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machine_coffee

19 karma · joined April 5, 2017

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machine_coffee··on Debugging memory corruption: who the hell writes "2" into my stack? (2016)
Also surprised an async completion was writing to the stack. You should normally pass a heap buffer to these functions and keep it alive e.g for the lifetime of the object being watched.
machine_coffee··on U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions
I think they went even further and 3d printed their thumbprint and unlocked their phone with it, if I remember correctly.
machine_coffee··on Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout
Lol, author's thought process mirrored mine as I read the article, as I was reading I was thinking, 'doesn't kqueue support that?... and then a section on kqueue. Then I was thinking to myself, so how does the Linux implementation do it then?... was just about to start trawling the source code when 'A parenthesis..'

Great article. Sorry to say though, Windows does manage all this in a more consistent way - but I guess they had the benefit of a clean slate.

machine_coffee··on Do you need Redis? PostgreSQL does queuing, locking, and pub/sub (2021)
This is the best response so far. Session churn creates lots of db activity but lots of it is of low business value. Better to offload to a separate process.

Also session data is often Blobs which db's don't process as efficiently as columnar data.

machine_coffee··on Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
Oh Man, I think I have a candidate for the Apology Homepage.
machine_coffee··on The Later Years of Douglas Adams
Ah Tom Baker, also a gem.

Was also interested to hear one of the background clips mentioning how the greenhouse effect was 'really starting to bite', and this was in 1990.

machine_coffee··on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters?
At last an explanation that makes a bit of sense to me.

>Hopefully they own up to this, and explain what they're going to do to prevent another global-impact process failure

They probably needn't bother, every competent sysadmin from Greenland to New Zealand is probably disabling the autoupdate feature right now, firewalling it off and hatching a plan to get the product off their server estate ASAP.

Marketing budgets for competing product are going to get a bump this quarter probably.

machine_coffee··on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters?
>Crowdstrike runs on MacOS and Linux workstations too.

This is what chills me to the bone, there's loads of these installations worldwide on heterogeneous OSs but with very little oversight of the code. Companies have basically rolled over and stated, 'OK, we trust you'

I'm not usually a fan of strident calls to open source everything, but the source code at least for the channel file parser on all OSs should now be made public so that we can have an oversight of what so many have placed their trust in.

machine_coffee··on Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant (2016)
Perfect timing for this article after Putin's Russia just forced Apple to drop as many VPNs as possible from the App store in ru.

The aim obviously being to have an easier time surveilling the populace whilst also denying them access to any information not spewed by the Party.

It can't be long now until Moscow has a big sign that reads 'War is Love' plastered on some nameless building.

edit:typo.

machine_coffee··on Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant (2016)
>"they have no reason to surveil boring ordinary individuals."

Tell that to Parsons, Winston Smith's loyal to the Party neighbour who's betrayed by his own child. If surveillance is allowed to become pervasive enough, nobody is safe.

machine_coffee··on Apple Debuts VisionOS 2
Dvorak also got pretty irate at the 'idle' task on Windows consuming so much CPU, as reported by Task Manager. Ah, simpler days.
machine_coffee··on Apple Debuts VisionOS 2
You just have to keep rubbing it in!

Poor CmdTaco, after all these years, still can't get a break.

machine_coffee··on Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month
Something crashes, it's _never_ a compiler bug ...

April 16 Oh, it actually is a compiler bug!

Can confidently say I've never experienced one in my career, but at some level of abstraction I guess it's less rare to find them.

machine_coffee··on Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
Wouldn't say so.

An iterative model which has been up-front loaded with a firm architecture, feature elaboration, a rough development and testing plan, resources allocated and some basic milestones to hit so that upper mgmt. can get an idea when useful stuff might land.

The development _process_ can be as agile-y as you like, so long as the development of features moves incrementally with each iteration towards the desired end-goal.

But you have to be strict about scope.

machine_coffee··on A cargo ship's 'WindWing' sails saved it up to 12 tons of fuel per day
I wonder how well they hold up in strong storms, or if they can be folded away for safety.
machine_coffee··on Plastic experts say recycling is a scam. Should we even do it anymore?
We have a separate service that we pay for to recycle our plastic, and do exactly that; separate out all plastic and put in these bags - and yes, agreed, the amount of plastic is sometimes unbelievable.

Last night I cooked 2 packets of fresh Udon noodles. Each packet contained 2 plastics bags of vacuum packed noodles, so in total I had 6 separate plastic bags to throw away, for a total of 200g of noodles.

machine_coffee··on The Apple Macintosh Primer (1984) [pdf]
I'm also amused to see that 40 years later that they have "Copy Macintosh HD" on the Edit menu - like it's a floppy disk you can just copy to drive B :)
machine_coffee··on Traffic stopped on Crimean bridge due to ‘emergency’ as explosions reported
Who and where?

Russian propagandist, on Russian tv. You just have to wait for some horrendous act of indiscriminate killing by Russia to occur in Ukraine and they come out to justify or glorify the horror.

I don’t particularly blame them for their cynical actions, it’s their job.

machine_coffee··on Traffic stopped on Crimean bridge due to ‘emergency’ as explosions reported
Could be their moral compass has been warped by Russian propagandists who find the death of civilians in the Ukraine ‘SMO’ to be a cause of great celebration.