korginator

The noise levels everywhere in our cities overwhelms me. The constant chatter of people all around, e.g., a loud conversation in close proximity, people blasting some TikTok garbage on the train, or someone approaching me trying to sell me something when I'm simply walking - I'd rather avoid all of this.

I'm usually playing dark noise on noise cancelling earphones most of the time, and that helps me tune out the constant, stress inducing bombardment of unwelcome auditory inputs.

I want my software to work, consistently, repeatably, and predictably, every time. Whether it's the software that I use is for work - including embedded and real-time systems - or tools for personal use, the last thing I want is some "quirk of its soul" deciding that it feels like 1 + 1 == oranges, or thunderbird doesn't feel like showing me my email because it's too bored today.

Even the original author Ryo's rambling post on X [1] conflates the personal web (personal blogs), window manager UX, AI-generated code, commercial / enterprise software, testing, and boutique or hobby apps, concluding with a plea for a "path forward" that is already available today, while painting everything with the same brush.

Even back in the 1990's real software (e.g., I used VxWorks every day) was built for consistency, functionality, and repeatability, with strong QA, and the thing was expected to work.

[1] https://x.com/ryolu_/status/2038841219556724924

There was a 1970's Indonesian progressive rock band called Contrapunk that released an album called "Putri Mohon Diri" [1]

You can find the recording on YT [2] They were really unique - blending traditional Indonesian instruments, intense guitar work and classical influences.

[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/17424685-Contrapunk-Putri-Mo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb1792ZuXcY

The BBC micro was revolutionary. Had a few of these in school in the 1980's. This was the first machine I came across where you could program inline assembly, out of the box. Got me started on adventures with the amazing 6502 family, assembly language, RISC, hardware and a ton of fun things.

OAuth2.0 is for authorization, it is not an identity layer or authentication protocol. The article further conflates the purpose of OAuth with authentication types, phishing and other (valid) concerns, which are not entirely in the scope of OAuth.

There are widely used schemes (OAuth+OIDC+... etc.) that the industry is already using. The last two paragraphs are fluff. Not sure who this article is is meant for, but it's sloppy.

The user agreement T&C document is cause for concern. [1]

Specifically, sec 4.4:

4.4 You understand and agree that, unless proven otherwise, by uploading, publishing, or transmitting content using the services of this product, you irrevocably grant DeepSeek and its affiliates a non-exclusive, geographically unlimited, perpetual, royalty-free license to use (including but not limited to storing, using, copying, revising, editing, publishing, displaying, translating, distributing the aforesaid content or creating derivative works, for both commercial and non-commercial use) and to sublicense to third parties. You also grant the right to collect evidence and initiate litigation on their own behalf against third-party infringement.

Does this mean what I think it means, as a layperson? All your content can be used by them for all eternity?

[1] https://platform.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek%20User%20Ag...

There could also be a distant relationship with the Brahmi script / family [1]

Some characters have similarities. The Brahmi 𑀕 may be related to the <Gimel> 𐤂 character in the tablet. Other characters like the "tha" (the O with a dot in the middle), the (, the O, the ) and some others also appear to have common traits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script

Shein sells cheap, "fast fashion" goods. They had a few pop up stores here in Singapore, selling what looked like low end knockoffs, albeit at low prices. They're selling tops and dresses for anywhere between $4.95 and $12 (Singapore dollars). I'm sure that toxic chemical safety is at the top of their list, selling at those prices.

I remember hearing about them in their early days when they were called "ZZKKO" like yet another of those random sounding shopfronts flooding amazon and peddling junk. Their mobile app looks and works pretty much the same as the other Chinese owned marketplaces like Lazada or Shopee.

Their founder appears to be following a similar trajectory too, moving from China to Singapore with a permanent residency, like the founder of Shopee. I think the Shopee founder is now a Singapore citizen. Not that there's anything wrong, this seems to be a common pattern on the Silk Road these days.

You would be interested in this if you need the 'crypto' library to work in a FIPS 140-2 compliant way. You can switch on / off this mode by setting the runtime variable GOFIPS=1 before running your Go program [1]. Nice.

It looks like the Go community officially has no plans to support FIPS140-2 any time, so I'm glad to see this alternative.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/go/tree/microsoft/main/eng/doc/...

“If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster,” he said.

“There is something to be learned from that faster-twitch, shorter wavelength execution,” he said.

Raghavan urged employees to “meet this moment” and “act with urgency based on market conditions.”

After that he goes to praise the teams working 120 hours a week, that's basically 17 hours a day.

Early in my career I'd have been angry, surprised or in denial at hearing this sort of rancid garbage. Now I see this in so many organizations, this is just a symptom of the deeper rot and top-down dysfunction.

TVIX was a media player made by Dvico. I used to have one a few years ago. You may want to check on trademark issues around the name.

https://a.co/d/hOzOcvu

My current and past employers are all-in with Microsoft because (like it or not) managing large corporate fleets is easier. Our Linux and Mac machines are treated as exceptions.

This has nothing to do with user experience, it's all about risk management. If we need some software on our Mac, we need to sign a waiver accepting responsibility for any security issues. With the corporate issued windows laptops the IT department is responsible for risks.

Valgrind will tell you about memory leaks and won't always behave the way it did here when there's a backdoor. In this case it just so happened that valgrind was throwing errors because the stack layout didn't match what the exploit was expecting. Otherwise valgrind would have probably worked without issues.

xz is so pervasive, I just discovered on my Mac that the (affected?) version 5.6.1 made it into homebrew. The post in the linked article says that only Linux x86-64 systems are affected, but now I'm left scratching my head whether my Mac is also in trouble, just that we don't know it yet.

Hindenburg research's entire business revolves around producing "reports" about companies, claiming fraud and manipulation, and then short-selling on a large scale. They've done this in the past, and they've been sued.

In my wildly biased opinion, companies like Hindenburg are leeches that contribute nothing to the world.

While there may be some elements of truth behind their reports, I'd take it with a large helping of salt, given the main objective of this company.

Moderate to heavy use. Not 100% heavy use. The official specs claim 15-18 hours battery life. Practically, I'd say I do about 8 hours a day and the Mac lasts a couple of days before the battery goes to single-digit percentages. With lighter use, I see nearly a week of battery life.

[Mine is an M2 16-inch MBP from last year, perhaps the M3's are somewhat better?]

In comparison, my new Dell work laptop with an Intel chip gives me about 4 hours. It's not an apples <-> apples comparison but they're in the ballpark.

Ignoring the power-guzzling data centres running Xeons at work, and talking as a layperson using a laptop, my older Intel MacBook Pro gives me 2-3 hours of battery life and heats up like a toaster, while my M2 MacBook Pro runs cool, and lasts a couple of days under moderate to heavy use before going flat. That's a huge win for me.

I paid for Affinity Photo because of its reasonably priced perpetual license, being a great alternative to Adobe's tools for my work.

Canva's business model revolves around cloud based services, and subscription licensing, and I don't see how Canva will keep both pricing models available in the long term. The linked "pledge" is just a canned public relations soundbite during this merger process, until six months later when they pull the plug and mandate subscriptions.

Call me cynical, but I've seen this happen time and again. Parallels is another product I'd been using for ages until they switched to subscriptions.

MN10 as in my earlier comment is the starting point. The German monk Nyanaponika Thera provides a detailed exposition.

https://www.bps.lk/library-search-select.php?id=bp509s

https://archive.org/details/10011341809-the-heart-of-buddhis...

The topic is on what monks know about focus, so I'd say that any relevant monastic practices are relevant to the discussion, that includes Buddhist monks' practices on focus and mindfulness.

As to the second point - the Bible is older than Buddhism? What now?!? I'm surely in a different universe.

Boeing's dismal track record has been years in the making and the problems we're seeing were inevitable. However, I'm not holding my breath here hoping for a real change. Boeing is a huge defence contractor with deep connections. I hope I'm mistaken but I doubt we'll see any real systemic change.

In a discussion about what monks know about focus, I too find it strange that other schools and practices are ignored. The core of the Buddhist practice is about cultivating the mind for insight and clarity. In the linked article, I find the reasons offered by Nestorus to engage in reading rather specious and elementary, hardly scratching the surface of a vast and well practised domain.

His first point - that reading helps avoid toxic thoughts - is avoiding instead of getting to the root of the problem and fixing it. His third and "most mysterious" reason for immersive reading - that it deepens our understanding of the reading material because our minds are changing - is how education works in the first place.

The basic Buddhist teachings and practices even for lay people cover this vast domain concisely, with clear prescriptions to practice and try it out for ourselves, iterate and progress. In fact, the very first of the seven factors of awakening that we're advised to cultivate is mindfulness which underlies everything else. This commentary [1] provides an overview.

The practices are covered in more detail in one of the core teachings, MN10 - Satipatthana Sutta [2]. While reading/listening/remembering are valued as aids (it's called suta-mayā pañña - knowledge based on learning), pretty much every Buddhist monk and practising upāsaka / upāsika (layperson) are taught to practice the techniques and realise this clarity, focus, mindfulness, etc., for themselves. The instruction mentioned above - MN10 - instructs you on attention and mindfulness wherever you are and whatever you're doing, in the section on clear comprehension - you're cultivating the skill (bhāvana) where you're clear about what you're doing, why you're doing it, the consequences of your actions, etc., whether you're defecating, urinating, reading, lying down to sleep, whatever - a constant practice of mindfulness and a full-time job.

[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/piyadassi/wheel0...

[2] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wayof.html

I used to work with the Sun 3's, SparcStations and other Sun hardware at the time when they were transitioning from the BSD flavoured SunOS to Solaris. There was confusion at many levels including branding. The SysV flavour was initially called SunOS 5, not Solaris. Later they decided to use the Solaris name for later SunOS releases and drop the SunOS name altogether. There was some confusion about the Solaris 1.x vs 2.x naming, since Solaris 1.x was really the BSD flavoured SunOS, while Solaris 2.x was a completely different beast, being all SVR4.

What first struck me when we moved from SunOS to Solaris was just how clean and simple SunOS was to manage, from the directory structure to the /etc configurations to device file names. Yes, there were different ways in Solaris to address the disk block device (physical, logical, etc.) but it always made me cringe that something I'd addressed as '/dev/sd0a' now became something like '/devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/sd@0,0:a', or at best '/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0'. The /etc/ filesystem hierarchy also got a lot more complicated. I felt the SVR4 Solaris was far less elegant than SunOS.

Guess it was also because of the relative maturity of SunOS, but I felt things just worked as expected and the OS itself was generally snappier than SVR4/Solaris on the same Sparc hardware. Eventually we had no choice but to move to SVR4/Solaris but I still have fond memories of a simpler time and a cleaner SunOS.

The quality of google maps routing has become terrible over the past few years. I sometimes visit a few Indian cities on work. There are many places that you can walk to. Interestingly, Apple maps on my iPhone shows me at least 2-3 good walking routes, while google maps tries to get me killed on busy thoroughfares or tells me to walk across eight lanes of peak-hour traffic.

When taking a cab, google maps increasingly routes me through narrow roads, streets that can only accommodate a bike, or the wrong way in one-way roads. Apple maps usually gets it right. Sometimes google routes are just plain wrong - it takes me to the wrong destination - and I'm left scratching my head as to how the heck any algorithm that worked earlier could do this now.

I remember a time when Google maps was not this terrible.

Some countries are imposing extra fees on conventional aviation fuel. This is new - Air ticket prices to go up as Singapore mandates sustainable fuel for departing flights from 2026 [1].

[1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/air-tickets-sustai...

There are widely used practices for API design and versioning that work well today. While this article's kludgy approach to backward compatibility may have been passable a few decades ago, this is a terrible way to approach the problem in 2024, specially with services & APIs being deployed & distributed across platforms.

The article illustrates how *not* to build APIs.

China and the erstwhile Soviet Union wrote the book on propaganda. India has nothing on them.

I've done some work in this space and there are pros and cons. BLE gets very complicated quickly. The mesh idea itself is nice, since there's no pairing / setup time - your device can be mostly asleep, and it simply powers up, sends a few bytes quickly, and powers down - that's a common industrial sensing use case.

However there are broader issues that are not adequately addressed - onboarding, key management, credential revocation and key rotation and so on.

I've also done some work earlier on 802.15.4 based mesh networks, there are standards for access control, payload encryption, frame integrity and sequential freshness, but delivering complete working solutions still becomes a bespoke offering that needs a fair amount of work to get right.

To see a broad adoption of these mesh standards we need to address the broader engineering, integration, deployment and operational issues.

The habit of accumulating books is one I find stress inducing. The best decision I made over the years is to give away most of my books except for a few non-technical books and some old comics. There's less clutter at home, less baggage occupying room in the mind, and less stress telling myself that I have to make time to read those books because I paid for them.

I'd love to have a low-cost, low-end phone that can just handle basic communication requirements. However, life has changed so much over the past two decades that I believe it's no longer possible to live our lives without a smartphone and without serious compromises.

There are just too many basic necessities that require a smartphone these days, starting with multi-factor authentication apps, cab booking and navigation. In my country, government services, banking and financial services can work to some extent without an app, but it is becoming increasingly impractical to hold out.

Banks have replaced physical 2FA tokens with new features in their banking apps. The financial services I use require me to authenticate via faceID on my phone for specific transactions. Our government services use a biometric authentication scheme - not mandatory but it is terribly inconvenient to get your work done if you don't have a smart phone.

It's reached a point where I cannot function normally beyond a week or so, without a smart phone and relevant financial, government, and other apps.