Fascinating read, I had no idea they had digitized radar systems in the 1960's. Even though we look back on older systems as "outdated", "obsolete", "primitive", etc. the engineering behind them remains fresh and feels as clever as anything.
525 karma · joined January 4, 2019
These weren't corner cases, they were everyday reality. We had to intentionally slim down the firmware size to get it to fit comfortably since we added quite a bit of application code. Like I said before, we got a recovery firmware down to ~3MB, and the normal firmware (without our application) was ~8MB. Every megabyte counts at that point, so having a 1MB init system would be a non-starter. We were buying commodity hardware, so we did lots of shopping and there were still plenty of 16MB APs on the market 10 years ago.
You're right its not a problem if you buy new hardware, but OpenWRT is used to support older devices with limited hardware specs. Its one of the reasons people install it, to give new life to old hardware (rather than being forced to buy a new device).
By the way, I use and like systemd on full size computers. I actually know of a product that runs a full rpm based distro (with systemd) on an embedded device and it works great. But systemd isn't one size fits all.
> And OpenWRT abandoned this goal.
They have not. Individual devices get too old to be supported, but there are plenty of 16 MB devices they still support. Its true that basically every device now has 32MB or more of flash, but there are still plenty out there that don't.
> with a built-in planned obsolescence (what if the new update requires just a bit more space for "calibration data"?). Got it.
The calibration data is from the factory to tune the wifi radios, it doesn't change since its specific to that individual device. I really hate to reply like this on HN, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about. The kinds of constraints you deal with in embedded networking are different than that in general computing. There's a reason systemd wasn't used, and there's a reason OpenWRT devs went through the trouble of developing their own init system. Just because you can't fathom those reasons doesn't mean they don't exist.
Absolutely not.
> That hasn't been the case in quite some while
These routers and APs still exist and are in use. Yes, they are 10+ years old, but they're still out there. One of the main goals of OpenWRT is to support legacy networking hardware that vendors abandoned.
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
> The whole point of vi and vim was to edit text visually, instead of as lines.
My language was very imprecise here, I should know better when commenting on Hacker News. I didn't mean the original motivation for creating vi, but the main reason why someone in 2022 would learn vim with all the other text editors out there now. The main feature of vim at this point is the modal editing that requires you to change how you think about text editing. If you aren't going to accept this new paradigm, then there's no point learning vim in the first place beyond how to enter and exit insert mode, save, and quit.
The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text. People don't come into programming with a blank slate about editors, they were introduced to wysiwyg editors from an early age because of Microsoft Word, web based text input, and now phones (with emojis too). A mental model had been impressed already, but that doesn't make it the "default" or the best.
I used notpad++ in college, then switched to vim after I saw my boss edit some code while I was looking over his shoulder. He could do complex editing tasks with just a couple keystrokes and doing them so fast that I couldn't keep up just watching. It seemed like he was editing at the same speed as he was thinking which didn't seem possible to me at the time.
You can replay any moment in your life that your eyes saw or your ears heard... but so can the government.
It was like at 23 years old when I saw my boss using vim for the first time. I thought notepad++ was the best I could get until I saw the speed of an experienced vim user. It didn't even occur to me that there could be a better text editor until then.
For instance if the asking is $125, I'll offer $120 since I don't want to find a $5 bill or make the person find change for the extra $20 bill I'd have to use. I've even rounded up a few times to make it easy, though some people have been so insistent that they even resorted to giving me quarters.
I guess to summarize, with Destin it feels like you are learning with him and Veritasium feels like you are being lectured.
Another vote is for Mitutoyo vernier calipers with both inch and metric reading. No batteries, and still made in Japan. If the Japanese wanted to make something cheap, then they wouldn't make it in Japan. I view made in Japan as a mark of quality these days.
But this is exactly how evolution works. There are always mutations in every generation, and sometimes those mutations are beneficial. These genes are being selected by the organism's environment, and if the environment changes, then the genes that are selected will be different. That is "nature responding". Elephants without tusks (or very small ones) are more likely to survive and produce offspring.