somat

Isn't it worth exactly what you can sell it for. a few ways to do this.

slow and awkward, best market match: The auction. sell to highest bidder.

faster and more customer friendly but poor market match until a lot of units sold: The store. guess price, adjust up or down to reach sell frequency desired.

fast and good market match but takes a knowledgeable customer base: The reverse auction. Start with price too high lower it over time until it sells.

yes echo, total brain fart there. corrected.

I have used echo as a sort of poor mans equivalent for a safe check of a pipeline, removing the echo when I felt the rest of the pipeline was working correctly.

  shell stuff | xargs -n 1 -I % echo real command and % args

  script

  script | sh

Xargs is fine, but openbsd has a -J option and every time I read the man page to figure out how to use it I read the -I and -J options and my brain glazes over.

https://man.openbsd.org/xargs

Other brain glazing obsd wierdness is it's two argument cd command, a cryptid I am unable to wrap my head around.

https://man.openbsd.org/ksh#cd~2

It smells like a variant of inner platform effect. Where in order to save you from programming the the config is super flexible, What is missed is that you are still programming only now you have to do it in some weird context.

At least in this case it is an actual programming language instead of XML or YAML like so many of them.

An alternative slightly more charitable interpretation is this is the engine/gamelogic pattern. But the difference between the two is more subtle than it naively appears depending largely on proper layer segmentation.

The steam link actual.

While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

The impressive part is how big modding is in minecraft despite Mojang never providing a mod interface, I don't know it may be different now but the general route for a long time was decompile the java byte code make your mod and recompile. There were a number of heroic teams that made mod interfaces out of this but a whole lot of nothing from the actual devs. I came off the quake modding scene and was a bit horrified by the whole situation, with quake they gave you the game code, map compilers and later the source to the engine.

Consoles hate having a jit vm so java is a non-starter for them.

The real reason is you want to run your game on the latest greatest WiiStation(tm). if it is written in C/C++ you sit down with a copy of their development library and change your code to fit. If it is written in java you port the jvm to the device. And I don't really know how hard that is(having never ported the jvm) but most people sort of balk at that step.

Microsoft thought it was easier/better to rewrite minecraft in C++ than port the jvm to the xbox. There was a big enough customer base attached to the original java version they did not want to discard it(backlash would be too huge and messy).

As a tangent, the single greatest thing about my Lenovo laptop that I was not looking for when I bought it was that it has three physical buttons for the touchpad(or that pointer thing if you use it). I love X11 style middle click paste. So that middle button elevates it to the best feeling laptop I have ever used.

A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.

Yeah PC is sort of the "forever" console, I mean it's not strictly, there is always the upgrade grind, but new hardware tends to run old software fine(ish) and many(most if you play a lot of the smaller indie stuff) new games work fine on older hardware.

It is a huge mess compared to consoles but that is often the price of freedom and I am happy that at least one system escaped control of a single corporation.

Modern Lego set design is this super refined art where the final product looks amazing. It also sort of sucks, ninety percent of the pieces are 1x1 greebles with very few common structural elements, Distinctly different and I feel inferior from the peak of my young Lego architect career in the late 80's, and even then in retrospect, still way to many greebles and not enough structural elements. Sure you want a few of those infernal 1x1's but it feels like the era that best matches the Lego ethos was the 70's where most of the set was structural.

There are a few sets left like this and I bought some to get my nephews Lego bucket started. but still way too many useless small pieces.

It's a narrow connector and sideways force acts like a knife on the shell. blowing out the sides. and then the connector is unreliable. It is better than microusb but worse than usb-a.

So it depends on how you baby it, but a few good accidental tugs can ruin a phone.

I like to run my game controllers wired and ruined one(xbox-one controller) this way when I got a bit agitated during a game, it's replacement(8-bitdo wired) is much better designed where the plug housing goes in a snug inset in the controller. Providing strain relief. I dread having to find a new plug that fits if it goes bad. but a narrow plug should work, granted without the strain relief.

I saw it in the theaters and very nearly cheered when I saw someone actually using a command line and nmap in a hollywood film.

I have a hard time watching almost any "hacking" scene. I know I should just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the movie for what it is. But anything with computers just hits too close to my professional knowledge and I start to get agitated. I suspect it is probably the same for most professional fields. Me: Yep they are pouring concrete alright. The guy two seats down: What the F is that; you can't pour like that the whole batch would be ruined and look at that criminally negligent framing and rebar work. ugg. this movie is terrible.

So... Realistically fsn makes for a killer visual for audiences, "this computer is SOOO advanced it has a 3d interface" and here is someone doing something technical with it.

But if we take it at face value, immersed in the cinematic world they are building. Some young wanna be hacker, knows a little more than the average joe about computers. and when all the adults in the room are afraid to even look at the system, steps up to see what it is about. We have all been there. And stumbles on this 3d thing(perhaps needry enjoyed the demo and left a link on the desktop) but the names are familiar, it is the same as the sun system at the university you can telnet into. "Hey this is unix, I know this! now where would the the start park script be?"

Basically me "Hey my mac is not working right, you like computers can you fix it?" starts sweating, having never touched a mac in my life "S.S.Sure" Click around a bit find the terminal "Hey this is unix, I know this!"

As an aside I bought an sgi in the early 2000s ($300 for a $30000 doller computer, what a steal), I suspect largely due to Michael Crichton books and was tickled pink to find out the "This is unix, I know this!" One of the stupider in a long list of stupid hollywood interfaces was actually a real thing.

I need to find out what the matrix used, it smells like motif on the worst passive matrix(wait a minute) lcd screen you have ever seen in your life.

How is that better or worse than the "I trust everyone my authority trusts" mechanism the authority system uses?

A stupid/naive question. Why does this affect SpaceX? They have their money(The IPO) Any third party trading value does not change that. Sure there may be individuals, officers of SpaceX who hold these instruments who will be negatively affective, but the company itself?

My best guess, it makes it harder to get loans in the future.

True, braided has absolutely nothing to do with the specs of the cable, but braided "feels" higher quality, so I suspect quite a few manufacturers think they can skimp on the cable quality because of that.

It is a weird argument because X11 is also just a protocol. Sure at this point there is only really one server left in the wild(xorg). But historically there have been more.

And on that topic a question I have, seeing as wayland is "just a protocol" why can't the client application talk to the compositor server over a network socket instead of a unix domain socket? Update: reading the spec I found my answer, Wayland buffers are shared memory surfaces... So really wayland is not "just a protocol"

Is the author confusing MRI with a CAT scan? or is there a health risk associated with high flux magnetic fields that I am unfamiliar with.

update: The article is second order analysis. need to read it's linked article to understand it is more about the costs(including psychological) of questionable tests and not a direct health risk of MRI devices.

The hard part(especially for large vehicles) is to survive that era past when it is valued as a working vehicle and before it is valued as a historical vehicle, At that point is is just junk. Large expensive junk.

I was recently reading about the original great Chicago wheel(The Ferris wheel). it lasted about 10 years, nobody wanted it. The contract said the fair land had to be restored to original form. So they just blew it up, nothing left, did not even try to save a car. The other disappointing part was that Ferris was a bit secretive and no technical drawings for it are known to exist. I really wanted to know how it was powered, more that the blurb you get in the articles. Best I found from the pictures is there are cast wide spaced(not gear spaced) drive slots riveted to the rim and vague mentions of a chain. Some sort of wide spaced bicycle type chain in partial engagement against the rim?

See also: The USS Enterprise(CV-6) if any ship deserved to be a museum ship that one did, but they were not able to muster the enthusiasm needed at the time she was broken up.

The way microsoft just shipped openssh is one of the saner things they have done. I am still vaguely shocked they managed to resist the temptation to MSify it.

If I remember correctly mysql also started with a berkeleydb(dbm) storage layer. before myisam then later innodb.

I used to sort of dismiss berkeleydb(why so simple?), but a disk backed b-tree indexed key value store is not trivial to get right and having a prebuilt library to do it provides a huge value.

Weeks are largely biblical(with pagan day names, that's fun), but they got it from wanting a quarter month sized unit of time. Not deliberately with design, but I suspect that is how it fell out to satisfy their religious requirements.

The tricky part about months (and weeks by inheritance) is that while the moon phases are a nice easy mid-range timekeeping device(something between days and years) they don't line up with days or years very well. So as your society settles on having 4 important religious observations per month and starts keeping better time. It changes to having that observation every 7 days and delinking the month from the moon so it does not drift around the year so much.

I don't really know how the BCE biblical world did the week keeping. but our modern interpretation was mostly solidified by incorporating approximations of that into the other big influence on Europeans society, the Romans. Who used a month and half month system so it fit fairly well.

"But let’s look at what happens if an attacker discovers a blind SQL injection vulnerability anywhere else in the application.

The attacker doesn’t need to read the database or invert any hashes. An attacker can simply register a legitimate account and generate his own valid API key."

No they can't, The given scenario has not pushed the auth into the database at all. if your accounts are also database accounts why does the user have permission to create new accounts.

I have done this as an experiment, I was dreading building a comprehensive auth system and noticed that the barely used postgres internal auth system is very well fleshed out so just made every user be a database user. The application has little concept of auth at all, it just passes the user login into the database connection and all the auth (logins, what data the user can get, what data the user can write) is all done as database policy. It worked surprisingly well, I don't know if I would use it on a real system(whatever that means, pg logins probably do not scale) The idea still sort of makes my skin crawl, Nobody does it this way, I assume for a reason. But in theory it is fine.

I probably got the idea from the schemaverse game, where the whole game is internal to postgres, and the users are given direct select access.

https://github.com/Abstrct/Schemaverse

I sort of wish we had went with base 12 instead of base 10 for our counting system.

Based on the number of base 12 systems it was a near thing. Don't get me wrong using base 12 units in a base 10 number world is several sorts of cursed. but if we had went with base 12 numbers and cleaned up some of the stupider unit variants into a SI I could see it working well.

And before someone brings up the 10 fingers thing, I don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.

But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.

Weeks are quarter months. Or are supposed to be. Months have been screwed up for a long time now.

I can imagine in prehistorical times keeping track of midrange time by the phase of the moon, if months were kept synced to the moon we would probably name weeks as such, waxing gibbous, waning crescent...

On the subject of keeping months in sync, I can imagine having a fun festival season around the weird 13th month(all months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.

I use NSD myself, but the man page sez an auth-zone directive could act like a self contained authoritive zone served from a file. the other way it can be used to to speed up the cache for the actual authoritive data.

https://man.openbsd.org/unbound.conf#AUTHORITY_ZONE_OPTIONS

"Authority zones are configured with auth-zone:, and each one must have a name. There can be multiple ones, by listing multiple auth-zone section clauses, each with a different name, pertaining to that part of the namespace. The authority zone with the name closest to the name looked up is used. Authority zones can be processed on two distinct, non-exclusive, configurable stages.

With for-downstream: yes (default), authority zones are processed after local-zones and before cache. When used in this manner, Unbound responds like an authority server with no further processing other than returning an answer from the zone contents. A notable example, in this case, is CNAME records which are returned verbatim to downstream clients without further resolution.

With for-upstream: yes (default), authority zones are processed after the cache lookup, just before going to the network to fetch information for recursion. When used in this manner they provide a local copy of an authority server that speeds up lookups for that data during resolving.

If both options are enabled (default), client queries for an authority zone are answered authoritatively from Unbound, while internal queries that require data from the authority zone consult the local zone data instead of going to the network.

An interesting configuration is for-downstream: no, for-upstream: yes that allows for hyperlocal behavior where both client and internal queries consult the local zone data while resolving. In this case, the aforementioned CNAME example will result in a thoroughly resolved answer.

Authority zones can be read from a zonefile. And can be kept updated via AXFR and IXFR. After update the zonefile is rewritten. The update mechanism uses the SOA timer values and performs SOA UDP queries to detect zone changes."

It may also be telling to figure out why no startup is offering $400 ambulance rides and dominating on volume.

Unbound can do authoritative dns. It is a bit clunky so usually what you do is have NSD for the authoritative parts and unbound for the recursive parts. but unbound has local-zone: stub-zone: forward-zone: auth-zone: directives. I am not the most sophisticated dns admin but I am fairly sure that just unbound by itself can do almost any dns party trick you care to throw at it.

And as a counter example here you have openbsd "we are going to install a bgp daemon on every single device, because you never know when you may need one"

I am not complaining, I like the feeling that I could single handedly rebuild the internet using only what is found in an openbsd base install. But wow, considering the size there is a lot in there. They definitely punch above their weight.