Skip Navigation

RegalPotoo

@ RegalPotoo @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
92
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Get your new PebbleOS watch

    Jump

  • I'm pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I've even owned - smart or otherwise.

    That said, I don't think I'm going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren't around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn't had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I'm not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I'll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash

  • Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks

    Jump

  • They talk about AGI like it's some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

  • I hate this image because idiots will see it, not understand what its showing, and make up some crazy shit based on it.

    Jump

  • Oh one one eight nine nine nine...

  • France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU.

    Jump

  • This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

    • The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
    • Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren't based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
    • If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don't be surprised if a country turns around and says "ok, you can't operate here". Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn't mean you get to ignore laws you don't like

    To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

    • A physical device
    • An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

    They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it's use outside of a prosecution. It's not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it's probably better than "no encryption for anyone".

  • France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU.

    Jump

  • So I'm going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

    The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

    What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

    The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn't allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

  • US could cut Ukraine's access to Starlink internet services over minerals, say sources.

    Jump

  • I've been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn't really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he'd been getting a lot recently

  • When the product manager rolls in to open a JIRA ticket

    Jump

  • Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn't matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn't worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it

  • 3DBenchy Sets Sail into the Public Domain

    Jump

  • Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack

  • Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site

    Jump

  • I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that's probably a good deal for the city

  • TIL of the Business Plot, a conspiracy to overthrow the presidency of FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in 1933

    Jump

  • They didn't prosecute anyone because there was essentially no evidence beyond the accusation of one man, and even then no-one was accused of doing anything beyond talking about it

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Nah, that's still engagement. Ignore it, and let it rot away

  • Any Kiwis here? Hardware advice?

    Jump

  • Take a look for yourself:

    https://www.pbtech.co.nz/ https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/

    He says, forgetting what community he is in.

    Bring your existing gear, remembering that we use 240v here. Getting used server bits is pretty difficult and expensive because we don't have anywhere near the density of data centers selling off old stuff. Enterprise switches in particular seem to be hard to get, I've previously had to buy on eBay and pay absurd shipping

  • Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’

    Jump

  • Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.

    So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren't too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you'd want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.

    Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing "looked around and couldn't find anything off the shelf that was suitable" (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.

    They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was "good with computers" by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.

    Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it's essentially a "no code required" drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.

    On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:

    • It lacks real version control - you can "undo" a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
    • Because you can't effectively manage changes to the system, you can't do pre-production releases
    • Its native database system doesn't do referential integrity
    • There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it's really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
    • There is no way to do automated testing
    • The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn't, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of "is this a bug or bad design?"

    Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn't isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.

    Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don't manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer

  • Elon Musk Reportedly Emerges As a Potential Intel Buyer, Involving Qualcomm & Global Foundries In This Blockbuster Deal

    Jump

  • Are there people left who will lend him money after seeing what happened to twitter?

  • S̵̢̡̠̣̜͍̘͍̈́̿͒̈̎̉͌͂̎̾̓Ḩ̶̡̛̯̰̤̻͖̹̝̼͍͔̰̃̅̋̍̈̆̋̋́̔͝Ǫ̴̺͔̫͈͉͎̤͎͗͂̅͒̀͒W̶̛͖̺̰̠̙̲̓͆̋̉̌̆̂͛̀̒̕͘ ̷̨̦̤̇̀̓̉́̅͒̄͝M̶͓̗͚̩̬͈͎͗̓̈́́͜͜Ẹ̵̢̢̺̞͓͓̤͙̙͖̈́̈̉͝ ̶̧̡̲̺͓̮̰̘̮͚͉̝͈̝̀͒́̎̾̓͜͝͝͠T̷̡̟̘̫͋͋̑͊̓͐̊̐̎H̸̪̋͛̓̀̍̂̐̂͐̾̈́̒̃É̵̛̾̅̀͛̃̄̏

    Jump

  • Everything is a wire if the voltage is high enough.

    Every machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough.

  • Automattic "aligns" it's contributions to WordPress

    Jump

  • Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future

  • Automattic "aligns" it's contributions to WordPress

    Jump

  • Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?

  • Dust.

    Jump

  • It's not that they are particularly loud, it's that the noise they do make tends to be quite "whiney" and high pitched and can get quite annoying after a while.

    The problem with putting it outside is that big temperature swings (+/- 10C or so) could cause warping or other problems while printing - the plastic needs to cool at a fairly consistent rate, otherwise you end up with inconsistent sizing on your z-axis.

    Filament itself also doesn't like moisture, so if you live somewhere where you get close to the dew point overnight you could easily ruin the whole spool of filament

  • What is in Area 51?

    Jump

  • "Well is there anything dangerous in there?"

    "That's classified, also, take a good look round at the building you are in and think about that question some more"

    "Shit."

  • What is in Area 51?

    Jump

  • I'm imagining a somewhat boring looking office/lab with a bunch of locked rooms.

    "What's in there?"

    "Oh, it was Dr Simpsons lab in the 90s"

    "Well what were they working on?"

    "Don't know, its classified"

    "Well can we get rid of it?"

    "I don't know, it's classified"

    "Well who does know?"

    "I don't know, its classified"