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BooneJS

1,757 karma · joined June 16, 2015

Googler, but words are my own.
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BooneJS··on Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
My kids are in the middle of their finals week. What a mess. Universities know nothing, Canvas claims to be in a "scheduled maintenance", and one Prof claims to "not have any copies of material offline" which seems pretty negligent. Sounds like one section of a popular class will be doing paper exams while other sections had Canvas-based "half points for 2nd attempt"-type exams earlier today. How soon before names & grades appear in data dumps?

This would be like TurboTax "scheduling maintenance" on April 14th in the US.

BooneJS··on Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year
“Snow Leopard”, the original OSX release that focused under the hood, returns. I’m glad to hear it.
BooneJS··on Why Wisconsin's county highways are lettered, not numbered (2019)
They’re CTH : County Trunk Highway. Posting from CTH T between the intersections at TT and TTT.
BooneJS··on Merlin Bird ID
My father is in his 80’s, has poor hearing aids, but still goes out daily with his dSLR and Merlin to see what’s around him and he still gets great shots. I’m really happy Merlin exists.
BooneJS··on AI Is Making Developers Dumb
If you use LLMs in lieu of searching Stack Overflow, you're going to go faster and be neither smarter nor dumber. If you're prompting for entire functions, I suspect it'll be a crutch you learn to rely on forever.
BooneJS··on Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
It’s not just the orders of magnitude difference in number of rounds fired; it’s the size and power of the rounds. SEALs don’t shoot soda cans with .22 rifles.
BooneJS··on Apple found in breach of EU competition rules
And yet several places do. “Menu reflects cash prices” and “tuition payment via credit card will be subject to a 3.5% fee” are 2 I got this week.
BooneJS··on FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
The FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems. Are airplanes in a race to the bottom or is there an opportunity to inject quality and reliability into this industry?
BooneJS··on Reversing Choplifter
Would this have been written in C, asm, or something else? I suppose with Atari & Mac II both being Motorola processors the assembly would have been a direct lift except for any Apple-specific UI.

My favorite part of the story was the latent assertions looking for the bug. Any new code I write is peppered with these, though only active in debug builds. I've never learned to enjoy stepping through a debugger.

BooneJS··on Governor signs bills creating EV charging station network across Wisconsin
MG&E built one on the Madison isthmus[0], but they’re already a utility company.

[0]: https://www.mge.com/lovev/charging/charge-go#/find/nearest?c...

BooneJS··on Surge Pricing Is Coming to More Menus Near You
Dune 2 is almost 3 hours long. Why shouldn’t it cost more than a 90 minute romcom?
BooneJS··on Joplin is an open source note-taking app
https://www.craft.do on macOS is a great text+media notes app, but I still use Obsidian for pure-test use cases for some reason.
BooneJS··on Bookish Diversions: Do Audiobooks Count?
I like listening to The Great Courses on Audible. They’re long and interesting, but they’re nothing I’d take notes on, they’re not anything that would change my life. I have used credits on a few nonfiction books, gotten 1/4 in, and bought the physical book because I wanted a better understanding of the material.
BooneJS··on Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games
Disney is diversifying. This comes on the heels of their subsidiary ESPN creating a new sports streaming service with Fox and Warner/Discovery (https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/espn-fox-warner-bros-discov...)
BooneJS··on Bloated Google-cloud-CLI contains an entire Python installation (~300MB)
It's the output of Bazel's py_binary rule that includes a py_runtime to create a single hermetic executable file that can be deployed anywhere.
BooneJS··on Goodbye non-KISS appliances
Timely read; we’re in the process of replacing our $12k Thermador refrigerator 4 years after we bought it, and 6 months and a dozen trips by the repair guy.
BooneJS··on Apple to Remove Blood Oxygen Sensor from Watch to Avoid U.S. Ban, Rival Says
I’ve used the blood oxygen sensor during bouts with Covid, while sleeping, and while sitting at a computer (“email apnea”). It’s an important part of the reason I own it.

If Apple removes this sensor from my ultra 2, I hope I can get my money back.

BooneJS··on OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY: new open source router board by OpenWrt and Banana Pi
I wish I could get a decent mesh system. One router isn't enough to cover my house with some of the building materials used.
BooneJS··on FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s
Good news, everyone: The United 737 Max 9 I’m supposed to board tomorrow has “already been checked out and returned to service.”
BooneJS··on Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
I verified verilog using the Vera language back in the day. The largest test benches would take 5s to compile to interpreted bytecode. Verification engineers rarely change the design, so keeping that part compiled is great for productivity. It’s really too bad that monolithic compilation is so dang slow.
BooneJS··on Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
I worked at a startup company that created a DSL to generate verilog. We had the designers do unit testing in the DSL but “sign-off” verification was still UVM w/generated verilog. When a hidden bug costs millions of dollars, you can’t take the risk.
BooneJS··on Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
Awesome! When I was an undergraduate all I could tape out was a small wafer of capacitors and correlate theoretical vs silicon.

Chisel is no doubt a developer velocity booster. And generating those components does help speed you along especially when they’re silicon proven.

But I’d wager that most industry silicon has a competitive edge to pay off the NRE, something bleeding edge that can’t get away from verilog interop.

BooneJS··on Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
These languages are fun. "Look ma, no verilog!" But the underlying problem with all of these DSLs is the fact that the EDA[0] industry interoperates on verilog. Period. Worse, at some point in the design cycle, post-synthesized gate-level verilog becomes the codebase.

No upstream verilog changes are allowed because it can be difficult to get a precise edit (e.g. 2-input NAND into a 2-input AOI by changing a verilog function) and you just don't have 3 weeks of runtime to go from verilog to GDSII again. Or you want to make a metal-only respin that only changes one $0.xM mask layer and requires 8 weeks of fab time instead of changing multiple metal layers including the base and needs 16 weeks and a $xM payment.

Programming language design is quite rich because they used to cross-compile to C, and now they generally generate LLVM IR. It doesn't matter what the bug is in the final binary; you're not going to hex edit the binary like you would with a single metal layer of a 300mm wafer. You're just going to recompile and it generally doesn't matter if one machine instruction changes or 1M do because unlike verilog, not even GHC needs 3w to compile a program.

source: I've been on chip design teams for 2 decades and finally gave up on fighting verilog.

[0]: Electronic Design Automation. Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens, Ansys, etc.

BooneJS··on Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts
Looks like there’s one of 2 URLs to visit to take your subscription to YouTube or elsewhere.

> If you want to move from Google Podcasts to YouTube Podcasts, Google makes that pretty easy with a one-click button at music.youtube.com/transfer_podcasts

> you can also export your Google Podcast subscriptions as an OPML file at podcasts.google.com/settings

BooneJS··on Wisconsin couple has old phones and nobody to buy them
Growing up, I knew several people who worked HS jobs at Phoneco. Classic.
BooneJS··on Cooking and bird safety
Anyone try to physically polish cast iron? My Lodge pans are well seasoned but still have a rough surface area that can cause bits to catch.
BooneJS··on Leaving the Phone at Home
In bought a cellular Apple Watch a couple of weeks ago for the same reason. Verizon charges me $5/mo for the privilege based on my existing plan.
BooneJS··on Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use
My 10 year old GORUCK GR1 backpack has been around the world and been my only carryon for most domestic flights. Plus it’s my every day commute to work pack. I’ve had to replace some heat shrink tubes on paracord zipper pulls but everything else should last at least another 10 years if not longer.
BooneJS··on Foxconn's promise to invest $10B in Wisconsin is now a distant memory
Maybe you missed the part where Vos is openly talking about impeaching Protasiewicz before she hears a single case. https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-i...
BooneJS··on Tesla FSD Beta tried to kill me last night
Model Y w/HW3 + FSD Beta loves to take those turnoff lanes on 2-lane 55 mph highways, thinking that the road just went to 4 lanes. Unfortunately (for me), those turnoff lanes abruptly stop in a 90 degree right turn. I leave audio comments when it happens when prompted asking why I disabled FSD by yanking the wheel left, but I don't know what else to do.
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