelled out in white pixel letters on the mascot's forehead that individually turn red from left to right in a loop
An 88 by 31 pixel banner of an abstract floating head creature with a liquid eye facing away from the viewer, a closed eye with an eyelash facing towards the viewer, and teardrop-shaped gems coming out of the eyelash. Xhe is accompanied by text reading "Charm will protect you!" and is depicted in front of a purple background.an animated 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with alternating photos of Laura Les and Dylan Brady's faces screaming, sourced from the back cover of the album "10,000 Gec". The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with a crude scrawling of the word "GECS".an animated 88 by 31 button. along the top is text reading "SPONGEHEAD" in a font from Spongebob Squarepants, colored in black and cohost's plum color. below is smaller Spongebob font text reading "prof-badvibes" in green, with one letter at a time in sequence flashing white. To the sides are Incidental Number 7, a background character from Spongebob, and Eggbug, the cohost mascot, colored to resemble Spongebob.an 88 by 31 button of the transgender pride flag against a gray background next to text reading "trans rights now!"
an 88 by 31 button featuring animated pixel art of Reimu Hakurei from the Touhou series against a gray background. she is pictured next to text reading "powered by Reimu."an 88 by 31 animated button. the button starts showing a blue color, but the point of view zooms out to reveal a blue variant of Tux, the Linux penguin, against a gray background. text reading "Linux powered" appears in the banner to the left of Tux.an 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with a photo of Weird Al Yankovich's face. The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with the word 'Yankovic'.an 88 by 31 animated button of the Lapfox Trax logo, which is the word 'LAPFOX' in bold serif font with a cartoon fox's head replacing the 'O'. The logo is in front of a rainbow color-shifting grid
A parody of the "Netscape Now!" 88 by 31 pixel button. To the left is a rotating marijuana leaf, and to the right is text reading "Legalize Now!" along with the letters M and J in the bottom right corner.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a yellow-to-green hue-shifting background. To the left is a cropped piece of clipart showing the top half of a newspaper cartoon-styled individual's face looking at the viewer in a goofy way. The clipart is accompanied by text reading "FREE STUFF" in bolded all capital letters to the right.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting two photographed women looking up and to the right against a white background. Text reading "GAY WOMEN" in bolded all capital letters can be found to the right, with the word "gay" being larger and emphasized.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a sprite of a blinking one-eyed green alien from the Commander Keen games. To the alien's right is text reading "Accursed Farms".
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a rainbow peace symbol to the left of blue text reading "Peace Now!", both against a gray background.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an inverted United States flag with the stars replaced by a 'no' symbol. On top of the flag is black handwritten pixel text reading "ACAB".An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting Super Mario running to the right through a 'window' to the left. To the right is blue text reading "Dave's Videogame Classics".An 88 by 31 pixel banner containing sprites of Kris and Susie from the video game Deltarune. Susie is looking at Kris with a cartoonishly angry expression. Below the two is white text against a black background reading "kris where tf are we."
An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a gray background. To the left is a 'window' showing a sprite of a dove against a black background. The dove is shown flying and being covered up by a red X symbol in two alternating frames. To the right is black-and-gray flashing text reading "DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT" in all-capital letters.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an illustration of Hatsune Miku against a gray background. Miku is blinking her eyes and smiling on alternating frames. To the right is text reading "This site is Miku Approved", with 'Miku' in large, bolded blue letters and 'Approved' flashing rapidly between blue and red.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the transgender pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the blue Sega logo against a white background.
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a screencap of Blender version 1.X, with a classic-styled logo and a wireframe cube in the centerAn 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the words "download SBURB" next to a logo of a minimalist lime-green house separated into segments. The word "SBURB" is rendered in a bold, cartoony, lime-green font.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the lesbian pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting character art of Sonic from the fangame Sonic Robo Blast 2 against that game's title screen background.
an 88 by 31 button of the blue-and-orange logo of the Doom video game series to the right of the Doomguy's grinning Heads Up Display face against a gray background.

Thanks to @framebuffer for my profile picture, @candiedreptile for the Charm button, @softwareangel for the Spongehead button!


Sources of any other profile graphics that weren't made or commissioned by me can be found here:
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

usb, usb2, usb3, usbc, displayport, hdmi, sata, nvme, pcie, and about a dozen other interconnects are all identical. they're just LVDS serial ports. yeah, yeah, i know, there are implementation differences, but nothing that matters.

as much as I hate USBC/thunderbolt/etc. it really drives this home. yes, yes! any port on your PC SHOULD secretly be able to turn into a monitor connector! except, harder! with better planning! and not by having a bunch of totally incompatible Modes with utterly dissimilar underlying philosophies that nobody wants to implement, especially because they don't have to. the USB forum completely fucking dropped the ball, then fell on their faces and their pants fell off and everyone saw their tiny nads, and yet they made a good point that nobody is going to take to heart.

PCIe is the lingua franca of computing. everything is one or more lanes, and has been for years. USB is a way to get some lanes. we just inexplicably won't let those lanes out of the computer unless they're first turned into a bunch of other protocols that are fundamentally identical, just incompatible for some reason. stop that!

computers should not have HDMI or USB or DP or anything on the back. graphics cards should have no plugs on them. sound cards, no plugs. video capture cards, no plugs. only motherboards should have plugs, and the only ones they should have are identical data ports and the only language they should speak is PCIe.

all capabilities in a computer should be published or subscribed to. devices and software should offer sources and sinks, and the motherboard should be little more than a PCIe router, a backplane that creates a Data Marketplace where devices can announce that they are a Source and if anyone would like to Sink them, they would be happy to set that up for a nominal fee (1-16 lanes, depending.)

you have an HDMI monitor? you plug it into a Port, any Port, through a dongle. the dongle asks "who's the primary video source?" and the graphics card says Well That's Me and the dongle subscribes, and now you have a picture. if you need more monitors, you plug in more dongles, and continue until you run out of lanes. if your GPU doesn't have the smarts to span a ton of displays, that's no problem - buy an ASUS ROG Display Mux that plugs into a Port, sinks all available lanes from the GPU, then republishes a new source that monitors can subscribe to. want to clone some displays? the chipset can do that for you by allowing multiple sinks to subscribe to the same source, and then the packets get duplicated en route; this is the age of Multicast On The Backplane, baby.

GPUs stop needing to know about sound. that's over. windows publishes itself as an audio source, to which monitors can subscribe if they want an additional stream. apps can also publish themselves as sources, and with the appropriate Advanced Control Panel you can manually route a single app to a single device. sample rates aren't compatible? Elgato Hyperstream Audio Conflater, $89.95. plugs into a Port, sinks all your audio sources, then resamples and refuckulates them however you like before republishing them - in whatever configuration you want, of course, mirrored to as many devices as you want.

you should be able to dupe the video coming out of your video card and send it to a capture card inside the motherboard. you should be able to connect a video input to your PC, then route that to your monitor instead of buying a KVM switch. i'm right

"PCIe won't run that far" yeah yeah i know, obviously this won't literally be PCIe in all forms at all times. that doesn't matter - the Dongle Future I propose (which won't suck because it'll be the assumption, rather than a shitty hack to make up for not having planned right in the first place) will invisibly convert things to whatever longer-distance protocol they need to be. we're already putting chips in all the cables; commit to that bit. every cable should be a short haul modem.

besides, lots of things don't need a whole PCIe lane. that's why we devise the new fractional lane, so your mouse and keyboard and streamdeck etc can all share one PCIe channel. yes, i am proposing that we bring back the 1980s AT&T TDM circuit switching model, and I'm right.

this has been feasible for over a decade. the damning thing is that we knew it, a decade ago, and had we started moving towards it then, the platform would be salvageable. instead we've done nothing, and the hell nightmare future where tablets actually do replace PCs will come to pass because, in our hubris / apathy, we didn't pivot the PC to focus on its strengths. the thing that makes the PC special is its incredible flexibility, but we let it solidify and stagnate, and now it's probably too late to undo it.

edit: ZERO PORT RAID CONTROLLERS. NUFF SAID

edit edit: SFP MODULES REFLECT THE TRUE FACE OF GOD. MAKE EVERYTHING LIKE THAT



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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

puts on dunce cap what about hardware exploits/system access on the PCIe bus?

I know that was something people were talking about with regards to thunderbolt for a period of time... but I also don't know exactly who hardware security serves anymore so maybe a moot point.

No point in worrying about the sidechannels when the front door is usually open.

Thinking about it, isn't this kinda how server motherboards have been going? With recent-ish storage developments there I think they've basically just been turning into "here's all your PCIe have fun". They obviously don't have video or audio output needs, but I think that'd be the blueprint.

Of course now they're doing CXL or whatever because they want to add system memory to that One Big Bus.

Well, there's this thing called a DPU which is basically an ARM SoC along with some support hardware (crypto acceleration?) that lives on your network card and does a bunch of network stuff for you. The damn thing can perform en/decapsulation, do some absolutely disgusting DMA to give VMs true wire speed (slightly dumber network cards can do this too, but not as adaptably), even run Kubernetes to turn your single physical server into edge computing lambda-microservice hell, all because it speaks - guess what - PCIe. TCP segmentation offload is so last decade.

I think they're putting it on graphics cards too.

to the best of my knowledge -- which admittedly isn't great, I haven't touched supervisor-mode code in decades -- the memory bus already has a device (the IOMMU) sitting on it that can do memory protection from I/O devices; there'd definitely be work to do to build it out and clean up OS IOMMU handling (with a bit of googling I found a paper from someone building a malicious PCIe device to exploit IOMMU handling in 2018), but I don't think it'd be insurmountable.

one of my unpopular computer opinions is that the iPhone USB-C switchover really should have been a teachable moment for this. Lightning existed in the first place because Apple wanted to use a cut-down version of Thunderbolt for its phone dock connector Now, back when Intel was still messing around with making it a primarily-optical interconnect1. imo Apple had no deep devotion to Lightning "as a technology", even to sell sole-source proprietary cables, and it was more than happy to get rid of it in favor of USB-C worldwide when the EU forced its hand -- but everyone was too focused on "Apple Gets Owned By The EU" to pay attention to the fact that Apple already sells bad white USB-C cables by the score.


  1. before thunderbolt eventually moved to copper, then ironically languished primarily on apple hardware for years (arguably up until the present) and made space for things like USB Power Delivery and USB-C, the rotationally symmetrical connector that inexplicably allows implementers to detect connector orientation

The fundamental issue with this is that you could just DMA over PCIe with any regular-looking device (e.g. a flash drive). Technically you could stop this, but noone writes a PCIe driver assuming that the device on the other side is malicious.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post: