@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

eichin

@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu

MIT, Cygnus, many startups. RHR today.

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nedbat, to random
@nedbat@hachyderm.io avatar

Achievement unlocked: found a bug in https://coderpad.io during a coding interview!

Run this Python 3 code:

for l in range(70, 80):
line = (f"{l:2d}: " + "0123456789" * 10)[:l]
print(line)

Why are lines 72 and 73 the same? Where are the "8"s in lines 73 and up?

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@nedbat
Specifically in their terminal emulator? Does resizing/changing font shift which line fails?

("Where is the cursor when you've printed a character in the rightmost column" was something different vendors of hardware terminals disagreed about :)

treyhunner, to random
@treyhunner@mastodon.social avatar

Not one project is holding their sprint on the rooftop (4th floor). I feel like that's a missed opportunity here.

Tables outside on the fourth floor roof with a yellow bridge in the background

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@geofft
My first thought was lack of whiteboards (and maybe power) but my second was accessiblity? Though if they got all that furniture up, there's at least a freight elevator...
@treyhunner

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Ok so. The story so far:

  • Late December I have an idea for a kinda-funny Web Art project I could make. It would require me to be able to "tokenize" a 4 hour video by word, that is, I'd need timestamps of the beginning of each word.
  • I assume this means using a text-to-speech library.
  • However, I don't want to use software that runs not-on-my-computer, or which is made by methods I consider unethical. This means using only old discontinued libraries, since all new ones are cloud-based. (1/3)
eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcc is openai/whisper on your list? (python, MIT license, offline, Transformer-model based) it looks like an "obsolete" library but it was new in late 2022 so it's not that out of date, and it looks like upstream hasn't done much to make it worse. (I haven't tried it, just squirreled away a copy of the couple of git of models it downloads in case it did go away, but the question rang a bell.)

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcc nods my packrat side is... somewhat indiscriminate.

yurnidiot, to random
@yurnidiot@mstdn.social avatar

can't tell me this isn't skilled labor 🥑💨

woman packing avocados in a box by tossing them from one hand to the other rapidly without looking at the catching hand

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@clive
To be fair, you wouldn't toss them at all :) unboxing is hard, but the complications here are (1) not enough space for the robot (2) food safe grippers are tricky (3) she's probably implicitly rejecting gross ones that you wouldn't see in this speedrun :)
@yurnidiot

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@clive @yurnidiot Yeah. I shouldn't do driveby workcell design :-) but there are in-line box-closers/sealers/labellers (they'd just drop in further down the conveyor belt.) And I've worked on half-pallet workcells (intended for easy reconfiguration, ie. "we're doing a batch that we know the robot can't handle, pallet-jack the robot out and put a person in for a shift or two") that would fit there - but at least 4ish years ago couldn't get anywhere near human rates.

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@clive @yurnidiot would definitely need a lot of work to get something even vaguely price-and-speed-competitive with the human. (This is how roboticists end up being in favor of raising the human wage floor - not on ethics grounds, but because robots are basically never competitive with exploited humans :-)

eichin, to random
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

Didn't get any color, but... when did phonecams start successfully shooting constellations handheld? I knew note 9 -> 24 was a bit of a leap, but I hadn't realized how much. (Didn't get aurora, and I assume it's doing some stacking, but I'm used to personally dark-adapting way farther than anything without a tripod can get...)

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

Trying to fix the office ptz camera that's infected with botnet malware while not having the correct power supply

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@MLE_online Step 1: make the camera more hazardous than the malware? :-)

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Why is the Bart diesel? Do they not have electricity in the bay area?

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@foone all the stories I keep hearing about PG&E make it sound like no, they don't...

overholt, to random
@overholt@glammr.us avatar

Donald Duck says protect your children with DDT-infused wallpaper. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/mg74qm295?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=042924

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@overholt
The "lickable wallpaper" from charlie and the chocolate factory is now that much more disturbing...

hynek, to random
@hynek@mastodon.social avatar

Positively surprised that Ubuntu Noble is shipping Python 3.12!

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@hynek 3.12.3 even. (of course, it's an LTS and will be shipping 3.12 for a long time :-)

eichin, to random
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

Beeware has been on my list for ages as an answer to "how do I write a reasonable amount of code for small helpful mobile apps that doesn't get drowned in meta-code and initialization". I finally walked through the current tutorial a few days ago - had an ubuntu hello-world in an hour, and an android one (in an emulator) 10 minutes after that. Then had my first not-very-exciting "real" program done by the next evening. So: it delivers, actually do the tutorial :-)

https://fosstodon.org/@beeware/112306608098938241

geofft, to random
@geofft@mastodon.social avatar

LRT: I wonder if open-source projects will start treating aggressive questions about "when is the next release" as a potential attack. I'm undecided about whether this is good; it may well be.

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@geofft @glyph I've been doing something like this (for over a decade/2 startups) at the dpkg level instead of language-package levels - one big simplification is using an LTS as a baseline, so most of your backported features are just cherry picked out of the actual future of the package, so doing an LTS upgrade "cleans up" most of your cutouts. None of the tooling is any more interesting than aptly, apt-ftparchive, and pbuilder (the latest gen oversimplifies a bunch of that with docker.)

AndresFreundTec, to random
@AndresFreundTec@mastodon.social avatar

I accidentally found a security issue while benchmarking postgres changes.

If you run debian testing, unstable or some other more "bleeding edge" distribution, I strongly recommend upgrading ASAP.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@AndresFreundTec And a lot of persistence! Reminds me of one of the classics of the industry, Cliff Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg - "Stoll traced the error to an unauthorized user who had apparently used nine seconds of computer time and not paid for it" leading to a german hacker selling content to the KGB - 38 years ago. It is impressive (but uncommon) to see someone paying that level of attention to anomalies these days, with how thick tech stacks have gotten...

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

what's your favourite way to simplify your life with git? mostly interested in slightly unusual tricks to reduce the number of git features you're using, like:

  • never using the stash, just creating temporary branches instead
  • deleting your main branch so that you can never accidentally commit to it
eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@b0rk
Not sure I'd generally teach this, but: disk space is free - I never switch branches, I just clone into a new directory. Saves a lot of hassle.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Anybody understand network debugging, or the Chrome performance monitor?

I've been having a problem. We've got fiber, but basic sites like google.com or github.com can frequently take >10 seconds to load. It is as if once a connection is open I have high bandwidth, but my computer struggles to open connections. And I see this symptom on more than one machine.

I would like something to measure, is the problem:

  • Opening connections is slow?
  • Connections are high-failure?
  • DNS is slow?
eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcc
Long shot, but this vaguely rhymes with something I once saw on a corporate net - the NAT association table was filling up, stalling new connection attempts until syn retransmits got lucky. (The cause was some misguided security scan, blocked by a firewall and leaving half open entries in the table. The short term fix was rebooting the router.) At the time the diag path was tcpdump on both sides of the NAT. (I suspect it's DNS or ipv6 instead though.)

mcdanlj, (edited ) to linux
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

About a third of a century ago, I read the original source code to the Linux ps program that worked by reading kernel memory from a setuid root program, used that to enhance the brand-new /proc filesystem to support all the features I now knew ps might need, and wrote a brand-new version of ps. I added features I'd wanted forever on the VAX 11/780 I was using at the time, like built-in sorting instead of piping through sort or awk, and at least trying to fully honor both BSD and System V command-line arguments. I called it "procps" to distinguish it from the original "kmem" ps.

As far as I know, none of my original code survives. I think it's been re-written at least once, maybe twice by now. This is clearly the procps of Theseus.

But it's still called "procps" in Linux distributions, which I have to imagine confuses newcomers. "Why do I have to install procps to get the ps command?"

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcdanlj
At least in ubuntu it is Priority: Required, so that question doesn't even come up, it's already installed :)

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcdanlj
Ah, he's mostly arguing for including these in stripped down cloud images (which might only have Essential plus the relevant app.) Which is more of an experienced-dev self-inflicted problem than a newcomer one :)

It has been a very long time since it was important to know that procps was "the good one" instead of "the only one"...

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcdanlj
Sure! But his list was of the ubuntu package names in particular. (And would newcomers be starting there?) All I'm getting at is that the name isn't terrible - and is probably less bad than just ps - since back in the day we'd probably have called it mkj-ps to disambiguate, and that would have stuck (see vixie-cron)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So this single bug
https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel/issues/2055
is by itself my biggest frustration with using Linux as a daily driver.

I wonder if it's simple enough I could fix it myself. Cracking into X Windows code feels like putting my hand in the garbage disposal but I think I know why it's happening

A video of scrolling windows left and right on a laptop trackpad. The scrolling is jerky and sometimes totally nonresponsive

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@mcc
You could probably confirm the coarse/fine event types analysis with xev? (It sounds plausible, but I turn touchpads off at the BIOS level so I can't crosscheck it myself.)

eichin, to random
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

12 new pix http://flic.kr/p/2pBq9L8 [Concord,Massachusetts,River,trail,Concord Conservation Land,Assabet River,photodismantlement,Sudbury River,Wood Street,ripples,sign,ups,charging station,Concord River,Reflections,maple syrup,survey mark,part number,Elm Street,Burlington...]

elizabethtasker, to vr
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

[In a WG meeting discussing improving hybrid and online experiences]

Me: Why doesn't (one of our colleagues) see the power of #VR for conferences? Has he just not had the right experience?

Colleague 1: I think he hasn't found the killer use case yet.

Colleague 2: Honestly, maybe we should just find the next large-scale furry conference in VRChat and throw him in for an hour. He might not be quite the same after, but I do think he'd believe he'd seen the use case!

🤣

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@elizabethtasker hah! I sympathize (as someone who isn't particularly comfortable with headphones or cameras, I'm certainly not going to wear eyegear) but I've got a few coworkers who would definitely hop in (or they're already there, hmm :-)

tubetime, to random
@tubetime@mastodon.social avatar

a story in three parts (1)

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@ke8smq @tubetime if I remember right (and some quick googling suggests I do) 1,1,1-tricholoroethane went away for ozone layer damage, not personal risk (I used it a bunch in the 80s, it was an amazing solvent.)

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

I think it's time to try printing this now very complicated battery case for my drill

eichin,
@eichin@mastodon.mit.edu avatar

@MLE_online
The... rectangularity? gives it vaguely Thor's Hammer vibes

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