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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • Ubiquiti has had outages in the past that meant you couldn’t manage the equipment right in front of you.

    Even discounting the potential security implications of that kind of management, the rage I would feel in that situation is enough that I while my AP is nice, works great, I will never use any of their gateways.

    I’m using a 2.5g protectli with OPNSense now, and it’s easy to manage, and all local.




  • Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

    You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

    Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won’t kill anyone, but you’ll make the line go down temporarily.

    If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don’t catch it because you don’t respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.






  • These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

    You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

    The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

    I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.


  • It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

    The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

    I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

    I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

    The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

    That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.



  • Short answer: No, this guy is all the way up his own rear end.

    Longer answer:

    Author: “C is not ‘close to hardware’”

    Also Author: “Successful one to one struct comparisons may require padding, which isn’t automatically applied!!!”

    Like if you have an entire PhD on this stuff and you don’t understand how and why you need to pad, when you need to do it, and how to calculate the proper amount of padding, maybe somebody should’ve stopped you before you showed your whole ass on the Internet like that.

    (Padding is applied to align chunks of data more closely to the size of memory writes possible in a given architecture, it is extremely system dependent and you use it in very specific circumstances that you, a beginner, do not need to understand right now other than to say that if the senior says thou shalt not fuck with my struct you better not)




  • I caught a junior trying to reimplement an existing feature, poorly, in a way that would have affected every other consumer of the software I’m a code owner on a week or two ago. There’s good reason to keep them around.

    PRs suck to do, but having a rotating team of owners helps, and linting + auto formatting helps with a lot of the ticky tacky stuff.

    Honestly, the worst part is “newGuy has requested your review on a PR you requested changes on but he hasn’t addressed” that’ll get you in the ignored pile real quick.


  • I’m working on moving to local control as much as possible for my smart home stuff. Switched to zwave for my thermostat from nest, excellent move, I don’t lose connection (and automations) randomly anymore.

    Also ripping all my optical media for jellyfin to avoid relying on these assholes deleting stuff from their streaming catalogs for tax breaks.

    It’s not just google, it’s all of these companies.


  • Google is not an endpoint if you wanna be a money-laden tech bro. To get real cash you gotta create a startup and grift some money out of VCs. To do that, it helps if you “innovated something totally new” at someplace with name recognition like Google.

    Everything except search and ads are simply practice grifts before the real grift. You cannot rely on any Google product to last for any length of time, even properties Google purchases will lose reliability as they fall into disrepair and neglect, see Nest.

    I used to love Google everything, I was on the wave beta. I was one of the first with a cr-48. It is sad for those of us that want to contribute to something big, cool, and impactful, watch for fuschia to implode next, I think it already started when they “had” to layoff “over hires.”

    One or two person teams don’t put a man on the moon. It takes a lot of really smart people working on very small specific things together to make world changing stuff happen, the culture of Big Tech is not conducive to “real” work anymore. It’s big grifts run by little grifters.