danderson

danderson, 10 days ago to random

How to tell your OSS is ridiculously popular: people aren't 100% sure they didn't embed it, and tack on the software equivalent of "packaged in a facility where peanuts were also present" to the license list.

This watch contains software, so statistically probably contains at least traces of curl.

danderson, 5 months ago to random

Wow, TIL near where I grew up in France, high-speed rail (the TGV) caused tangible reduction in passenger air traffic. The budget airlines shut off the routes as soon as the TGV started running, unable to compete. The larger airlines kept trying for ten years, but eventually gave up as well. Turns out, 2-3 hours on a comfortable train that drops you in the middle of town is better than faffing around in airports, despite the trip time being just 1h.

Just a thought, North America.

danderson, 11 months ago to random

Google just emailed me to let me know that "Album Archive" is going away and my data will be deleted in a month.

Album Archive is apparently the dumping ground for images that were in other products Google has already killed, such as Google+ and Hangouts.

They're killing the place where images from killed products went. It's just beyond parody, incredible.

danderson, 13 days ago to random

Hi. Quick break from the posting for a serious PSA.

Please have a bottle of aspirin in your home. Make sure the tablets can be chewed as well as just swallowed. Make sure you remove any fiddly foil seal and such. Don't use this aspirin for regular pain relief, just keep it around and know where it is.

Hopefully, you'll never need it and will just feel silly for having it. But if a bad time comes for you someday, being able to chew aspirin when emergency services tells you may save your life.

danderson, 1 year ago to random

Blog post I don't have the energy to write: production engineering has to be forestry management, not wildfire response. Many organizations fail to understand this, and as a result don't understand why staffing more firefighters doesn't seem to help.

danderson, 1 month ago to random

The poor original maintainer of xz is on it now, and has already found another "fun" thing: https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commitdiff;h=f9cf4c05edd14dedfe63833f8ccbe41b55823b00 . The configure check for enabling the Landlock sandboxing facility was subtly broken, so that Landlock support would never get enabled. The original malicious commit landed around the same timeframe as the main backdoor, also at an abnormal time of day compared to the new maintainer's historical activity pattern.

danderson, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

Today I'm remembering one of the coolest space things ever: Voyager 2's S-band radio receiver has been broken for 44 years, and yet we can still talk to it.

Back in 1978 the primary receiver failed, and the team discovered the backup receiver had a faulty capacitor in the PLL circuit that adjusted for Doppler shift. Since then, Voyager 2's receive bandwidth has been much narrower, and the band-pass window wanders back and forth by a few hundred Hz with temp changes.

danderson, 1 year ago to random

Framework is so cool.

"To fix power efficiency, we're shipping a new rev of our DisplayPort module..."

(me: aww, I'll have to buy a new module)

"... but if you have an older module already, click here for instructions on how to update its firmware!"

"Sadly the HDMI module did need some electrical changes in addition to firmware..."

(me: aww, oh well)

"... but if you're handy with an iron, here's the rework instructions to upgrade your v1 module!"

🤯 Amazing amount of giving a shit.

danderson, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

I have just discovered that a popular brand of washer/dryer has a diagnostic function that is literally you hold your phone up to the washer and the machine screams AFSK tones down the phone to the support person, and I'm sorely tempted to buy one just to support the chaotic design choice of shipping an acoustic coupler in consumer hardware in 2023.

danderson, 5 months ago to random

The ACM website is janky and slow and a bunch of its links 403 because they link to old domains. This is a poor impression of the industry the ACM represents, and also a very accurate impression of the industry the ACM represents.

danderson, 1 month ago to random

As the xz thinkpieces start showing up about What Should Be Done, a couple of questions I'd encourage you to keep in mind while reading them:

• Is this advocating security nihilism and giving up because stopping 100% of badness is impossible?
• Is this pushing a random hobby horse like "sign your commits" that wouldn't have helped this incident in any way?
• Is this equating employment/nationality/notoriety with trustworthiness?
• Is this pushing a technical solution to a social problem?

danderson, 8 months ago to random

Today's fun rabbit hole: there's a mechanical watch feature called a "hack". Why is it called that?

The hack (aka a "hacking seconds watch") is a feature where the seconds hand of the watch stops advancing when you click over to the time-setting function. IOW, as you adjust the hour/minute, the seconds hand is frozen in place until you finish the time adjustment.

danderson, 6 months ago to random

Periodic reminder that posting screenshots of garbage people having garbage takes is bad. You think you're doing a good thing by screenshotting to deny them a backlink, but the extremists posting hate speech care about the reach of their ideas, not backlinks.

By reposting it at all, even to point and go "look, how horrible!", you are giving them exactly what they want: more eyeballs. And maybe one of those eyeballs will be the latest radicalization victim.

danderson, 2 months ago to random

I went down a Voyager rabbit hole again. And I came up with a factoid that entertains me.

The original Grand Tour program was canceled in late 1971, due to congressional pressure over cost. Voyager was the cheaper mission to just Jupiter and Saturn.

Voyager and its team are incredible, and they managed to pull off the entire grand tour anyway, and then 34 years and counting more science after that.

There's a good chance Voyager might outlive the entire congress that killed the grand tour.

danderson, 9 months ago to random

Turns out, hashicorp was a zero interest rate phenomenon. Now that the chips are down, it immediately just folded and turned into traditional enterprise software, unable to compete on the merits of its offering.

danderson, 7 months ago to random

Watching the Foundation series made me wonder about a "reverse 4X" kind of game, a strategy game where you start with a galaxy-spanning empire and have to manage the fall. Feels like it could be an interesting twist. Surely this has been explored already... But I don't know what games might have done this.

danderson, 1 month ago to random

Reminder/warning that it's 1 April, and assholes are doing pranks.

Also reminder that almost all "pranks" are cruel and make you an asshole, not a sparkling wit, for doing them. This goes triple this year in software, because read the fucking room, it's been a rough couple days, people are on edge, and you're not helping.

Anyway, back to happy rust posting now. Well, happy for me, my incompetence may make you cringe, but I promise that's not a prank, I am actually incompetent at rust.

danderson, 1 month ago to random

Weird pre-coffee take: the geographical locations that cloud providers offer, and the breadth of services offered within each, forms a kind of modern day ley line map of tax optimization.

danderson, 22 days ago to random

Just one more wrapper around runc, i promise just one more wrapper and then cloud-native is done, come on bro just one more coordination layer i swear just one more api come on bro just one more

danderson, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

"Did the sentient spacecraft evolved from Voyager 6, which featured in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, have twink mode?" is not how I expected to start the day.

Not complaining mind you, not at all.

(the answer is yes btw, assuming the existence of Voyager 6 implies politicians who aren't unimaginative money-grubbing shits, and thus funded a version of the Grand Tour program even more ambitious than the original, in which Voyager 6 would be the proposed TOPS spacecraft design)

danderson, 1 month ago to random

It's all over my feed already, but in case I get to give you good news: VOYAGER ONE LIVES! Its incredible team managed to work around the damaged region of memory, and they're getting engineering data back again!

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

I went digging for more details, and quickly ended up out of my depth, but 🧵 of the bits and pieces I put together...

danderson, 1 month ago to random

Yesterday I ended up taking a random walk through "the rust memory model is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules".

Today I took a wrong turn and ended up on the LKML, in which I learned that the kernel has its own unique memory model, but also now contains rust code which follows the rust memory model (whatever that turns out to be), and also it's necessary to be able to exchange data back and forth between memory models.

Some days, I'm just amazed that computers sometimes work.

danderson, 28 days ago to random

It's that time again where we try to answer the recurring question: who's the piece of shit today, the roku box or the wifi

(yes I know about the ads thing and roku becoming shit generally, please let me debug this specific thing myself unless you know something about my home network that I don't)