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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • This is true of a even some public universities in the US. I can’t remember if it was a rule where I was, but definitely most freshman did just live in dorms.

    Lot of folks brought their own desktops to set up, and we were allowed Ethernet switches to hook up multiple devices - had to be wired. Wireless had two options, WPA# 802.1X or unencrypted captive portal guest. If your device didn’t support that, it had to be wired by policy.

    And they weren’t wrong, I did a radio scan and they had the full sized enterprise access points about as good as they could (with a few low signal exceptions, and the air waves were still overloaded with too many people. The building uplink was perfectly fine, it was just overcrowded wireless.



  • I’m an American android user and I’m confused too. At least in my area, contactless is pretty ubiquitous now. (I accept adoption is slower, but it’s getting there)

    Sure Apple Pay seemed to come to a lot of terminals first, but NFC Google wallet or whatever it is the phone does automatically I’ve only seen fail at certain terminals. In that rare case, usually someone behind me with Apple Pay often also fails, so I’d be more likely to attribute it to a system glitch rather than lack of support.



  • Yup. My background is computer science transitioned to IT Infra.

    My sister sent me a screenshot of a Spotify one-liner error, white text on black background, captioned “they wrote a lazy error”. I immediately recognized that the actual problem was the load balancer in the front end trying and failing to connect to the backend/middleware in the first error, then in the second it recognized a failed health check and reporting that no back ends were available. Root cause is probably networking issue or actual server crash.

    I also have a bonus that in high school I had watched a ton of videos on VFX/SFX and knew a rough way around After Effects and compositing (before I jumped into CS I had considered this as a career path), so now when I watch TV and movies I can also see some of the “layers” they use to compile the on screen effect.




  • The first few screens look like a combination reverse job board and Coinbase. But your description says “post stuff and create tokens”, which doesn’t quite seem to line up

    Why?

    I don’t think Web3 contracts have tested case law yet, so who knows if it’s enforceable in court, at most it may only be as strong as a gentleman’s agreement. And the token part looks like an easy way to create rug pull coins, just on the ETH database instead of an independent database.




  • I’d like to politely disagree

    Finding alternatives to large software packages is great, don’t think I’m not saying that - but any time you have competitor X and competitor Y, be they both commercial, both F/OSS, or some combination thereof, the competitors must be cognizant of each other when setting up features.

    Burying your head in the sand and ignoring Microsoft, Apple, and Google is a very solidly Microsoft-Apple-Google-style play. It’s the play of someone who believes the other side offers no competition. That’s how you get unwieldy features these tech giants implement because they know they can make a 70% effort and people won’t be annoyed enough to leave.

    Every tool they make has a reason someone made it. Many tools are very important - for one example, the Microsoft Office document format is considered to be almost a universal format in presentations, spreadsheets, and plain documents for message passing between businesses.

    But as we as a society design alternatives to those various monopolies (as we should), we need users to want to use the new thing. We have to take what people like and keeps them on their old platform, and best preserve the intent of what they want on the new platform. Doing so requires discussing the features those big tech companies

    And as users, when we select the platforms we use, we need to weigh the cost of going with an alternative vs going with a giant. No solution is a perfect solution for everyone, and the chooser needs to weigh the maintenance cost (in hours or money) they will incur, how their users will like/dislike it, and maybe even look at a piece of software and decide “nah the vibes are off”.

    I’d love a world where those three tech giants had proper competition in all fields, and I think their business practices are scummy and need improvement. But the real alternatives to each need some polish before they’re ready to be used by [arbitrary tech illiterate grandmother].



  • A to B made more sense in a world where devices cannot serve as both roles via negotiation. My android phone when I got it utilized a data transfer method of plugging my iPhone charge port into my Android charge port, then the Android initiated the connection as a host device.

    The true crime is not that the cable is bidirectional, the true crime is that there is little to no proper distinction and error checking between USB, Thunderbolt, and DisplayPort modes and are simply carried on the same connector. I have no issues with the port supporting tunneled connections - that is in fact how docking stations work - just the minimal labeling we get in modern devices.

    I’d be fine with a type-A to type-A cable if both devices had a reasonable chance at operating as both the initiator and target - but that type of behavior starts with USB-OTG and continues in type-C.