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Search - "hardware"
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It was only a while ago that I realized that “firm” was not quite “hard”, but also not “soft”, hence “firmware”, it's in between hardware and software.32
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I am working on my passion project, on my own vacation days because my advisor did not approve it and I can't take no for an answer.
But I had 3 amazing days working with my friend and research partner, full of stupid bugs, moody hardware and a lot of nutella-covered food.
I think I am going to document some of the progress on Twitter, because it supports uploading videos. If anyone is interested in failing robots, I can share the link/handle :)rant no is a word i don't recognize chaos vacation what vacation robotics phd life drone twitter debug research10 -
Well one thing that became obvious today is that companies that make wifi routers really dont want you flashing other firmware on it.
For example i got a new router cause it was time.
Ofc fully compatible with OpenWRT. The thing tho ? The GUI flashing process accepts only encrypted binaries. And surprise we as customers cant encrypt it like they do.
So the next thing that comes to mind instantly is UART. They cant break that right ? Well turns out they can. They just disallow key inputs from console. So you cant make the damn device load into TFTP mode.
And D-Link has this lovely recovery utility that accepts unencrypted firmware. EZ way to flash it right ? WRONG. The garbage doesnt load second time after you load it once in 1 boot. And even if you get it to start loading the firmware. It wont really flash it.
Luckily there was an exploit :)
And joining via telnet and enabling http server on PC and wget-ting the binary from there. And flashing.
Honestly now. I pay money for this garbage. I own the hardware. Let me do what i want with it.
At least it runs kernel 5.10 now and is super fast :) Worth the trouble honestly
(Should be noted im not new to flashing firmware on routers. But this is the first one that really didnt want me to flash it. Like nuking my freaking UART access ? Taking it too fucking far)7 -
So I just found out that my colleague who I often have to work with does not use a debugger to troubleshoot any bugs at all. Actually, he does not even run or test his code locally either with prints or something similar. He just commits java code directly on bitbucket, no source control, without making sure it compiles and then he runs a CI provided by devops that takes 4 freaking hours to run because he bloated that shit up somehow.
I suggested politely to help him find a more efficient approach and to use my hardware setups for speeding up his work because I assume it must be pretty painful to work with, but he just refused.
That and those "seniors" with 10 years Linux development XP in the embedded field who don't know basic commands like ls, cat and touch and code in notepad.
Fucking me, who the hell am I working with and can someone please end me?6 -
Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.
Worked today… At Saturday.
Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....
*rolls eyes*
We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.
Guess why I got called...
Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.
It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.
*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*
The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.
IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...
*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*
Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.
Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...
NOTICE SOMETHING?!
Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.
After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.
Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…
*turning into antichrist*
I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.
Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...
Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.
But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.
Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.
Just one hour implementing shit.
*goozfraba*11 -
The newest addition to our lab - Pikachu!
We managed to overcome the weirdest pinout configuration ever on the MCU and power up the Nvidia Jetson.
Next week I'm going to make a clean install of the Jetson because there is some funky garbage there, and then I'll try to drive the little beast :)18 -
Lisp code was live-debugged and fixed with REPL on a spacecraft 100 million miles away
“An even more impressive instance of remote debugging occurred on NASA's 1998 Deep Space 1 mission. A half year after the space craft launched, a bit of Lisp code was going to control the spacecraft for two days while conducting a sequence of experiments. Unfortunately, a subtle race condition in the code had escaped detection during ground testing and was already in space. When the bug manifested in the wild--100 million miles away from Earth--the team was able to diagnose and fix the running code, allowing the experiments to complete. One of the programmers described it as follows:
Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.”
https://gigamonkeys.com/book/...4 -
!rant
Linux just made my day. Everybody knows how Windows won't let you shutdown your hardware until it updates, right? So last night I forgot I was upgrading Manjaro in a background terminal (full distro update, tons of packages) and hibernated my rig, plugged it off, took it to a different location. Today I hooked it up - different network, IP, etc. - it woke up, finished compiling whatever it ended up on then downloaded, compiled and installed everything else, said "Thank you very much!" and dropped the mic. Someone tell me this isn't pure awesomeness! 😂
It asked again for root password but other than that... shrugged off 12 hours difference like a boss!18 -
This brings joy
https://reddit.com/r/technology/...
Bypass paywall:
A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.
The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.
"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."
Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.
How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.
A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.
For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.
During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.
Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.
Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.
Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.
"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.10 -
I find it annoying when non-tech savvy people criticize the Parler devs for using AWS because "it's Amazon they had it coming", I don't know the devs or company behind that website, I've never used it, but wtf man do you have any idea what's involved in building, deploying and maintaining a platform like that or any other similar? ffs you would barely be able to write an HTML blog by yourself and you dare judge devs for using AWS. fuck off.
I agree with the sentiment, it sucks, if my platform was removed from AWS I probably would keep it that way because I don't have the money to afford the hardware nor am I somewhere that's readily available and that's what is really sad it would suck that just because Amazon doesn't like you or you don't have the influence to fight it you and your userbase can go fuck off. Very bad precedent, it is discouraging.68 -
Is obsidian a fucking joke?
Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.
There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).
How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.
I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.8 -
I interviewed for a YouTube channel that hosts young researchers from different fields, to discuss robotics (in very simplified and people-friendly terms).
I also to managed to assemble my TD-7 drum kit remarkably fast, considering I don't have previous IKEA experience. This is why you should give opportunities to enthusiastic juniors, they might surpass your expectations :)15 -
When you realize that there's no "magic" and no "only really smart specialists can understand this" in computers, software and hardware.
Everything is clearly defined in protocols/RFCs. The "magic" part is nothing more than extremely tedious, annoying and boring work combining those protocols together, making them talk to each other, and layering them inside each other.
Understand the little parts and you'll understand how the big ones work.4 -
the year is 2050
- Linux is written in Rust and called Windows
- Python 2 market share increased by 2% since 2023
- The latest JS framework to finally solve everything just came out, and this time it’s the real deal. The exact same thing also happened in 2045, 2041, 2037, 2035, 2030 and 2026
- More than 60% of every CPU is hardware JS cores
- React became a separate language
- Sentient Copilot refused to write code in it
- Unit tests are illegal in three states
- Google had changed their motto from “Do The Right Thing” to “Do At Least Something”
- Chrome OS was rewritten in JS
- CSS is Turing-complete29 -
I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.
Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.
However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.
Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!6 -
Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.
We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.4 -
So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...13 -
Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.
Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.
I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.
And there is no unit test or spec doc.
Fuck me dead3 -
Interesting. A few hours ago I had a nice domestic conversation with my coleague about robot vacuum cleaners. He was talking about iRobot Roomba and I was talking about Xiaomi. Here's the result!
Interesting thing is that we talked in a *voice* conversation. Over Slack. Over Chrome. Over corporate VPN (openconnect).
Where's the spying link? Slack or Chrome?
My bet's on Chrome.
What does that tell you about the privacy of your sensitive conversations? :)
Hide behind VPNs all you like. If you have proprietary software (or hardware in the case of Huawei) - you're being watched and listened to.
EDIT: I'm on Linux, he's on MacOS9 -
A becomes B
B becomes C
C becomes A
D becomes B
E becomes A
Now add real hostnames... Make this list longer (roughly 15-18)
Add resource calculation, migration of VMs, organizing new hardware, removing and rebuilding hosts, etc.
I think my brain is permanently damaged and cannot be repaired.
Hardware migration finally over tomorrow.
I really won't miss the fuckton of Excel lists, constant speaking mistakes, having sore fingers from mutilating the desk calculator etc.
I'm too tired to be happy. But... It's over.1 -
Who makes monitors which can only change the input if there is a signal on the currently selected input?
Monitor on -> VGA -> No signal -> Going to sleep
Like, let me change it to something which has a signal instead of directly going to sleep again?9 -
Writing an efficient, modern renderer is truly an exercise of patience. You have a good idea? Hah, fuck you, GPUs don't support that. Okay but what if I try to use this advanced feature? Eh, probably not going to support exactly what you would like to do. Okay fuck it I'm gonna use the most obscure features possible. Congratulations, it doesn't work even on the niche hardware that supports that extension
If I sound jaded, ya better believe I f*cking am! I cannot wait for more graphics cards to support features like mesh shaders so we can finally compute shader all the things and do things the way we want to god dammit -
The good: use the hardware watchdog in your application control flow.
The bad: don't use a watchdog.
The ugly: trigger the watchdog from a fucking timer interrupt.4 -
Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...
So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together
So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.
Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?
After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.
Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.
The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.
Lockdown started.
There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.
A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.
Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!
It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.
The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.
Suddenly my manager is fired.
Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.
The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.
Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.
...
...
Fuck
"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.
...
It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.
I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.
But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.
It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.
So yeah, sorry for the rambling.5 -
This planet is lame. Apparently there is a company called “Microsoft” that is not micro by any means, and it even sells hardware. Unacceptable.5
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MS Teams:
*Notification*: Bob sent you a message: "Hello netikras. Got a minute for a call? Andrew told me <...>"
Open up Teams, open chat with Bob. Last message received -- 2 weeks ago. Chat summary on the left (chats list) shows the last message was 2 minutes ago with "Hello netikras. Got a...."
Prolly just javascript failed to fetch the full message to display it in the chat.. refresh the Teams tab
Same thing.
How the f*ck do I read the full message? WHAT DID ANDREW TELL BOB????
Fucking Micro$oft... Ironically, the only thing they're good at is hardware. Well okay and the office suite.
Can't even make a working chat app that doesn't lose messages or doesn't behave like a three-headed dragon with multiple personalities in each head.6 -
None, actually.
Tho I should thank Mr. S, calculus teacher in my last year of highschool, and most of my physics teachers, and that one lady in first year of highschool teaching maths. I think those were way more important in teaching me logic than the folks who pretended to teach me stuff later in uni.
Oh, and that dude, Sir O.D., who was my professor of embedded microcontrollers in uni. Didn't teach me much programming, rather taught a memorable lesson on VHDL and how hardware really works. -
After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.
Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.6 -
Well shit, now I (re-)learned C,
And all I want to do is program in C,
But all C jobs are like -
"C guru that merged to Linux kernel"
"Driver writing low level must know Assembly"
"Military-grade realtime hardware design"
Isn't there a C job that's like Python - "here I wrote this script in 5 minutes and spent the rest of the day playing Eve Online" :D :D10 -
So earlier my Windows 10 machine decided to crash to blue screen on me. First time I have seen a blue screen in 4 years. I thought, this sucks. I waited for it to reboot. I logged back in and saw it was busy doing "stuff". Then I heard the hardware attaching noise.
This is what I think happened. I think because I did an update the other day that it had installed new drivers. I think there may be some sort of driver A/B testing going on. So the blue screen gave Windows enough info to know which driver. Then when the machine restarted it either reverted to a known "good" driver or switched to an alternate.
I don't know if this is true, but it is a cool feature if it is. Do other OSes do stuff like that?11 -
One of our customers wants our mobile app to log out the user after 15 minutes of inactivity because of SeCuRiTy…
Why? The phones protect the apps with their hardware encryption from any malicious access.
And we are not dealing with super sensitive data here like some banking app or so.
Why do some people want to have bad UX for no reason?12 -
So I have a hardware project which requires two spindles to move something. Turns out one of the two i ordered has a sliiiightly smaller pitch than the other. Therefore it to moves slower than the other one and shit doesnt work.
FuckThis.exe I go to the hardware store and get two M8 threaded rods with nuts. Install it and it works. This shizz has less backlash than both spindles combined and cost 1/3 of just one propper spindle.
This is pretty much the first time I've seen the shitty solution work waaay better than the propper one.2 -
Embedded app design resources?
We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.
Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?
I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.13 -
Macbook keyboard is shit
Especially european variant.
I want to see any person in the world that is braindead enough to think that making short left shift if favour of having abolutely useless button there is good.
This is the most stupid decision that could be ever made.
Not only the symbols used by that button are seldom used, they also are duplicated on they other keyboard keys. But shift is used all the time and must be big enough instead of that shit.9 -
We had today a meeting in management that ended in a discussion about prevention instead of crisis and risk management.
Or to make it bit simpler: prevention instead of treatment.
In IT / management / government, treatment is usually the way - you let the crisis happen, despite knowing it could have been prevented, and treat the damage / crisis.
Needless to say, the discussion escalated like usual.
It's funny how managers are able to put sentences like: "it's important to have quality assurance like prevention but staying within budget should be priority" (loosely translated from German, it's hard - sorry)...
You mean the budget that exploded and quadrupled in size because you dumb fuckers pay no attention to quality assurance? Or the additional cost of hardware, maintenance etc. to compensate for the fuckups regarding performance evaluation and regression testing?
"We cannot prevent everything nor anticipate everything, it's safer to deal with an estimated risk than with the unknown"...
"But we'd need to invest in ..., which reduces value"
I could give more details, but I think the point is clear... the discussion became quite heated and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to have an morphine drop with suicide option...
Why do people hate prevention so much?
Is the concept that hard to understand? You prevent things to not deal with crisis.
You invest to prevent loss.
It's just one of these weeks where the only happiness consists of tipping the delivery guy with 20 % plus and getting an honest smile.
:(3 -
As many here might be aware, the new RTX series dropped! With this, a lot more performances… and a lot more power consumption
At this rate you'll soon need a dedicated grid to power this shit. This is pissing me off, as we're not living in times of energetic abundance. Prices of fuel skyrocket due to the situation in Eastern Europe, and we need more than ever to find alternative energy sources that don't mess our planet further up. So the last thing we need is some piece of computer hardware that chugs near as much as a fucking vacuum cleaner
There's a petition treating of that with more details, if you agree this is a problem, it would be awesome if you could sign it and share it everywhere you can
https://chng.it/hGkcvHpdY87 -
Got that old mid 2011 MBA and just put Ubuntu 20.04 on it. Tried 18 on it before but didn't really feel right. 20 works great though.
I love it when I can reuse old hardware I have laying around and it works out of the box.😁
Will use it for entertainment purposes, movies, music etc.2 -
Give up. Share Target API is already on Android, even in garbage like Samsung Internet. Desktop native apps are already history, mobile apps are sure to follow. Led by Apple Silicon, we will add JS-specific hardware to the CPUs and conquer the world. JavaScript will be the only language, with an exception being C and Lisp.7
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I'd like to ask: What's trending at the moment instead....
Either I'm old and senile and missing something, or there is not really sth new.
Okay, JS might be crapping out new frameworks in their common "Not invented here" diarrhea....
But otherwise? What's really new?
I don't really know. I'm not only thinking about languages and stuff, but even in hardware there ain't really a big thing going on in my opinion.
Hab ich wat verpennt?
(Have I overslept?)
We had an interesting and frightening discussion regarding NGINX, as it is russian software today and that a new trend of a true, actively developed webserver is severely lacking... Apache looks semi dead and most other niche webservers, too.
That's all I've seen as a "trend" discussion in the latest time4 -
Hardware irony - clicking "eject" for an external HDD that's asleep wakes it up just to immediately send it to sleep again.
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Why can't GitHub allow you to use a
`/Licenses/` folder for multiple licenses.
Example:
Using a `LICENSE` (AGPLv3 for software) and
`LICENSE-HARDWARE` (OpenHardware Permissive)
That's 'only' two, however there could be
more and regardless they only clutter the root..2 -
One of our servers had a disk fail this week. Luckily it's 1 of 3 in a RAID5 array. And, luckily, it was our mostly-dev box and didn't have any production stuff on it, except for some support things. We scheduled a disk replacement with the hosting company, took everything down, waited. Somebody at the hosting company apparently didn't know we'd scheduled the replacement, saw the machine was down, and brought it up again. Sigh. Finally they did the replacement, got it back up, but now we're seeing an ethernet port flapping, suggested they have someone go in and make sure all the jacks are fully seated, maybe one got loose when they were doing the disk switch. Bureacracy reared up again and we got the boilerplate "if there's a hardware issue suspected please boot into rescue mode and run the tests"... sigh...8
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Received a new HP Probook 640 G2 laptop for work, everyone else has theirs as 64bit machines. Yet the idiots who handle hardware and software installs installed windows for a 32bit machine. Well at least I get waste half a day and do nothing while they redo everything and then I have to still get shit done later.
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A remarkably stupid but efficient technique I invented today to measure the latency of an audio feedback channel involving multiple hardware elements that is difficult to synchronize by itself:
1. Knock. Observe the echo in the feedback.
2.Try to knock in such a way that the physical sound more-or-less lines up with the feedback. The human brain is really good at this on average.
3. Once you often only hear one knock (as perfect synchronization as your ear can tell), record several minutes of audio
4. Stop knocking, count the additional knocks in the echo
5. Multiply the average delay between knocks on the recording by the number of additional knocks from step 44 -
Besides firefox and emacs there is also Linux, the library emacs uses to interact with the computer hardware
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Isn't it beautiful? It's a DS game. I LOVE it when they use the lowest resolution textures because of hardware limitations, yet use real 3D. I want to live in this picture. It feels like home.2
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The universe has taken a cactus.
It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.
After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.
Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.
Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...
There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.
Guess what happened..... Naaaa?
*drum roll*
For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.
:thumbsup:
That's not cactus level yet.
Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.
So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...
Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).
I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.
Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…
Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...
I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.
It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.
I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.
After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...
We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).
This day was a marvelous shit show.
I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.1 -
Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?
Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.
Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.
They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.
Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.
Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.
Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.
So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.
Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.9 -
Got myself a new work computer. Aside from setting everything back up, it's been an absolute treat. I didn't even have to move to Windows 11.
Why Dell feels the need to put 7TB of garbage, including literal adware that spews notifications, escapes me. All it does is hurt their reputation.
I would have been allowed to build my own from scratch, but I didn't even ask since it's been so long since I built my last machine and I don't even know where to start hardware wise these days.
12th gen i7
GTX1080 that has all the video memory I could need
RAM just pouring out of the thing
I'm living the life.28 -
1. Windows is unreliable and crappy.(I have had a lot of bad experience with windows.)
2. Mac is good but doesn't have a lot of things to tinker with.(Used mac, it runs on specific hardware only, for rich people who don't know how to use computers or for chad programmers )
3. Linux is the best. (The real programmer shit that has it all.)
What do you think?46 -
Hey friends.
I'm looking for recommendation of books, online courses, Youtube channels, training, Facebook groups, etc. that teaches the basics of computer hardware - including maintenance.
I'm a software engineer that lacks this kind of knowledge and I've been looking to supply this gap recently.3 -
I tend to be OS agnostic, but I hate the way that Microsoft treats yesterday’s hardware like garbage. I was an unfortunate owner of a surface rt. I also currently own 3 machines with older i7 processors that are not supported by Windows 11.21
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TL;DR Asus is a scumbag company when it comes to software.
I love Asus, they make awesome hardware but man do they blow ass when it comes to software and their customer support. They had perfectly working Link To MyAsus app (on Windows and Android) but no no no, we have to release updates and break this shit. Now I cannot use my phone as a webcam.
Fuck this shit.5 -
So I got the LSTM working in keras.
Working from a glorified tutorial.
Why the fuck do people let their github pages go down with no other backup?
Especially if its a link in your blog?
Why would you do that and not post the full script (instead of bits and pieces interspersed with *partial* explanations)?
In any case, its working and training on a test set and examples just to debug my own understanding of the process.
Once thats done I can generate some training data and try training on a small set. If that goes smoothly and the loss looks like it is heading in the right direction, then I'll setup the hardware for the private cloud and start writing the parallel computing component.2 -
do you guys have problem with not receiving the proper tools for work where you live? here in brazil it seems like a given that companies won't provide good software and hardware for workers6
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What's with so many developers using shitty hardware? It's literary the one tool you need for your profession, there should be absolutely no objection to having the best one available. Stop bitching about some software using 50% of your CPU when you're on the bare entry-level HW ffs! And don't give me that "can't afford it" bullshit. If you take your car to the repair shop, you're also paying for the tools needed for the job; the same way, your customers need to pay for the tools you need as a developer. If you can't afford that, there's clearly not enough demand for the work you do, so go find a different job.16
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everytime i get a new, slightly better hardware i think to myself "how was i living until now, and how could i ever go back", which means I'm spending more money on stuff as time progresses. I'm not complaining tho, the audio in this phone is ridiculous
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Windows 11 kinda defeated me (although probably by my own fault of installing it on unsupported hardware).
I’ve been having horrible input lag whenever my system has been doing something CPU intensive - gaming, even copying files, to the point where I would have 2 second delay between key input and key being registered by the system.
I reverted back to Windows 10.5 -
I am looking at replacing my Dell XPS 15 from 2019, but because I work 100% remote I am considering building a desktop developer rig instead of getting a new laptop. I have only had laptops since early 2000s, but thought it would be fun building something from scratch again. The problem is I have fallen tragically behind on everything hardware, and therefore looking for some pointers.
I don't want an RGB rainbow unit with 6 loud fans requiring a noise cancelling headset to work on. I want a top spec, stealthy thing that has all the goodies but also runs quiet. A decent graphics card that can run the latest games at a decent frame rate, but not the top of the line either.
Any tips on cases, motherboards, RAM, drives, fans and grahpics cards appreciated. The budget is roomy, comparable to a top spec Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad X1 Extreme.12 -
After brute forced access to her hardware I spotted huge memory leak spreading on my key logger I just installed. She couldn’t resist right after my data reached her database so I inserted it once more to duplicate her primary key, she instantly locked my transaction and screamed so loud that all neighborhood was broadcasted with a message that exception is being raised. Right after she grabbed back of my stick just to push my exploit harder to it’s limits and make sure all stack trace is being logged into her security kernel log.
Fortunately my spyware was obfuscated and my metadata was hidden so despite she wanted to copy my code into her newly established kernel and clone it into new deadly weapon all my data went into temporary file I could flush right after my stick was unloaded.
Right after deeply scanning her localhost I removed my stick from her desktop and left the building, she was left alone again, loudly complaining about her security hole being exploited.
My work was done and I was preparing to break into another corporate security system.
- penetration tester diaries2 -
Seriously WTF TP-Link?
Bought an Archer T4E Wifi adapter card for my PC. This has got to be the worst piece of shit hardware ever sold.
I mean are you kidding me? This card has two TWO!! antennas sticking out of its back and won't maintain a connection to an access point that I have NO PROBLEM AT ALL connecting to with my fucking phone? And don't even try to connect to the 5G network with this embarrassment of a WIFI card.
Looking at the support forums and loads of people complain about the exact same thing without any reply from this shit company.
Seriously screw you TP-LINK I will never buy any hardware from you again.17 -
had been working from home and that was my plan for today as well but got called to office on a MONDAY for some hardware related stuff and guess what? the stuff related to it isn't here. thanks
IT1 -
Why the fuck does proxmox change its primary network interface name after I installed a new SSD?
Thought I broke my poor server :c2 -
Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.3
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What are some of you favorite tools from your toolset? be it software, hardware, some plugin or even some hack you use often19
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Working with badly designed hardware is amazing
While it is highly frustrating most of the time, I'm gonna be able to say "We can't develop software for broken hardware" to a lot of highly paid and highly annoyed peiple and that will be immensely satisfying.3 -
If you run into occasional graphics driver crashes and you use Firefox on Windows & Radeon Graphics, then you might want to disable hardware acceleration setting in Firefox. It reduced the frequency of crashes for me
Seems like Firefox screws up Radeon OpenGL driver somehow 🤔💭🦊
It is prone to crashing when I have a 3D game open and Firefox with hw.acc=enabled open at the same time2 -
What's the difference between computers and sex?
In one you put the software in the hardware, in the other, the hardware in the software.3 -
1997 Olivetti, 122 MHz Intel processor, 8MB RAM and 1GB HDD and Win 95. I mostly used software for children learning and games.
But my first “computer” was a shoebox with a keyboard drawn by hand on the cover and a screen on the bottom where I could change the “software” by swapping different drawings inside a transparent envelope.
All hardware and software made by me 😁 -
What’s the best way to manage third party libraries in C++ especially when you’re not just dealing with software but several hardware?
I usually just store each library in its own sub module that gets rebuilt each update/pull, but this is started to get crazy as my project gets larger that it is not scaling.2 -
Learn enough math to solve the problem Chat GPT (and two university math professors) have been unable to solve :(
The hardware is ready, the software is ready, and the only missing piece is to align a laser pointer with a Lambert's conformal conic projected map... I thought Chat GPT would be able to at least provide me with the necessary formulæ, but not...6 -
what on earth do games like starcraft II do that even on more modern hardware their 'game modes' take awhile to initialize ?
why is the data not already organized for fast load ?11 -
Building gunpla.
Helped me postponing my burnout by doing 1 page a day everyday at lunch break (or 2 steps, depending on the model)
Also helped a lot with realising its fine to break and customise stuff, that most hardware is just marketing & that the right tool, while being cheap, can save you a huge headache and lead to a better result. -
Good day. I come to ask a question
Does anyone know a free program for Windows to test RAM throughput? In GB/s
Thanks9 -
I suppose the modern equivalent to waiting around code compiling is building the bloody Docker images. Vastly exacerbated by the requirement of an X86 image on ARM hardware.
FML 🙃1 -
Tony Stark is one of the most fascinating hardware and software testers. The man has got some good body (to withstand injuries)and big brains in a big pocket.1
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So I love what Apple is doing with the new Macs, great hardware, streamlined optimization, blistering performance.....great stuff.
But here's the thing. I think I'm gonna get a ThinkPad and just install fedora on it. It's far cheaper and outside of only going up to 16GB of ram it meets all my needs.
But between you and I a big factor in why I'm finding it hard to go Mac is the system settings. Like why is it like that? Why when I click something a separate window opens.....odd.6 -
I am a stupid monkey that spilled coffee all over his keyboard, and now it seems to be EOL.
Looking for some "inspiration" - what keyboards (and mice, might also just buy a whole new set) are you guys using?9 -
I try to delete a partition from my sundisk Pendrive using GParted but when I do this I got the error that is shown in the image.
And If I try to use "fdisk" which run `sudo fdisk /dev/sda` following command it gives me ```welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.34).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
fdisk: cannot open /dev/sda: Read-only file system```
following error does that mean my pendrive permanently broke can anybody help me!9 -
Prolific, just because their product gets pirated, make all their old devices incompatible with Winodows 10! So you have to use a windows 7 driver! What a bunch of wankers! How the fuck dare you invalidate hardware YOU sold only recently, fucking over your customer, because YOU cant prosecute knock off coming from the far east, you cunts!
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I'm the only one here who cares little about hardware?
I hear people (even non IT ones) spending months in comparing computers and reading any technical spec (cache size, RAM frequency...) before buying one while I just give a glance to the main specs (CPU, RAM, GPU) and if they're decent enough and I like the price I buy, once I even bought a laptop while half drunk and I haven't regretted the purchase.2