zeta0134

Depends on the distro really. Linux (the kernel) doesn't have or require such a concept, but it's quite possible to build a linux-based system whose surrounding operating system is designed to work this way. My Meta Quest 3 is one such example. Linux kernel, but Horizon OS only allows updates to be postponed. It'll automatically install them and in one case soft-bricked itself, forcing me to recover manually. (Great job, Meta.)

This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)

You're correct that verification *reduces* risk. It does not eliminate risk. Humans are imperfect. That does not mean that we should stop seeking understanding on principle though, because the journey towards that understanding improves outcomes.

Recall also that LLMs are not actually entities. In their current form, there is no sentience, there is no agency. They are tools. Therefore, their output must benefit the user that requested it. Right now, that's humans (and, ideally, the planet at large; we don't exist in a vacuum) and so it makes sense that humans should verify that output and try to ensure that it aligns with their goals.

That's not to say that the output of an LLM is useless, far from it. But we should still *try* to understand its output. It gives us at least some chance to notice flaws, and an even greater chance to appreciate the implications and tradeoffs of the solution it picked.

Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile...

I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.

You walk down it. Extend your hands, see if they pass through the walls, etc. If you've never used VR before this can be hard to explain with words, but "it's like you're really there" in terms of spacial presence at least. Something about being able to turn your head and have the camera perfectly mirror that movement helps your brain with all sorts of depth cues that are harder to pick up with a flat panel.

Truthfully, I don't know! Especially for younger kids though, there's usually at least an adult in the room, right? Even when they're visiting a friend, the other parent is there to step in and check on them occasionally?

I guess once you hand your teenager a smart phone (and all their friends have one too!) all bets are off. That's new, and wasn't a thing when I grew up. We were rural and on the tail end of dial-up, so I couldn't get online at home without someone hearing the modem. That sure limited my attempts to do so without permission!

This is generally my opinion, and goodness it's swung around quite a bit. This entire debate feels like it should be solved by adequate parental controls.

To the extent that it matters, I think the missing link here is "primary education should support a parent's intent to limit unrestricted internet access for their children." That is, during school activities where internet use is unavoidable, require supervision. (Maybe a lab monitor that can roam the room and see screens?) And for homework, don't assume the kid has internet access, because that is the parent's choice, and they may well not. On the flip side, if the parent trusts their kid with that access, or intends for them to learn through real world experience, let them. That should not be the state's decision.

The problem of course is that this idea in my head is a pipe dream. Schools seem to be well onboard with digital coursework, presumably for efficiency reasons? Unclear. I'm not sure what a more practical middle ground actually looks like.

By far the most irritating limitation is code size. This is a fantasy console, but the Lua VM is compressed into some sort of bytecode stream with a hard limit on the number of "tokens" (basically whole words) in the code. This leads to some oddities, like "e.pos.x" being 5 tokens, while "e.pos_x" is only 3.

My usual platform is NES, and I've got a pretty good handle on how to optimize assembly language to squeeze code down to size, but I haven't really developed that intuition for pico8's Lua implementation. The final version of the game uses 7989/8192 tokens altogether. It just barely squeaks by!

There are some minification tools I could have run, and I think with hindsight there are some architectural changes and code habits I could develop to make this slightly less of an issue. In practice, I'm now learning picotron instead. (It's got actual widescreen! Much more practical for modern displays, I think.)

They *are* doing the basic housekeeping. What do you think this announcement is, if not exactly that? AUR is very clearly documented as user-submitted, and automatic installs from it are heavily discouraged by the maintainers for this reason. Malware aside, there is very little quality control, and a poorly made AUR has the potential to break the system pretty badly. (Though, in my experience, most of the useful AUR packages are trivial to remove if something goes wrong.)

The officially maintained repositories (which are part of a default installation) were not affected. Users need to go somewhat out of their way to use an AUR.

The definition files are all plain text and not especially complicated. It's not too difficult to glance at the file before doing an install to get a basic idea of what it's about to do, just like you should do when running a random shell script or cloning a random git repo. Indeed, most AURs are implemented by cloning an upstream git repo and configuring it so it can be built. The same basic threat model applies: Do you trust the install script? Do you trust the upstream URL whose code it is about to compile?

Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.

Shopping in the US, these have entirely replaced zigbee and other sensible mesh-based options at hardware stores like Home Depot and Lowes. The only exception I can find is Phillips Hue, and those seem to be slowly getting phased out with (sigh) a new "hubless" (requires wifi) series.

I run my home automation network entirely offline, so anything that needs the internet doesn't get added to my cart. I just do not trust the security of these IoT vendors at all, and refuse to have their nonsense cluttering up my limited network bandwidth and causing unknown problems.

(Edit: maybe not obvious, this is in the "smart bulbs" product category. Regular bulbs are still much more common on store shelves, because why fix what isn't broken? Most people don't need to automate their light bulbs.)

Speaking personally, I have the "must be covered" gene along with the "overheats easily at night" gene, so it's been a bit of a struggle hitting a balance. Right now a thin breathable quilt is the way to go, even in deep winter. Hard to explain really, but I feel anxious (and cold!) if my body is exposed, even if it's actually pretty hot in the room.

The best mitigation for this conflict seems to be those knitted blankets with the enormous holes. Terrible heat retention, and they're pretty heavy. That got the job done during a Texas summer on more than one occasion.

A pox specifically on my otherwise delightful samsung OLED, which immediately upon any sort of disconnect event (say, changing the resolution, or restarting the machine) decides to spend 10-15 seconds slow-scanning every other possible input. Exactly none of which have a physical cable attached, and exactly zero of which have ever been used once.

What the devil is taking so long? I'm sure there's some technical reason that the check isn't more instant, but gosh it is frustrating every damned time.

Aye, the inspiration is not subtle. Technically it is the latest entry in the "rhythm-based roguelike" genre... which to my knowledge mostly includes CotN and its sequel, Cadence of Hyrule. Both are excellent, and I recommend them highly. Of course I'm unaffiliated, so this is more of a spiritual successor (... demake?) and is its own thing in terms of IP.

It is indeed also on Itch. I'm planning to release both, along with a physical cartridge at some point. It's a real NES game, so a ROM is included. (No DRM, of course. I'm not even sure how you would achieve DRM on a ROM chip.) I test on an Everdrive N8 Pro. It's a big game, so simpler flashcarts tend to not be able to run it.

https://zeta0134.itch.io/tactus

Still chugging away at my NES rhythm game. Currently, in addition to climbing the content mountain (so, SO much pixel art and music needs to be made) I'm also slowly learning video editing workflows. I was able to put together a brief gameplay trailer this last week:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4129270/Tactus/

Right this second I'm looking for an alternative to After Effects that runs on Linux systems, as kdenlive has some limitations with its layering implementation. I'll probably give Blender and Godot both a whirl, as I want to get more comfortable with those tools for future projects.

I got lucky: the only creator doing that used a consistent name for the video, so I could pattern match on that. I haven't found anything that would work universally.

I've been having some success by configuring my RSS reader with simple rules, like "please don't tell me about shorts" and "I don't care if this person is live right now." Too bad the real homepage shows three enormous thumbnails and pretty much exclusively the things I want to not see.

My tell is to recognize any room with a piano in it. I naturally want to sit down and play this piano, but the keys are totally wrong. No problem, I'll look around and, lo and behold, dozens more pianos all... with the keys in the wrong places. I can't play anything. "Oh, this again. I must be dreaming. How frustrating."

The answer is loyalty programs. I wouldn't be surprised if many existing loyalty programs already violate this law in spirit. The customer is encouraged to scan their app, and offered personalized coupons. Anyone not participating pays the base (highest) price possible, and those who are price conscious get a tailored discount, which is not necessarily the same discount as their neighbor.

(As an added bonus, the data stream from the loyalty program is attractive to marketing teams. Want to not be tracked? Higher prices for you!)

I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other.

So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.

In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)

I'm firmly on team "dual USB port" for this problem. We do this on computers, which can then perfectly well charge and play audio at the same time. Why not phones? It seems like there's plenty of space for a second port.

I started seeing this term come up everywhere when Overwatch first released. The common usage is much closer to mystery bundles as you describe, and regulators tend to be upset about them when real money gets involved. It feels an awful lot like gambling at that point.

I've owned and used the CR-48 prototype Chromebook model, which very well did have a developer mode and a third kernel option built right in. Ran Ubuntu on it with no issues. This has been possible since before the device family was officially available for purchase.

The school thing is different, but also hardly unique. A school issued macbook is often similarly locked down and unusable as a dev machine, due to the student lacking permissions to install anything the school deems dangerous.

I've had pretty good success with CleanRip https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.

For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.

That the news sites allow bottom of the barrel advertisers on their site primarily reflects negatively on the news site, for not curating their partnerships. They decided to become a tabloid, and should lose an according amount of respect.

Ha, my first thought is that I'd likely break this system. My page synchronizes its animation playback rate to an audio worklet, because I need to do both anyway, and some experimentation determined that syncing to audio resulted in smooth frame pacing across most browsers. This means that requestAnimationFrame has the very simple job of presenting the most recently rendered frame. It ignores the system time and, if there isn't a new frame to present yet, does nothing.

Location: Tennessee

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Within Tennessee

Technologies: C, C++, Rust, JavaScript, Python, Lua, 6502, Verilog

Résumé/CV: On Request.

Github: https://github.com/zeta0134/

Email: zeta0134 at reploid dot cafe

Hello! I'm an experienced systems administrator and software engineer, with primary experience in the web hosting space and lots of secondary experience poking around low level hardware. I took a sabbatical to do NES development and start my own business, and now I'm re-entering the workforce. (The business is doing fine, but my first game isn't ready to sell just yet.) It looks like lots of AI stuff happened while I was out!

I love deep technical dives. My professional background favors web hosting with an emphasis on docker and kubernetes, but I'm open to explore. I've worked in customer facing technical support roles, and I do rather miss the human interactions. I'm comfortable on most Linux systems, with strong RedHat and SUSE experience in particular.

I've found that I rather enjoy working with assembly languages. I've picked up enough Verilog to simulate custom cartridge hardware (via FPGA) and do lightweight audio synthesis. If I return to college, it'll be to pursue an Electrical Engineering degree. For now, it remains a delightful fun hobby.

It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.

I've been pretty happy with my Framework Desktop, though I managed to snag it before RAM prices shot through the roof. Currently, a tricked out model is around $2500.

https://frame.work/desktop

Mine sees more use as a Steam machine, but it can run decently large models. Ollama was trivial to get working, and qwen3-coder-next spits out paragraphs of text/code in seconds. I don't really do anything with that, but it's fun to mess around with. (LLMs are still pretty bad at assembly language.)

I've had no trouble with syncthing on Android. It just has access to the sync folders, as far as I can tell. Seems to work great, even if I've got the same file open simultaneously on several devices. I use a tablet in my kitchen to show my TODO at all times.