clan

Yeah. I find it important to laugh at the absurdities of life. I found this to be a home-run (albeit light-weight).

It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.

I grant you that it might pander to a certain audience.

You are 100% correct on good fiction.

I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.

Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.

Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.

But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.

I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.

Enough Internet for me today! ;-)

This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.

There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.

I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.

Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)

I have noticed many non-techies simply put words into the address bar and click on the first link from the search result.

So if people just remembers spacename.house then that might be enough.

My dad tend to skip the TLD part as well. The results usually work. When they do not - he gets very confused.

The Internet is really a gold rush for scammers.

I did not understand a thing from that link. But clicking on 2 blue boxes allowed me to download 143 MB of "something" from europe.

Too many secrets, indeed!

Well, yes. You are right.

But as I read the OP it is that he objects to the barrier of entry. He would prefer (possibly very harsh) rate limiting over the hassle of registrering an account. Maybe combined with a weak "nag" screen.

It might be hard implementing in a bulletproof way as IP restrictions are easy to circumvent. But it might be "good enough" to drive more adoption.

I'm a bit on the fence. It would be an interesting experiment.

I did that at home. But I needed to try several KVMs until I found one which was stable. And I hate all the cables.

I agree that the industry hates its consumers and likes to mess things up. CEC never always quite the same. Not supported on many GPUs etc.

I do not want to appear to condone LG. But actually (sorry!) some supoort[0] it using DDC side channels (0x50 rather that 0x51). But I agree it is painful. Yet I prefer it over my cable spaghetti.

[0] https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/wiki/Switching-input-so...

Most people are unaware that the should buy a monitor with USB and DP-Alt mode. The same people are also unaware that they should ensure the same for the laptop they are buying.

Lower prices are always nice. But such things can be found at reasonable prices. I think awareness is a larger problem.

I am happy enough with the built-in speakers. But I do agree that line level aux out on the back would be nice.

What a great idea. It should be obvious and easy but DDC commands are hard to find and should be documented better.

I have a Dell U4323QE in the office and look forward to trying this out. I wondered if it was the same DDC commands so I googled a little and found this gist (concerning DDM):

https://gist.github.com/nebriv/cb934a3b702346c5988f2aba5ee39...

Which has the very useful comment:

https://gist.github.com/nebriv/cb934a3b702346c5988f2aba5ee39...

Which states:

#define LUMINANCE 0x10 #define CONTRAST 0x12 #define VOLUME 0x62 #define MUTE 0x8D #define PBP 0xE9 #define SWAP_USB 0xE7 #define SWAP_INPUT 0xE5 #define INPUT 0x60 #define SUB_INPUT 0xE8 #define INPUT_ALT 0xF4 // alternate address, used for LG exclusively? #define STANDBY 0xD6

I much prefer simple DDC commands over using something like Synergy or Barrier. I think it is a much cleaner solution.

Totally out of fashion today but think of TN3270. Rather than "streaming" they were forms based and heavily keyboard driven. This could easily be mimicked by a GUI but keyboard shortcuts has become an afterthought.

I still today meet users missing those old workflows. But they express it as "old text interface" aka TUI. If you listen to them you realize they mean blazing fast and shortcut driven. When you work with data entry you care about speed - not animations.

Any beginner likes eye candy. The veteran has stopped caring.

I tried but could only find the slides:

https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/

Do you have a link?

You missed the point.

The bike is for biking. Of course it is annoying when people bring it on the bus. Or park it in front of my door.

The bike on the metro is not rare because it is annoying. People do simply not have that much tact. It is more rare because people bike those distances and you pay extra on the metro. It is free on the S-Train which also covers longer distances - hence more bikes.

I find bikes annoying in general as well. But that is because they are usually attached to a human.

The point was that it can actually work.

It is not all of nothing. It is an integrated system which actually works.

This was a reply to a comment which claimed that bikes could not work in a large city with a lot of bikes and public transportation.

The same people often argue that bikes cannot work in cold weather.

Copenhagen has fairly decent public transportation and biking is quite common.

Bikes are allowed basicly everywhere: https://dinoffentligetransport.dk/en/how-to-travel/bicycles-...

Caveat: Bikes are not allowed in the Metro during rush hours 07:00-09:00 and 15:30-17:30. But it is allowed the rest of the time and has 24H service.

You should also know that the greater Copenhagen area is covered by "S-Trains" which are running on dedicated (not mainline) tracks. So metro-ish.

The S-Trains have dedicated space for bikes: https://youtu.be/hgfOxNRAktI

So even bumblebees can fly if you let them.

I respect your opinion and especially your honesty.

And at the same time I hope that you will some day be forced to maintain a project written by someone else with that mindset. Cruel, yes. But unfortunately schadenfreude is a real thing - I must be honest too.

I have gotten to old for ship now, ask questions later projects.

Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!

I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.

So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done? Who should get the least amount of surprise?

Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.

Almost. To such a degree I would call it a very dark pattern.

There is however one very good argument for. Currencies with very high volatility. Think extreme inflation. If you accept their conversion you know what you pay in your own currency. You have then mitigated a risk. If your own currency is volatile then you might gamble and win. If the foreign currency is volatile you will usually win by paying in the foreign currency. If both are volatile then it is a blind gamble.

The important part here are the settlement dates. Your bank usually do not calculate the exchange rate of the eaxct purchase time.

That is the excuse for the "service". But it is still not wanted and I consider it evil.

When traveling places with rampant inflation you will notice that sellers always negotiate 2 prices. One in the local currency and one in what is considered an easy to use hard currency such as USD or Euros. Forgeries and less cash flowing around has made it harder to use other less know but otherwise hard currencies.

So sellers never care what currency you choose to settle in as very close to zero sellers have multiple accounts on the same terminal. And those who really need it will always negotiate in different currencies.

You might have experienced something like this at times when visiting Argentina or Turkey.

So the "service" is only there for those who want to understand what they pay in their own currency or mitigate a settlement date. And will pay for it!

Local terminal holders rarely care. But the ATM mafias (such as EuroNet) do very much so. Because they actively are playing the mitigation game and are allowed to add fees.

I strongly feel this field should be very heavily regulated. But too much money is involved. And if you look at where VISA and MasterCard are located you will understand that is not a regulation happy corner of the planet.

That is what I am suggesting with the Atto adapter.

Infiniband is way faster and lower latency than a NIC. These days NIC==Ethernet.

As Jeff states there are really no Thunderbolt switches which currently limits the size of the cluster.

But would it be possible to utilize RoCE with these boxes rather than RDMA over Thunderbolt? And what would the expected performance be? As I understand RDMA should be 7-10 times faster than via TCP. But if I understand it correctly RoCE is RDMA over Converged Ethernet. So using ethernet frames and lower layer rather than TCP.

10G Thunderbolt adapters are fairly common. But you can find 40G and 80G Thunderbolt ethernet adapters from Atto. Probably not cheap - but would be fun to test! But ieven if the bandwidth is there we might get killed with latency.

Imagine this hardware with a PCIe slot. The Infiniband hardware is there - then we "just" need the driver.

This actually makes me happy! I must be getting old!

It truly is a bad one but I really appreciate Kevin Day for finding/reporting this and for all the volunteer work fixing this.

All I had to do was "freebsd-update fetch install && reboot" on my systems and I could continue my day. Fleet management can be that easy for both pets and cattle. I do however feel for those who have deployed embedded systems. We can only hope the firmware vendors are on top of their game.

My HN addiction is now vindicated as I would probably not have noticed this RCE until after christmas.

This makes me very grateful and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!

Try a larger n.

They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.

While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.

Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.

So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).

The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.

You said it better at first: Standardization.

Posix is the standard.

Docker is a tool on top of that layer. Absolutely nothing wrong with it!

But you need to document towards the lower layers. What libraries are used and how they're interconnected.

Posix gives you that common ground.

I will never ask for people not to supply Docker files. But to be it feels the same if a project just released an apt package and nothing else.

The manual steps need to be documented. Not for regular users but for those porting to other systems.

I do not like black boxes.

I can sympathize. It makes sense.

But...

As a veteran admin I am tired of reading trough Docker files to guess how to do a native setup. You can never suss out the intent from those files - only do haphazardous guesses.

It smells too much like "the code is the documentation".

I am fine that the manual install steps are hidden deep in the dungeons away from the casual users.

But please do not replace Posix compliance with Docker compliance.

Look at Immich for an unfortunate example. Theys have some nice high level architecture documentation. But the "whys" of the Dockerfile is nowhere to be found. Makes it harder to contribute as it caters to the Docker crowd only and leaves a lot of guesswork for the Posix crowd.

Exactly. When it works it is great.

I stick with a single 43" 4K@60 but it was a bit of a challenge to get on the happy path:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intermittent-scanline-fli...

All systems can have issues. But the more widely used systems are at an advantage.

I daily drive FreeBSD on my desktop with KDE. It is not as smooth as Linux and requires a little more tinkering compared to Linux. But I love it!

The killer features for me:

- The pf firewall. Rules you actually understand!

- Jails! When you cannot have Zones this will do.

- Native ZFS. Stable, mature, safe and with all the features you can dream of.

- Linuxulator. Binary compatibility with Linux if need be. Can be put in jail as well.

- pkg/ports. I really like it but I might have been indoctrinated.

- Networking stack. Good. Stable. Makes sense to me.

For a nice graphical UI Linux is more smooth but if you are willing to tinker it can work. As Linux gets all the attention you will see stuff such as Chromium lag behind.

I can understand that can scare people off. But FreeBSD feels like a comfortable old glove for me. I will suffer the minor holes. My beard has grayed and my hair line is non-existant.

If waiting for a laptop I would perhaps wait for FreeBSD 15 for much needed improvements in WIFI. If you want fast WIFI today you need weird hacks routing through a Linux VM[1]. It works rather well but it is honestly a bit clunky.

[1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox

Sounds like Basilica of San Clemente[1][2]. One of the many many many "hidden" gems of Rome. Highly recommend visiting it!

Or you can go on a virtual tour[3]

[1] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/zpXpQuxQLUvE5TLA9

[3] https://www.basilicasanclemente.com/eng/a-virtual-tour/

Perfectly pure happiness:

"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." from the man himself[1]

...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth. Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might then be flowing in the ether.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...

Reasonable.

That seems to be the key word.

One camp argues: Expect nothing. Move on.

The other: Could they - with very little effort (reasonable) - have choosen a more palatable route.

There must be a middle ground between the nihilists and the pampered.

What irony?

The Danish king has zero power. Yes, he needs to sign the laws. Should he refuse, the next law he would see was his removal.

We have been lucky enough to have reasonable people give up power without bloodshed.

Have a word with the French how it goes if not. Can we find other examples of revolutionary wars? Something more close to home?

I sadly see no irony. None at all.

You love a strong man. A negotiator-in-chief. You think that is a president. Learn from the Germans. They replaced a monarch with a toothless head of state (look how I gracefully avoided the Austrian Painter). Most Americans do not even know the difference between the German President and Bundeschancellor.

What you are arguing for is a litteral king. Call it what you want. You will soon enough find out how hard it is to get rid of cetralized power.

What do you think is happening now?

With fewer friends the super power ends up simply being a power. A more volatile world.

Brilliant minds thought up the Marshall plan. It secured the world. Nothing less! The world.

Did it come with a price? Yes. But what the protectionist do not get today as they dismantle the system is that is might actually have been cheaper than the alternative while remaining the leader.

Those who think that governments should be run as a business are delusional. They think we buy F35 because they are the best. The sales proves it! They will never realize that SAAB had better and more fitting options for us. They will never understand that we did pay some protection money. It is not a simple Luca Brasi situation. It is more subtle.

Ou friend is gone so we will try to do that. We have to. Now you understand that might not actually be to your advantage.