pm

I noticed this when it was first announced on HN as well. Hoping to give it a try as well shortly.

Hey Alex! Just wanted to say I came across Slicer three or so months ago, researching automatic provisioning for RPis (and other devices in the homelab). It piqued my interest, as I was also researching solutions for partitioning and distributing workloads. I hope to give Slicer a go within the next quarter, however I'm still getting to grips with the fundamentals of distributed computing. Either way, it's interesting work.

It is possible to exist in both camps. The quality of the process affects the quality of the product, and the quality of your thought affects the quality of the process. It's a cycle of continual learning, and from that perspective, thought, process and product are indivisible.

Treating code as a means to an end doesn't guarantee success for your product anymore than treating code as a craft.

The company cares about neither. People inside the company will care about a great many things. The people who care about users either don't have the power to act or no longer care enough to do so.

If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.

This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.

Quality is 2nd best to what? And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS.

Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.

It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.

It was specifically for the M1 mac minis, so not too fussed about everything else, but judging from the comments, experiences are mixed.

I'll try to sign up again in a week or two.

I won't comment on the reliability of their services, as I've not experienced it. I was signing up specifically to provision a M1 mac mini, and couldn't navigate it. It was unfortunate, but worth a comment, in case others experience the same issue (or someone else could point me in the right direction).

Glad to know you've got good experiences though.

I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.

I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.

I don't think wpa_supplicant.conf has been used for sometime, as they moved to cloud-init for bootstrapping. It requires the network-config file instead, the format of which is documented on the cloud-init documentation page.

I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks. I offer my own network-config below, though I've only tested it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have two 3B+s).

  network:
    version: 2
    renderer: networkd
    wifis:
      wlan0:
        regulatory-domain: "AU"
        dhcp4: true
        dhcp6: false
        optional: false
        access-points:
          "<access-point-name>":
            password: "<password>"

The important parts are:

1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server). It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet.

2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't remember about quoting the string, however).

3. Disabling IPv6 may be relevant, though unlikely. It was just in a working configurations I found; I just haven't had time to confirm it. The relevant line in my user-data file is as follows:

  bootcmd:
  - sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

The rest of the configuration is standard, though I purposefully made the wi-fi non-optional so I could confirm that wi-fi worked (my only Internet at the moment is through my iPhone hotspot, which was another source of issues, but that's a whole other story).

NB. According to someone else, the imager has the respective command line options for user-data and network-config, which I didn't know.

What were some of the technical challenges you experienced while reverse-engineering the wallpaper system? I've been reverse-engineering (for lack of a better term) some of macOS' and Xcode's poorly-documented functionality prototyping a personal developer tool. My investigation isn't sophisticated by any means; it's just been trial-and-error, but I haven't found much online in the way of resources for people going down this route.

Cool project!

This article is yet another reminder I need to learn Haskell (I've been meaning to for a decade), although the code from this article is approachable considering the topic. However, I've just started using Rust for professional projects, so the code you've posted is a bit easier to read, if more verbose, though the concepts are still unfamiliar to me.

I'm assuming this isn't your first go at writing a compiler?

Ignoring its negative connotation, it's more likely to be a highly advanced "stochastic parrot".

> "You don't do that without some kind of working internal model of mathematics."

This is speculation at best. Models are black boxes, even to those who make them. We can't discern a "meaningful internal representation" in a model, anymore than a human brain.

> "There is just no way you can get to the right answer by spouting out plausible-sounding sentence completions without understanding what they mean."

You've just anthropomorphised a stochastic machine, and this behaviour is far more concerning, because it implies we're special, and we're not. We're just highly advanced "stochastic parrots" with a game loop.

Swift evolution and governance is open and publicly documented. It will always be dominated by Apple engineers, but the evolution of the language is largely orthogonal to Apple's OS releases.

I'm not sure how much of the standard library is available on the server side. However, I it's more about the engineers' interest than it is Apple's, and in that respect, the Swift ecosystem has been evolving constantly, e.g., the Swift toolchain was entirely divested from Xcode a month ago.

I can't speak for the .NET ecosystem, but your fears are unfounded. Whether Swift is useful in a cross-platform context is another question, however.

My understanding of CVE is superficial at best. I thought it was just an acronym publicly identifying vulnerabilities; I didn't realise there was a political structure behind it all.

While the article presents good food for thought, certification isn't a practical solution to the problem at hand. This database seems like a reasonable alternative.