ranger207

A stopped clock is right twice a day. A running clock set incorrectly is correct zero times a day. If you have an incorrect clock, the solution isn't to stop the clock, it's to set it correctly and fix the process

I play a wargame (Battletech) where the rulebook says "use a bottlecap if you want to as long as you can tell which way it's facing" and even there 3D printed minis are uncommon. For Battletech there's two official sources of minis, plastic from CGL and metal from IWM[0]. IWM has a model for almost every unit published in the last 40 years, but some of them are... very hard to look at. CGL's plastic ones look much and cover the most common units so you can usually get by with just them (although, I did just order a couple minis for an upcoming tournament). If I ever see a printed mini, it's either a) one of the ones where the IWM model looks terrible, or b) a model ripped from the Mechwarrior video games that the person thinks looks better aesthetically.

Where 3D printing has been revolutionary for Battletech though has been terrain. Battletech's played on a hex grid, and ever hex has an elevation printed on it to form hills, buildings, and rivers. There's one company (Thunderhead Studios) that makes STLs of the elevation of the official maps that's very popular. Popular enough that they've actually started mass manufacturing them and selling prepainted terrain retail. That shows up in every event I've been to, even official events where 3D minis are banned. But it's a decidedly ancillary part of the experience for Battletech.

[0] Catalyst Game Labs and Iron Wind Metals

You don't change people's minds by telling them the truth. You change people's minds by letting them discover the truth on their own. People want to believe what they already believe, so a direct argument that goes against their belief is more likely to harden them against the argument than change their mind. "Elegance", or an indirect approach, softens the argument. The parts ancillary to the argument itself creep into the person's mind, make connections there among other things they already know (including of course the concept that "elegance is truth"), and prime the other person's belief system to accept the argument when it's finally presented. By making connections with flowery language and things-that-aren't-the-argument, the argument settles in as a highly-connected vertex in the belief system instead of a brick thrown in through the window.

I don't mind natively high framerate, but I can't stand interpolation

It's a single value per pixel, but each pixel has a different color filter in front of it, so it's effectively that each pixel is one of R, G, or B

A lot of scheduler experimentation has been enabled by sched_ext: https://lwn.net/Articles/922405/

IMO Apple and Valve are taking the opposite approaches but on a different axis than the article discusses: Apple is continuing to increase their lock in and remove choice, while Valve continues to add choice. You can argue that Steam being a nigh-monopoly means there isn't a lot of choice, but I'd argue that's not correct. For one, Steam rarely censors games (it does happen! A notable case happened this month! But it happens rarely) and doesn't have requirements for games to use Steam's platform technology to be on the market. In fact, you're allowed to offer direct competitors to Steam features in your game without penalty (some games I play have both Steam Workshop support and the game dev's own mod platform support). For another Steam doesn't try to nudge you towards their solutions constantly either (eg like in the recent article on passkeys where the user had to click half a dozen times to not use Touch ID with the Touch ID option being on every page of those clicks). And of course, there's the "Add a non-Steam game or app" button in Steam that just asks you "where's the executable" and then it gets all the non-platform features Steam offers, like the overlay, screenshots, Steam Input (I think it even supports community input profiles for non-Steam games; I'm pretty sure I've seen community profiles for Primehack on my Steam Deck), etc. Of course the Steam Deck (and now Steam Machine and Steam Frame) are constantly advertised as "it's just a PC and you can do whatever you want with it". There's no lock in; you can install competitors' stores on those devices easily.

The reverse playbook then is that Apple is trying to make every option other than staying in the Apple ecosystem a bad choice, while Valve is trying to make Steam the best option in every scenario. The difference in base philosophy is the important part.

(Of course as a profit-seeking corporation there's no guarantee they'll stay this way, particularly after gaben leaves, but I'll appreciate it while it's here at least.)

Gundam is several universes that are unrelated except they have giant robots colored in primary colors. The main universe is called Universal Century (UC), and started with the original Mobile Suit Gundam show in 1979. It's retroactively called 0079 ("double-oh seventy nine") after its in-universe date. It's good but has significant lumps, like the haphazard animation and villain of the week fillers. I'd recommend starting with one of the 90s OVAs: War in the Pocket (0080), Stardust Memory (0083), or 08th MS Team, as they're fairly short, self contained, and have fantastic animation. Alternatively a modern UC show is Unicorn, but there's a lot of references in it you won't get unless you've seen some of the older shows. Another option is the latest Gundam series, The Witch from Mercury. It's set in a new universe unconnected from UC so there's no prior knowledge necessary.

Contrarianism leads to feelings of intellectual superiority, but that doesn't get you anything if everyone else doesn't also know you're intellectually superior

How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards

If configuration is an API, what's the harm in scripting against it?

Typically, Docker and Kubernetes run container images based on Linux and run them on top of Linux servers. I can say from my experience using Kubernetes to run Docker containers that having separate Linux experience is very helpful

Good, move slow and avoid breaking things

If your config language doesn't have its own control flow then it's going to get a meta layer added on with control flow. Like, what do you do if this service has a different hostname in staging versus prod? Or connects to a different DB, or whatever. Either have one template file and give it a values file when you go to deploy it, or have two fully-written out files... which becomes annoying when you have to make sure you keep them in sync across two or more environments, often leading to a hacked on and poorly implemented templating system anyway (eg, Helm)

Yeah too many times the Helm chart is barely less complex than writing all the manifests yourself because all the manifest options are still in the chart

Honestly from the domain I figured this was going to be a Xorg/Wayland/XWayland issue

It's both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?

A couple weeks ago Amazon said something about "we were trying to compete with Steam and even with all our resources nobody noticed" and that made me realize something: ideally, companies with similar products and services compete on features and cost, but nowadays the big tech providers compete more on lock in than anything else. But in the market of video game retail stores the competition _is_ on features and price, because Steam competes on those terms (ref gaben's famous quote "piracy is a service problem"; they're even competing and succeeding against free products)

Speaking of, I was recently looking into what exactly makes lights NVG compatible, and found this informative PDF: https://www.consolite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Basic...

tl;dr NVGs are sensitive to near IR so you want lights that are dim in those wavelengths (but not completely out since you still want to see them with NVGs) while still being bright in visible light. There's a neat picture of the flying controll tower on one of the UK's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers that shows two rooms with similar illumination levels in visible light, but under NVGs one room which isn't NVG compatible is massively brighter than the other. In the NVG-compatible room there were still a handful of panel indicator lights that were not compatible and lit up the whole space

It's worth noting that the meme of "it was DNS", including the haiku[0], is from the old school sysadmin world, which has a lot more terrible DNS implementations than modern stuff (especially including Active Directory which has DNS attached to a massive complex system that does dozens of other things as well and because of which has its reliability suffer), so the meme is really a reflection of a harsher time.

[0] the original source of the haiku: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4oj7pv/network_so...

The advantage of KVMs like this is that it's a remove keyboard, video device, and mouse. That means that you can use it before the OS has started

Honestly? "Nothing because all our vendors are on us-east-1 too"

From a link in TFA: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/05/02/smartplugs/

Yep, this is why. Containers are a way to package more of the OS environment than you can do otherwise

> After using the knobs in Garageband for a while, I noticed that they didn’t always react the way I thought they would. Most of the time the little indicator dot on the knob would follow my finger as I spun the knob around in a circle. Other times the knob wouldn’t follow my finger at all and seemed to go in random directions. I eventually figured out that I had stumbled on three different ways to turn a virtual knob.

> ...

> Apple’s attention to detail is what has propelled it to be the most valuable company on earth. Whether it’s the click of a physical button or the math behind inertial scrolling, Apple employees work really hard to make products that are deceptively simple and just feel right. The virtual knobs found in Garageband are no exception and I hope others enjoyed learning about them as much as I have.

I think these two statements are contradictory. Personally, I've noticed a pattern when people post about Apple UX that seems to go "yes this thing may be unintuitive but actually it's a sign of really good design!" that I can't quite seem to wrap my head around

The top of the S-curve

IMO this is caused by the ease of creating non-mainstream media sources with the internet. Before the internet there were only a handful of media sources (the "mainstream media") and since ~everone got ~all their news from them, society mostly agreed on the same news facts. This doesn't mean that the media of the time was always true and unbiased, just that people looked at it less critically. Now that there's alternative sources, people can find ones that better align with their beliefs, even if those sources and their beliefs are incorrect. Inevitably any source is going to be wrong some of the time, so evidence of mainstream media being wrong is treated as reasons not to trust them. As the underdog, alternative media gets a looser pass in most people's minds and are held to a lower standard. If people get sucked far enough into an echo chamber that they no longer regularly see opposing viewpoints then it's possible they don't criticise their sources at all as they look like they're always true.

The solution to this isn't fact checking, banning disinformation, or forcing unbiased media, because that creates an impossible standard that nobody will be able to reach all the time (which will cause the standard to degrade as exceptions are passed over). Instead, it's to cultivate media literacy: who's reporting this, why are they reporting this, why are they choosing these facts to highlight, why do they deemphasize facts reported by other sources, what's their long term bias and affiliation, and what are they trying to get you to believe. You need to apply those questions to every source and trust none of them implicitly, at least because nobody's perfect.

"Opt-in by default" is a contradiction. Do I have to actively do something to turn it on, in which case it's opt-in; or is it on by default, in which case it's not opt-in?

Nowadays it's more like the excellent 90% need to interview at 20 companies and the terrible 10% need to interview at yet more

Say you're trying to go to google.com (dig resolves this for me right now as 64.233.177.100). Your packet leaves your laptop and travels over wifi to your access point, where it goes into a switch. The switch sees the IP, recognizes it's not part of your LAN (because you've set your network up as 192.168.168.0/24 and that IP's not part of that range) and forwards it to its gateway, the router. (Often the AP, switch, and router are colocated in one device, which can cause shortcuts.) The router forwards all its packets to its upstream, which depending on if you have fiber, cable, etc may mean a modem or something first. Say it goes to a modem, where it's put onto a coaxial cable, the other end of which is at your ISP.

Now the packet is in the ISP's network. Logically this will be a big pile of switches with some servers attached, such as CDNs and the like, and connected at points to other ISPs/backbone providers at IXes. Physically it's a bunch of neighborhood racks feeding to ISP datacenters scattered around the country and interconnected wither by the ISP's own cables or backbone providers. Your packet will traverse this network in a number of ways depending on the specifics. Maybe the ISP's switch recognizes that 64.233.177.100 is a CDN on a server in the ISP's datacenter, so it forwards it there. Maybe the address is outside of the ISP's network. The switch that your modem is plugged into will pass the packet along to a router of some sort which will have a routing table (which is distributed and updated by internal routing protocols like OSPF or IS-IS) which will tell it where to sent the packet. If the address is outside of the ISP's network, then the router will direct it to one of the IXes based on its routing information.

Now we're at the IX. Your packet has gone from your laptop, to your AP/switch/router, to your modem, to the ISP's switch, to the ISP's router, to several other ISP switches and routers, and is now at the ISP's router in the IX. The physical configuration of an IX is like any other datacenter: just a bunch of racks, this time with routers in them. There'll be Comcast's routers in one rack, Cox's in another, Lumen (a backbone provider) in another. Then each router will be cabled to each other router, just like you plug your desktop into your router at home. The routers will exchange routing information with BGP, and that information will include who has address 64.233.177.100 connected directly to their network, or if nobody has it then who has a connection to the network it's directly connected to, or if nobody has that then who has a connection to a network that's connected to the network that 64.233.177.100 is connected to, etc. Like your ISP's network, each other network is a logical mass of switches and routers, and a physical connection of datacenters, neighborhood routing racks, and IXes.

Maybe in this case 64.233.177.100 is in a datacenter connected to another ISP at the IX; in that case the packet will go to that ISP and through its internal network to the datacenter. Or maybe nobody connected to this IX has 64.233.177.100. In that case the packet will probably travel through one of the backbone providers' internal network to the IX where the ISP that does have 64.233.177.100 connected to it is connected.

Since physically an IX is just a bunch of routers in a rack, you can have things plugged into them other than other routers, although this is generally frowned upon. Many IXes have locked racks to prevent that