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dgriffith

@[email protected]

I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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dgriffith ,
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Well they're not a charity, so my bet is on enshittification of some sort under the guise of "improving the experience for makers and users".

dgriffith ,
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Oh come on now, that's a defeatist attitude!

There's always scope to further extract value for shareholders!

dgriffith ,
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It's statistical blandness writ large.

The stack of single-sentence paragraphs after the introduction paragraph trying so hard to have an impact.

The tendency to put "not X, not Y, just Z" everywhere.

The perfect conclusion written at the end of each piece , summarising three bland paragraphs with yet another bland paragraph.

Statistically regurgitated bullshit, all of it

dgriffith ,
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Ha, If you're alluding to my post being similar to generated output, you obviously haven't experienced the pure blandness of LLMs trying to write engaging content.

All U.S. Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat ( www.ecoticias.com )

According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks. ...

dgriffith ,
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because it is far from a secure number.

It is only the American obsession with using it as a unique identifier for everything in their lives that has caused this issue.

dgriffith ,
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If you can't control yourself, you can always get the state to control everybody

"I can handle crack just fine! I don't know why it's outlawed!"

State control applies to a lot of addictive substances that cause material harm to society in general.

Stares hard at social media

dgriffith ,
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It was fault tolerant but I wouldn't say it was perfect. There were plenty of "known issues", and the fix in production was basically, "don't do that".

dgriffith , (edited )
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You mean "shuffle" like when you shuffle a deck of cards and have exactly the same cards still but in a different order with no single card repeating because you started out with a deck of cards and why would there suddenly be an extra card or 5 of the same face value in the deck because that's just crazy talk? That kind of shuffle?

Yeah sorry, Spotify doesn't do that.

dgriffith ,
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But what's the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you're blindfolded?

dgriffith ,
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All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they've got veils they can lift!

dgriffith ,
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You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls

Copper wiring is protected from the elements (that is: oxygen) by its insulation.
The gauge of the copper wiring is a far greater factor in audio quality than the voodoo science behind OFC.

You don't have to worry about corrosion in your speaker wiring unless your speaker installation is literally in the ocean.

dgriffith ,
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Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the <BLINK> of the 21st century? Discuss.

dgriffith ,
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Love me a good <MARQUEE>!

dgriffith , (edited )
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And newer versions of Android have notification categories for each app.

So if the developer does their homework I can turn off particular notification types and let others through, and that way you can -gasp!- actually have a messaging app that only notifies you of actual messages, instead of constantly begging for your attention for a bunch of superfluous crap.

A long list of stuff that I don't care about in Messenger

And if I go to the notification settings for that app and it doesn't have a category I can easily drop, it either gets completely silenced, or it gets uninstalled.

dgriffith ,
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I think it's becoming a play store requirement for apps to use various "notification channels" or whatever it's called, so hopefully the all or nothing behaviour will disappear in time.

Orrrr as you say apps get totally silenced / uninstalled, I don't have the patience for that kind of stuff anymore.

dgriffith ,
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But it's definitely not perfect and tends to add unnecessary changes, I constantly have to review and add new rules.

This is the bit that bugs me. I spend a bit of time to create a relatively simple application in C# with it, and it's constantly tacking on new features and four extra command line arguments and it's frothing at the mouth to add Cool Feature X, "just say the word and I'll do it".

Just do what I asked. No more. That's enough. There's enough mangled code and logic errors lurking in there already, I don't need any more "features" clouding the water.

dgriffith ,
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Oh lawdy, a budget phone shipping with an OS SEVEN WHOLE MONTHS out of date at time of publication. Will the horrors ever end!?

Quick, someone bring me my fainting chair!

dgriffith , (edited )
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I've worked in mines in the desert in South Australia where temps semi regularly hit 46-47 degrees.

It's OK (ish) because the humidity is low. But you can drink a litre an hour all day (11+ hours) and not need to pee. All that water goes somewhere.

The underground workings are often more dangerous, with lower temperatures but higher humidity. Once wet bulb temps get above 34 degrees underground personnel need to retreat from the area and the only work that can be done there then is work to fix the ventilation.

There's heat stress meters that measure wet and dry bulb temperatures and airflow, and can basically compute cooling power in watts. Not enough cooling power -> everyone out.

dgriffith ,
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Considering that some extra trackers were just added in this company's first release, it doesn't seem like it's going to be great.

dgriffith ,
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Revert to a version of nova launcher from a few years back.

All the features I needed from it were finalised years ago, so why update?

The usual nebulous comments like "bug fixes and performance improvements" in the changelogs isn't really a strong reason for me.

dgriffith ,
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8.1.6 apk from uptodown.com.

And then find the app in your installed app list in Google Play and untick "install updates automatically" in the three dot menu.

dgriffith ,
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Yeah, I had a surface laptop that had 60GB in there. Real handy when it's only got 128GB of storage.

I used PatchCleaner and it did the job.

dgriffith , (edited )
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Maxbotix make robust ultrasonic sensors that range out to 6m, they have a 3/4" pipe fitting on the back for mounting them.

So with that you can get a few lengths of 3/4" pipe and an elbow and have an easy way of mounting it a little ways into your well.

A little on the expensive side but simple to use and easy to weatherproof.

YSK a US passport card costs $30 and is definitive proof of citizenship. It fits in your wallet like a credit card.

For fellow Americans living in cities where ICE is active, many people, especially those of Hispanic descent, are already carrying around passports on their persons at all times because they're rightfully afraid of being forcibly disappeared or deported to some random South American country. ...

dgriffith ,
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It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean.

The way you've phrased it sounds quite dystopian.

dgriffith ,
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Having a need for a "valid travel document" to cover for your perceived ethnicity stinks of "papers, please" and I am alarmed that you cannot see that connection.

dgriffith ,
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Are you doing chmod with the recursive option? You could list a few subfolders with "ls -la" and see who owns them and what permissions they have.

It's also possible that your distribution mounts that drive with fixed permissions that override whatever you're trying to set. Checking with "mount" and seeing what it spits out for the mount options for that device might give a clue.

dgriffith ,
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Well, they used to be trained on Stack Overflow.

In the future they'll be trained on all your code, as per the end user licence agreement you clicked through.

dgriffith ,
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Perhaps the pressure difference between a column of fresh water and the equivalent height of salty water is enough to tip the scales.

dgriffith ,
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There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.

Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your "loop" becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.

Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.

If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don't get tasks treading on each other's toes.

FreeRTOS is in the Arduino libraries so you can just add it to a blank project and then have a play running two tasks at once.

dgriffith ,
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measuring the ram usage on a blank desktop isn't really a "benchmark" and doesn't say anything about the OS itself

Benchmark: noun

  1. a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared.

And frankly, whatever memory the OS hogs is less memory for applications to hog.

My laptop is 14 years old with a lightweight modern Linux distro. The "OS" - kernel, desktop environment , and system tray apps, a few widgets - uses 800MB of ram when it's parked at the desktop after startup. Which means the other 15.2GB is available to my applications, and it makes my wheezy old laptop perfectly functional for most things.

dgriffith ,
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Maybe it's time to implement an AI tarpit. Each response for a request from a particular IP address or range takes double the time of the previous, with something like a 30 second cool down window before response time halves.

Would stop AI scrapers in their tracks, but it wouldn't hurt normal users too much.

Maybe I should start looking into it a bit more 🤔

New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo ( www.phoronix.com )

A new patch series that was posted this week allow for users to more easily replace the default kernel boot logo. While many of us are long accustomed to seeing the picture of Tux as the kernel boot logo, for those preferring to better customize your console boot experience these patches allow it to be easily manipulated via the ...

dgriffith ,
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Only systems that have framebuffer console enabled at boot I guess.

Recovery mode booting would probably be normal 80x25 text console in case there was something up with framebuffer initialisation.

dgriffith ,
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I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.

dgriffith ,
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There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend's comments and posts started to get intermixed with "other stuff" , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that's when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else's opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people's brains. And you can bet it's going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn't matter a fuck if what its handing out i's mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you're engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it's crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can't stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there's anything left remaining after that is debatable.

[SOLVED] Send commands to Linux box via e-mail?

Edit/Solved: Thank you for all the great input! Both on alternative solutions and on security implications. I'm going to make a draft on how I would setup the e-mail method as securely as possible as a programming/scripting exercise, but will IRL probably end up using either some reverse tunnel/shell variant. ...

dgriffith ,
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If you can arrange a fixed IP address externally (or dynamic DNS that follows your IP around) you can set up a reverse SSH connection instead.

Basically your server connects to your external computer via SSH and then sets up port forwarding so that when you connect to localhost:2222 or similar on your PC, you're actually connecting back to the server.

dgriffith ,
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It can be a Cron job that runs every minute.
Run a script that:

  • Checks for the existence of a file, if it exists, exit.
  • (Optional) ping your end, if it's up, continue, otherwise exit
  • Touches said file.
  • Runs SSH to try and connect to your end. If the connection is made everything halts here until the connection drops.
  • Cleans up said file.
  • Exits.
dgriffith ,
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the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn't make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn't necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled "Look around and enjoy it" , that's not the point.

I am looking for a quality and durable headphone with high audio quality on a budget

Hello, I am looking for a quality and durable headphone with high audio quality on a budget around $200, I want it to last long and be comfortable when I wear it for hours, I primarily listen to music and audio-books and do some casual gaming like story games and Minecraft, I don't usually carry headphones around but portability ...

dgriffith , (edited )
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Ditto on the QuietComfort headphones. I've had a pair of QC35's for 10 years now with heavy use on weekly flights.

Runs off a AAA battery which is good for like 18 hours or so. Works as regular headphones when the battery goes flat. 3.5mm cable with media controls and a mic in it.

Still in its original hard case, have replaced the ear pads a couple of times, decent pads are cheap enough on eBay and etc.

I also bought a Bluetooth insert for it for ~AUD75, it plugs in where the cable goes and has it's own rechargeable battery with only about 6 hours life which is a bit of a nuisance.

Edit: regarding audio quality, I can say that if you're using headphones in any sort of urban environment, noise cancelling absolutely trumps audio quality. But the QC35's aren't too bad in the quality stakes, especially if you're using them on the move.

Small edit: The major thing that stops portable electronics from lasting 5+ years is the little rechargeable battery inside that dies. Removable batteries like the AAA battery in the QC 35 solves that, and as a bonus it's "instant charge" when it goes flat, as long as you keep a tiny packet of AAAs in your bag. 4 x AAAs lasts me about 3 months.

Scientists build device to harvest electricity from Earth's spin ( www.earth.com )

A Princeton-led team has built a tabletop device that generates voltage directly from Earth's rotation through its magnetic field. While the power output is orders of magnitude too small for practical electronics, the breakthrough suggests Earth's spin could someday provide constant, fuel-free energy if the effect scales up. The ...

dgriffith ,
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As the earth rotates, the oceans follow the moon's gravitational pull (and the sun's, to a lesser extent). From an outsider's perspective it is a lump of water always bulging towards the moon, and the earth rotates underneath this lump.

By placing a resistance to the free movement of the tides you are siphoning a very small amount of energy from the rotation of the earth as you are restricting the passage of the earth through that lump of water.

So it doesn't matter if your generators spin both ways on the rising and falling tides, you are still restricting movement.

folders is inherently a bad idea

am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension? ...

dgriffith ,
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I know, instead of folders, we could use "shelves" and the Dewey Decimal System.

dgriffith ,
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My response when I see 3/4 of my results page is an AI summary is to close the page in disgust as usually it just regurgitates a bland summary of shit I already know on the topic.

Maybe they're reading that as success?

dgriffith ,
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My only guidance is: Do not assume the wire colours have any significance. Work your way through all the combinations, regardless if they are "logical" or not.

Phoenix Emerges as a Modern X Server Written From Scratch in Zig ( linuxiac.com )

Although Wayland has largely replaced Xorg, and most major Linux distributions and desktop environments have either already dropped support for the aging display protocol or are in the process of doing so, efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue. Recent examples include projects such as ...

dgriffith ,
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32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it's just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.

Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there'll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.

@rimu@piefed.social avatar rimu , to CassetteFuturism
dgriffith ,
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I'll wager this thing has at least 5 PCBs crammed in there , each chock-full of discrete components.

dgriffith ,
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You have a smartphone that can pick up analog television and play cassettes? That's fantastic!

But seriously, this was cutting-edge stuff for 1980.

dgriffith , (edited )
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Ok there's a whole lot of wtf going on here.

AI codebots in the cloud doing your code for you, cool, I guess.

So you need to watch them? And presumably intervene if necessary? Ok.

So then:

They decided that they'd stream a video of the AI codebots doing their thing.

At 40Mbps per stream.

For "enterprise use".

Where presumably they want lots of users.

And then they didn't know about locked down enterprise internet and had to engineer a fallback to jpeg for when things aren't great for them. Newsflash - with streaming video peaking at 40Mbs per user, things will never be great for your product in the real world.

How, in any way, does this scale to anything approaching success? Their back end now has to have the compute power to encode and serve up gigabits of streaming video for anything more than ~50 concurrent users, let alone the compute usage of the actual "useful" bit , the AI codebots.

For say, 5 users out of a site of 200, IT departments will now see hundreds of megabits of streaming traffic - and if they're proactive, they will choke those endpoints to a crawl so that their pathetic uplink has a chance to serve the other 195 users.

All of this for a system that is fundamentally working on maybe 5kB of visible unicode text at any particular moment.

dgriffith ,
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How does a person get this far down a rabbit hole?

I don't know. Software engineering is tangential to my field but I have to wonder, is software efficiency even a consideration these days?

It seems that maybe a week of just solid thinking about what they have and what they need - WITHOUT touching a keyboard - could have put them in a better position. But move fast and break things doesn't seem to accommodate that kind of approach.

dgriffith , (edited )
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Would be fine. Maybe a few decoupling/buffering capacitors at the sink end just to help things along, depends if your device has its own supply regulator and etc onboard. A high and low value pair in parallel would be good (eg 100uF electrolytic and 100nF ceramic).