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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There is this thing that I feel is most prevalent in the USA, to call any attraction to a girl under the age of 18 pedophilia. Because that’s the age to star in porn. The term should truly be used for attraction to children. I think it’s an extension of the “pedo panic” where every man is assumed for some reason to be a child rapist now.

    As such almost every young man could at some point be caught as a “pedophile”- 17 year olds sneak into clubs all the time, for example. 20 year old hooked up with one? Now he is considered a pedophile even if the actual age of consent is lower.

    Meanwhile the porn industry glorifies “barely 18” girls as something highly desirable. It’s a little messed up to say the least.

    Actual pedos who are into kids should be put in mental institutions. But I would strongly suspect that 15% stated just includes honest young men and creepy old men, none of which are truly pedophiles. That number is way too high.



  • Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

    It’s a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

    And yes, it’s terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it’s interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

    It’s also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I’m sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.




  • This would work but assumes the primary use of the machine is Windows and derates your performance under Linux significantly due to USB speeds. Even if you’re storing your data on the Windows HDD, NTFS drivers are dog slow compared to EXT4 and other *nix filesystems.

    Also some BIOSes are a pain to get to boot off removable drives reliably so it really depends on what your machine is.

    I’ve used Linux as a primary dev system for well over a decade now, and with the current state of Windows I’d really recommend just taking the leap, keep your Windows box if you need Windows software and build a dedicated Linux workstation.



  • That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.

    So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.

    A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.

    Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!


  • My type is a dying breed too, the guys who do their best to write robust code and actually trying to consider edge cases, race conditions, properly sized variables and efficient use of cycles, all the things that embedded guys have done as “embedded” evolved from 6800 to Pic, Atmel and then ESP platforms.

    Now people seem to have embraced “move fast and break things” but that’s the exact opposite to how embedded is supposed to be done. Don’t get me wrong there is some great ESP code out there but there’s also a shitload of buggy and poorly documented libraries and devices that require far too many power cycles to keep functioning.

    In my opinion one power cycle is too many in the embedded world. Your code should not leak memory. We grew up with BYTES of RAM to use, memory leaks were unthinkable!

    And don’t get me started on the appalling mess that modern engineers can make with functional block inside a PLC, or their seeming lack of knowledge of industrial control standards that have existed since before the PLC.



  • Great to hear this story of success. That plus

    $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

    Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

    Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.








  • I feel the OOP debate got a bit out of hand. I hate OOP as well, as a paradigm.

    But I love objects. An object is just a struct that can perform operations on itself. It’s super useful. So many problems lend themselves to the use of objects.

    I’ve been writing a mix of C and C++ for so long I don’t even know where the line is supposed to be. It’s “C with objects”. I probably use only 1% of the functionality of C++, but that 1% is a huge upgrade from bare C IMO.


  • I was more referring to the fact that everything is immutable by default. As someone who’s just starting to get old (40) and literally grew up with C, it’s just ingrained in me that a variable is… Variable.

    If I want a variable to be immutable I would declare it const, and I’m just not used to the opposite. So when playing with Rust, the tutorial said that “most people find themselves fighting with the borrow checker” and sure enough, that’s what I ended up doing!

    I like the concepts behind it, it really encourages writing safe code, and I feel like it’s not just going to be a fad language but will likely end up underlying secure systems of the future. Linux kernel rewrite in Rust when?

    It’s just that personally I don’t have the flow of writing code like I would in C/++, just not used to it. The scoping, the way you pass variables and can sort of “use up a reference” so it’s not available anymore just feels cumbersome compared to just passing &memory_location and getting on with it, lol