𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

What? I had to uninstall Factorio to install Space Age on my machine (Linux) - I’m pretty sure I see new stuff in the tree, although I’m still building from scratch in the rare time I get to play.

I sure hope I don’t have to install mods! I’m trying to keep this play clean.

Sure, I could do that, but not everyone can. But you still have the problem that many of these devices don’t function well unless they can phone home; they don’t very firmware upgrades, and they expect to be controlled by a bespoke app. If you filter out all the devices that are HA compatible without running through an external service, you shear the product choices in half.

This is good information. I had a complete failure with flashing Tasmota once, and bricked a $100 device.

I like the project, though. My biggest complaint is that - at least for what I was trying to flash, the Linux support was iffy. I was trying to flash something for HA, and the instructions assumed I had access to the computer running HA (which is a headless device in a closet in the basement - entirely unpractical for doing fiddly pinning while trying to flash) or using a web browser with webUSB - which Firefox on Linux doesn’t. So eventually I found a completely unrelated set of instructions I could run from the CLI from my desktop over a cable connected to said desktop, and while it appeared successful, the device is bricked. I can’t even get it into flash mode anymore.

I don’t think any of this has to do with Tasmota, except that the Linux tooling seems either weak, or make assumes people are running Chrome; and if you’re security conscious enough to be flashing a device to run Tasmota, you’re not running Chrome.

So I’m not doing that again. It’s a hundred bucks and two days of digging around for tooling and instructions I’d like back.

Again, not Tasmota’s fault, but it’s not super accessible.

I once owned a bunch of WiFi connected devices. One day I inspected my router logs and found out that they were all making calls to a bunch of services that weren’t the vendor - things like Google, and Facebook.

WiFi connected devices require connecting to a router; in most homes, this is going to be one that’s also connected to the internet - most people aren’t going to buy a second router just for their smart home, or set up a disconnected second LAN on their one router. And nearly all of these devices come with an app, which talks to the device through an external service (I’m looking at you, Honeywell, and you, Rainbird). This is a privacy shit-show. WiFi is a terrible option for smart home devices.

ZigBee, well, I haven’t had any luck with it - pairing problems which are certainly just a learning curve in my part and not an issue with the protocol. I chose ZWave myself because I read about the size and range limitations of ZigBee technology, versus ZWave, but honestly I could have gone either way. Back then, there was no appreciable price difference in devices. Most hubs support both, though, and I can’t see why I wouldn’t mix them (other than I need to figure out how to get ZigBee to work).

In any case, low-power BT, ZigBee, or Zwave are all options, whereas I will not allow more WiFi smart devices in my house. I’m stuck with Honeywell and Rainbird, for… reasons… but that’s it. I don’t need to be poking more holes in my LAN security.

My wife has an irrational fear of frogs. She’d agree with the frog part.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.

Your use case is obviously different, but I’ve gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.

When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that’s the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.

the frequency of which they’re happening which is the concern.

You have storms which were once in a generation happening every 20 years or so now, and we’re the cause.

Absolutely. I hope I was clear: we’re absolutely in a man-made climate crisis, and our global addiction to cars is part of it.

The only reason only the cars were affected wasn’t because nature hates cars, but because we build buildings betterw than we used to. Mud slides and floods have been wiping out entire towns since… well, since humans started building houses.

Floods used to happen before cars. The Biblical flood story was probably based on a real flood that wiped out a civilization.

Even within recorded history there have been floods not linked to modern (post-60’s, extinction-level) climate change.

Cars bad, yes. But if this had been 1000 years ago, this flood could still have occurred naturally, only the results would look more like a WWII carpet bombing, with much of the city flattened. And the most hilarious thing would be that there would have been done fucker saying, “this is God’s way of saying ‘fuck people’”.

It’s so laughable that in this day and age people run around saying “we have sinned, and are being punished for it! Repent!”

I’m kinda the same, only for me it’s been decades. But I will forever remember Applebee’s fondly because that’s where I first discovered fried mozerella sticks and marinara sauce. It was a religious experience, and for a couple of years I went whenever I had money and opportunity just to eat those. Can’t say I remember eating anything else there; I must have, at least the first time.

Applebee’s mozerella sticks are like Taco Bell tacos: they may not be the best quality, but if that was your introduction, nothing else can be quite as good in quite the same way.

God, this is brilliant. I wish I could upvote twice.

Although, the whole thing about not crediting the artist kinda sucks.

Go ahead… you can whisper it to me

Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I’ll agree with.

In the US, though, it’s usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it’s always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don’t get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It’s very much a case of “9 women making a baby in one month.” Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.

Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it’s by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn’t the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.

If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.

Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It’s still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.

India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.

It’s a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they’re not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they’ve already admitted they’re willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won’t be getting those good, more expensive developers. You’ll be getting whoever is cheapest.

It is among the most stupid business practices I’ve had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.

Developers are not cogs. You can’t swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.

This is not an engineering limitation; only an engineering problem to solve. My e-ink tablet can, and does, differentiate between three different types of swipes and taps, and it never does something I don’t ask it to.

Make it a 3-finger swipe. Hell, enable a confirmation dialog if you’re that uncertain about your ability to control it.

It’s like being afraid of accidentally running "sudo rm -rf /”, and just as easy to prevent accidents.

Microsoft tried this, IIRC, but the one thing that’s technologically possible that I desperately need is the SciFi concept of “throwing” content to another device. Like in The Expanse, where you swipe in the direction of a device, and it sends that content to that other device. Swipe toward your friend, the file gets sent. Swipe towards a TV, the content comes up on the TV. Heck, I’d have swipe toward my speakers and play music.

What would we need? Phones already have compasses and GPS, so the vector information is there. We have UPnP, for announcing services; we have geo recording servers like OwnTracks; every smart phone has gesture capability. We’d need a couple standards: adding geo information to UPnP; choosing a fucking universal sharing protocol (instead of the current dozens of niche protocols); and a little UI enhancement. We could have this, but instead we have walled gardens and no broadly supported standards. It’s infuriating.

Ok. It seems weird to me that it’s so common for people to call their dogs dumb… but OK.

I’ve been around enough dogs to get the drum part, but what’s the song?

Huh. It’s a little off in some details, but does a pretty good neckbeard.

I’ve been using Arch for several years, including off-beat offshoots like Artix, and have never once compiled a kernel on it. The last time I compiled a kernel was a couple of decades ago when I was running Gentoo.

Arch is mainly a precomputed precompiled binary distribution; AUR is where you get the compile from source packages, and that’s the community repos.

Arch users may have a reputation for acting superior, and I’ll admit that they Arch wiki justifies a lot of “look it up yourself” mentality, must because it’s so comprehensively good. But I think GPT misses the mark on a couple of points, like extra fingers on a Stable Diffusion person.

It was a joke. Like, it’s turtles all the way down.