giantrobot

Unless you're a rich pedophile. Those guys are super safe.

To add on I've seen a lot of instances where hardware people build software...like hardware people. They think in terms of relays and maybe PLCs and build their software along that model. They're sort of stuck thinking in terms of hundreds or thousands of Hertz. They don't really internalize that a little silicon bit can run at hundreds of megahertz and read sensors thousands or millions of times per second.

It's not about being dumb, I think it comes from the mental model where big electrical appliances/machines are controlled by big slow relays and switches. Changes to the state of operation involve inertia and momentum and huge power spikes and fuses that make extremely loud noises when they blow.

Facebo...I mean Meta did it to distance themselves from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (among others).

2107: The year of IPv6, DNSSEC, and The Linux Desktop.

I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.

The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.

Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.

It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.

My solutions to these problems are thus:

1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.

2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.

3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.

4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.

Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".

Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.

You've convinced yourself that asking for a sysdiagnose is only ever used as a stalling tactic by Apple. There's not much I can say that will change your mind.

A minimal reproduction is great in a bug report but it's still not a complete in-situ snapshot of the machine.

> Also things like attaching a sysdiagnose is useless and is well known to be hoops Apple requires bug reporters to jump through with no benefit to either party.

As a former Apple SWE that has read innumerable sysdiagnose reports, this statement is bullshit.

External bug reports very commonly have a variation of "THIS IS BROKEN YOU SUCK FIX THIS" as the main note. Even with a crash log attached that's not at all helpful. A sysdiagnose gives a state of the system the reporter has in front of them. You can't triage a bug with "FIX NOW" as the description.

I know I know, Apple has infinity dollars and every SWE should just magically fix bugs without needing to triage them first. Every external bug reports very is also a special snowflake that deserves concierge VIP serve and a dedicated SWE team to fix.

Mine is seared into my brain. It's also cheating a bit because it's only six digits.

> so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.

See Meta et al complaining about Section 230 of the DMCA. Meta would be entirely able to moderate in an environment where mass scale moderation/censorship would be required to prevent a host's liability for UGC. Almost no one else would be able to do so.

That means no upstart could possible come along to dethrone Meta as they did with MySpace. It would also be impractical to run a FOSS social network (or forums). Meta could literally just have bots sign up on a FOSS social network until its DAU count ran over the statutory minimums to be subject to UGC liability.

Regulatory capture is a de facto ban on competition in a market.

The big feature of the GeForce 256 was hardware offloading of transform and lighting calculations. While it was fixed function it was programmable. This offloaded a pretty significant amount of work from the CPU and lightened the IO load single the math was done on geometry living in the VRAM.

The NV1 and other cards before the GF256 did accelerated drawing and geometry raster but lighting and transformations were done on the CPU in main memory then transferred to VRAM and rasterized.

Even if the GF256 had say the same texel output performance as a TNT2, the T&L running on the GPU would allow for more complex scenes at higher frame rates than a TNT2 doing T&L on the CPU. The GF256 also had better raster performance so for many games it was just a "free" performance upgrade over a TNT2.

> So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore?

Votes and karma. The concept of karma isn't bad but Reddit's implementation is bad. HN has a similar problem. There's only up and down votes with no context.

Why was a post upvoted or downvoted? Did people find it funny or informative? Did it correct the original link or a parent post? No fucking clue. Just scalar value that goes up and down. Then you get bad proxies for context with vote ratios (controversial etc).

Slashdot's voting system isn't perfect but much better. Instead of some scalar value a post is moderated with some sort of context (Interesting, Informative, etc). Voting is also distributed among users and limited. If you get moderator points you're limited in how many you get and you can't post to a thread you've moderated. Meta moderation also helps to correct for overzealous/reactionary moderation.

The context is useful because you get an idea of why something was moderated as it was. The limited number and random distribution of moderation points helps inspire actual moderation. You either downvote obviously trolling/bad faith posts or upvote actually constructive posts. No one wastes their mod points on memes and "me too" posts. Drive by memes and short knee jerk replies just wallow in the Score: 1 area most users quickly learn to filter out. They're not punished but also not rewarded.

Giving everyone unlimited mod points devolves a site into gaming karma. Trolls enjoy seeing how low their karma can get while karma whores will post whatever gets upvotes rather than something constructive. Karma is a bad proxy for constructive contributions to the community.

There was also CD+Graphics which encoded graphical information in a subchannel not used by CD audio. It ended up providing about 28kbps of data for the graphics. It is used for karaoke but some commercial albums were released that displayed images of the bands and stuff when played on a compatible player.

> The problem, for me, is that self-running installers can create a mess that's hard to keep track of.

For reasons my machine with a beefy GPU is stuck on an older set of Nvidia drivers. I've got them pinned with apt. The ollama installer fucked everything up by updating stuff that apparently wasn't pinned. After I had fun cleaning up that fucking mess I found it overwrote my custom systemd service file so I had to go in and fix that.

Curl-to-shell is a bullshit antipattern. I have no interest in going back to the dark days of expanding tarballs to / and hoping for the best.

> so it makes you wonder what the fuss about ALPRs is and how it affects them.

Wow. Poe's Law in full effect here. I'm not sure if you're just oblivious or trolling. If you're oblivious do yourself a huge fucking favor and read up on what Flock is doing in addition to ALPR and how even that is abused by law enforcement.

You're right I was forgetting the Falcon Heavy. But it's certainly not cheap when the government is footing the bill. The Nancy Grace Roman launch cost NASA $255m, far above SpaceX's prices for even an expendable GTO launch.