rincebrain

At the moment, I think a lot of Best Buy's survival is that Microcenter has very limited store count, and every other store that was primarily electronics has eaten shit and gone by the wayside, meaning it's effectively got a monopoly in certain areas for things like "Dad wants to go buy a new TV and stare at a display of 50 of them to decide between first".

I suspect the wildly differing experiences for this depend on the number of bad actors doing this in the pools feeding into whatever warehouses, versus total churn.

For me, living first in Baltimore then NYC, places where there's quite a few people buying quite a few things up and down the cost scale, I never saw a counterfeit anything come up.

That's not to say I think it doesn't happen, just that I think that's why some people have wildly different experiences here.

I think GP's point is that "just do it" shows a lack of understanding that an inability to "just do X" is often a symptom of depression that leads to people not talking about it, because people who haven't experienced it think you must be lying about having decided to do something and not actually then doing it.

Consider: there was a study about a guy who was paralyzed from the waist down, who got an implant to bypass the injury, and with a year+ of walking with the implant, could eventually walk to a limited extent without the implant.[1]

This suggests walking can be used to treat loss of ability to walk. Unfortunately, there's a catch-22 there...

...and so too with inability to make yourself do anything.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06094-5

I would assume the amount they paid is "valuable, but not 'disabled by worm for the prize' valuable", or it's just that hard to find the larvae now.

There's also probably a part where if someone was caught having released it in their area, they would probably be found dead in a ditch for inflicting that on people.

It's possible to do both, you just need to be cognizant of what you're doing in both positions.

A tricky part becomes when you don't have both roles for something, like SRE-developed tools that are maintained by the ones writing them, and you need to strike the balance yourselves until/unless you wind up with that split. If you're not aware of both hats and juggling wearing them intentionally, in that case, you can wind up with tools out of SRE that are worse than any SWE-only tool might ever be, because the SREs sometimes think they won't make the same mistakes, but all the same feature-focused things apply for SRE-written tools too...

Something that should also be factored in, IMO, is the gap between "on paper" and "reality", and how it varies by area.

That is, my friends in rural areas report a lot more cases of hostile workers in medicaid/etc processes actively doing their best to screw people over, to an extent that I, as someone who's always lived in the suburbs or cities, would have expected someone to get fired over. "Misplaced" paperwork, "oops, I told you to submit the wrong thing and now the deadline is passed, too bad so sad", "refer you to another doctor with no openings for 3 months...who then refuses to see you because the referral was malformed, and now you need to get in again at the first place because they refuse to do paperwork without an appointment..." ...the list of ways that you can be malicious in the gap is very large.

But in larger environments, my experience is those people get fired or transferred out of those positions once a stink is made, because regardless of the organization's feelings as a whole, they don't want the attention the stink caused. In smaller settings, that response is harder to trigger.

So that would be, I suspect, a major reason this can work better in urban settings - because the people who actively sabotage the use of these services are better filtered out.

The problem with that premise is that often, projects can be having trouble with sustainability already, so even if you're getting 90% of the people in your fork, that might still be too few.

If 90% of the contributions are by 10 people, if the project is large enough, losing one of them is going to be an enormous additional tax on people unless you can get an additional one to step up.

That's not using zdb to change anything - it's readonly, all the time. The person reached out and used dd on the disk to corrupt the copies of the uberblock with bad data so that ZFS would be forced to use the older ones (what zpool import -T does, basically, but doing it the hard way).

A fsck could pretty readily notice and repair the spacemap inconsistencies - zdb already generates its own spacemaps and compares to reality on import.

If you have the keys, technically nothing stops a fsck from noticing the encryption problems, but yes, usually it wouldn't unless you had some known issue you added special detection for, like when XFS years ago had problems with if you mounted it with inode64 once and then not the next time so the inode numbers would wraparound.

The two obvious examples that come to mind are native encryption bugs and spacemap issues.

Nothing about walking the entire tree of blocks and checking hashes validates the spacemaps - they only come up when you're dealing with allocating new blocks, and there have been a number of bugs where ZFS panics because the spacemaps say something insane, so you wind up needing to readonly import or discard the ZIL because it panics about trying to allocate an already-allocated segment if you import RW - and if your ondisk spacemaps are inconsistent in a way that discarding the ZIL doesn't work around, you would need some additional tool to try and repair this, because ZFS has no knobs for it.

Native encryption issues wouldn't be noticed because scrubbing doesn't attempt to untransform data blocks - you indirectly do that when you're walking the structures involved, but the L0 data blocks don't get decompressed or decrypted, since all your hashes are of the transformed blocks. And if you have a block where the hash in the metadata is correct but it doesn't decrypt, for any reason, scrub won't notice, but you sure will if you ever try to decrypt it.

"They're working on it." [1]

It sounds like they put this mechanism into place that stops regenerating large torrents incrementally when it caused massive slowdowns for them, and haven't finished building something to automatically fix it, but will go fix individual ones on demand for now.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/theinternetarchive/comments/1ij8go9...

If someone punches you, and you punch them back, you're being hostile, but so are they, and a lot of people would say that was reasonable.

If you deliberately go find someone's secret that they hid after you think they hurt you, and disclose it, it's because you're trying to hurt them, justifiable or not.

I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.

Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.

Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.

The two main frustrations that I've seen encountered are:

1) Microsoft aggressively attempting to convince you to use OneDrive, no matter how many times you turn it off.

I've had a Dropbox subscription since before OneDrive became a common name, and it works for me, so I have no real use case for OneDrive. That doesn't stop Microsoft forcibly "helpfully" re-enabling the OneDrive app and embedded link in the quick access bar regularly...which leads to

2) Microsoft attempting to sync your user profile in OneDrive, and bugs that arise from how it implements that.

I've never enabled this, so I haven't dug into how it works, but the first time I ever encountered OneDrive discussion in tech or adjacent circles was people complaining about OneDrive syncing of user profile folders breaking some games.

I assume it's something like the comedy of errors that could come out of folder redirection and software not expecting multiple people touching it at once, or the comedy of conflict resolution on a filesystem layer that isn't expecting that for semantics, but I have heard more complaints about OneDrive in this context than I've heard anything else about it.

So I suspect that it works fine, if you use it as a Dropbox-alike.

Using it as a Folder Redirection/Roaming Profiles replacement, or trying to say "no" to Microsoft, is where the problems ensue.

I assumed it was a combination of a relic of the plans to have unified Phone/Desktop back in Win8 days and part of a goal of eventually locking things down as much as Apple has.

Unfortunately, there's a lot more random apps on Windows than macOS, so that was never going to be a good sell...

A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.

Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.

It's going to be more interesting, I think, to see what the campaign says if asked about this, than the actual policy itself.

A sibling comment [1] remarks that they play games with raw pointers that are incompatible with the newer GC, so it's not "just" an older runtime that's biting them in the ass.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415568

The article touches on it - assuming it's correct, it's because they did a bunch of proprietary modifying on Mono, so it's not "just" Mono any more, it's Mono and a decade or more of the most exciting layer violating crimes you can imagine.

I would assume, if someone Meta scale had an app that had to be built on Unity for whatever reason, we'd see similar blogposts to the ones they did about finding bespoke optimizations for their Android app to be performant with how enormous it became, probably involving either some bespoke alternative to IL2CPP, or writing a bunch of bespoke optimizations onto a bastard descendant of whatever version of Mono Unity originally derives from and so supports...or just paying Unity so much money they get to do whatever they want to the underlying source.

It's not.

The key thing is, one of the things most tumors need to do to get past a certain point is avoid getting caught being tumors.

If you can very selectively cause precise tissue death, from any method, then your body will suddenly start looking askance at any tissue that looks like the secretly-full-of-tumor-markers corpse it just found.

And ultrasonic cavitation means you can, in theory, cause very precise tissue death with even less surrounding effect than radiation.

There were reports that if you inject the goo from melting the tumor into another mouse, that mouse became much more resistant to that class of tumor[1], so...

[1] - https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/these-bubbles-kill-canc...

This makes sense to me.

Having spent a bunch of time with people who have had persistent issues with stable income, a lot of them internalize it at various levels as them personally not being worth anything, because so many systems involved seem to be operating in bad faith.

Anything involving the US medical system, for instance - even as someone working in tech with good health insurance, so many of my interactions with doctors can be summarized as "the doctor makes a snap judgment in the first 30 seconds of interacting with you, and arguing with it results in them interacting in bad faith thereafter".

And that's not as bad as other machinery in the US. The advice I've heard around trying to use the limited social safety machinery in the US is "plan for it to be a fulltime job for multiple years to get on it, and expect to randomly be kicked off it repeatedly".

And having the systems you interact with regularly very clearly act in bad faith, assuming by default you don't deserve things, does things to people's mental health.

It's not a negative, at all.

I just shared it because it's sort of like learning Slack started life as the internal communication tooling for the online game glitch, or that a lot of the "weird Twitter" folks started life as FYAD posters - once you know that, you can draw the lines between the two points.

Oh, it's not bad or janky (...okay, no, it was in some ways janky, but on purpose), I loved that game.

But the sense of humor/tone between the two games is very visibly the same thing.

A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.

Seeing neurons fire in recognizing the homage in the site appearance that haven't fired in 20 years was wild. Thanks for that.

I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.

Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.

[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...

I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the announcement of the other devices.

I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here.

Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around...

The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.

(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)

This is only true in places where there are more people trying to rent than places.

In theory, having more capital available in the face of a landlord raising rent an obnoxious amount will incentivize people who aren't making much to move somewhere with a lower CoL that they might not have been able to make work otherwise because of uncertainty in the amount of time they'd be out of work or their base level of money available for that time.