chunkyks

It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.

My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]

You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/

Also known as bikeshedding: http://bikeshed.org

(if the color scheme is hard to read, hit reload. You'll understand after reading the piece)

Wake me up when wayland just works for basic things I need and use daily, and I don't have to hear some diatribe about why what I do daily is wrong.

(What I do may be "wrong" in some cosmic technological sense, but it's still "the only thing supported by the software vendor" and also "isn't actually broken" in the sense of "works just fine". Unlike wayland, which "doesn't work just fine")

If you think about it, a Turing machine is also Turing complete, and also is a zero player game where one only sets initial inputs...

I got you! https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer

We've been hit by this.

When I talked to them four years ago, they agreed we were good to use it for free, no problem.

The dollar figure they're asking for would make it the single most expensive software product we would be licensing in our enterprise, by a lot. The deadline is absurdly soon for such a big deal. And they opened discussion in an incredibly hostile manner and have made no attempt to work with us.

So, I'm helping lead the effort to completely purge them from our ecosystem. On the one hand, I'm sad because their stuff is pretty good. On the other hand, their behavior is bad and the product isn't better by the amount they're asking for.

Good riddance.

I'm not the only person who uses "dc" for throwaway calculations all the time? Woo!

The thing that I find has the biggest useful-to-popularly-known ratio is "tee".

This book was wonderful. I worked through it and it made it super easy to create one. Thank you for writing this!

(https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer was the one I created. Slightly obtuse but I really enjoyed writing it)

I work with a lot of economists. As such, I'd argue that people respond to incentives. Famous example being the cobra effect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive)

The job market is hell to apply in. Job seekers are incentivised to come up with strategies and techniques to make mass application simpler, and sure enough, they have. Go team humanity.

I developed an unhealthy obsession with the RAND book in 2020,which culminated in an article on the front page of the wsj. https://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-million-random-digits-numb...

RAND used to cut copies of the punch card deck for anyone who asked, but I'm sadly unable to find anyone who's still got a copy.

Are there in person communities for this sort of thing? I've set myself a personal project to reproduce some circuits I have in a 1947 paper. But I'm not a hardware guy, huge tracts of the tooling are opaque, best practices are unclear, etc etc etc.

So I'm looking to just come meet people in person who know the material and can provide advice. Do such groups exist? Especially in Los Angeles?

"malicious compliance". Do exactly what you're told!

It's easy to imagine that the same person who's willing to ignore explicit instructions and clearly put others at risk, is going to be willing to spend extra time struggling to open a locked container.

This isn't going to be a "gave it a tug, didn't open, give up and move on" situation.

I have a USG Pro 4. Which is still purchasable from their website, not yet EOL, nominally still supported. The only firmware update in the last two years was to fix a security issue, and didn't include support for updated VPNs.

Release notes history is here: https://www.ui.com/download/software/usg-pro-4

The wireguard of which you speak is only available on their "next gen" gateways, ie, not the full set of gateways currently "supported": https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/12594825307927-UniFi-G...

It's now been three years since at least some of the forum threads started expressing concern: https://community.ui.com/questions/L2TP-unsecure-update-to-I...

From my perspective, they have failed catastrophically to do what I perceive as the pivotally important parts of their job, without which the rest of it is pointless. So, while you say "Just stop", I say "Why the hell should this company be trusted with anything network-related, if they can't do bare-minimum-required security stuff?"

The hilarity that goes with this is that their VPN has been broken for years - android and iPhone both deprecated protocols that were considered insecure, but ubiquiti hasn't seen fit to add any others. It has been years.

Their security posture is trash, which is unfortunate for a company that plays a central role in security

But then you lose many of the benefits of a single pane of glass.

There's also the trust issue; the VPN problem has been known for years. If they won't maintain a key security component of their key security device, why would I trust them with anything?

I bought into their unifi ecosystem years ago. Separate devices, prosumer pricing, features and quality, single pane of glass.

... And I haven't upgraded anything since. Their new products are totally undirected, they aren't making items that are obvious and needed. Their software is falling behind and they just don't care.

Case in point: the usg pro 4 is years old but they havent released an updated affordable just-the-border device. Their new stuff like the dream machine, and now this, just isn't the right thing to replace what was there before. The VPN on there doesn't work with recent Android or iPhone, and they just don't care.

Adding even the most basic firewall rules is hard. The single pane of glass got a major interface overhaul, and they added a huge amount of hard-to-turn-off phone-home crap at the same time. Enshittification reigns supreme.

And don't forget other runty hardware like the poe ceiling lights and doorbell.

The company just needs to buckle down, make good stuff, fire the product astronauts, fix obvious major problems before adding pointless new features.

... Suffice to say, my next hardware refresh almost certainly won't be from this company.

The research has prompted fears that a lack of major regulation in the data brokerage sector may constitute a national security risk.

At least you have to pay now. Historically OPM just gave it away for free. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...

Or even worse, premiums went up because you could have inherited costly diseases (but didn't), and they have no way to verify it unless you also prostrate yourself on the altar of no privacy.

My pet silliness in sql from a couple years ago: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer

You remind me I need to finish my hunt the wumpus implementation. (sqlite has an easy way to get user input, mid query...)

I'm brand new to this. I've got a relatively simple schematic from the 1950s I want to reimplement, to have a functioning thing on my desk.

As you say, a few parts are missing (particular vacuum tubes). Unfortunately, every time I start implementing stuff in kicad, that's where I get overwhelmed... And to someone who's not a hardware guy, I'm completely stymied. Can you suggest what I should do?

Many years ago, I wrote a tool that logs OBDII and GPS data - it was one of the first around [pre-dates things like bluetooth ODBII devices and github], I never really focused on usability or anything, but what I made was cool: http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/

The real enduring piece, though, was an OBDII simulator; I didn't want to keep going out to my car to work on the logger, and none of the other simulators out there were a) software, and b) supported most of the ELM327/OBDII protocol. So I wrote one.

The website isn't pretty, but if anyone actually wants to learn OBDII programming stuff, the simulator is still, AFAICT, one of the best out there: http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/obdsim.html

FaxMonkey, a well known WoW player and video maker, made a video showing it, at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLZ_q4N55T0

Not in precisely the way you mean, but that can be done: https://www.sqlite.org/expridx.html

As Yegge said, years ago: "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You"

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

Time to link grug brain again! https://grugbrain.dev/

Oh, it's super hard to build good interfaces, I'd never claim otherwise. Everything user facing I build is trash and I know it, so I work with UI people. I would assert that most of what's made under the banner of "UX" by people who think they're good is also trash from a usability perspective.

(it's possible that the ux people are optimizing for something other than end users getting their stuff done, like conversion rate. But that doesn't make a trash interface good, it just means you get to pay your mortgage this month.)

My observation is that once "UI" became "UX", interfaces turned terrible across the board.

When I did the human interface course in my comp.sci degree, there was a lot of attention on standardization, making things people could effectively interact with, consistent feature widgets that are clearly those widgets. Remember "HIG"s?

Nowadays, instead of trying to find a way to make an interface pleasant and consistent, it has to be a unique butterfly of some glorious design that just sucks.

Next time you're designing something with a button that doesn't have a border and isn't clearly a button... Step back and have a rethink. Radio buttons indistinguishable from checkboxes? Your design is bad.

Now get off my lawn

I switched to feedly. No biggie, in retrospect.

But, that was the first Google product where it really hit home, to me, how even if a product is fantastic and useful, Google will kill it without a second thought.

It fundamentally changed my attitude toward Google and made me far more deliberate about what services I choose to rely on, especially from the big G.

Obligatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/