Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I feel this is a reductive argument. Parents should help their kids avoid harm while also encouraging growth. Phones and the Internet can absolutely encourage growth. The parent’s job is to ensure that the phone isn’t harming them. If the kid isn’t on the phone too much, isn’t picking up bad shit from the phone, and isn’t harming anyone else, I don’t think it makes sense to deny them.

    If the kid is being harmed by being on the phone, then the parent should try to figure out what the problem truly is so they can find good solutions. I was on the computer too much as a kid and missed out on important shit. Rather than ripping out desktop out of the desk in a rage (which is what happened), my dad should have thought about why I felt the need to escape from my life so much (e.g. being afraid of a father who would do shit like rip out a computer and threaten to throw it off of a second floor balcony, self hatred, intense bullying at school, or alllll the crazy shit my mom did). He didn’t try to help me fix the things that were harming me, so all I had was my computer and the few people who didn’t seem to hate me.

    I spent so many hours browsing Wikipedia, learning about scientific concepts. I talked to people who had lives like mine and were able to commiserate. I found a place and community that I was lacking in my everyday life. I learned skills that eventually translates to a successful career in software development. I don’t think that it’s good when kids feel like they need to escape to the Internet, but I think that having access to all the great stuff out there is worth it. For the kids who have awful lives because of shitty fucked up parents, the internet (or any escapist coping mechanism) can literally save them, albeit at a substantial cost.

    The internet can be harmful, but we only seek out harmful things when the alternative is going without things we need. I think this is also true of children, so the question I feel parents should ask is “what does my phone-addicted kid need?”




  • I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.

    I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.


  • Yeah, I’ve been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

    I’ve heard that batteries (can’t remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

    EDIT: To avoid spreading misinformation, I’m providing this edit to say that the batteries absolutely were not the cause of the explosion. This was a supply-chain attack. Explosives were inserted into the pagers. The batteries in these pagers cannot be made to explode like this. I was overly excited when I made this comment.



  • Sorry for the off-topic question, but is your username a reference to the Culture books? I think that would have been a great addition to Very Little Gravitas Indeed/Zero Gravitas/Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Like, I can just imagine a book where the Very Little Gravitas Indeed, Zero Gravitas, and A Gravitas Deficiency all happen to be in the same incident group chat and constantly fuck around while the other ships debate and fuss, and then one or all three of them pulls a rabbit out of the hat and fixes the problem while the other Minds aren’t looking.

    God, I miss Iain M. Banks. Also, if your username isn’t a reference then I probably sound like an absolute lunatic.


  • Very true! I was just in a rush and didn’t want to explain who he was.

    For others, Bryan Cantrill (the guy in the video) is an incredibly gifted engineer who worked for Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle. He was deeply involved in Solaris (Sun’s really cool operating system that included pioneering shit like ZFS), and was then involved with Illumos, which was a fork of Solaris. He worked for a company called Joyent that made a super fucking cool thing called SmartOS, and now he’s the CTO for a company called Oxide Computer.

    This is a hideously bad summary of his accomplishments. People who want to know more should read his Wikipedia article or watch the talk I posted. He’s a great presenter, so his talks are always pretty entertaining.

    EDIT: The shit they’re doing at Oxide is absolutely nuts. They’re making what is effectively a datacenter contained within one 48u rack, and they’re writing all their own firmware and BIOS and shit for it. It’s crazy cool.








  • I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can’t seem to get a link to it, so I’m just going to repost it here since I feel it’s relevant. My kbin client doesn’t let me copy text posts directly, so I’ve had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn’t emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/12147

    I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

    I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

    Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

    Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they’re very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don’t have to change from “I’m writing code” mode to “I’m reviewing code mode.”





  • They need to do what MacOS and Linux have done. There are safer ways to interact with and inspect the running state of the kernel in those operating systems (eBPF for Linux, a bunch of APIs I don’t know much about for MacOS). Software needs a way to do the shit it’s doing, you can’t just turn it off and provide no alternative.

    If Microsoft provides a safe API, then Wine can translate calls to that API and approximate the same degree of protection for Linux boxen.

    I also agree with the other person, you should still be allowed to fuck around with the kernel on your own box. Major software vendors should be discouraged from writing shit that directly runs in ring 0, but end users should be allowed to do whatever.


  • The other person may have responded with a fair amount of hostility, but they’re absolutely correct. I run Kubernetes clusters hosting millions of containers across hundreds of thousands of VMs at my job, and OOMKills are just a fact of life. Apps will leak memory, and you’re powerless to fix it unless you’re willing to debug the app and fix the leak. It’s better for the container to run out of memory and trigger a cgroup-scoped OOM kill. A system-wide OOM kill will murder the things you love, shit in your hat, and lick your face like David Tennant licked Krysten Ritter.