I'm more than happy to step up in price/power. I'm not sure if a more expensive device would act as a webcam, though.
1,911 karma · joined August 28, 2018
It'd be nice if there were some docs about how this works and how to hack it.
Key thing with tools like OBS is you want a dedicated CPU. It's not super-CPU hungry, but it can stall if your CPU is otherwise, erm, occupied.
As far as I can tell, that's the company who imported and sold it. If Amazon and Walmart are liable, I won't need to worry about fake Sandisk memory cards, fake medicines, fake clothing, and other fake products there.
I'd love that.
Maybe I just had a really bad 6 months with Amazon, but it seems everything that comes is a fake or a scam.
I'd gladly pay 10% more for real products than 10% less for 50-50. Right now, I switched to mostly buying off-brands direct from China for a lot of products, since I get the same thing as Amazon, but at a lower price and with an honest label.
Or buying direct from manufacturers if I want something real.
I got screwed once doing even that, though. I ordered a brand-name headset. They did... fulfillment by Amazon. The headset is barely usable, so I'm assuming Amazon did commingled products. Or perhaps I got a defective copy. In either case, not worth fighting for 50 bucks.
So it's not pointless in that sense. You know who might have been exposed.
It's also not pointless for monitoring spread.
I know people in Poland who avoided getting a COVID19 test because they knew they would have to quarantine if they took the test, and would not have to quarantine if they didn't. That's perverse incentives for ya'.
It's very hard to enforce, of course, but if you get caught, there are (in abstract) severe fines.
I hate editing RAW files, but in 30 years, I'll still have them and might have a use for them. In 300 years, my ancestors will have them. Seems like image processing algorithms might advance by then.
I once reran my photos from the early '00s through a modern raw processor, and the difference was night-and-day. No tweaking, no nothing. Just modern versus ancient noise reduction, color algorithms, etc.
Disk space is cheap enough.
For a data/ML position, in most cases, I'd expect you to be able to handle data cleanly and efficiently.
If you can't, there are jobs far over on the data side, but:
1) As a business data analyst, you're fine with Excel and PPT, but you'll be paid roughly 1/3 of an ML/SWE position, and you should have excellent communication skills.
2) There are primary mathematical positions, where you work with a data engineer, but you'd better be awesome at math. AND it still helps to be able to handle data cleanly.
Even so, good data workflows require knowing what you did, when, and to which version of data. Properly used, git provides an archival log of some of that. I use very similar data structures when I build some of my own data pipelines too, with data stored under its hashes, Merkle trees, DAGs, and similar. If you find that "annoying and time-consuming," I'd hire you for a business data analyst, and not much more.
It sounds like you find that stuff boring, though. It's a test of interest, passion, and drive, much more so than diligence and grit. Although those are important too.
As a footnote, I would expect you to be able to understand things like SSD performance and reliability, and how it's affected by complex algorithms in the drive controller (e.g. wear leveling, garbage collection, write block size, etc.). I would also expect you to be able to understand things like how subpixel rendering works, how rendering engines coordinate within LCD refresh, or how displays advertise their parameters to computers.
You shouldn't take those as black boxes either. You do get into bugs and issues which relate there, and an experienced software engineer will have a depth of knowledge around oddball topics like that. That brings huge value.
It sounds like you're not a nerd. Why did you go into software engineering? It sounds like you're not interested in the stuff. There are lots of career tracks which don't expect people to do those sorts of deep dives, and where willful ignorance is okay. Engineering, including software engineering, just doesn't happen to be one of them. All the good software engineers I know will do dives into this stuff, and that expertise accumulates over time.
The key thing is most of us enjoy those deep dives. That's what makes the career track a good fit.
If you don't, you'll be doing the equivalent of maintaining a COBOL database on a mainframe as you get older.
For my engineers, I'm not looking for tools which are "Completely intuitive, just works™." That's Scratch. I'd advise you to code in Scratch if that's what you want. I want tools which enable people to be productive, efficient, and get stuff done at a high level of quality. If that has a learning curve, that's okay. People are coding 40 hours per week. If my programmers spend a month learning each year, and that makes them 50% more productive, they'll beat your Scratch team. That's why good programmers get paid the big bucks, and mediocre programmers can't find jobs.
I picked Debian over Red Hat since, at the time, I could understand how .deb packages worked, and look over the state of the system. Red Hat had more opaque internals. If something broke on a Debian system, rare as it was, I could go in and fix it manually. If something broke on a Red Hat system, it was generally in a binary database file, and meant a reinstall. Red Hat also broke more often, I think for very similar reasons in design philosophy.
If I were making a tool for grandma to manage her photos, that's be something different. If you're making a coding tool for 3rd graders, perhaps you want to hide more stuff too, but even there, many modern coding environments translate blockly into Python/JS/etc. code, and show the code to kids so they can see under the hood.
I have a car, and as a car user, I want thinks to just work. As a car mechanic, I'd like things to be understandable, fixable, documented, and transparent.
git is like that. It has simple internals. Once you understand them, the userspace become very understandable too. The upsides of the elegant internals far outweigh the downside of a slightly clumsy userspace, which is why it's the dominant VCS right now.
It took over precisely from things which "just worked" with a simple userspace, and clumsy internals, like SVN and CVS.
1) It's like understanding the basics of databases, network protocols, or compilers. It gives a lot of insight to how things work in a pretty deep and generalizable way. How do you organize data, and why are DAGs, Merkle trees, and hashes awesome? It's a beautiful case study in data engineering.
2) It's like knowing the shortcuts in your editor. It makes you more productive. If a programmer is hunt-and-pecking to type, and gets confused by shortcut keys, they'll be less productive.
Yes, I understand not all programmers will know how important it is to know this stuff, and I won't disadvantage someone who hasn't done this YET in hiring. But I would never hire the type of programmer who says "I don't need to know this." You do.
I'm sorry, but it takes a couple weekends of work to write yourself a git end-to-end from scratch. That's 0.5% of the time you put into a CS degree. If you don't have the interest, discipline, or drive to do that, there are plenty of jobs out there.
git internals are simple, but hard. Like Go. If you don't understand them, the userspace is a near-infinite pile or arcane complexity, incantations, half of which break something in counter-intuitive ways. If you do, it's a matter looking up the right command in the docs in a few minutes.
Yes, compilers, database, and other tools abstract away a lot of stuff. But if you don't understand the internals, you're likely to hurt yourself and my system in very bad ways. I don't want that on my team. My experience is good programmers are fluent one or two abstractions up and down, to not e.g. make a database query that does a full table walk, run out of stack space with a compiler that doesn't do tail recursion (and conversely, know they can use tail recursion with ones that do), etc. A tool you use every day definitely falls into the category of Stuff You Ought to Know, in a way that understanding how quantum tunneling is used in an SSD is in the category of Stuff You Don't Need to Know.
If you're hurting yourself with git, that's a good signal it's in the Stuff to Know category. And if you've wasted more than a few hours fighting git, as it sounds you have, it sounds like making a focused effort to learn it will save you time in the long term. Probably in a few months, even.
If people live 100 years, you have 1% of the population die each year. In the US, COVID has killed a quarter-million, which is just under 0.1%, so an increase of under 10%. You'll barely see a 10% increase on a noisy chart.
In practice, that's a 50% increase some months, and a 1% increase others. So it looks underwhelming. But it isn't the same people.
But it's definitely not just people who would have died anyway. We're also at just under 1 in 30 people infected. If everyone caught COVID, you'd naively see 30x as many deaths, or 7.5 million dead.
Practically, not everyone would catch COVID, and by demographics, I suspect fewer would die, so we'd be talking maybe 2-3 million excess deaths if we let it burn. And probably another few million with long-term disability.
I think it's misleading to just look at Canon SLRs. SLRs are dying. Looking at the most modern mounts from all companies:
* Canon 50mm f/1.8 R-mount: $200
* Fuji 35mm f/2: $200
* Nikon 50mm $-mount f/1.8: on sale for $500 (normally $600)
* Olympus 25mm f/1.8: $300
* Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 MFT: On sale for $150 (normally $250)
* Panasonic 50mm f/1.4 L-mount: $2300 (although Sigma makes one for just $430).
* Sony 50mm f/1.8 E-mount: $250
I've adjusted to 50mm for crop factor.
I think the Canon f/1.8 50mm is sort of an outlier for low-cost in 2020. On the whole, prices have been creeping up (as has sharpness, AF speed, flare control, etc.). I feel like lenses are as expensive as they've been in decades.
What I want now is an open source Android device where I have controls.
The #1 things I want to control is app permissions. I should be able to shut them down. If an app "needs" my location, it should get a random spot in the world. If it "needs" my contacts, it should get an empty list. If an app "needs" my network, it should see that it's offline.
The #2 thing I want to control is data going out.
#3 is having security updates forever, rather than sudden EOL with no notice.
I think someone should fork Android and do that. Ironically, I think several Chinese companies are well-positioned to do that, from a market perspective, but not from a cultural perspective.
1) Companies can make a lot of money skimming $1 each off of 100 million people.
2) Federal enforcement agencies don't have time or energy for that. We can outsource that to private firms
3) Private law firms can file class action suits, and companies are forced into agreements where they pay damages AND often need to change behavior
It kinda sorta works too, in that companies stop doing the bad things. Lawyers collect the lion's share of the money, but few consumers care about a $1 payout. Judges approve deals to make sure they're equitable to the class.
It sorta doesn't work, since settlements are negotiated by lawyers who don't really care about anything other than getting paid. Few actually care about the class they're representing. Judges are former lawyers, and part of the corrupt culture. So in many cases, the changes in behavior are less than one might hope for.
There are plenty of companies which didn't do so well when the management team went from a domain-specific background (e.g. having an electronic engineering run an IC firm) to people with an MBA background.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many other founders were exceptionally competent managers, but at the time, they had never run a major firm before. Everyone has their first major restructuring at some point.
The whole point of youtube was to make it convenient for decentralized content creators to share things. Most WANT their stuff being downloaded. If I'm uploading an educational or family video to Youtube, it's because it's a convenient way for others to watch it, not because I want to maintain control, or earn $0.0001 in ad revenues for Auntie being shown a Trump campaign ad.
youtube-dl makes it possible for kids in the developing world to watch educational videos, for people to watch family videos in rural America, and for kids to learn remotely.
Youtube-dl doesn't do what Youtube does. What it does is extends Youtube to millions of people without high-speed internet connections. That's not a population Google particularly cares about including (not a lot of ad dollars), but it's also not one Google particularly cares about excluding (they are not douchebags, like the RIAA).
If the RIAA wants locked-down controls, they should go with centralized platforms. That's what they're there for. In the meantime, shooting educators using Youtube in the foot means, eventually, educators will go somewhere else.
* Complied with a DMCA take-down request which he had no legal reason to comply with. DMCA takedown requests are for infringing content. DMCA bans anticircumvention measures, but that's between youtube-dl and RIAA. RIAA does that by initiating litigation, or sending a demand letter to the youtube-dl project.
* Took down forks of youtube-dl, which he had no reason to do. Those should have been independent DMCA requests.
* Threatened to ban users who forked youtube-dl, in violation of his own ToS and DMCA policy.
If Nat was doing the bare minimum required to maintain legal compliance, I wouldn't fault him. Legally, he's zealously pursuing youtube-dl and acting as the RIAA's lapdog. At the same time, he's publicly making statements of empathy towards youtube-dl.
Pathetic.
For a while, there were, but they disappeared, and now it's a web of 404s and obsolete documents. Most recommended chrubuntu, but (1) that relies on obsolete ChromeOS components, which introduce security issues (2) someone said that's now dead too.
I'll see if Chromium builds for it. Thanks for the pointer. There's a lot of AC700's out there.
Tech is a bit different, since things move fast. Less organizational cruft has time to accrue, so I'd agree boardroom table is the predominant problem. But most companies don't move that fast.
1) Organizations build up capabilities over time they don't need. For example, there might be a purchasing department with a complex approval process. Getting rid of that process can cut costs and improve efficiency.
2) There might be opportunities for outsourcing nonessential internal roles into organizations who specialize in those, and can do them at better quality and lower cost.
3) There might be efficiency gains by combining or breaking up units which grew up organically.
... and so on.
Once you come up with a good structure, there's a question about how to transition:
1) Good people tend to leave during layoffs, which is the opposite of what you want. How do you protect critical units?
2) People who leave don't necessarily want to train their replacements.
3) Some people just don't want change.
... and so on. You want to minimize morale hit. A lot of that is in the details of how transitions are handled. In some sense, in a best-case, if you're, for example, outsourcing IT to a company which specializes in IT, your top IT employees will seamlessly transition to that company. Your lower-tier IT employees will have some path out which leaves them minimally disgruntled about being laid off, but no opportunity to do damage on the way out.
Think about it. You're a competent, qualified executive who grew a 10 person company to 10,000 people. It's no longer competitive, and you realize you need 7,500 people to compete.
Would you know how to do that? Or would you like to work with someone who has done it 50 times before, day-in-day-out, and seen things go right and wrong?
That's the selling point. How much value does it add? I've seen it go both ways.
If you're hiring PWC to do a Fit For Growth Transformation, that means you believe you need layoffs. The symptoms of are usually obvious: you're burning money, and you'll run out soon. They can be less obvious: You lose contracts based on cost, because your overhead is hire. You don't hire the PWC/FFG team if you believe you're poised for actual growth or need help hiring to move into new markets.
You can get their book. It says point-blank that FFG generally involves a 25% layoff. This isn't some big secret or inside story. It's just what they do.
The advertised value-add of PWC/FFG isn't to tell you that you need a layoff (you knew that already). The value-add is understanding how to structure that layoff. An ideal outcome of a layoff is that you've cut the corporate fat: people doing useless things with no value add. You've removed a big chunk of the corporate bureaucracy. You have faster, simpler, more agile business processes. When you want to do something, you don't need a 3-month approval from Jim in legal, Alice in finance, and Yoav in branding, since Jim, Alice, and Yoav no longer work there. On the other hand, parts of your business which contribute business value are left untouched.
Does it work? I don't know. But most executives go through this occasionally. As an executive, you're an expert on your own business. PWC/FFG has done layoffs over and over and over again. They've seen what can go right and what can go wrong. You're paying for that experience.
It'd need to cover the corner cases well. Multimonitor setups. High res. Etc.
I've been gradually moving from Amazon to eBay to Aliexpress. Ironically, this happened because I got scammed on Amazon a few times. I figured if I was gonna get scammed, I might as well save a bit with eBay, and it seemed a bit more reliable. Then Aliexpress came out even cheaper, although shipping times are sometimes insane.
Aliexpress also has real human beings. I got scammed there once too, and the result was human, efficient, and chaotic (partial refund, on a product worth $0). All-in-all, it was a lot better than talking to Amazon's recently-useless reps, or eBay computers.
What's odd is Amazon had amazing customer service just a couple years back.
And if I need quality/genuine, I order direct from the vendor most of the time.
Congratulations!
If the model number doesn't have a typo, it might be expired. Most of the ones not listed tend to be expired, and many vendors sell expired ones.
Oh ohs!
If so, you're in good company. Many less affluent, less educated families find themselves there. Some find they wasted $150 on a Chromebook which has a few months left, and some keep using it, and find their data held for a few grand in bitcoin.
Thanks Google!
But I suspect you have the CB514, not CB154, which IS listed, and which expires in 2024. If so, you've got almost four years left. Congratulations!
There's a whole pile of AC700 Chromebooks around, with no upgrade path as far as I know, at least if you don't want to be p4wn3d.
I guess it beats Android, where the same happens, only without the warning.
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
If this scenario happens, you can think of it as Google terminating the lease early. No biggie.