Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!

“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that

Am farmer, can confirm. I also have my chequebook with me… Non-farmers, when was the last time you wrote a cheque, aside from rent? I feel like we’re the only ones still using them.

“I’m drunk”

These microplastics are digestible by your immune system, though, which makes them ultimately harmless. PLA is used for drug delivery for this reason.

Being concerned about incomplete PLA degradation is like being concerned about a piece of wood breaking down into micro-woods. Yet even if you get a dangerous shard of micro-wood embedded in your skin, your body can deal with this cellose polymer just fine.

Ultimately it will break down completely someday and in the meantime, nothing will be harmed.

VPN and have them punch in to a cheap or free cloud instance that acts as a hub router.

You give them a config file and they feed it to their device or router, use a private subnet in the 10.0.0.0/8 range because everyone is on 192.168.1.0/24 and then they just hit it at 10.0.0.1 or whatever.

I like Wireguard but you might have to use something with layer 2 support if you want service discovery to work for true zero config.

A million tiny decisions can be just as damaging. In my limited experience with several different local and cloud models you have to review basically all output as it can confidently introduce small errors. Often code will compile and run, but it has small errors that can cause output to drift, or the aforementioned long-run overflow type errors.

Those are the errors that junior or lazy coders will never notice and walk away from, causing hard to diagnose failure down the road. And the code “looks fine” so reviewers would need to really go over it with a fine toothed comb, which only happens in critical industries.

I will only use AI to write comments and documentation blocks and to get jumping off points for algorithms I don’t keep in my head. (“Write a function to sort this array”) It’s better than stack exchange for that IMO.

I tried using AI tools to do some cleanup and refactoring of some legacy embedded C code and was curious if it could do any optimization or knew any clever algorithms.

It’s pretty good at figuring out the function of the code and adding comments, it did some decent refactoring of some sections to make them more readable.

It has no clue about how to work in a resource constrained environment or about the main concepts that separate embedded from everything else. Namely that it has to be able to run “forever”, operate in realtime on a constant flow of sensor data, and that nobody else is taking care of your memory management.

It even explained to me that we could do input filtering by using big arrays to do simple averaging on a device with only 1kB RAM, or use a long long for a never-reset accumulator without worrying about what will happen because “it will be years before it overflows”.

AI buddy, some of these units have run for decades without a power cycle. If lazy coders start dumping AI output into embedded systems the whole world is going to get a lot more glitchy.

Install a modchip, or as we used to call them a “remote starter” lol

I’m sure someone still makes a product that you can splice into the wiring harness. And if they don’t… There’s a market for it

For free tier, Google Cloud is more transparent about what you get than AWS IMO.

The only catch is to make sure your persistent disk is “standard” to make it totally free as it defaults to SSD.

However if you do mess up the disk you’ll still only be paying $1-2/mo. Been using GC for years, and recently they finally started offering dual stack so you can do your own 6to4 tunneling or translation if you want, depends on your usage case.

AirVPN also are legit and will let you forward ports to expose your local services if you’re worried about DMCA type issues.

I finally got IPv6 here through Starlink, it’s nice to have full access to the internet again after a decade behind CGNAT

Ballsy? He’s an outright copyright troll and anyone celebrating him here in the comments should read the article…

He wrote a knockoff book and then tried to claim Tolkien’s characters as his own and sue his estate? Does nobody remember the days of BS software patent trolls trying to claim they invented “the app” or “method for clicking on things with the mouse cursor?” Do we remember how mad we were at those shysters?

This guy deserves whatever he gets.

Everything will seem to be be going great, but to actually gain access to the castle you’ll have to compare your situation to successful rescues to find the undocumented drawbridge control

Futurama did it too. Though I remember it being actually funny, without all the associated culture war baggage.

More of a commentary on Bender’s poor impulse control and minimal ethics than on society I would say

I really don’t see how building a docker container afterward makes it easier

What it’s supposed to make easier is both sandboxing and reuse / deployment. For example, Docker + Traefik makes some tasks so incredibly easy and secure compared to running them on bare metal. Or if you need to spin up multiple instances, they can be created and destroyed in seconds. Without the container, this just isn’t feasible.

The dockerfile uses MySQL because it works. If you want to know if the core service works with PostgreSQL, that’s not really on the guy who wrote the dockerfile, that’s on the application maintainer. Read the docs, do some testing, create your own container using its own PostgreSQL or connecting to an external database if that suits your needs better.

Once again the flexibility of bind mounts means you could often drop that external database right on top of the one in the container. That’s the real beauty of Docker IMO, being able to slot the containers into your system seamlessly due to the mount system.

adapting can be a pita when the package is built around a really specific environment

That’s the great thing about Docker, it lets you bring that really specific environment anywhere and in an incredibly lightweight manner compared to the old days of heavyweight VMs. I’ve even got Docker containers running on a Raspberry Pi B+ that otherwise is so old that it would be nearly impossible to install the libraries required to run modern software.

You can download from Spotify using Zotify. Albums, playlists, if you set it to Artist unfortunately you will get a bunch of singles and EPs that you have to clean up.

If you have Premium you can download at high bitrates, otherwise you get Ogg Vorbis at around 150 ABR. You can automatically transcode to whatever format you want, then I feed it to beets to catalogue and deliver it with Ampache.

I like the moderate bitrate OGGs myself, as I often stream from Ampache to my phone and our mobile service is quite slow. So this system works great for me.

Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.

I used to love Perl as it worked the way my brain worked.

Then I started taking medication for ADHD.

I haven’t used Perl since except for text parsing, it’s an absolute hot mess of a language (though very powerful and functional at the things it does well)

Sometimes a guy just wants to not have to cook and to just go eat some god damn chicken strips

Apparently even the simplest pleasures in life are luxuries now.

Thanks, this sounds like a great way to start building a library and might actually be more effective than downloading massive torrents, especially as it claims to handle metadata and tagging effectively. Definitely will give it a try!

Whaaat Soulseek still exists? Thanks, will check it out

Despite being proud to still fly the Jolly Roger for most media I have to say that for the Linux gamer it’s nearly as cost effective just to put Steam games on your wishlist and wait for the sale notification. Lots of great games can be had for single dollars, you get support, patches, online play etc. so it’s not worth the effort to plunder them.

I found honestly it’s rare that a Steam game has issues on Linux these days and if it does, just refund it and get your $5 back. Otherwise as mentioned they are very hard to find.