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yabones

5,680 karma · joined February 15, 2019

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yabones··on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
An all-in-one solution would be far too heavy. Splitting the tasks up makes a lot of sense. Having all the equipment onboard to drill cores, quickly analyze them, decide if they're worth keeping, and then putting samples in containers is enough work for one rover.

* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover

* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter

* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system

yabones··on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA
It's super common and very useful for security systems to work like this. Instead of putting something in-line that might choke on a burst of traffic you put it off to the side and send it a firehose of packets it may or may not be able to handle. If it falls over, no problem.
yabones··on How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
Until 2023 I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc. I had an ancient 6c/6t box with about 24G of memory, and a couple 10K drives & 500G SSDs. It was fast, responsive, rock solid, and LDAP had everybody's accounts synced perfectly.

Then they strong-armed everybody but the largest enterprises onto their cloud. The alternative was painful (exporting/munging/importing to an alternative) so most of us went along for the ride. It took less than a year for them to start enshittifying their core product. Now it's basically unrecognizable from the product we used on-prem only three years ago.

I'll always be salty that my box of spare parts was superior to their cloud service in nearly every way.

yabones··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
Every server with port 80/443 open has thousands of hits a day from random boxes looking for wordpress login pages. The only new thing is that they're pretending to be a different type of annoying bot. There's a new layer of sophistication and subterfuge, but it's the same junk traffic we've always dealt with.
yabones··on Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?
Indeed, it doesn't seem to think that the fairly large cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, and Thunder Bay have a population of approximately zero. Anywhere in northern Montana has the "beam" shoot all the way over to Maine before reaching 100K, which isn't quite right since it passes through a couple medium Canadian cities and dozens of prairie towns.

I think this tool would be much more interesting in the western US if they had incorporated Canadian census data as well.

yabones··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Lots of people didn't invest in mortgage backed securities but still got screwed in 2008. When something is systemic, you don't have to be directly exposed to be effected when it goes sideways.
yabones··on The World's 2,400 Castles
It's probably somewhat regional, as the ones in Canada seem to have pretty good tourism interest, especially when they're right inside a city like Quebec and Halifax.

But we're also very starved for true "Medieval Castles" like Europe or east Asia, so we take what we can get!

yabones··on Map of the world's great castles and fortresses
Not sure if they count, but the site appears to be missing loads of British star-forts built around the great lakes, st. lawrence, and eastern Canada!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Hill_(Fort_George)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Island_(Nova_Scotia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadelle_of_Quebec

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Fort_Erie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Anne

They built these things _everywhere_, probably a good part of what bankrupted the British Empire!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Charlotte_(Nassau)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Wales_Fort

yabones··on Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode
Looks like its started to publish new imagery again! I'm sure those fellows are relieved to have it working... I can't imagine the stress of trying to debug something that far away and unreachable!

https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/sector_band.php?sat=G1...

yabones··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
It once made me exit the highway, using the nearly empty exit ramp, then do a U-turn on the surface street and get back using the lightly used entrance ramp. Wow, all that effort to move about 250m forward in traffic, saving me perhaps 30 seconds of time on my 3 hour drive. Very "over-optimized" software does bizarre stuff that no sane person would ever do.
yabones··on An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop
There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.

The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.

yabones··on Tenda firmware (multiple versions) contains hidden authentication backdoor
You can use basically any hardware. I've done it with trash-picked laptops and USB ethernet adapters. Best option these days is a N100/N150 mini-pc with multiple NICs onboard, but with the price of everything going up maybe trashpicking will make a return.

https://nbailey.ca/post/router

yabones··on Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor
I don't see the issue with dry cask storage medium term, and deep geological storage long term. Spent fuel isn't really that dangerous once it's been cooled down and for a couple decades before putting it in the ground, to the point that there are far more dangerous natural things you can dig up.

What concerns me is that 250 years of fossil fuel energy continues to store its waste products in my lungs and the water I drink. That's the issue we need to solve with urgency.

yabones··on The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
This issue here isn't surveillance as per a signed warrant. I don't think anybody's really arguing against that.

The problem is mass data collection without suspicion, probable cause, or warrants whatsoever. That's a brand new thing, other than the places in the world unfortunate enough to have roving gangs of police going door to door and searching homes without warrants. This facilitates it on a scale that's never really been seen before in human history.

yabones··on ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker
While there might be some benefit, most of them are snakeoil. Effectively they're just sending polite emails to "people search" websites to remove you from search results. The real, very harmful, data brokers are background check systems (LexisNexis), credit bureaus (Equifax), and insurance industry registries, which there is effectively no way to opt-out short of faking your death.
yabones··on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything
Obviously "physical access is full access", but it's shockingly easy to break into a Windows box if you have access to the unencrypted drive. I learned with I was a teenager how to use the recovery partition to mount the C: drive, then copy "cmd.exe" to "utilman.exe" or "sethc.exe" and get an instant root shell on the login page. Takes about 2-3 minutes, can be done in the time somebody leaves their laptop to go to the bathroom at Starbucks.

To me that's the main thing about disk encryption, it's to stop a nasty rootkit from being installed trivially as much as it is about stopping the guy at the pawn shop from getting your tax info. Whether you're on macos, linux, or windows, it's really quite easy to fully compromise a machine if you have hands on it.

yabones··on Car headlights don't have to be this blinding
I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.
yabones··on BYD is bringing its 5-min 'Flash' electric car charging to Canada
The situation out west is indeed rough. Saskatchewan still burning coal and Alberta... Being Alberta. It's not to say we can't fix it, those are both places where you can build plenty of solar and wind power for very cheap.

These problems are very political, but also very fixable. I think (well, hope) once it becomes clear that cheap Chinese EVs are here to stay the tide will begin to turn. In terms of total lifetime cost, you can either spend 200K CAD on a Silverado or 50K CAD on a Dolphin.

yabones··on BYD is bringing its 5-min 'Flash' electric car charging to Canada
Seems like a good plan. Canada has the third largest hydroelectric power production in the world, and quite a bit of nuclear, so let's use it properly. People talk about transmission infrastructure like it's difficult, but we're the ones who made the ~5,000 KM HVDC system that feeds the northern US from James Bay! I don't see why we can't quickly electrify transportation, it's the kind of project Canada seems to be pretty good at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...

yabones··on PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you
I'm curious how this might help with our biggest downtime-causer with postgres, which is major version upgrades. Poolers do a great job for failover and load balancing, but we consistently need ~10-20 minutes of downtime once or twice a year to do upgrades. Logical replication between old->new versions could probably help, but it would still require flipping everything over to the new cluster without partial writes or anything silly. Anybody have experience with this?
yabones··on Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.
yabones··on Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]
The toyota hybrid transmission is genuinely brilliant. Probably one of the most important and broadly overlooked innovations in automobile technology this century.

https://eahart.com/prius/psd/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmxIsoV_Xo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM

yabones··on CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHub
I bet the scanner went off quite a few times and the guy disabled it...

"I turned off the carbon monoxide detector because it kept beeping, now I can finally get some sleep"

yabones··on Claude for Legal
Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you. There's no errors or omissions insurance, no legal accountability, no attorney-client privilege, and no bar association to handle disciplinary action.

I think we should be realistic here, this is a more advanced version of those "will kits" that spit out a PDF. The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff until something fundamentally changes.

And like, I would love if we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in a culture as litigious as ours. But I wouldn't put my life and well being on this thing.

yabones··on Extremely Low Frequencies
It's crazy that they're using radio frequencies that are within the range of human hearing... Obviously sound and RF are different things, but it puts into perspective how a "high" sound is a very "low" frequency ;)
yabones··on I want to live like Costco people
I get the allure, but it's not for me and my partner.

We live in a small apartment. We drive a small car. The pantry has a good amount of dry bulk & canned food, but we largely shop one week at a time.

Sure, we could "lock in" on two or three foods, buy weeks worth of them at a time, and save some money. But like most people we like a bit of verity. It's just not possible to buy such massive quantities of things with nowhere to store them.

What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.

yabones··on Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)
It's so you can obliterate your tires by sending all 260 ft/lbs through first gear from a dead stop, or pull entire buildings up hills.
yabones··on Life During Class Wartime
For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged.

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

yabones··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
"move fast and break things" only sounds good when it's not breaking things in a serious and unfixable way. Maybe we shouldn't take hype mantras as instructive means to an end.
yabones··on Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?
A very simple fix for that is to use the systemd log driver to send all the container logs to journald. Then you can set a size or time limit on journald.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/logging/drivers/journald/

I believe Podman can do something similar.

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