alerighi

I appreciate my 2011 vehicle that only has a car radio with FM tuner and CDs, and yes, I know that I could easily swap it but I didn't on purpose, let me explain why:

- all the controls that I need, that are basically volume, radio station or CD track, are easily accessible trough physical buttons and knobs, that I can use without taking my eyes off the street

- I get in the car, insert the key and the radio turns on instantly and start playing music, no things that have to boot, no things that have to connect, etc. I usually listen to the radio and I stay up to date with news, listen to programs, listen to music without the need to create a playlist, or not and always listen to the same songs, or worse paying a subscription to just listen to music

- if I want to listen something different I can just put in a CD, and considering it supports mp3 CDs a CD can contain up to 100 songs without a noticeable loss in quality

- the UI of the radio in general is well designed, no useless functions, everything is easy to reach, no distractions. The radio is well integrated into the car dashboard, the design has something to say, not like a boring 10' tablet

- no distractions, notifications from my phone stay on my phone, calls don't pop up, simply when I arrive at destination I recall saying I was driving, or respond to the message

- finally, the sound quality is good, much better than most of integrated infotainment in modern cars that have 2000 useless functions, a shitty touchscreen, and a very poor sound quality. If I turn the volume all way up it shakes the car, the quality of analog FM radio is much better than modern digital radio that have the quality of a low bitrate MP3, and we are talking about the stock radio of a VW Golf 6, a normal car (when I bought it in 2011), not something fancy.

Except than later we returned to a sort-of segmented memory. That is of course paging, our programs allocates pages of memory that are a fixed size (4096 bytes) and are arranged in memory or in swap space how the OS decides.

We just have the illusion of a "flat" memory model, but it's not really flat, the CPU and the operating system does an important job in translating our flat memory model in something that is not flat at all. All that address translation work could have been avoided if we accepted to not have a flat memory model and be aware that our memory is divided in pages.

Basically we are doing in hardware the job of managing a non flat memory space that the programmer, or well, the compiler (or these days you would say the AI agent) could probably to better because it knows how to allocate things to avoid being them on page boundaries, and all of this to give the illusion to the programmer that it's working with a flat memory (except when it does something wrong and gets a segmentation fault, that, as the name suggests, is an hint that at the end the memory is not really flat).

but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once

Is really that simple compared to a normal cross platform web application written in (for example, but there are multiple frameworks) QT?

I mean, sure you have to write JavaScript and not C++, but in the end is that more simple? Maybe to start with yes, but then you get into tooling, typescript, multiple build steps, etc that makes it probably more complex than a old boring QT program in C++. And nowadays with most software not even written by humans, does the argument "but javascript is simpler than C++" really holds?

It's absurd than we could have very performant computers, and we still have the performance of 10 years ago because the added resources in modern PCs gets wasted by programs that need to run an entire Chrome instance to do basic stuff. I mean, open 4 programs that use Electron (Discord, Spotify, VSCode, WhatsApp desktop) on a modern PC and you consumed most of the available RAM just for them.

And a limited VM, for example I look at the documentation and it's not possible to share USB devices with the VM, making it perfectly useless for doing embedded development where you have to connect to the boards with USB. I will continue to use UTM for that reason...

It did work quite well. The problem with the filesystem could have been solved by optimizing the Windows kernel, that would have benefit also programs run outside the WSL by the way (NTFS have performance problems and Microsoft knows, and even provided a kind of solution as far as I know with the developer FS or what they call it).

The thing that I don't like of the WSL2 is that is just a VM, but a VM that is very limited. For example working in the embedded development field I often need to use serial ports or USB devices, a thing that the WSL2 is not capable of doing (unless passing trough USB/IP that has its compatibility issues especially for stuff like debuggers needing precise timing), and that the WSL1 was at least for the serial ports able to do. This is a limitation that doesn't allow me to use the WSL. Same thing with all kind of other software that wants to access peripherals of the machine natively (e.g. a GPU for example, or another PCI card, something that to be fair is not even doable as far as I know with hypervisors on Windows but completely doable with hypervisors running on a Linux OS where trough the IO MMU you can share any PCI device of the host to the VM).

WSL1 was a great idea, bad thing that Microsoft abandoned it for something that is just good for web application development.

The future is clearly that, model inference running on consumer hardware not a network datacenter. We are getting there, local models gets better and better, it's only a matter of time. Of course this would be bad news for big AI companies (and whoever invested in them).

if you don't like that car/company, don't buy their product. buy competitors. that will show them much better. (or petition to government to put pressure on them).

That maybe fine, but if something is allowed at the time I've bought the car, and then the manufacturer changes their policy such that the usage that I did is no longer allowed?

BTW, to me this is bullshit, first cars shouldn't be connected to the internet in the first place, in the case that they are, I would need to be in full control of what I can do with the API, not that I need to use special software to talk to my own car.

No: T&C cannot override the law, that is a national/EU law is still superior to anything that is written in the T&C. If there is a contrast between T&C and the law of course that T&C are just scratch paper.

To me there is a fundamental difference. Even if PC hardware costs slightly more (now because of the RAM situation, Apple producing his chips in house can get better deals of course), it's something that is worth more investing in in.

Maybe you spend 1000$ more for a PC of comparable performance, well tomorrow you need more power, change or add another GPU, add more RAM, add another SSD. A workstation you can keep upgrade it for years, adding a small cost for an upgrade in performance.

An Apple machine is basically throw away: no component inside can be upgraded, you need more RAM? Throw it away and buy a new one. You want a new GPU technology? You have to change the whole thing. And if something inside breaks? You of course throw away the whole computer since everything is soldered on the mainboard.

There is then the software issue, with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server usage. True nowadays you can install Linux on it, but the GPU it's not that well supported, thus you loose all the benefits. You have to stuck with an OS that sucks, while in the PC market you have plenty of OS choices, Windows, a million of Linux distributions, etc. If I need a workstation to train LLM why do I care about a OS with a GUI? It's only a waste of resources, I just need a thing that runs Linux and I can SSH into it. Also I don't get the benefit of using containers, Docker, etc.

Mac suck even hardware side form a server point of view, for example it's not possible to rack mount them, it's not possible to have redundant PSU, key don't offer remote KVM capability, etc.

It's not the job of the operating system to protect children. Social media is bad even for adults, to my point of view why they don't address the source of the problem, banning what Instagram, TikTok, etc. is doing that is bad even for adults, and don't make laws that restricts even more what a person can do with their personal computer (if this law comes into effect it's like saying it would be illegal to run Linux or whatever OS that doesn't implement this bullshit)?

Well, surely because the government is full of investors in Meta and uses Meta for their propaganda, and possibly because the government wants more data to put on their databases that is used by ICE and other agencies.

To me is strange that for such important document they didn't print them and scan with a scanner (that way it's physically impossible that some metadata or other thing that is not on the printed piece of paper ends up in what is released).

It's the standard practice.

Nowadays they call AI everything. Browsers translate websites from decades, when AI was only a word you would see in science fiction movies.

Why they are a security feature? They are not, the article even says it. Even if UUID4 are random, nobody guarantees that they are generated with a cryptographically secure random number generator, and in fact most implementations don't!

The reason why in a lot of context you use UUID is when you have a distributed system where you want your client to decide the ID that is then stored in multiple systems that not communicate. This is surely a valid scenario for random UUID.

To me the rule is use UUID as a customer-facing ID for things that has to have an identity (e.g. a user, an order, etc) and expose it publicly through APIs, use integer ID as internal identifier that are used to create relations between entities, and interal IDs are always kept private. That way numeric ID that are more efficient remain inside the database and are used for joining data, UUID is used only for accessing the object from an API (for example) but then internally when joining (where you have to deal with a lot of rows) you can use the more efficient numeric ID.

By the way, I think that the thing of "using UUID" came from NoSQL databases, where surely you use an UUID, but also you don't have to join data. People than transposed a best practice in one scenario to SQL, where its not really that best practice...

If you put an index on the UUID field (because you have an API where you can retrieve objects with UUID) you have kind of the same problem, at least in Postgres where a primary key index or a secondary index are more or less the same (to the point is perfectly valid in pgsql to not have any primary key defined for the table, because storage on disk is done trough an internal ID and the indexes, being primary or not, just reference to the rowId in memory). Plus the waste of space of having 2 indexes for the same table.

Of course this is not always the case that is bad, for example if you have a lot of relations you can have only one table where you have the UUID field (and thus expensive index), and then the relations could use the more efficient int key for relations (for example you have an user entity with both int and uuid keys, and user attribute references the user with the int key, of course at the expense of a join if you need to retrieve one user attribute when retrieving the user is not needed).

Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.

In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?

To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.

I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on doing so.

Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.

Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.

More easily in the past (I don't think if it's still true for 4K) you only needed an HDMI splitter to bypass HDCP copy protection.

It's easy to make the switch in a rich country with less than 10 millions of inhabitants, mostly living in big cities.

It's not that simple. There are a ton of legacy systems that upgrading would cost a lot of money and it's not the fact or replacing a 100 euros smartphone. A lot of these systems have a critical (safety) function, and thus if they stop working there would be consequences (I've mentioned the elevator alarm, but consider alarms for plants in remote areas that use 2G to send out alarms, let's say a pumping station for sewer, remote sensors in the mountains, dataloggers, electronic bracelet given to people that has restrictive sentences, etc).

This is the same reasoning why they keep active the "old" analog telephone network, why not everyone is switched to VOIP, because there are situations where it's still used by stuff that is critical or too expensive to replace.

with 3G/4G/5G on higher frequencies as optional bandwidth booster.

There are 5G bands in the ~700MHz bandwidth (that was recovered by switching to more efficient encoding for DTV) that could be used that are even lower than 2G that is around 900MHz.

They could (and probably will) dismiss 2G for consumer use, but keep some frequencies that are used by operators that provide MTM SIM.

Give them a reason to switch and they will adopt it - they both ditched their land lines.

I've tried to make my grandma learn how to use a phone to send SMS multiple times and failed. If she uses a mobile phone (rare situation) she uses it as a landline phone, that is type the number that she wants to call, not even using the contacts in the phone. To be fair I had difficulties explaining how to use a cordless landline phone.

Speaking of elderly, there are a lot of them that have dedicated devices that they can use to make emergency calls to registered numbers, that probably use 2G network (some other use even landline). Since these devices are even provided for free by the national healthcare system, I see that there is not much money to spend to upgrade them.

BTW, are we sure that all the smartphone out there support VoLTE? If not, to make phone calls they need to fallback to 3G/2G, it was a common problem not many years ago, with some providers (Iliad) that even started supporting VoLTE like less than 2 years ago...

You can't shut down 2G, because there are a lot of devices, mainly embedded systems like alarms, lift emergency call button, GPS trackers, etc. that still use 2G. Also 2G is the only reliable network connection in a lot of areas that are not otherwise reached by 3G/4G/5G, mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise, and also is low frequency, thus 2G is the only option available in situations such as on top of mountains and stuff. And finally there is still a lot of people, maybe elders, that don't have/want a smartphone (mainly because they are more complex to use etc.) and still use an old Nokia with 2G networks (they only need to call or send SMS in the end).

Also: VoLTE is not a thing since a lot of years, and probably there are even a ton of smartphones out there that does not support it (and thus switch back to 2G/3G to place voice calls).

They do that now because they care about your security, but to make it difficult to modify (jailbreak) your own devices to run your own software that is not approved by Apple.

What they do is against your interests, for them to keep the monopoly on the App Store.

I don't thing Google will enforce this verification as an option that cannot be disabled. Not because they care about open-source, but because there are contexts where Android is used where the device doesn't have an internet connection to contact Google services to verify apps that are installed by whatever deployment method is used. I talk about all the industrial contexts where the devices (terminals that operators use) doesn't connect to the internet but to a local network that is only used to communicate internally with the server the application is using.

By the way, if that is truly implemented and not bypassable using some methods such as some developer option, I think that I will return to running a custom ROM (hoping that they would not start restricting also the possibility to unlock the bootloader, fortunately that is up to the manufacturer and you would still find phones with unlockable bootloader, or just get an older phone).

Of course they want them: if not one could install a modified Signal client from F-Droid and bypass the mass surveillance they want to introduce with Chat Control.

I'm considering that the UK did not take a bad decision of leaving the EU. The EU is demonstrating itself as a more and more corrupt institution that is not democratic (in the sense of doing what the people want it to do) at all.

They are also shooting themself in the foot: the USA impose to us tariffs, we make laws from which benefit 2 big American companies, instead of pushing for developing alternatives to these companies.

This is plain stupid. Countries (e.g. where I live) already have systems like SPID or CIE that can authenticate users using a multitude of factors, for example I can authenticate myself with a QR and a phone, or I can not even have a phone at all and have a 20 euros NFC reader connected to the PC and can authenticate using my digital document and a PIN.

I see this as a huge stepback to be fair.

I remember the time one of my coworkers accidentally enabled failevault on our CI machine, I had to take it out of the rack, dust it off, connect it to a monitor and keyboard, just to login and disable it. Good thing they made it can be unlocked with SSH, so in case it happens another time I can just do it remotely.

First not all Android versions do that, and not all vendors implement that. Not everyone is running the latest version and has a Google Pixel. Second passing from the OS is less secure since there are a multitude of actors, Google, the device vendor, eventual VPN app, etc. that could get access to that queries (in fact apps to block ADS such as ADAway if you don't have root use VPN functionality to intercept DNS queries). In the end if you want to be safe better not pass from the OS in the first place.

What I like about Tabby is the fact that it has also options to connect to serial ports.

I know that is not something useful to everyone, but working in an embedded using serial ports is something I do everyday. And I know there is Putty or Kitty or Teraterm or another serial connection tools, but most of them are either only for Windows, and don't allow all the options that I need (e.g. option to enable local line editing with history).

The fact that it uses Electron... whatever, we are still full of Electron applications anyway, it's not an issue to me, I have enough RAM.

I've jet to find something replacement that either has all the features of tabby (including support for connecting to serial ports) I would be happy to switch.

The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.

That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.

Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.

To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.

Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?

To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...

A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.

Yes because inductive charging has a lot of losses, they are ~75% efficient, that means that you waste 1/4 of your battery capacity, and that is power that you also pay for in your electricity bill (for how it's small).

While a phone with removable battery, like it was normal back in the days, you just buy whatever number of batteries you want, when the battery is dead you replace it, and you instantly have a 100% charged phone in a matter of 10 seconds. It's surely better than a MagSafe, than a powerbank, etc.