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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

    I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

    “Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.




  • I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

    Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.


  • I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

    Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

    The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.



  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoAndroid@lemdro.idSyncthing saved my ass
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    1 month ago

    I keep my Obsidian notebooks and several source code repos in syncthing and then have them auto-shared between all my computers and my phone. Its been a great system, all my docs I need are readily available on all my devices with almost no delay and no cloud needed. A little advanced configuration to allow local deletes and I also have all my phone photos backed up this way too.

    When I travel, I use my laptop and phone on a little travel router, so they’re always networked together and syncing files. Definitely saved my butt a few times!



  • But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

    And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

    But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

    He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

    The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.



  • I’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

    We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

    I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.