Teknoman117's comments

I just wish there was a stronger source on this. I am inclined to agree you and the source you cited, but unfortunately

> [1] This story requires some reading between the lines - the exact text of the contract isn’t available - but something like it is suggested by the way both sides have been presenting the negotiations.

I deal with far too many people who won't believe me without 10 bullet-proof sources but get very angry with me if I won't take their word without a source :(

As someone who works in the datacenter hardware / system software space who does robotics as a hobby - the craziest thing to me about ROS is how tied it is to Linux and how Linux-illiterate half the people using it seem to be.

It was like pulling teeth trying to explain to someone that they couldn’t use the Linux GPIO subsystem from python to accurately measure sub-millisecond events…

Linux is a general purpose OS, it’s typically tuned for throughput not precise timing. Sure there’s PREMPT_RT but it only buys you so much.

Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.

Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.

Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.

If my experience driving through a school zone on my way to work is anything to go off of, I rarely see people actually respecting it. 17 mph would be a major improvement over what I'm used to seeing.

I have a TV because it's a nicer group experience than everyone viewing something via their personal device - whether that is cuddling up with a partner on the couch to watch a movie, or crowding around the TV with friends to play 8-way Super Smash Bros.

Maybe it’s ironic that I’m saying this because right now I’m scrolling HN while waiting for my flight to board rather than trying to strike up conversations with people … but when I was riding the bus home a few days ago, I got fed up with the algorithmic feed (too many “you’re single because you don’t follow a dating coach that will tell you to gaslight people” ads in a row). I put my phone away and just decided to take in the scene around me.

Every other person was on their phone. Started wondering what these people did with their day, what new restaurants they discovered, what quirky thing they may have seen in the city. Conversations that might have been had if people weren’t afraid to strike up conversations with strangers. (something I definitely struggle with myself too)

Anyways, random thoughts as usual.

Getting a Lego Mindstorms RIS 2.0 set for Christmas in 2001 is what instilled the love of programming, computing, and engineering in me. I’ve pretty much known what I’ve wanted to do with my life from that point forward.

The homebrew community that grew around it was also legendary. I learned Java (via LeJOS) because the block based programming became too restrictive for what I wanted to do. I learned C (via brickOS) once I hit code size limits with LeJOS and became less scared of pointers :)

The current generation of consoles can’t play games directly off the disk. They have to be installed to local storage first.

As someone who works at an F100 company with massive proprietary codebases that also requires our users to sign NDAs even see API docs and code examples, to say that the output of LLMs for work tasks is comically bad would be an understatement even with feeding it code and documentation as memory items for projects...

One of my friends got a Pimoroni InkyFrame and was trying to figure out what to do with it. Ended up learning a substantial amount about how dithering works to convert images into the 7 colors the eInk display can produce. It just sits there playing the original Shrek at 1 minute per frame over and over again XD.

When he messed up the color conversion "Green Farquaad" was a recurring meme in our group chat.

There's also this fun company (DM&P): https://www.vortex86.com

Their "Vortex86DX3" is basically a dual-core 1 GHz Pentium II system on a chip...

As someone who does backpacking, a few reasons for bringing power sources:

- A satellite communication device. You don't use them for internet access, but it does allow me to send my location and a small message so I can let an emergency contact know where I've made camp for the night (and a lack of a message means I'm in trouble). It also enables me to contact search and rescue if I know I'm in trouble.

We did have to use it once when my sister lost her footing and fell of the side of a mountain and shattered her leg. (full recovery, thankfully)

- GPS receiver. I've shifted to using my phone as my GPS unit (with Gaia GPS). Trail GPS units have been subjected to planned obsolescence in a bad way, many will only be supported for a few years now, after that you can't load maps into them anymore. Might as well use your phone and Gaia works offline. Although you do learn that modern cellphones really, really hate being offline for weeks on end and random things start breaking down.

The latter was super important this year. With the budget cuts to park services this year in the US, many of our back country trails are in worse disrepair than they usually are. There were multiple days where the only way I knew I was still on the trail was to follow the dot on my GPS and look for the occasional cut log...

The last 20% of the performance takes like >75% of the power with Zen 4 systems XD.

A Ryzen 9 7945HX mini pc I have achieves like ~80% of the all-core performance at 55W of my Ryzen 9 7950X desktop, which uses 225W for the CPU (admittedly, the defaults).

I think limiting the desktop CPU to 105W only dropped the performance by 10%. I haven't done that test in awhile because I was having some stability problems I couldn't be bothered to diagnose.

ARM systems that support UEFI are pretty fun to work with. Then there's everything else. Anytime I hear the phrase "vendor kernel" I know I'm in for an experience...

An interesting example of this was i386 support (as in being able to run on the 80386) being removed way back in kernel 3.8 (early 2013). If you can support 80486 why can't you support 80386?

Well, there really wasn't much support for atomic instructions in x86 before the introduction of compare-exchange in the 486. Any time you wanted guaranteed atomicity on a 386 you had to disable interrupts, which among other things means that if you lock up during a critical section your entire system hangs. Another implication is that nearly all of our lockless data structure constructs depend on compare-exchange instructions.

It vastly simplified some very tricky sections of the kernel to remove support for systems that don't have hardware atomic instructions, so it ended up being done.

That's also in line with my memory of it.

We still don't have all of the interesting C++ features in freestanding mode. It's still a fairly unknown component of libc++ and libstdc++. I've only been playing with it recently because I was curious about how many of the c++17 and newer compile time features I could get to work in avr-g++.

And the answer is ... not much.

I've been spoiled by Rust's "core" crate.

I almost had that experience with one of the popular PC liquid cooling hardware vendors around 10 years ago.

I emailed them saying I'd be interested in developing drivers for their hardware for Linux as I was a happy customer and was immediately put in touch with one of the managers and their engineering team.

Made quite a bit of progress before the whole thing was shut down because one of their component vendors threatened them saying it'd be a breach of their contract with them.

Apparently that vendor sold a "datacenter" (non consumer) version of that hardware for which they charged a hefty license fee for the management software (which was Linux compatible).

Jokes on them, someone reverse engineered the whole thing with a USB analyzer years later and published it XD. (not me)

Apparently I have trouble telling the difference between different shades of pink...

It's shocking how recently this all seems to have been removed. I'm in my early 30s and learned most of this in public school.