spaceywilly

“And so that’s why we recommend using phased rollouts” -Every DevOps engineer from now on

So there was apparently an Azure outage prior to this big one. One thing that is a pretty common pattern in my company when there are big outages is something like this:

1. Problem A happens, it’s pretty bad

2. A fix is rushed out very quickly for problem A. It is not given the usual amount of scrutiny, because Problem A needs to be fixed urgently.

3. The fix for Problem A ends up causing Problem B, which is a much bigger problem.

tl;dr don’t rush your hotfixes through and cut corners in the process, this often leads to more pain

The best uses of AI I’ve come across are one that are integrated well into a tool I’m already using and just make my job a little bit easier. So look for something where you could add a little box that says “summarize the messages in this thread” or “suggest a title for this note” or something along those lines.

As a matter of fact, yes! This YouTube video is probably one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, he measured the change in voltage traveling along a Y circuit, where one end is open and one is closed.

You can see the voltage “ripple” through both branches of the circuit, reflect of the ends of the branches, and eventually settle into steady state. There are limits to this way of thinking (for example, water can’t travel in the space between “tubes”, but electricity can), but it is a very good way to approximate it.

https://youtu.be/2AXv49dDQJw?si=Bu50bjG6jkt1ktSQ

Maybe it’s just me, but I would much rather watch a higher bitrate 1080p copy of a movie than a horribly encoded 4k copy. I also wish that we had made 1080p60 commonplace for sports before trying to make the jump to 4k. Seems like the industry has just focused on “big number better” instead of making a product that actually looks better.

Exactly, I see many questions that start with “If the electrons are flowing from the negative terminal…”

The movement of electrons is inconsequential. It’s the magnetic fields between electrons that provide the power in an electric circuit. These fields actually don’t even travel through the wires! They move around the space outside the wires. Ask anyone who has routed a differential signal pair :)

This was my first thought as well. I took a quick look through the API docs and didn’t see any mention of MFi.

I have to question how many people in 2024 are navigating the internet by going to the address bar and typing “foo.com/thing-im-looking-for”

Not sure what you’re getting at. We take those rules and use a static analysis tool (LDRA) to prove they are met. You can write unsafe code in any language.

>Its language characteristics make it trivial to accidentally introduce memory safety issues resulting in undefined behavior or security vulnerabilities.

I worked for a space-related defense contractor. They are using MISRA C, and everything is very thoroughly designed, documented, and tested. I haven’t seen any research into bugs in safety critical systems caused by memory safety issues, but I think that in practice it is very possible to write memory safe C code if you follow industry standards.

The stock market is a measure of what investors think the company will be worth over the next 10 years or so, essentially. Because if someone came along and wanted to buy the company, they’d typically pay around that amount. So take that amount (what the company is valued at) and divide by number of shares, there’s your share price. Like anything, it’s worth what someone will pay for it.

This is continuously adjusted as investor sentiment changes about where the company (and the economy at large) is going and what that “10 year valuation” is. A single quarterly result certainly could change that number if there’s a big surprise in there, but for the most part companies are good at predicting their revenue and expenses and that is priced into the stock already.

For Tesla, there was a wide expectation that they weren’t going to have a great quarter, it was pretty much known. So the stock was already significantly down before the earnings call. What was not expected was that Musk dedicated the company to building a cheaper car in the coming years. Investors thought this was a good move, stock goes up.

Now look at Meta, it was widely expected they’d have good results this quarter, so stock price is already up recently. What changed in this report is their expenses are much higher than what they previously estimated. So the stock goes down.

The actual quarterly results are a factor in the price but generally those are priced in already, unless you get some big surprise. What’s more important is the investor sentiment about whether the company is going in the right direction, which can change on a whim and for no reason at all.

I think the author is incorrect to look at the cycle of market bubbles and should instead be looking at the Gartner Hype Cycle. We are currently at or just past the peak and moving into the trough of disillusionment (to wit: this article). Eventually the companies that are actually building useful technology will emerge and win out in the long run, the others will fail. Just the same as any other new hyped technology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Sounds like a good idea for an app. I believe all that data is available through HealthKit. ChatGPT it up :)

BPF works more like Java, where you have your high-level source code, then a JIT compiler translates it to bytecode that runs on a VM. Even BPF “programs” written in C aren’t using a standard C compiler. The BPF JIT compiler translates them to bytecode.

The subset of C you can use is fairly limited, only what their compiler supports. So what people have done is written compilers that can take Go or Python and compile it to BPF bytecode.

As someone who works with BPF every day, I don’t think comparing orders of magnitude is right. It just enables things that can be done now that you wouldn’t dream of doing before. I think a good analogy is going from horse drawn carriages to the automobile. In a carriage going from Boston to New York would be a multi day journey that you would have to plan for weeks in advance. With a car you just get in and go. BPF is like that, suddenly you have all these options for things that you can do instantly, that you’d only do before if you were ready to dedicate years to getting support into the kernel. It’s a superpower for kernel development.

I worked for a company a few years ago that issued me a System76 laptop. It was ok. Weighed a lot and was made of cheap plastic, and it also had issues with the fan. However, for a Linux laptop with open source hardware and firmware I was ok with putting up with those niggles. Glad to see they are still rolling along.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I changed jobs this year directly citing my company’s forced RTO policy, and my manager said I wasn’t the only one doing so.

I think the companies that are trying to force RTO will start changing tune pretty quickly when studies like this show there’s really no downside in terms of productivity.

I don’t want innovation that comes at the expense of human lives. The same thing is going on with self driving cars right now. It is wild to me that they aren’t required to follow the same regulations as airliners.

The safety record of commercial airliners should be help up as an example of how the system works. It’s proof that we can set aside corporate greed and design systems that are safe if we want to. The way that Boeing has gone downhill and the FAA has allowed it to happen is shameful.

Beacon has a pretty specific meaning in the BLE world. A BLE beacon sends a broadcast out every now and then* that says “hey I exist, here’s my ID”. Another device can scan for these “advertisement” and do something when a particular kind of device is detected.

An example use case is a museum app displaying info to a user when they walk up to a particular exhibit.

* the interval can be set from 10ms to ~10s. The radio can be turned off in between advertisements, which is where the “LE” part comes from.

The Max 9 has been in service since 2018 though, I think if it was a design issue it would have occurred before now. This seems like a Manufacturing QA “escape” to me. Some bolt was either not installed properly or not tightened to the proper spec, QA did not catch it

Probably not, most devices have the first stage boot loader on read only memory that is locked using an e-fuse. You would need to physically modify the device to change it.

FWIW, I had an older Fire tablet that I had loaded Android onto and it wasn’t great. It would crash randomly and the battery life was awful. These days I have a newer Fire tablet. It’s a few years old now but I still use it all the time for reading e-books from the library, and I have a few Android apps loaded onto it that I use for working on my car and they all work fine. In other words, there’s not really any reason to reflash them, the stock OS is fine.

I have a widget on my Home Screen. It has 4 tiles for my 4 lights, tap a tile to turn the light on or off.

Yup. In a past job I did a lot of work writing ALSA drivers for custom souncards. The ALSA interface is a good example of this. They provide an API app developers can use to do sound stuff (change the volume, for example). In your sound card driver you provide an implementation of the API to do whatever changing the volume means for your particular hardware (in my case sending an i2c message to a digital potentiometer).

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/sound/kernel-api/alsa-...

True I see what you mean, but that would seem to be an easy function to build into the car’s charging controller. I’m not sure how it works today but I would imagine most cars have a “stop charging at x%” function already without depending on the charger for that.

Yeah that just seems like a poor decision on the part of these charger owners. I feel like there’s an opportunity for a company called “EZCharge - we take credit cards”. People will seek it out when looking for a charging station because they know they won’t need to download a BS app.

Or maybe another solution would be like WeChat Pay in China, something that’s so ubiquitous that all stores just have a QR code you scan to pay for anything nowadays. I’m surprised nothing like that has taken off in the US, it’s crazy convenient.

There’s also a company in China that does EV swaps for cars. It’s a very cumbersome process, the battery can be thousands of pounds, and there are also cooling connectors to worry about. On top of that, it would require every car to have a standardized battery, or else we’d be back to we are today.

It would require a large increase in battery energy density combined with a large improvement in thermal efficiency to be successful on a large scale. Plug in chargers make way more sense. Solid state batteries are on the horizon that will charge as quickly as filling a gas tank.

It would be easy to support both options. Many gas stations have their own app payment system.

If I may ask what seems like an obvious question… why can’t they just use credit card terminals like gas stations have been using for many decades?

I’ve had good luck as well with the practice of leaving myself a “head start” to pick up in the morning. It seems like it wouldn’t help that much, but in practice it makes the task of getting back into the programming zone much easier. Seems like just one of those ways to trick our brains into working a little better.

Meta ironically unveiled just this thing. An AI model that can translate in <2 seconds intended for use in real time conversation.

https://ai.meta.com/research/seamless-communication/