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locknitpicker

1,096 karma · joined October 29, 2025

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locknitpicker··on The Milwaukee Brewers win the first World Series title in franchise history
> The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer.

Soccer is a slow burn where a game is always standing on a fragile equilibrium. Football and baseball are mainly boring because they are turn-based, with long periods of nothing happening between brief action moments.

Basketball is the only dominant US sports that matches soccer in terms of excitement and teams standing on a fragile equilibrium. Of course the NBA screws this up by stretching finals games into 7-game series, capping soccer-levels of excitement derived from winner-takes-all tournaments. It's no coincidence that NCAA tournaments manages to build up so much attention and such a dedicated following.

locknitpicker··on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
> It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe.

I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.

Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.

Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.

So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.

locknitpicker··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
Yes, ESP32s are not exactly like RPis. And that is fine.

Do you need a full blown Linux desktop to blink a led light? Or drive a servo? Or even have a HTTP server? No.

locknitpicker··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
> Is that a change in the valuation of the pi or of the dollar?

I believe that revenue maximization plays a role. So it's inflation in a way, but not the kind where bom costs are forwarded to consumers.

locknitpicker··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
> Those are entirely different operational models.

In some of the tinkering applications, RPis are shoehorned into the very operarional model that is followed by ESP32s.

ESP32s may be harder to debug but they allow us to remove a big chunk of the complexity that lies between our code and what we want the device to do.

I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.

locknitpicker··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
> Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.

A few years ago we could get our hands on a Orange Pi Zero, with wifi, Ethernet, and 512MB of RAM, for less than $10. I think I bought mine for slightly over $5.

Now they sell for a tad over $30. What a shame.

We now have the ESP32 line of microcontrollers. That should scratch some of the itches.

locknitpicker··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
> The not so good ones, are doing the same bullshit they did before, but now the don't even bother to check it.

What bothers me greatly is how the not so good ones are now delegating all their contributions, code and otherwise, to AI assistants, and fail to to any cursory check in what they are delivering. It's sheer laziness and irresponsibility.

So far I've seen junior developers who found sudden passions for code reviews to post high volume of comments on any PR to showcase their technical prowess, but the comments clearly don't match the code or context and we're obviously posted without looking. I've also seen old but barely competent developers leaning quite heavily on AI assistants to formulate troubleshooting theories that are based on scenarios that deeply contrast with the actual problem, and go to the extent of announcing they identified root causes when they didn't even tried to reproduce them in the actual system, because if they had tried they would notice the whole theory is impossible.

Everyone talks about high productivity gains, but these types manage to use AI to waste everyone's time.

locknitpicker··on Type Server Protocol
You're trying too hard to play the role of the "aktually" guy. Assuming good intentions and taking a pass at replying would have been a better contribution to the discussion.
locknitpicker··on New iPad mini
I don't know about the US, but not even FANGs pay six figure salaries to most of their European employees. Perhaps L7 and up.
locknitpicker··on New iPad mini
> I can, easily, wouldn’t feel the cost in any way.

You are not in the median. Half of Americans claim they do not have emergency funds, and over a quarter cannot pay their monthly bills.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/10/14/many-amer...

locknitpicker··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> I actually have seen good coworkers get chopped down because they cared more about the system than others egos.

What does this even mean? This sounds like an euphemism for someone being a jerk just because they wanted to unilaterally push changes to the code.

> It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.

Management are hired to support the people that maintain the product, and help them work together. If a developer fails to work together with coworkers, it's the manager's job to either help that developer right their wrongs, or support other developers by getting rid of the problematic one.

locknitpicker··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> Being “easy to work with” is unfortunately often confused with supporting other people agendas.

I don't think this is hard or complex. It's an easy question with a simple answer: do you like working with user foo? Whether you answer yes or no, why?

If virtually all your coworkers answer no, and the org feels it's in their interest to kick you out, then what lesson do you take from that?

And let's not forget that someone going around inventing fires to put out that he alone can put out is also something that fits the description of an agenda.

So no, sometimes the world is not our to get you. Sometimes you cause grief to everyone around you, to the point that it's a net benefit to get rid of you.

People need to stop confusing geeks and nerds with being socially awkward and outright sociopaths. Enjoying tinkering with things doesn't require you to be abhorrent or lack any social skills. You're not smart or intelligent if you believe it's a good idea to go around telling others to fix problems they don't have and being obnoxious about it. Being able to fix a bug does not change that.

locknitpicker··on I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0
> If GPU were from the get go designed as a parallelism tool first and video game tools second the hardware architecture and the language would probably be different than today and simpler (...)

The market demand was for video game tools, though.

People didn't wanted faster compute, they wanted their computer games to work smoothly on the hardware they already own. Therefore, they preferred to spend 100-200€ on a point upgrade, much like RAM, than scrapping their 2k€ PC.

To give people a reason to buy these upgrades, games had to use them. Therefore video cards were designed specially for the usecases and development flow that game developers already followed.

If it wasn't for the video game market, NVidia wouldn't exist as we know it today.

locknitpicker··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
> What is weird is criticizing people who acknowledge good things because of past bad things when nothing anyone said here, that I can see, anything close to "they are redeemed rejoice!"

This is like going to a politician's event and seeing him giving away lollipops to toddlers and kissing babies. But it's the same politician caught in corruption and embezzlement scandals.

You look at that and praise how they have redeemed. Other people look at that and see a corrupt politician handing out candy.

People tell us who they are through their actions. If you prove yourself to be capable of morally reprehensible things to the point throughout the years you build a reputation for all the morally reprehensible things you do, does your potential to do morally reprehensible things change if you go way out of your way to let people know that sometimes something's you do aren't morally reprehensible?

locknitpicker··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
> After their effort to take credit for the research of others last time, it's within OpenAI's best interests to go the extra mile to convince skeptics to not dismiss new research findings.

This.

The truth if the matter is that this is still a publicity stunt. This investment of time, effort, and compute is aimed at building a reputation that this company's model is better than the competition's. The previous publicity stunt brew up in their face, and now they seem to be trying to adapt and double down.

locknitpicker··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?

Or would they say something completely different?

locknitpicker··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.

Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.

People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.

locknitpicker··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
> How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?

By witnessing first-hand the abuse and blowing the whistle on Zuckerberg for trying to manipulate elections.

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal broke because an employee leaked proof, and now Facebook has to cough up 25 billion in fines. Do you think Zuckerberg didn't felt this?

locknitpicker··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
> Your argument would carry more weight if the employees weren’t getting paid absurd sums of money.

What a stupid appeal to morality. This is not the middle ages where you can only aspire to do the right thing if you abdicate any worldly possession. I am paid well because I stood up for myself in contract negotiations, and no keyboard hero is going to put my sense of right and wrong into question because I earn more than you.

locknitpicker··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
> Yea Meta is the only possible company you can work at…

If you care about preventing Meta from doing evil things, you have far more influence and power over that if you work for Meta.

locknitpicker··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company.

Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.

To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.

locknitpicker··on Microsoft Decision-1: 9B Qwen Model Launch Explained
> Yeah the most usesless and stupidest bench ..

I recall that when this benchmark came out there were concerns that AI companies were gaming benchmarks to fake their progress. The purpose was to find something silly and outlandish that AI companies would definitely not have trained their models on, and thus have a way to check a model's capabilities.

A pelican riding a bicycle is pretty random. That was the whole point.

locknitpicker··on Lula wins election after final votes tallied
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement

What do you have to say about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Brazilian_co...

locknitpicker··on Lula wins election after final votes tallied
> This far less popular than United 24 which is a propaganda outlet disguised as a news site.

What are smoking? If you bother to check, United24 clearly describes itself as "The official fundraising platform for collecting donations to support Ukraine."

locknitpicker··on Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
> it's also completely reasonable to say that US has been in relative decline

I'm not sure you understood the point, which is that relative trends are irrelevant.

If there's a single member who outgrows everyone and increases its share of the global market, of course all other members will see their relative share shrink.

locknitpicker··on Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
> As for Europe, this [1] is a graph of the EU's share of the global GDP, PPP adjusted.

That's fun, here's the US's version of that graph.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-sha...

Notice that both show the same downward trend?

Do you know what's behind that trend? It's because it's a graph of the global share. The share drops if the GDP of other members is increasing faster. Someone like, say, China.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/270439/chinas-share-of-g...

China is doing brilliantly since the 80s, to the point it overthrew the US as the global hegemon. India is also doing well, albeit in a far less impressive way

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271328/indias-share-of-g...

locknitpicker··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
> Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly.

Not really. It's pointless to go around accusing everyone of picking what they believe to be subpar alternatives when they even fail to establish what the par actually is, let alone what would be a preferred option.

It's as if they post this blend of comments just to try to feel smug.

> There are a bunch of well known alternatives:

See, that's what makes these exercises pointless. Those might work for your weekend pet projects, where you have the luxury of wasting all Sundays toying with how to deploy CICD systems because you have nothing better to do. For actual work, not so much. For example, SourceHut is renowned for being in perpetual alpha. It's baffling how it's being floated as a reasonable alternative to either GitLab or GitHub. Here's what they have to say about the risk of choosing them at this stage:

https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

locknitpicker··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
> What’s so much better about it?

It's so trivial to put together any CICD pipeline that it barely registers as a skill you need to develop. All jobs run on containers you control, you specify the scripts you want to run in each job (e.g., npm test), and done. For standard pipelines you don't even bother to set precedence and fan-out/fan-in because if you set your stages as the default stages then that's already done for you.

Also nice, GitLab provides terraform providers for it's CICD infrastructure.

GitHub Actions in comparison is a god-awful mess that has only parallel in Azure YAML Pipelines, another abomination that should be used as a punishment instead of a production system.

locknitpicker··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
> don't understand why GitLab CI is praised so much when it is the most limited and unintuitive ones of all the CI systems I've worked with.

I'm baffled by remarks of GitLab's ICD being "unintuitive". I mean, GitLab's pipelines are made up of a set of stages, and stages are made up of a set of jobs. To put it differently, GitLab's pipelines are made up of jobs, which are grouped into stages. Does this go against your personal notion of a pipeline?

> The smallest unit of action on GitLab is a whole job

No. A job is the smallest unit of execution you can assign a runner to execute. It is used to set things like dependencies and runtime environments. Once your job sets the environment, your job can start to execute your scripts. This means a set of individual shell commands or shell scripts you provide.

> You cannot share secrets between jobs.

Yes, and only a very silly and clueless person would ever think it would be a good idea to share secrets through random runners due to exfiltration risks.

This is not a GitLab thing, mind you. You should really read this

https://secure-pipelines.com/ci-cd-security/gitlab-ci-cd-sec...

> Multiple workflow files instead of a single `.gitlab.yml`

Now I wonder if you're just trolling.

> Dynamic services,

Now this is just silly. Did you even bothered to learn how GitLab handles this?

https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/matrix_expressions/

locknitpicker··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
GitLab has a top of the class CICD system that is leaps and bounds over GitHub Actions. That alone makes it worth using GitLab.
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