matdevdug

matdevdug, 3 days ago to php

May god have mercy on the souls of those sad people running #php on #windows and who now have a serious CVE. https://devco.re/blog/2024/06/06/security-alert-cve-2024-4577-php-cgi-argument-injection-vulnerability-en/

matdevdug, 4 days ago to apple

I want to meet the person at #Apple who decided when running #macos updates to allow the progress bar to get to the end and then go back to 0 again. What does “progress bar” mean to you?

Excuse the dirty screen, but this is the 4th time the progress bar has completed, then restarted back at zero. Is something wrong? I don’t know, because Apple has removed all useful information. Can I see a log? None of the log shortcuts work.

You might as well get rid of the progress bar and show a random sequence of numbers going up to 100 and then starting again if the update isn’t over. They convey exactly the same amount of information.

matdevdug, 4 days ago to Kubernetes

On #kubernetes birthday I have to say some thanks. Big thank you to all the maintainers doing great work, especially the small team keeping #etcd alive and kicking.

When I was introduced to k8s when migrating a large datacenter over to it, my initial impression was “this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of”. It’s incredible complexity compared to solutions like Xen seemed destined to doom it to the pile of overcomplicated Google tech that seems good on paper and falls down for normal people.

However in the years since I’ve come to really enjoy the ecosystem and the stack itself. There is a learning curve, but the payoff is pretty amazing. You can scale applications to truly global sized without exponential increases in headcount. The ecosystem of third party software around k8s keeps getting better.

So thanks for allowing me to pay my rent #kubernetes. Also YAML is the devil.

#devops #infrastructure

matdevdug, 5 days ago to twitter

I enjoy watching #twitter struggle through a familiar pattern we all saw in the 90s on the internet: “Why Libertarian Moderation Doesn’t Work”.

It starts out with free speech but the right kind of free speech. The rest is fake or bots or trolls. Then we evolve into you are either friends with the moderator or you are again them.

Finally we end with the desperate plea of “we will allow pornography” except of course nobody is equipped to moderate that so within days someone will post something either horrifying or just against the law (revenge porn etc) and the entire operation collapses in on itself.

On the plus side the speed by which corporations will cancel their ad spend rather than run the risk that Coca-Cola posts are run next to fake celebrity pornography is going to really show us how fast Musk can speed run destroying a company. Fingers crossed it’s shut down by 2025 and I get to watch a documentary on its death.

matdevdug, 5 days ago to random

New post on my blog. You can read it here: https://matduggan.com/simple-kubernetes-secret-encryption-with-python/

matdevdug, 6 days ago to VHDL

I feel like I’m missing something with the #modretro chromatic #fpga handheld. Putting aside that Lucky is an altright shithead for a minute, who is this device even for?

For $20 more I can get an Analogue Pocket that also plays GBA games. Or for $70 I can get an FPGA that plays Gameboy and Gameboy color games. I’m impressed the screen is pixel accurate but having owned a Gameboy Color I don’t remember that screen as being particularly good.

This thing also looks HUGE compared to anything else on the market. It seems to have a lithium battery and a spot for 3 AA batteries, which seems insane? I love supporting AA batteries but why do both?

As someone who loves FPGA retro gaming and uses my #MiSTerFPGA all the time, I cannot think of a single reason I’d buy this.

matdevdug, 7 days ago to github

Sometimes I wonder if the marketing team at #github is mad that #microsoft stole the copilot branding and took it over. Like imagine being the github sales people after Microsoft keeps saying they're bringing copilot to everyone for free. "No you should keep paying us for our copilot, even though we're owned by Microsoft and they are also selling you copilot. They're different copilots."

matdevdug, 7 days ago to random

Programming during work hours: slow, repetitive, trouble staying focused

Programming for free at night: fast, easy, so engaging I lose track of time.

matdevdug, 8 days ago to windows

Out of curiosity for the #recall feature on #Windows I tried the rewind app on a separate SSD for my Mac for a few days. It functions in a similar way, capturing screenshots and allowing you to ask questions about what you did and saw.

I think I better understand the usage case Microsoft is imagining. It does a few things that I could see people liking: specifically making it easier to pull up things you saw across different apps and browser windows. The ability to ask for a link or a chart that you saw somewhere is clever and depending on how you consume information, might be useful.

I suspect I now understand the actual hope of recall, which is to consume a lot of disk space so consumers have to upgrade. Looking at the Surface pricing it appears Microsoft has learned from Apple and now charges a premium for more SSD well beyond market rate. This will encourage people to step up in laptop storage tiers.

But I also cannot stress enough how insanely dangerous this is for companies or individuals. Historically stolen laptops tend to be known dangerous vectors, where you need to remote wipe it and lock it out of critical systems with rotation. However now with these systems there is no upper threshold on how dangerous a stolen laptop could be.

If I ran this on my computer and you stole it and got in (which is not a crazy thought given password reset options), you’d be able to do almost incalculable amounts of damage. Personal information about friends and family, banking information, insane amounts of data about every person in my life I communicate with.

matdevdug, 11 days ago to random

Nothing more tense than telling your spouse you didn’t move X, then spotting it out of the corner of your eye and trying sneakily to move the item back to its home before it is discovered in the place that you obviously left it and forgot about.

matdevdug, 13 days ago to microsoft

It's amazing how completely fucked normal people are when it comes to #Microsoft #copilot and understanding what is coming to their computers. This is an actual conversation I had today.

T: "I heard Microsoft has a new thing coming that takes screenshots of your screen called Copilot. Do I have that?"
M: "That's called Recall and I think it's only coming to Copilot+ computers."
T: "Well I already have Copilot. I think I have normal Copilot and Copilot for Office 365."
M: "Um I don't think its related to that. For some reason they're calling new laptops Copilot+"
T: "My son has Copilot from his programming class. Is that the same as my Copilot?"
M: "No that's GitHub Copilot which is a different thing."

You couldn't have done a worse job with naming if you tried. Hats off to Microsoft marketing for being so confusing it took a team of people walking through your marketing docs to figure out what unwanted feature is coming to who.
#ai #llm

matdevdug, 13 days ago to twitter

Click on link to read a tweet. Get the following page which not only contains my favorite warning (the disable privacy settings which means your site is doing something bad) but also a mysterious square in the corner that does nothing. Oh also retry does nothing.

Remember when the executive world was calling Musk a genius for firing everyone because the site didn’t immediately break? Sure seems amazing now. #twitter #elonmusktwitter

kyle, 14 days ago to random

Saw Furiosa in a movie theater; first time we have been to one in five years. 10 people total in the theater. Glad we got to see the last movie ever shown!

matdevdug, 14 days ago to random

I’m raising $10 billion for my LLM startup that is just an offline copy of Wikipedia loaded into Sphinx with a fun front end.

matdevdug, 15 days ago to random

10 years ago: Our monorepo is a pain to deal with. Changing one tiny thing here breaks something there!

5 years ago: We’re migrating to microservices. That way everything is decoupled and you can do what you need to.

3 years ago: Microservice maintenance keeps falling behind. We need some way to enforce service contracts between services but now our stack is too complicated to do full integration testing.

1 year ago: We’re proud to announce we’re migrating to a new concept: a monorepo!

Everything old is new again.

#programming

matdevdug, 16 days ago to random

#furiosa was excellent. Visually stunning, so many pieces on screen that are just perfectly designed and click together.

matdevdug, 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago) to random

New post on my blog. You can read it here: https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/
#vmware #broadcom #tech

matdevdug, 18 days ago to random

Some days I think “maybe today is the day my wife tells me about her secret trust fund and I never have to work again”.

I’ll be gracious about it. “I understand, you wanted to wait ten years so you knew I was here for the right reasons. No you hid it amazingly, there was never a single hint that it existed.”

I will start a charity that works on an important but lower key problem. Open source voting machines or public transit ticketing system. Something where people are like “oh ok sure?”

matdevdug, 20 days ago to random

Whenever I have an internet problem I always dread contracting my ISP because I have to explain what I’ve done to the repair tech and I can tell I’m annoying them.

Like my fiber box is getting no signal, so I reach out and they’re like “we’re going to reset your router”. Except they can’t, because I don’t use their router I use my own router and trick their system into accepting it because I’ve tagged the port with the cable from the fiber box with the right VLAN. So then after I explain that part they’re like “ok well can you hook up our router for testing?”

I can but I also have an old fluke fiber tester that I’ve already tested the line with so like…..I know it’s not that. But then I have to explain “well I actually already tested the actual fiber and there is no signal so the problem isn’t with the router. Here’s the output of the test.”

I feel like it must be like an ISP techs worst nightmare to get a fluke test output in a service ticket.

#networking #isp

matdevdug, 22 days ago to ai

One thing that’s funny about #ai and #programming is I keep hearing the same thing. “Oh I use it for generic snippets, just common tasks and functions”.

The amusing thing about that is when I first started working with a #php app years ago there was already a solution to that problem. It was called “the PHP Cookbook” published by O’Reilly. I was told “oh we buy you a PDF copy and you just search for whatever you are trying to do and use that code. It saves a ton of time for junior programmers.”

Not only was it true, it did save me a ton of time and headaches, but we didn’t need to steal anything. The authors got paid, it worked offline, it didn’t require scraping the entirety of human knowledge to write or nuclear power plants worth of energy to distribute.

It also helped me learn. Since I would have a solid foundation to the solution, I felt more confident experimenting. I always had a known-functioning standard library solution as my base. So when something broke I knew where to start debugging.

Just an incredible thought that instead of paying $20 for a pdf once we decided this was the way to go.

matdevdug, 21 days ago to programming

One job interview question I try to ask that I strongly recommend people copy is “can I see your list of pages?” Ideally the full list from PagerDuty but whatever you can get is good.

This tells you everything you need to know about the team you are joining. See a lot of pages that repeat and are snoozed forever? If a team isn’t empowered to fix alerts that wake them up, that means they’re not empowered to do much of anything.

What’s funny is people who try to track and account for pages instantly know why I’m asking, but if you don’t care often they’ll let me see the whole list which is amazingly informative.
#programming #interview

matdevdug, 22 days ago to apple

Gotta hand it to #Apple #findMy. Lost my AirPods in a giant ball pit and was able to locate exactly where to dig it look for them. Was shockingly accurate.

matdevdug, 25 days ago to Texas

I like how this article about why Austin didn't end up being the second tech hub skips the laws discriminating against women in the form of anti-abortion laws. Like 50% of potential employees were risking their lives in moving to the state, but maybe it was the power outage that did it in.

https://sherwood.news/business/austin-tech-hub-growth-market-texas-housing/

#texas #austin