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BikiniPrince

354 karma · joined January 4, 2021

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BikiniPrince··on Allstate used GasBuddy and other apps to track driving behavior: lawsuit
For older cars the telematics module might not even function. The phase out of legacy cellular networks will clean out some of this monitoring. Disabling the telematics module isn’t even difficult and it’s easily accessible in my vehicle.
BikiniPrince··on Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch
Someone finally did for at least the Sonos One. After selling it in stores they quickly abandoned it. The CEO promised air play 2 update while it was being sold and then back peddled after discontinuing it. At first they said they would retire it entirely and effectively kill it. They eventually back peddled on that too after massive backlash. This was when I decided never to buy their locked in garbage again. Meanwhile, someone released a small app that advertised the device for airplay 2. It quietly runs on my garage server.
BikiniPrince··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
I would actually offer they Facebook is changing because their base has grown tired of their antics. My normy friends and family have complained of censorship increasingly over the last year. When I asked why we still use the platform one friend replied: “birthday reminders.” Then I thought that actually does summarize what I use the platform for. Not a great prospect for a company.
BikiniPrince··on U.S. appeals court strikes down FCC's net neutrality rules
What it means is abusing chevron deference to make law isn’t going to work anymore. Such sweeping changes need to be passed through Congress.
BikiniPrince··on Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)
You can already put with a sha256 hash. If it fails it just returns an error.
BikiniPrince··on Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete
The micro distribution devs found that Replay is now a dependency for explorer. They have to install it and then disable it. Seems MSFT really wants those screenshots.
BikiniPrince··on Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
It was more of an opportunity initially. Bezos saw a chance to purchase extremely discounted systems. He had the foresight to move redundancy from a single host to clusters and then eventually data center level redundancy. This decision reshaped how services were implemented and scaled. Specialized devices returned because they offer a better value or in some cases enabled products that were never possible before. At the end of the day a lot of decisions are based around cost. Can you do it with a toaster or an oven cheaper? Can we cut all of our food into pieces and cook it in a Beowulf cluster of toasters? I think you get the idea.
BikiniPrince··on Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
It was only a handful of frankenracks. It was challenging and not very performant, but it let everyone get a jump on the research. Disk speed was increasing so fast in six months the first SKU was out of date. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the argument directly to assets when we retired those racks years earlier than planned. The rack positions were so much more valuable with the new denser and faster models.
BikiniPrince··on Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS
It was a good year after that incident. We focused on stability and driving down issues. We turned around a lot of development idea too. However, the wheel turns and we were back on feature development. I’ll always remember that year as having the fewest escalations during my entire time there.
BikiniPrince··on I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
The navy used to throw the boards in the cleaner and repairs the failures. Now we have better cleansing solutions, but damn if that isn’t nightmare fuel. I would have pumped and dehumidified the room until parts could be pulled/repaired. These days they just scrap everything. It’s terrible.
BikiniPrince··on Show HN: Blip – Incident Management Platform Built by Ex-FAANG Engineers
Any NFTs?
BikiniPrince··on Free DDNS with Cloudflare and a cronjob
A dhcp lease hook is also useful to keep up with changes instantly.
BikiniPrince··on A Trial HIV Vaccine Triggered Elusive and Essential Antibodies in Humans
The fact they can trigger antibodies on a stable portion of the virus is impressive. Near the end, it sounds like a multi pronged approach is needed to deal with variations. I’m not an immunologist, but it was pretty light. If they are in trials does that indicate they have a white paper?
BikiniPrince··on Femtosecond lasers create 3D midair plasma displays you can touch (2015)
check engine light in the upper left hand corner of his vision.
BikiniPrince··on FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules
I believe they are only restoring it to enact “security” aka more spying. I would like to see what the actual text of these policies are. The administration has its tentacles into too many tech companies already.
BikiniPrince··on Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video]
Imagine a future in which the power company manages drones that destroy the electronic barnacles on their lines.
BikiniPrince··on German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice
Every large organization that I have worked at has a solution for desktop and server Linux. The downside is you typically have a password hash stored in ad or a separate service. Ultimately, it isn’t terrible, but you do have a lot of enforcement at the border. So trouble can surprisingly appear when you connect remotely.
BikiniPrince··on German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice
I had the exact same thoughts. At least this time around it’s basically done out of the box.
BikiniPrince··on Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at Garage Sale
They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine without a successful title.
BikiniPrince··on Improving Network Performance with Linux Flowtables
Sorta, you are using hardware offload at a level above the vm. There are a lot of situations in which traffic can interact poorly with that nic. You won’t really be able to identify what traffic resulted in the nic responding because of a bug. I’m assuming you are not using sr-iov vf devices if you are managing offload at the parent. Probably for the best if it is that card.
BikiniPrince··on Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
Yet everyone I know that owned a pixel despises it.
BikiniPrince··on Switch off bad TV settings
They are in fact quite incorrect. These poor upscale features are horrors crafted in the early days of post-processing nightmares. Half of it was pitched to make football games appear more real. They all murder the soul of the film and jack up delay. The industry even had to invent a synchronized audio mechanism to compensate for the summoning of these Eldridge horrors. What I don’t mind are modern upscalers which look very nice on expensive sets. Other modern features like HDR are also lovely because they focus on reproducing the movie with vibrant lighting. Anyhow, one summer working in a television station will improve your acuity for these things. You might even come to understand how these old creations will be the downfall of civilization. As an aside, do not forget to surgically remove samba tv from any android set with adb.
BikiniPrince··on The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation
I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored with bias. This is funny and sad!
BikiniPrince··on I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
It depends on the manager who constructs the pip and goals.

The manager might lean towards salvaging or maybe documentation. Usually, an honest manager would give some hints as to the nature. Like, maybe it’s best you look at other opportunities kinda nods. Some people are also just bad as reading the crowd and would ignore a written sign that stated “you will be fired.”

I’ve seen bad managers give a junior work that needed a whole team to resolve. I stepped in during reviews and fixed that train wreck. However, on their second chance with simpler work it didn’t turn out much better. At that point we probably soured the engineer. Later we removed the shitty manager. He took off as soon as he received his PIP.

One of my first batch of directs I took over was in the latter group. He made no connection that this could lead to termination. I would love to have heard the conversation with his previous manager. Also, he might have been feigning ignorance for more time. He quite simply just needed direct coaching on interacting with people. He went from the worst engineer to someone I tried to give the highest rankings. My manager wouldn’t have it, but we did compromise.

A lot goes on in the background, but something I never did was bend to statistics. I didn’t care what HR thought was the expected target. Some people are spineless and just rollover. Drives me mad. What are they going to do? Fire me and send me some place else for more money?

BikiniPrince··on Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories
CR hasn’t completed an insightful review in ages. It isn’t even worth subscribing prior to a major purchase.

I find independent YouTubers significantly better.

To a point! There are a number of obvious non-critical flooded reviews for lots of products.

I suppose in closing CR is garbage and you have to do relevant research commiserate with how much you want to spend/care.

If only we had a review organization we could trust!

BikiniPrince··on Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories
Try a few alternative search engines. Google has other priorities these days.
BikiniPrince··on South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew
They have something like 23% vaccination rate. It is about as raw as it is going to get.

My friends who have it now indicate it is very mild.

BikiniPrince··on What happens to developers who never go into management?
It’s different depending on the company. I’ve seen companies that can have very technical managers and this is good. I’ve also seen companies where managers like to play engineer, but badly. They don’t relegate until it’s a problem and may or may not focus on correcting design issues.

I have had to say in a meeting. Stop engineering the product and have the engineers handle the development life cycle.

Regardless, life won’t change just because the duties do. You have to make time off happen. The market is so starved for talent you can go somewhere else over night.

BikiniPrince··on Truck driver leads NJ Senate president after spending $153 on campaign
The book is terrible. I toss it out and read the proposal or at the worst look it up on a few sites that track issues. There is not enough information for complex issues and the wording in my experience is very biased. It takes me more time to vote, but at least I can make an informed decision.
BikiniPrince··on What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
I think your first mistake was saying 'I believe.'

Chip manufacturing has a clear start/end date for the product lifetime. This is necessary when you are incorporating a product into a design and product lifetime. Sometimes they will 'oops' you and send it out of print early. Generally, they have a 'b' product that "meets" your needs or product engineering just scrambles and tries to guess how many we need for a final run for our EOL. Much like the guy above me, the former requestor and probably his boss... I pad my estimates. Thank the baby Jesus I don't deal with the complicated world of sales and cocaine.

I want to put a big asterisk on "meets" because one man's performance metric is another man's failure. In discrete circuits this can be harmonics and in more complicated topology this could be tuned for an entirely different (but potentially acceptable) set of characteristics.

Enter the hardware qualification rounds where people like me make people cry and deadlines slip.

Supply lines work in months of advancement and trust me when I say this they have been fighting with chip shortages for months.

The people who care about costs have been playing a weird game of rubiks cube and the people who don't have been buying everything for year+ production. Guess who won that game of planning competition...

Taiwan going complete Orwellian and shutting down for months screwed the market in so many ways. Short sightedness on bean counters screwed themselves in many other ways and automobile manufacturers had the brilliant idea to just 'buy it all out' and give the manufacturers a big payday.

Seriously, chip manufacturers are like shoe string manufacturing. The latter counts wartime boot string orders as a big payday and that is something a lot of us look at as a bad year in a paycheck. (well the ones with skill anyway).

Lines are created with a product if the current line cannot manufacture that product. There are cases where they have to shutdown and completely retool. This isn't remotely the case regarding components today. The line simply stopped and/or went to minimal production. It wasn't news or a surprise because this is garbage we have been fighting with for months. Taiwan simply stopped producing at the level they were because they have some severe lockdown strategy.

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