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https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/... sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )
23 -
Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"
Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"
Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"
Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."
Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."
Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."
Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"
Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."
Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."
Cprn: - "Please do?"
Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"
Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."
Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."
Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."
Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."
Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."
Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"
Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."
Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."
Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."
Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."
Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"
Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."24 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
*knock knock*
SIR do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior the WINDOWS UPDATE?
"uhm no sorry I'm busy"
*sees a bulldozer in the background*
"what the .."
SIR just let him in your heart and feel his security patches drive your vulnerabilities away!!
"but the rendering hasn't finished ye.."
TOO LATE SIR, green light fellas let's do this
*bulldozer destroys my house and i wake up, sweating*
*hugs laptop*
"Oooh Ubuntu my baby I've missed you soo much!"
*wayland crashes*2 -
A group of Security researchers has officially fucked hardware-level Intel botnet officially branded as "Intel Management Engine" they did so by gathering it all the autism they were able to get from StackOverflow mods... though they officially call it a Buffer Overflow.
On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.
Two weeks ago, the pair received thanks from Intel for working with the company to disclose the bugs responsibility. At the time, Chipzilla published 10 vulnerability notices affecting its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE).
The Intel Management Engine, which resides in the Platform Controller Hub, is a coprocessor that powers the company's vPro administrative features across a variety of chip families. It has its own OS, MINIX 3, a Unix-like operating system that runs at a level below the kernel of the device's main operating system.
It's a computer designed to monitor your computer. In that position, it has access to most of the processes and data on the main CPU. For admins, it can be useful for managing fleets of PCs; it's equally appealing to hackers for what Positive Technologies has dubbed "God mode."
The flaws cited by Intel could let an attacker run arbitrary code on affected hardware that wouldn't be visible to the user or the main operating system. Fears of such an attack led Chipzilla to implement an off switch, to comply with the NSA-developed IT security program called HAP.
But having identified this switch earlier this year, Ermolov and Goryachy contend it fails to protect against the bugs identified in three of the ten disclosures: CVE-2017-5705, CVE-2017-5706, and CVE-2017-5707.
The duo say they found a locally exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows the execution of unsigned code on any device with Intel ME 11, even if the device is turned off or protected by security software.
For more of the complete story go here:
https://blackhat.com/eu-17/...
https://theregister.co.uk/2017/12/...
I post mostly daily news, commentaries and such on my site for anyone that wish to drop by there
19 -
- I'm forced to do dev on Windows with no admin because security
- We receive patches to critical systems from outside company on FTP secured with password "asd123" and install them without reading because fuck security2 -
A critical vulnerability was detected in Electron and I urge all the devRantron users to update their app manually.
Please go to https://www.devrantron.com get the latest version which has the necessary patches.
Due to a request, we added compact mode in the app, which can be used to view a distraction-free mode of the UI. Notifications screen is a little bit more readable now. The read notifications are now greyed out.
Again, the auto update will not work for this version. Please manually update as soon as possible.
6 -
Working on the notes service and I'm still at the signup/login/password reset part.
Spending hours on thinking the process through, trying to think of any possible weaknesses in the system and writing patches right away.
I find it funny how thinking through every step (code-wise and user-wise) gives a very broad overview of how secure/insecure this thing is.
I fucking love doing this.40 -
I THOUGHT I JUST DAMAGED MY PHONE SCREEN LIKE AN IDIOT.
I haven't slept for 3 days, so I'm kind of out of it.
I was using my phone for a few hours non-stop, because if my mom sees me on my laptop she might take it away lol.
I had to edit my manuscript, so I didn't put my phome down, and it's really hot in my house for some reason even though it's cold outside (63°f).
So my phone overheated, and being the sleep deprived idiot I was, I realized how squishy it felt when I kept pressing my screen down. For some reason it felt good to push on it.
I know, I'm stupid. I kept pressing down until I snapped out of the trance, and realized what I was doing, so I stopped. Then I saw these distinct patches on my screen. Like when there's water in your phone, and you see these roundish splotches. Also, I couldn't move the screen.
I panicked because I thought I ruined the screen, so I turned it off. I kept it face down on my table, and read a book for an hour.
When I turned it back on, the patches were gone. I guess they were present because my phone overheated or something.
Still, that was kind of scary. I thought I ruined it.31 -
When you patch the patch of the patch that patched the patch of the patch and you pray no one ever notices the original issue still burried in there.......somewhere......
-
That moment when your software has been running so smoothly for the past few months that you have to start intentionally introducing bugs in patches to avoid unemplyment #yolo2
-
Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.
I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.
If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.
Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.
But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.
Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.6 -
Finally getting some upgrades for our office workstations!!
My work-pc still rocks 3rd gen core i7 with -40% performance loss because of spectre/meltdown patches and 1600 mhz ram. Its been a huge pain in the ass. Building unreal engine from source literally takes a day, while on my home Ryzen 5 it takes an our.
Ryzen 7/9 babyyy!!!
(I might even be able to talk them into a threadripper, wish me luck 😀)
4 -
The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.
TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.
Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.
So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.
IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.
I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.
Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.
I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.
5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.
They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.
I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.
I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.
Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.
While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-
Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.6 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
Not to get political, but apparently the political climate in the world leads to the following situation.
"I'm being a fucking evil lying asshole. But I'm actually a good guy, because I'm doing it as pseudo-scientific research to show how easy it is to be evil and dishonest"
https://zdnet.com/article/...
("Researchers" with an anti-FOSS motive attempting software supply chain attacks on Linux kernel)
What's next? "Scientists" killing puppies to show that, if someone was inclined to be that evil, puppies are weak and their necks snap easily?16 -
My favorite excuse overheard for running Windows over Linux: "I like my sh*t to work."
Then... as if it was planned, his presentation PC running Windows force rebooted to install patches.8 -
So Android phone makers have been lying about installing security patches for years. Hhhmmmm https://twitter.com/wired/status/...3
-
My job quickly went down the shitter. A mass exodus happened, with half of top talent leaving, and the other half let go. The gig started out great, and offered me the growth I needed at the time, but sadly, life changes and moves on.
Determined to leave amicably on my own terms, I started looking elsewhere about a month ago.
I got an offer today! It's a perm position to offer stability to my fam, but with a consulting firm, so I'm excited for the relatively consistent change of pace with projects, technologies and clients. After spending years on end working on good projects that fizzled out and never saw the light of day, I'm longing to have my code released to the wild! (Not counting various patches and bug fixes)
Wish me luck!2 -
The best software license ever seen :
my patches and additions on top of Ian's code are licensed under the ABSE ("Anyone But Stefan Esser") license.
note that an additional exception to the license is added, forbidding use/redistribution of said content to his
trainees as well, but only when in a 5 mile radius from "Stefan Esser" or while holding any sort of (video)conference/chat with him.
note that this license will only be used as long as what would capstone decode / that one other arm64 ida
plugin thing by i0n1c ("Stefan Esser") are not under the MIT license.
afterwards, all exceptions are cleared and basically WTFPL applies
if you need a copy of the rest of the license feel free to google it or something.3 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
Hey! You there!
Are you sick of windows 10 sending you intrusive reminders about updates? Are you tired of random unscheduled restarts? Tired of feeling like you have no control over your own computer?
Take back control!
DO THE FUCKING UPDATE, YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT, USELESS, LAZY, PIECE OF DRY WANK!
Seriously guys: pick a time convenient to you, and take 5 or 10 minutes (when you're likely spending hours at your computer), and do them. Not only will you get rid of the annoying notifications, but you'll also keep your pc safe and secure by keeping up with security patches. C'mon people, it's really not that difficult.
And can we please, for the love of all things holy, stop the circlejerking? You're developers, you are the computer proficient. The only things a PC will do are the things you tell it to do. Dig deep, dig into the registry, dig into the services manager, dig into the fucking settings cos a good number of the most common complaints can be fixed in the basic options menu. Tell your computer to stop doing the things you don't like and it will stop.
It's really not hard!19 -
That log4j RCE is some fucking nasty business!!! Its exploits have already been observed multiple times in our company scope.
Time for some unplanned Saturday evening hot-patches :/
P.S. Why the fuck leave such a feature enabled as default??? I mean really, whose brilliant idea was "let's leave the message parser enabled as well as the LDAP query hooks... BY FUCKING DEFAULT!!!"
I mean really, is anyone using that? ANYONE?
And then they laugh at me when I say "stay away from frameworks", "use as little libraries as possible", "avoid foreign code in your codebase",...
you know what.... JOKE'S ON YOU!10 -
WARNING: There is a dangerous malware out in the wild, and chances are, you have it installed on your computer.
It's called Windows Update, and it is marketed as a software that "delivers security patches to your PC". Wrong. What it actually does is hard-reboot your computer at randomly picked time intervals without asking for your consent, or even showing any type of warning, basically deleting all unsaved progress that you've made in your programs or games. It also deletes/undoes all registry tweaks that you might have made (e.g. to the context menu), it deletes your nvidia display configurations, uninstalls any custom themes that you might have installed, possibly even downloads another malware disguised as "Microsoft Edge" and shoves it in your face on next boot without giving a possibility to close it. Oh and it might also make your computer unbootable so you have to go to the advanced recovery settings to fix it manually.
Yes, everything I just mentioned above happened to me about an hour ago. This LITERALLY classifies the software as a malware (Google: "software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system"). If we throw in all the data collection that happens without your consent, Microsoft actually manages to check not only one, but all three boxes in the "malware" definition.
Pleas, stop using microshit, and switch to linux as soon as possible if you can.24 -
Microtransactions are ruining the AAA gaming industry. I have always liked a good fighting game. So I looked at Street Fighter 6. Base game is $60, better version is more, bestest version is way more. Plus from reading reviews the fucking game is riddled with microtransactions.
What happened to buying a fucking game and not feeling like you got ripped off? When you bought the fucking game you got the whole fucking game.
I am disgusted with what these big names are doing. Ruining a once less sketchy industry.
I have even seen games that start out good. Then after a few patches they introduce the microtransaction bullshit. The Conan games are like that. The main complaint is adding this bullshit for base game items.
I wonder how they think this is good for their player base. They just fired the dude at Unity over trying to fuck over customers. Of course the company cannot be trusted so a lot of bigger labels are jumping ship to other engines.
What kinda pisses me off is I will try and find a decent game on Steam and look and look and all I find is garbage. How did Steam turn into such a trash heap? I won't touch an EA game (which is where that CEO from Unity came from). It is too bad because I really liked Mass Effect.
tldr - gaming has turned into shit.8 -
May the people responsible for the decision to let Windows 10 wake up people's PCs from sleep mode in the middle of the night to install patches and then force-restart be tortured for eternity in hell. All of the hells. Of every religion. At the same time. While having to stare at a Windows ME bluescreen of death without the ability to blink or look away. For 65535 eternities. Followed by a buffer overflow.5
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Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.
Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)
Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.
Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.
ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing. -
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 -
Ever had that frustrating moment that the customer overreacts a small issue into a big issue? Just happened to me today.
Client: "Hey can you check why we are not getting any software update/patches to our firewall?"
Me: "OK. Lemme check"
** Checking **
Me: "I found that its not getting the latest updates because the license file registered has a product serial # mismatch with their support site. You can see it clearly here..."
Client: "THAT'S TERRIBLE!! QUICK!! MAKE IT A PRIORITY 1 ISSUE AND HAVE IT RESOLVE ASAP!!!"
Me: *Facepalm*1 -
I don't get it. Why the **** is windows update the slowest shit on earth. I'm sitting in front of an PC. Last update is 6 month ago. Windows take about 20 minutes to find out which patches are needed and now... Over 1h later... Not even half of them are done.
My Linux PC take about 5-10 minutes even if I haven't turn on it for a while.2 -
So I had to update my OS to Ubuntu 22.04 to support some newer software. I had been running 18.04. One of the things I notice is Ubuntu restricting security updates to Ubuntu Pro users. WTF is this shit? I look into it a bit more:
https://flu0r1ne.net/logs/...
and a long discussion with people for and against:
https://lobste.rs/s/h2dszz/...
Okay, great, Ubuntu is employing some hostage style manipulation to get people to pay for using the OS. Probably an exaggeration, but feels very slimy. But that part is NOT what bothers me about this.
What bothers me the most about this is Ubuntu will now have a list of computers that have or do not have specific security patches. This is valuable information if someone wants to sell this to a third party. Maybe Ubuntu would not do that, but they can always get bought by someone who would do that. This feels dirty like something Microsoft or Google would do.
I probably don't know the complete story. But the misunderstanding still leads me to want to avoid Canonical.12 -
In my opinion: Education requires more updates and patches than a system does but sadly its rarely done!2
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That time when one of the npm modules you use gets a patch that contains a breaking change. You fix your code. Then a week later the module patches again and revert the breaking change. :/
-
Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.
I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).
I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.
Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.
I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.
I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”
His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.
Anyways.... fuck Microsoft6 -
Windows makes me genuinely angry. Why is it that when I boot my computer, I am expected to wait 10+ minutes for windows to launch 5 startup applications, most of which are already patches for things that should be there to begin with, before I can even begin to use explorer to open GeForce experience because for some reason, windows said "Graphics drivers?! Who needs those?!" And threw them out the window! And then I get notifications about apps needing permissions to things, BUT IT WONT TELL ME WHICH ONE! I clicked the update driver notification 5 minutes ago and the installer literally just now opened up. This is a computer with a r3 processor and gtx970! It may not be the best, but it is by no means underpowered! Why must Halo online not have a Linux version? :(4
-
Fucking idiot designers providing design in .jpg and .pdf, how the fuck am I to know what padding or margin is to this element. and at the last moment, they ask to just to put down images as "patches" and make sure it's "clickable", man fuck this!6
-
hey... can I build a FUCKING android image that uses a camera library?
react-native-camera: deprecated, no longer maintained
react-native-vision-camera: it's like globalthermonuclear war with versioning and patches and support and splat splat bullshit in that repo, don't even dare look at the issues there, trust me, please
react-native-camera-kit: doesn't compile for targetSdk 33, no matter what the FUCK you do
jesus christ i want to scan a fucking QR code with my app and my gradle configs have turned into world war III where the fuck did we go wrong folks8 -
Init Mud. (A poem)
A Giant Ball of Mud.
Haphazard in structure.
A sprawling, enthralling, duct-taped warning,
Of things to come.
Tumbling down a well-worn path
Of untamed growth and aftermath.
Into Spaghetti-code Jungle.
Where quick and dirty wins the day
And warnings spoken hold no sway
Or fall on deaf ears in the undergrowth.
Tumbling.
Gaining weight.
Bits stuck on.
Bytes taken out.
Patches,
On top of patches,
On top of obsolescence.
Hacked at, uploaded
All elegance eroded.
Made and remade
Then duplicated
Relocated
Refined and redesigned
Suffocated by expedient repair after expedient repair
The original self no longer there
Replaced by something
Unwieldy.
Design resigned to undefined
An architectural mystery
Whose function can no longer be
Seen or gleaned
From obfuscated in-betweens
Of classes
Made and remade
Duplicated.
Abused.
A squirming library of disused.
Pulled at, prodded, committed
Corners cut and parts omitted.
Bug ridden branches fused to a rotting core.
The structure...
The system...
The content...
Mud.1 -
Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.
Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".
Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.
They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.
Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...
Now....
I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...
Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.
It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....
Never change a fucking running system....
Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 87 -
What's wrong with Mozilla?!
Savvy webdevs use link preloading to break up dependency chains for late discovered resources, and users like the faster loading as result. Firefox 56 started supporting that two and a half years ago. Turned out they had screwed up and it didn't work with non-cacheable resources. So Mozilla "fixed" that by disabling the feature altogether behind some config flag.
And they left it at that - still not supported. They even had patches, but decided not to merge them and instead try something different, some day.
Is Firefox becoming the new IE or what?6 -
I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.
I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.
I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.
I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.
I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.
I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.
Idk14 -
After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)
*Shit is expensive*
How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.
That got me into server administration and bash.
After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.
*Shit is buggy*
How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.
Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?
And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.
And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.
Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)2 -
which *git* diff algorithm is your default and why?
## default (myers)
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default. if you don't know whart you are using, this is it (and it sucks)
## minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
##patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
## histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".4 -
Trying to explain a game developer in a community, why its a bad idea to only make client side patches for equiptment to appear correctly..
me: because the server needs to be aware of the changes made to avoid faulty calculations, for instance if the client calculates a fatal but the server disagree..
dev: but it works...
me: yes, but not optimally.
dev: Working as intended (TM)
me: ... teh fuq?
not sure if he's a bad troll or wut..1 -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.6 -
Anybody else exhausted from supporting like 5 half baked projects that were pushed to production way too early and /or were forced to do things they weren’t meant to?
I’ve only been writing software in the industry for two years and it would take me two more just to ship enough patches. Sometimes it just gets me so negative. -
I hate servers that only support EFI boot with a passion. Yes, legacy / BIOS boot is old, but it was so simple. I've been spending hours trying to get EFI boot working on servers with swraid-ed disks and *nothing* works without ugly hackish patches all over!
Anyone successfully got an EFI partition (/boot/efi) on an MDRaid device? D':4 -
So, small note to all developers out here:
If you provide a Serverside program to update your software in a network, like M$ WSUS to remove internet traffic,
Please consider not to introduce Bugs in your newest version that make this Service unusable and patch it out later.
Microsoft did exactly this with the Anniversary Update 1607 last year.
Now, after each installation I have to install the most important patches manually to use the WSUS. Because when I go directly i get the newest version that is not tested in our environment. :(
This is From Sysop to Dev :-)1 -
First patch for buildroot submitted and added applied to master!! 😁
I had the impression that git (like, more than "git add ." was just too complicated and that making patches was some sort of dark magic using some obscure unix tools.
Well, it turns out that is actually pretty easy, fun and exhilarating!!
Looking forward to build up until I'm making contributions to the kernel! 🤓 -
Fucking Eclipse at it again.
Colleague was setting up their IDE for working with the ABAP R/3 backend, we use. To speed up the process, colleague A is sending the zipped plugins folder to the new colleague B and telling them to put them into the directory of where eclipse is stored.
Like a good and neat person, B renamed the folder plugins into plugins _old and unzipped the other folder in there. Clicked on eclipse and nothing worked, Error message immediately.
B then proceeded to tell A that it didn't work. A then asked "how did you copy the stuff in there?", and B said that they backed up the original and put the new one in there (mind you, technically that should work, because the eclipse versions were pretty close to eachother, only like a few patches apart).
And then A said, "No No No, you need to just overwrite it."
So that's what B did. Okay so original plugins folder has been overwritten with the sent plugins folder. B clicks eclipse.
Eclipse starts, and shows loading screen.
For like 5 minutes.
Then crashes with sone random error message.
B asks A what's going on, and what cracked me up was, that A just said: "Yeah, it's supposed to crash, just restart it".
So B clicked it again, it launched for another like 5 Minutes and then opened normally, with everything where it should be.
B asks then, if that's normal, and the other devs in the call replied "Yeah, we did it like that too"
ngl, that was one of the funnier teams meetings i had in a while7 -
South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2
In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.
In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.
The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.
The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.
Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet
Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system1 -
The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.
The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.
Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.
Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.
Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.
Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.
In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.
I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.6 -
Windows 10 updates. You'd think they could at least fucking make them not break systems completely. Linux runs on more hardware and doesn't have a fraction of these issues with patches. What the fuck? Is Microsoft intentionally breaking systems or are they really that fucking incompetent?7
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I just found out YouTube ReVanced now has a kind of working patcher for android. It was easy to use and I don't have to use outdated vanced anymore. I can also choose which individual patches I want to used.
It's really nice. Even for people who don't want adblock and only want dislikes back since you can just disable that patch. I don't get why anyone wouldn't want to use it.13 -
Had a client whom was using the staging system on my server as cdn, remote computing, etc... because his prod server was a cheap vhost while the vm was a beast compared to it. I shut it down without telling. I just got a call that his site is now slow a f and full of errors.
I kindly told him that there was a recent security breach called dirty cow. Then I told him that I shut the vm down because it would mean security risk for him since there are no patches available yet and only Power on again with there was work for me to do.
If you want resources pay for them -
It's time to say goodbye...
... to PacRom.
//(PacRom?
//PacRom is a custom rom which has tons of //unique features. Problem: It's supports only a //few devices, like my good old OnePlus One.)
But why do I want a change now?
1. I don't get any updates or security patches any more. Yes, it hadn't stopped me to change for a longe time, but I think now that my device has more holes than a cheese.
2. I have an old Android Version (5.1.1) so I have some problems with performance and compatibility in general and with some apps.
3. I want something new, a change.
Which Custom Rom will I use next?
I want to try Ubuntu Touch for a while and then I want to go to LineageOS, but I am open minded for other ideas or suggestions.4 -
I really hate all kinds of tattle that sweeps the hallways of corporations, the gossip behind one's back, BUT this colleague of mine starts pissing me off. Recently joined that team where he should support us getting the Agile thing going. And he can go on for hours of how it should go and how flawlessly it worked in his previous company - all that needless meta talk - so much that a team member jokingly even said: yeah, shut up asshole. But he is all talk. When the name of a library was dropped his experience in using it went to upstream patches. His Linux experience lets us speechless. He is so convincing, I'm even doubting my accusations. Yet his only contribution in code wouldn't show and other team member wasted hours upon hours to recompile plugins to show that shit. Man, just leave us alone watching your youtube live-streams so we can get the shit done.
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Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?
To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.
Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!
Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.
To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.
Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.8 -
Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....
Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.
O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...
Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.
Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.
I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.
After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.
But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...
...Thrice.)
The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.
So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!
👾2 -
Does anyone know of any patches to make the android UI more responsive. Like the iPhone just better? I really think that would be the patch to ruin apple for good!10
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Just upgraded to macOS High Sierra (10.13.1), and holy cow it is buggy as hell.
Some of my findings include:
1. unresponsive "cancel" button on certain dialog boxes.
2. erratic behaviour of the "show password" checkbox.
guess how is trying to downgrade until the requisite patches arrive?2 -
I use Microsoft Word like once a month. Every time I open Word there is an update to all of the Office Apps. And the update take like half an hour to complete.
I usually like updates and install them, because I hope that the new version maybe patches a bug or makes the software more efficient, but unspecified updates that often is frustrating.
2 -
Just a friendly note: If you use the same technique as I i.e. local GIT repositories backed up on cloud, ALWAYS make sure there is still at least as much free space as the largest repo shallow clone.
It may happen that some really really archaic "commits" will disappear and git won't work as usual, but mostly you'll have an access to the branches, which you can diff against the master and make patches. Then just clone, make branches from patches and code happily ever after.
Also... you really really shouldn't push when you discover(git fsck --all) such an issue in your local repo, although I think git won't even allow you to do so. -
Opinions on buying an old unsupported android phone?
Say I'd buy a galaxy S7 thats no longer supported or even an S8 that soon will be unsupported and don't plan to use a custom ROM.
How bad would that actually be?
I know it'll lack security patches, but how risky is that?7 -
So I was just thinking scenario wise how if I founded a military organization who’s aim was to depose an insane dictator from power while remaining undetected including from all his insane supporters how I would use Linux
After I took every source package offline and modified and source checked it and disabled the ability for it to use regular tcp ip for anything but tunneling
The reasoning ? I just installed one program and it downloaded 40 some extra packages that I have no idea what are doing
Linux is great but do we actually know what the software is doing ? Same as windows only you can’t compiler that from scratch
It’s either trust a bunch of random people or trust a bunch of random people part of an evil company
Not the best of choices
But oh how beautiful it would be after I had 500 people pick every last package apart with a reasonable deadline of 2 years entirely offline at frozen versions
Then we could fork all the projects
Or only implement very carefully source reviewed patches transported via offline medium To computers that are running vms to house and test all additional patches so if it blows up we just copy our raw frozen image back over it and either scrap or repair the change
As connecting to the internet in general is not an good idea for silent running25 -
So today I learned how tree shaking works and I was just about to publish patches to my NPM modules when the registry gave up.10
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got employed as web developer, had to make an app for test, so i made simple PWA, you can search videos and you have related videos on the side, basically search videos and watch them with simple list of related videos on the side.
idk how i ended up being tester and bug hunter in this huge ass pile of spaghetti extravaganza.
all i do is wasting my talent on hunting and resolving bugs on a legacy-code apps, don't remember when was last time i actually wrote some feature, oh yeah i do, last month but that was refactoring/fixing.
so i am stuck on weird tech stack someone build with shovel, feels like they were having that famous golden hammer.
what interests me is something i will never do at this company and still i am trying to help them to fix the app to have better product.
It is hard when you feel like you are third and last person in whole company that cares about actual product, rest of devs just fixing things with quick workarounds, hacks and lousy patches.
I really tried, I did, I was excited as I saw opportunity to one up the product but got stuck with the rest of the devs fixing bugs instead of fixing the whole codebase, I tried to introduced improvements but we don't have time cause fixing bugs means happy customers, better codebase takes more time and means impatient customers are unhappy!
I think it is time to sail away.
So folks, any thoughts or feelings?1 -
Fully upgraded wordpress for my blog (just not interested writing my own ) with security patches and got hacked... all index files in first level directories replaced. Will find the time to make my own and migrate all posts because "wordpress is awesome"6
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Recently many of us may have seen that viral image of a BSOD in a Ford car, saying the vehicle cannot be driven due to an update failure.
I haven't been able to verify the story in established news sources, so I won't be further commenting on it, specifically.
But the prospects of the very concept are quite... concerning.
Deploying updates and patches to software can be reasonably called *the software industry*. We almost have no V0 software in production nowadays, anywhere (except for some types of firmware).
Thus, as car and other devices become more and more reliant on larger software rather than much shorter onboard firmware, infrastructure for online updates becomes mandatory.
And large scale, major updates for deployed software on many different runtime environments can be messy even on the most stable situations and connections (even k8s makes available rolling updates with tests on cloud infrastructure, so the whole thing won't come crashing down).
Thereby, an update mess on automotive-OS software is a given, we just have to wait for it.
When it comes... it will be a mess. Auto manufacturers will adopt a "move fast and break things" approach, because those who don't will appear to be outcompeted by those who deploy lots of shiny things, very often.
It will lead to mass outages on otherwise dependable transportation - private transportation.
Car owners, the demographic that most strongly overlaps with every other powerful demographic, will put significant pressure on governments to do something about it.
Governments (and I might be wrong here) will likely adapt existing recall implementation laws to apply to automotive OS software updates.
That means having to go to the auto shop every time there is a software update.
If Windows may be used as a reference for update frequency, that means several times per day.
A more reasonable expectation would be once per month.
Still completely impossible for large groups of rural car owners.
That means industry instability due to regulation and shifting demographics, and that could as well affect the rest of the software industry (because laws are pesky like that, rules that apply to cars could easily be used to reign in cloud computing software).
Thus... Please, someone tells me I overlooked something or that I am underestimating the adaptability of the powers at play, because it seems like a storm is on the horizon, straight ahead.6 -
At some point I need to do an older project i've had on hold a while, but it'd require writing my own ROM patch system as a major step in completing it, as i'd need to dynamically patch stuff into older games based on system, which current patch formats don't allow for. (This project will also help me learn a few things I need for yet more projects I've got stashed away, so it needs to happen eventually.)
Now, the interesting part: the patch format. I was debating on whether to use binary data, like IPS/BPS and similar formats do, which would be easier to implement... but if I were to have plaintext patches, you'd be able to not only understand what's happening, but also have things like scripting and conditionals and user-defined options and such. This would be WAY harder to implement, slow as fuck, and require an assembler per-target-system, either external or internal... but it'd be transparent, editable, and hella extendable.
This would all happen after I'm both over my burnout AND done chewing through my current stack of projects and such, of course, but still... which sounds better to you, dear reader?2 -
A demon process is running inside me,
whenever I hear your name it's triggers an interrupt to brain,
Causing my brain to stop working and perform a context switching to think about you...
My memories are encrypted by your memories as like wanna cry...
And it demands to always think about you as a ransom...
I tried songs as a patch, But
I found that you memory encryption can't be fixed with any patches...
My heart is not strong as Linux ,
It's so week like Microsoft...
So please don't inject more bugs as my system can't sustain that...
I hope you will also get some disturbance like segmentation fault as you are trying to access my memories.. -
I dont get why companies shy away from proper source managment and devops it just sounds like managmentheaven:
Your developers would write down every single thing they did in nice and easily quantifiable units of work, with then they did it exactly to the minute, and with CI/CD patches could be released directly after being tested. And tests mean the devs even safe some QA time.2 -
Well. Here we go... new version of buildroot, new version of the kernel patches, new version of several packages...
1 -
Accidentally reverted the repository wiping all the non-versioned custom patches in a production client! I thought it was my computer’s terminal. Luckily we’d got a backup from last deploy. Later we customized the bash prompt in all prod servers to avoid confusions like this.1
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some things I found in AOSP code good to see that I am the only one who writes bad patches to make things run .
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So, I am in the last stages of development of a really big project and I need to figure out a way to package future patches and updates for the client in order for them to manually update the project on prod server.
For reasons I cannot specify here, they will not use any automated process, and we need to provide regular patches and updates for the next year.
So I was thinking of using git archive to package changed files from our repo for every new commit, or series of commits, and just give them that, along with any database schema updates as sql files (again, no automation can be used).
We are talking about a large PHP + MySQL app, and cannot use automated deployment strategies.
I feel there must be a better way to do this, but this is the best I could come up with so far.
What do you people think?
Any ideeas? -
Holy fuck for me Mercedes episode 1 where the dysfunction is real but the descriptions of simple programs planted on someone’s computer make a delete command or patches email client look like the work of a god
And Omfg meanwhile
Why am I watching this ? -
Development of 1 year where you send to the customers the files edited or the full package to upload in their servers.
After an year you discover that they was doing patches of your code, fine but I need that. They sent to you that patches to be in sync.
After 1.4 years you discover that they have their own git unused and they want that we use that because they are bored to do manual patches.
Useless to say that we discovered that they was doing patches only when the system gone on production?
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