scarygliders

It does appear to work. I received a message from Discord saying "We determined you're in the adult group. <learn more>"

narrator> And that's when he discovers his account has now been hacked...

;)

Ah, brings back memories of being a Silicon Graphics Customer Support Engineer based in London and the Home Counties, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.

Indy, Indigo, then later the Octanes, and others I can't quite remember the name of off-hand.

The video post-production companies in SOHO - I saw the CGI being rendered for Event Horizon...

The "IBM Stiction Problem" as it was called. Batches of IBM hard drives that worked fine for months - right up until the machines were powered off - which then entailed an on-site visit. The stifled gasp from the customer as I remove the old drive and give it a stern tap on the desk, to get it unstuck so I could clone it to the replacement. ;)

Enjoyed that job immensely, except for the driving around London bit.

Bush Porn. Here in Scotland, way back when I was, oh, 7, 8, 9 years old, always stumbled across discarded porn magazines in the woods I used to play in. Moved area when I was 11, once again, always used to stumble across discarded porn. Bush porn was a thing.

Hmmm, no mention of Teknicad? sadface

I seem to be the only person (along with 3 others who were my cow-orkers) who ever used or heard of Teknicad , running on Tektronix Unix workstations and terminals :)

That could be a very good thing, depending on which part of the planet you live.

For example, I'm in Scotland, and apart from one or two days, we've basically had a "year without a summer", with cooler than normal temps. ;)

Projects I haven't touched for a long, long time...

XRDPConfigurator : https://github.com/scarygliders/XRDPConfigurator

- This is a GUI application I wrote 10 years ago. It even has a full WYSIWYG emulation of the xrdp login screen, which you can use to customize the look of it! All written in Python and PySide. It was originally meant to be a commercial product that I'd sell. Turns out there was no market for it and no one seems interested in it. Oh well!

X11RDP-o-Matic : https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic

- This was a shell script which automatically built and installed the Xrdp server on Debian based systems. Was quite popular back in the day but became kinda obsolete, which was good.

Polkit Explorer : https://github.com/scarygliders/Polkit-Explorer

- reads in a Policykit .policy file, parses its XML contents, and presents the information it contains, on a more human-readable GUI window. This seems to be useful to folks and someone even created an Arch Linux AUR for it, which was nice. I perhaps should try to update it so that it works with more modern versions of Python and PySide.

That last one. Hmmm. It's been a hot minute since I even thought about it, but someone recently created an issue to do with getting it running with python 3.12, so maybe I should have a peek at it once again...

The author of the article, I agree with. It's OK to abandon things. XRDPConfigurator is what I used to learn Python and Qt (with a naive goal of making income from it). That application took a year and bit of my time. I'm particularly proud of the Xrdp emulation, and the WYSIWYG editing of the Xrdp login screen layout! But spending any more time on it was wasted time. I open-sourced it after taking out all the nasty - and self-designed - registration (DRM) stuff I'd also had (which spoke to a central registration server and was Very Clever[tm] With No Chance Of Being Bypassed! ( /s ), and promptly just left it stewing in stasis. And no one was really interested in it, either. I guess Xrdp just isn't sexy enough for folks ;)

Congratulations. I already told you I test my programs. The discussion is about expending brain power and time writing hundreds of lines of code to test the intended user-facing code, which, in my opinion, is just dumber than a bag of hammers.

Don’t get me wrong, the field is riddled with people who think testing is beside them and wash their hand with the quality of what they ship and what they put their users through. That’s an issue to fix not a situation we should tolerate.

See, this is my point. It's not that testing is beside me, it's that my stuff gets tested anyway.

Here's the test: Does it fucking work or not?

You do that by running the thing. If it explodes, find out why and fix it. Job done. No thought or line of code was wasted in writing tests, all brain power was used to initially write a piece of code - which initially had a bug of course - and then said bug was fixed.

My code gets tested. By people using it. Or by me testing it as I write it ("does it fucking work").

There is really only one test.

You can choose to expend your brainpower and time on this planet writing code that will never actually be run by an end-user, or you can just write the fucking code that the end-user will run. That's how I work. Write it and run it. That's the test.

Test code written to test Useful Working Code is time wasted. It's like putting stabiliser wheels on bicycles - you're either gonna be stuck forever riding a bike with stabilisers, or you grow up and rip them off and have a few falls on the bike then become confident and competent enough to ride that bike without them. And have more freedom and time to experiment and go places you couldn't when they were put on.

So yeah. I definitely wouldn't work with people who like wasting my and their time on this Earth.

Write it. Run it. It either does what it's supposed to or not. If it doesn't, find out why and fix it. Or discover that your function/code abstraction/thought was shit in the first place then write it differently - oh and that's the worst part about writing code that tests the Code That Does The Work; say you discover that the function you're writing was a load of bollocks and needs to be highlighted and simply erased - there goes all that test code you spent brainpower and time, with it, too. And now you have to spend even more time writing new test code to test the Code That Actually Does Useful Work.

No thanks. And goodbye.

But I would like to thank all the people here who think testing is useless for their attitude. You make my job easier while hiring.

That's fine.

I've never written a test in my life. Have my programs ever had bugs? Sure. But I sleep very well at night knowing that I spent all my brain power and time writing actual code that Does Useful Work rather than have wasted significant lengths of my time on this planet on writing test code to test the code that does the Useful Work.

You speak of attitude and smugly "thank" those who don't write tests as that acts as your hire-or-not filter. With an attitude like that, I'd 100% not work for anyone with that attitude anyway.

Easily distracted by giant balls of knitting wool ;)

Their one Achilles Heel.

My first home computer was Z80 based; a Sinclair ZX81

I think I still even have a book on Z80 assembly somewhere. Had a bright orange cover.

Er, vaping is 100% NOT smoking.

There is no fire/combustion involved when vaping. Vaping is when a liquid is heated up enough to turn it into a vapour. The same process as heating water enough turns it into steam. That's it. The liquid will have flavourings and nicotine added to it, meaning the vapour produced will deliver said flavourings and nicotine to the person inhaling it. The exhalation will contain remnants of that vapour along with just water vapour - most of the flavourings and nicotine will be absorbed by the person who inhaled it.

I always get puzzled as to why people say they are /disgusted/ by vaping, or why they equate combustion based smoking with the non-combustion based conversion of a liquid into a vapour. Help me understand you. What part disgusts you about vaping? That you can see a cloud of water vapour being exhaled? Have you ever been out somewhere where a fog machine is being used? Congratulations, because the liquid used for the fog machines is mostly the same as used in vapes and also asthma inhalers.

You might as well get "disgusted" by the fact that if you are in a room with another person, you'll inevitably be inhaling part of that other person's exhalation! I guess that's okay though, because their exhalation products aren't visible to you?

This is entirely incorrect. The small village I live in, in Scotland? The really crappy and unreliable public transport? Yep. I need a car if I want to get to the Reasonably Priced Supermarkets and transport the weekly shopping back home conveniently, for example.

Or if I need to travel to Place of Work/customer sites.

And then there's the long trips around the country when I want to embark on them.

So please. Don't tell me I don't need a car. Reality, practicality, beats ideology any day.

I don't hate the idea of living in car-free cities.

It's cities I hate the idea of living in. Which is why I choose not to live in cities. And is why I need a car. Fuck cities, I hate 'em.

Yeesh! It needs a toggle for a dark theme. Was not expecting so much blinding white.

Look at the BBC article...

Headline: "Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images"

@Trump_History45 does appear to be a Trump supporter. However, he is also a parody account and states as such on his account.

The BBC article goes full-on with the implication that the AI images were produced with the intent to target black voters. The BBC is expert at "lying by omission"; that is, presenting a version of the truth which is ultimately misleading because they do not present the full facts.

The BBC article itself leads a reader to believe that @Trump_History45 created those AI images with the aim of misleading black voters and thus to garner support from black voters in favour of Trump.

Nowhere in that BBC article is the word "parody" mentioned, nor any examination of any of the other AI images @Trump_History45 has produced. If they had, and had fairly represented that @Trump_History45 X account, then the article would have turned out completely different;

"Trump Supporter Produces Parody AI Images of Trump" does not have the same effect which the BBC wanted it to have.

Unfortunately you've been misled by the BBC. Please read this: https://order-order.com/2024/03/05/bbc-panoramas-disinformat...

Those AI generated photos are from a Twitter/X parody account @Trump_History45 , not from the Trump campaign as the BBC mistakenly (or misleadingly) claim.

Whilst I realise that it would eat into the weight budget of such landers, I reckon adding a fuel cell with enough fuel to last through the lunar night, which keeps the lander and its batteries alive, should be a standard and integral part of such craft.

Of course, that would mean taking less science with it, and increase the cost of the lander, and quite possibly if I can think of such a thing, engineers more clever than I am have already considered such.

Still, congrats to the team for managing to at least soft land on the moon. No doubt they'll be learning a lot of lessons from this mission.

Hang on. You said you were living in a minivan - a vehicle which took a few technological leaps to be able to develop and build, so you could live in it.

You also appear to have an internet connection and a means to use it. Again, technological leaps were required for you to be able to whine on HN.

Perhaps - if you're so utterly sincere and serious about saving the planet as you appear to be - you should be living in the nearest available cave? After all, that minivan is likely to use an internal combustion engine and runs on dead dinosaurs; let alone the plastics and metals and silicon used in said minivan's assembly.

See, this is what I don't get about eco-heros like you appear to be - even if you are homeless, you're still, right now, utilising every single technological leap that it took to get you to the stage of even just living in your minivan and complaining about rocket development on the internet. This, to me, reeks of hypocrisy.

> X is the tech we have used since the dawn of time. It was released in 1984 and so the architecture is not suited for the way modern desktops operate.

X is a mature architecture which Just Works Fine. I don't know why it's considered "not suited for the way modern desktops operate", because as an X(org) user, all my desktops operate Just Fine whereas whenever I try Wayland my desktops do not operate Just Fine.

> Wayland is a modern replacement, but it is not a drop-in. That is because it has a completely different architecture and approach.

Wayland is a newcomer and alternative to X(org) - the authors of Wayland want it to take over from X(org) and for X(org) to die off. I hope that X(org) stays.

I still don't understand the hate for X/Xorg [0]. It must be a generational thing. Maybe I'm just being a grumpy greybeard? Who knows. But I do know that whenever I try, say, KDE Plasma (Wayland) I get problems, for example, playing games with WINE, and other annoying glitches and hitches which I don't get using MATE/Xorg.

And no, I don't care if Gnome works great with Wayland - I have a visceral contempt for the modern iteration of the Gnome desktop (and had nasty experiences with the Gtk toolkit way back when which put me off developing with it forever.)

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/175chou/linux_b...

That is nothing compared to the cringe I experience whenever I see people type "lead" when it really called for "led"; "He lead them into battle" instead of "He led them into battle." - I see that a lot these days.

Oh and speaking of "a lot", it makes me sad every time I see people using "alot". And that non-word gets used increasingly often. It's not like it's a typo or autocorrection. A lot of people unironically type "alot". Ugh!

EDIT: Lol, I received a downvote. I found the "alot" user. Or the "lead instead of led" user! Or perhaps I scored a double strike ;)

I agree with both your reactions.

Self-service tills are good for when you've only got a very few items to purchase and rather than stand in a long line of a staffed checkout, you can just use that instead.

Otherwise, yes, as the article mentions, they're quite frustrating to use if you have to wait for staff approval for, say, alcohol purchases, and it can take a while for said staff member to attend to the self-service till; you might as well have waited in the staffed checkout line.

Bringing staff back to checkouts increases employment. That can only be a good thing.

Perhaps some time in the future, someone will come up with a robotic assistant intelligent enough to do the checkout task... but I suspect that's not going to happen at least for another 5 years or so.

I see. "Look, I see racism. Everywhere! Reeeeeeeeee!"

Indeed! The white man tripped and fell, and everyone laughed at his misfortune, then the white man ordered dinner for his family. The end.

Designers and companies of the world, you are badly serving an ever-growing segment of your customer base, a segment that you too will one day inhabit.

That last part - "a segment that you too will one day inhabit" - is one which should be shouted from the rooftops and ingrained into folks when they are in their early teens or twenties - before they get employed as designers of any kind.

I absolutely do not mean to be rude when I say "The description of what this is, is complete word salad."

Having tried the thing, it seems best summarized - currently - as "This thing is a GUI, written in javascript, allowing a user to view and manipulate the contents of a browser's origin private file system (OPFS)."

Did I get it right?

Also, what, exactly, would be its use case(s)?

You seem to be of a similar generation to me (Gen X)? So like yourself I grew up through those halcyon days of ZX81s, VIC-20's, Amigas and so on, as well as various flavours of Unixen, and finally Linux these days. I just don't grok the relationship between the aforementioned word salad introduction, and whatever the usefulness of this Thing could be.

Adblockers should get more devious then.

I've not looked into exactly how adblockers work, but I presume they just don't allow advert content through to be rendered by the browser - they block the html/css/js from loading in the page - and that's how places like Youtube and other sites can detect one is using an adblocker.

If I were going to write an adblocker, I'd make it such that it pretends to load and play/display the adverts, meanwhile allowing the video which the user intends to watch through. The adblocker basically says somehow that "yup! I'm the browser and your advert was definitely rendered. Honest, guv'nor!"

Something like that. (I fully recognize that I may be talking out of my ass if my assumptions above are incorrect.)

Just know that the .ckpt format has more or less been replaced by .safetensors these days.

tl;dr .ckpt files can contain Python pickles containing runnable Python code, which means a Bad Guy could create a .ckpt model containing malicious python code. Basically.

Okay I can't try it out anyway. "Blocksparse is not available: the current GPU does not expose Tensor cores"

My "best" GPU is an RTX 2070 Super, Turing architecture.

I've seen similar messages when using stable-diffusion... either with -webui or with automatic, can't exactly remember, but they both run fine on that RTX 2070 Super, so I can only guess that they revert to some other method than Blocksparse on seeing that it doesn't support Turing. Or something. I haven't looked into how they deal with it.

I've submitted an Issue [0] for it. I don't have enough knowledge to know if there's some way of saying "don't use Blocksparse" for fontogen.

[0] https://github.com/SerCeMan/fontogen/issues/2