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2 yr. ago

  • They're in a lot of government networks world wide (I visited them a long time ago to discuss some potential cooperation) - they're technically quite sound, and as bonus them being privately owned and headquartered in small Finland is generally seen as reducing the likelihood of backdoors or similar issues due to conflicting state interests.

  • Preordering made sense when games came in nice boxes, and you wanted to be sure to play it on the day of release instead of waiting for restocking. With digital downloads now which are not limited in quantity it is just stupid.

  • What kind of monster stores bananas in the fridge?

  • I've been trying that for a while until I ran out of searches, and was trying to pay - after getting unsolvable captchas thrown at me several times by their payment processor I eventually gave up. Having a captcha at that point also doesn't make any sense at all - as I'm in the EU my card will have to go through strong verification before adding it. For a US audience the experience might be different - I guess that's also their main initial target.

    They also just did a bare minimum job of supporting non-javascript - while it nowadays is pretty much impossible to handle payment without allowing some javascript they also have their own account logic unusable without javascript, and they don't have a way to easily open that in a private session when you get stuck. That'd be trivially solvable by just giving you a URL with an account key attached you can paste into a private instance to do your payment.

    metager does that way better - they're usable without javascript, and don't force you to create an account with them. You can create a key with tokens tied to it to unlock search features. You can just use that to enable it in other browsers - and you easily jump into a private instance from the key workflow to just add money to the key.

    I might revisit kagi later to see if they fixed some of those problems - but for now metager seems to be the best option. I'm a bit amazed they still exist - it was my main search engine back in the 90s before google came around.

  • With lower voltage DC you can only set the house on fire. With high voltage AC you can set the house on fire and electrocute people. In a safety oriented company you'd try to limit the parts of the device carrying 230V (or, more generally: if your device has dangerous bits, you try to keep those bits in as few places as possible, as that limits teh amount of places you need to keep safe). Now obviously this has limits - like the mentioned bed size - but I don't think we're yet at a point where this should overrule safe design principles.

    I haven't seen a bambu printer myself yet - but given that the cable is undersized and not protected against side effects from bed movement I'd bet they also skimped on on making everything carrying 230V safe - in which case this is a cheaper design. I'm reasonably confident that a safe 230V heating design for a printer that size would not give you noticeably cost savings over a DC design, if at all.

  • Not a bambu owner (and unlikely to ever be one), but read up on that out of curiousity.

    I guess they're offering self replacement as cost cutting measure, but wouldn't be surprised they'll stop doing that once their legal team fully understands the impact.

    This problem is a fire hazard which is unlikely to be solved by replacing it with a same spec cable, so even if you can replace it yourself I probably wouldn't, just to make sure there's no arguing over liability if this thing catches fire. I'd assume they'll do a longer term fix with a more stable cable, possibly with added strain relief - though I also find doing a 230V heatbed a questionable design choice.

  • Apple has low memory behaviour way better optimized than Windows, so running at 8GB will not be as painful as it is with windows - but in the background the OS will constantly shuffle stuff around to avoid running out of memory, which costs performance.

    16GB is the bare minimum for computer nowadays - and that applies to macs as well. I'm currently using a 16GB air m1 for some things, and I also regularly run into performance issues due to memory limits without doing heavy stuff.

  • You nowadays even need to pay attention on Android as you might get an "software related to what you're currently trying to install" with an install button on top of the install button you want - in the location where the install button used to be in googles playstore. Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.

  • A small form factor, small high density connector. Most interfaces are not populated, as on the regular pis, but just lead out via the connector, so you can decide what you want to expose on your compute module carrier. It has a gbit ethernet chip on board, and a pcie chip - rpi4 also has pcie, but it is hooked up to USB3 there. With the compute module you can decide what you want to do with that.

  • Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.

    That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.

    I'd nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they're smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.

  • Some of the drugs are not manufactured in the US. There has been an EU wide ban for selling drugs used in executions to the US without making sure they're not used for executions. Which also is the reason why medical organizations were very unhappy few years ago when states lied to them in an attempt to get those drugs - as they risk getting cut off for legitimate medical use.

    Reason for the EU ban is simple: We consider executions a human rights violation over here.

  • He got purged a few years after the war.

  • 50 pin centronics should be bulkier in all dimensions

  • The problems come when the woman turns around and keeps closing the notebook with her breasts.

  • Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.

    My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.

  • The real danger is when people start believing the artist more because of how much more aesthetically pleasing they can make their misunderstandings, and trust me it is a real danger.

    We already have that a lot in our field - people just buy a shiny UI, and don't care about the rest.

    One of the first times I've encountered that was when a customer bought a ridiculously overpriced firewall box because of the easy to use GUI, and asked me to implement a pretty complex rule set. The irony of having bought the fancy UI so the can do it themselves, and then hire an expert to do it instead was completely lost on them.

    This thing had troubles doing what was needed there, and had pretty much zero debug functionality exposed - so eventually I suggested they give me one of their old desktops and half a day to see if I can get the ruleset done the old fashioned way with OpenBSDs pf (that was before Linux kernel 2.4 was released, so Linux firewalls couldn't do stateful filtering yet, which was required there) - got everything running in a morning, they decided to just stick with it, and the expensive fancy box was collecting dust.

  • killall typically sends SIGTERM by default. It accepts a single argument, the signal to send - so shutdown would call it once with SIGTERM, then with SIGKILL. killall is not meant to to be called interactively - which worked fine, until people who had their first contact with UNIX like systems on Linux started getting access to traditional UNIX systems.

    It used to be common to discourage new Linux users from using killall interactively for exactly that reason. Just checked, there's even a warning about that in the killall manpage on Linux.