tom_alexander

My favorite: For one day all the Microsoft Zunes froze for the entire day, only to recover on their own 24 hours later when the infinite loop in their leap year code had finally resolved: https://web.archive.org/web/20090313105752/http://www.zunebo...

> it seems like there's no standard reporting of charge level over the wire

Isn't that the "Battery_Status" message in the USB PD spec? Page 152 in this pdf: https://e2e.ti.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussion...

Combine that with the "Battery_Capabilities" message (page 163) to get the total capacity, and you can calculate the charge percentage.

To be fair, GCC's design was motivated by the same thing as the license. They intentionally didn't modularize GCC so that it couldn't be used by non-free code.

> Anything that makes it easier to use GCC back ends without GCC front ends--or simply brings GCC a big step closer to a form that would make such usage easy--would endanger our leverage for causing new front ends to be free.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2000-01/msg00572.html

> Why does there seem to be much more market for NAS than for direct attached external HDD?

I can access my NAS from anywhere in the world, but you can only access your direct-attached drives when sitting at your desk.

I can hide my NAS in a closet, but your direct attach drives are wasting valuable desk space and causing noise in your workspace.

My NAS has a software raid (raidz2) so any two of my drives could die without losing a single bit of data. Technically this is possible with direct attached drives too, but usually people aren't attaching multiple external drives to their computer at the same time.

Multiple people/computers/phones can access my NAS simultaneously, but your direct attach drives are only usable by a single computer at a time.

I can use my NAS from any device/operating system without worrying about filesystem compatibility. With direct attach drives, you need to pick a filesystem that will be supported by the devices you want to plug in to it.

The downside is a NAS is running 24/7 which will consume more electricity than drives you only plug in on-demand, and file transfers will be slower over a network than directly plugged in to your computer, but 99% of the time the speed difference does not matter to me. (It really only impacts me when doing full-disk backup/restore since I'd be transferring hundreds of gigabytes.)

> not enough v4 IPs

No one is giving their IoT devices public IPv4 addresses. They would be behind a NAT. RFC 1918 provides 17,891,322 usable IP addresses for each private network. If we want to be a little more adventurous, RFC 6598 provides an additional 4,194,302 usable addresses and 240.0.0.0/4 is another 268,435,454 usable addresses "reserved for future use" since 1989, but still sitting unused so we can use them as internal addresses inside a NAT anyway (for example, AWS uses this range internally).

Show me a network that is using all 290,521,078 addresses and I'll show you a network managed by a team of network engineers who can just set up IPv6.

Could you be more specific on how to circumvent the android permission model + sandbox? So far I have only thought of two ways an XZ-like backdoor could circumvent that:

1. By being baked into the OS itself, which is unavoidable since the OS is the thing providing the sandboxing + security model. It still massively reduces the attack surface.

2. By being run through the android debug bridge, which is far from normal and something users have to explicitly enable. Leaving you the option to shoot yourself in the foot in an opt-in manner 99.9% of users will never touch isn't the same as Linux where foot-shooting is the default.

> untrusted

I think the important distinction is _everything_ should be considered untrusted because even trustworthy software can become malicious. For example, the XZ Utils backdoor[0].

On Android, everything I run is subject to the permission model and sandboxed. That is not the case on Linux.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying, it just happens to be the platform these kids are currently using. The same bullying tactics have been possible since long before the iPhone existed.

So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?

> plus every participant has to migrate over

I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.

> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything

"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.

There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.

> all the history and context is retained

That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.

It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can start the new group with a message "I started this new group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending messages to a group that will not respond to her.

> create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.

All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

  - create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
  - invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
  - kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
  - send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.

> obviously needs to be a PDF

I've been making my reports in self-contained HTML files[0] and it works out so much better than PDF. It is not constrained by paper sizes, and it lets me add some nifty features. For example, I recently added support for hiding columns in a table using exclusively CSS. The only downside is browsers can render things slightly differently, but for my use cases I don't need pixel-perfect identical rendering.

[0] Images are inlined base64-encoded, CSS/JS embedded with style and script tags. No external assets / no http requests.

Ah I didn't realize it was that fast! I always pictured a few mm per 1k years.

> ground level then was a few metres lower than now

What?! That's huge. What happened?

That's already the case. I run a quantized 70 billion parameter llama 3.1 model on my framework 13 inch laptop. Only cost ~$300 to get the 96GB of ram (which I purchased for unrelated non-AI reasons before the AI boom). It certainly isn't fast, but it is fast enough. I run it via vulkan compute using llama.cpp with an anythingllm web interface in front of it.

Wikipedia puts the "preferred walking speed" around 3 miles per hour, so that would be 2 hours of walking per day. So with 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, 2 hours of walking, 1 hour of hygiene, 1 hour of commuting, and 2 hours for meals, you'd still be left with 2 hours of personal time to do all your extracurriculars like cleaning, parenting, spousing, hobbying, shopping, repairing things, etc.

> all routers are uniformly fucking awful [...] the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs

My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.

OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.

I'm not buying a new monitor with a decade-old version of DisplayPort. Non-oled monitors are products that last a long time (at least a decade) so if I bought this monitor, I'd still be using DisplayPort 1.4 from 2016 in 2036. I need UHBR20 on a new monitor so I can rest assured that I will have some lanes available for my other peripherals. I've already lived the hell of needing to dedicate all 4 lanes to DisplayPort, leaving only a single USB2.0 connection remaining for all my other peripherals to share[0][1].

[0] https://media.startech.com/cms/products/gallery_large/dk30c2...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/iGs0LbH.jpeg

FWIW I've managed to "fix" the power button by pouring 99% rubbing alcohol over the power button while pressing the button in and out. Doesn't prevent it from happening, so this is still problematic behavior, but it at least can save you from expensive repairs or replacements.

But yes, now I disable this "feature" on my phones.

I have the opposite problem with pixels: they keep trying to call 911 on their own. On the past couple Pixel phones I've had, the power button started to click itself on its own and ignoring my presses. Turns out Google, in their infinite wisdom, made rapidly clicking the power button into a shortcut for calling 911.

It's already not true. I had browser.ml.enable and browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false but I was still getting an option to ask an AI Chatbot about stuff in my right-click context menu. I had to also set browser.ml.chat.menu to false.

Also pick a lane mozilla. Either use "enable" or "enabled", don't use both.

That's awesome, TIL. Next time I do a dive into plan9 I'm absolutely using this (with the Win 9x theme too for the nostalgia).

While the look certainly isn't flashy, I'd be fine with the look. It's the reliance on 3-button mice that's a problem for me. At least modern laptop touchpads can do middle mouse click with 3-fingers but that's a pretty lousy UX, so it's really only practical with a real mouse.

Also I'm much more of a keyboard + tiling window manager kind of a person, so the plan9 focus on the mouse isn't my cup of tea.

> It has an achingly elegent internal structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade. [...] I was writing a civilized window manager for it in my spare time

Brutal, but the window manager is probably one of the three big things hurting plan9 adoption (along with the lack of common editors like emacs/vim, and the lack of modern web browsers)

I wish I could use this but last I checked, every supported robot used consumables for cleaning (like vacuum bags). My current vacuum robot uses no bags and has washable filters so nothing gets consumed. Turns out that was more important to me than local-only operation.

How would you do screen replacement? That is a common repair since people drop their phones and currently you can get your phone repaired by some teenager in a booth at the mall. If you fill the phone with epoxy, how are you detaching the screen, and getting a new ribbon cable through the epoxy?

I thought these days the fabs in water-scarce areas collect their waste water. re-purify it, and re-use it. So their actual drain on outside water sources is far lower.

> It will initially have a water recycling rate of around 85 percent, with a goal to achieve 90 percent. Currently, the company’s water resource center has an efficiency rate of 65 percent, converting industrial wastewater for use in the company's operations.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-breaks-groun...

> Dark Souls II did not want to recognize my Controller

I ran into that problem on DS2 also. It seems that game picks the first input device it finds, so I was able to force it to use the controller by unplugging my keyboard (or maybe it was the mouse? It was one of those).

USB modems exist and work on Linux[0]. The Steam Deck is a Linux computer with a USB port. You could be living this reality today.

[0] https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-4g-lte-advanced-m...

I use FreeBSD on my machines because it has netgraph: https://klarasystems.com/articles/inside-freebsd-netgraph-ad...