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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Ironically enough Aurora city water consistently wins awards for it’s quality lol.

    I think the legitimate reason is that Aurora is a physically massive city, has lower housing costs than the rest of the metro area, and Denver has a habit of forcing its homeless population out and into Aurora. The police department is also an absolute good ole boys club who are all terrified of city residents to the point where they drive unmarked/undercover vehicles by default (at least it seems that way, I see so few marked police cars but whenever there’s a collection of cop cars with lights going the majority are the undercover)

    Sauce: Current Aurora, CO resident. It’s not all bad


  • If Wells Fargo had amazing management, was a massive and undeniable benefit to humanity, and every one of their employees loved working there, how precisely would that have changed the outcome here?

    The only two things that I can think of that would have changed what happened is 1) Security actively monitored every single person’s activity within the building at all times and make notes so one of the security team would notice that she’s been slumped over for a long time, and 2) management insisted that all team members are in office every single day to ensure that they all can see each other. In today’s work culture, I’d argue that doing either of those things is bad management.

    You say the point is that it happened at Wells Fargo, but let’s be more clear here: is your goal to find any reason to help justify your distaste of Wells Fargo?

    I do believe Wells Fargo has a lot to answer for, but let’s be honest and just in what we go after companies and people for. If we constantly attack entities we don’t like for anything that on first pass sounds bad, eventually we’ll have called wolf too many times and legitimate complaints will get ignored



  • Embedded systems run into this a lot, especially on low level communication busses. It’s pretty common to have a comm bus architecture where there is just one device that is supposed to be in control of both the communication happening on the bus and what the other devices are actually doing. SPI and I2C are both examples of this, but both of those busses have architectures where there isn’t one single controller or that the devices have some other way to arbitrate who is talking on the bus. It’s functionally useful to have a term to differentiate between the two.

    I’ve seen Master/Servant used before which in my experience just trips people up and doesn’t really address the cultural reason for not using the terms.

    Personally I’m a fan of MIL-STD-1553 terminology, Bus Controller and Remote Terminal, but the letters M and S are heavily baked into so much literature and designs at this point (eg MISO and MOSI) that entirely swapping them out will be costly and so few people will do it, so it sticks around



  • For graphics, the problem to be solved is that the N64 compiled code is expecting that if it puts value X at memory address Y it will draw a particular pixel in a particular way.

    Emulators solve this problem by having a virtual CPU execute the game code (kinda difficult), and then emulator code reads the virtual memory space the game code is interacting with (easy), interprets those values (stupid crazy hard), and replicates the graphical effects using custom code/modern graphics API (kinda difficult).

    This program is decompiling the N64 code (easy), searches for known function calls that interact with the N64 GPU (easy), swaps them with known valid modern graphics API calls (easy), then compiles for local machine (easy). Knowing what function signatures to look for and what to replace them with in the general case is basically downright impossible, but because a lot of N64 games used common code, if you go through the laborious process for one game, you get a bunch extra for free or way less effort.

    As one of my favorite engineering phrases goes: the devil is in the details



  • So many people forget that while they understand how to use a Linux terminal and how Linux on a high level works, not everyone does. Plus, learning all of that takes time, effort, and tenacity, which not everyone is willing to do. Linus’s whole conclusion was that as long as that learning curve exists and as long as it’s that easy to shoot yourself in the foot, Linux desktop just isn’t viable for a lot of people.

    But Linus has done a lot of public fuck ups therefore everything he says must be inherently wrong.


  • I think part of the “what do I do with this” factor for the iPad was that Apple (and other companies still to this day) were so hell bent on making everything smaller and more compact that releasing a larger product was marketing whiplash. Not to mention that smartphones were being pitched as this “do everything device” so why would you need anything else?

    After you get over that marketing sugarcoating, it becomes pretty obvious what you’d use an iPad for. Internet and media consumption at a larger scale than your phone, easier on your eyes than a phone, but retains at least some of the lightweight smaller form factor that separates it from a regular laptop. Sure you didn’t have the stick it in your pocket advantage of a phone or the full keyboard and computational power of a laptop, but there was this in-between that for a modest fee, you could have the conveniences if you can live with/ignore the sacrifices.


  • I don’t think the MacBook Airs launch is a good comparison.

    Sure there was an early adopter tax on being one of the first “thin and light” laptops, but people already know what you can use a MacBook for, there was already a large value proposition in having a MacBook, the extra cost was entirely being more portable than it’s full size counterparts. Everything you can do on a Mac, just way easier to take on the go.

    I’ve read a few reviews on it, watched MKBHD’s initial review, and outside of a few demo apps they point to the vision pro having no real point to it. Which if true, then it falls in line with existing VR headsets that are a fraction of it’s cost and in a niche market, being three times the cost of your competitors is not a good position to be



  • The issue is that with ongoing service across time, the longer the service is being used the more it costs Kia. The larger the time boxes Kia uses the bigger the number is and the more you’re going to scare off customers.

    Using Kias online build and price, looks like the most expensive Telluride you can get right now is $60k MSRP, cheapest at 30k

    Let’s assume Kia estimates average lifetime of a Telluride to be 20 years so they create an option to purchase this service one time for the “lifetime” of the vehicle. Taking in good faith the pricing Kia has listed, using that $150 annual package, and assuming that price goes up every year at a rate of 10% (what Netflix, YouTube, etc have been doing) across those twenty years you’re looking at around $8.5k option. At the top trim thats still 14% extra that is going to make some buyers hesitant, at the base model that’s 28% more expensive.

    Enough buyers will scoff at that so Kia can either ditch the idea entirely as they’ll lose money on having to pay for the initial development and never make their money back, or they find some way to repackage that cost and make it look like something that buyers are willing to deal with.

    To me the bigger issue is the cost of the service vs what you’re getting. Server time + dev team + mobile data link cannot be costing Kia more than a few million annually, mid to upper hundred K is more likely so they must not be expecting that many people to actually be paying for any of this


  • It’s IEEE misinterpreting the guys original paper.

    https://liuyang12.github.io/proj/privacy_dual_imaging/ (can’t find the full paper, but here’s the abstract at least)

    The paper author straight up says the light sensor is impractical to use as an attack vector, but when you use it in conjunction with other sensors you might be able to gleam more information than most might think. It leaves me with question of what other sensors can you combine to start getting behavioral information that is a security threat?

    I’ll say it worked for me. I read the IEEE headline, called bullshit, dug into it and yeah you can only get a tiny bit of information that you have to stretch pretty far to get useful conclusions from… But it’s more than the zero I initially thought. So props to the paper author, he met his goal. IEEE wanted sensationalized clicks, which they too unfortunately got.


  • In pure C things are a bit different from what you describe.

    Declaration has (annoyingly) multiple definitions depending on the context. The most basic one is when you are creating an instance of a variable, you are telling the compiler that you want a variable with symbol name X, data type Y, and qualifiers A,B and C. During compilation the compiler will read that and start reserving memory for the linker to assign later. These statements are always in the form of “qualifiers data_type symbol;”

    Function declaration is a bit different, here you’re telling the compiler “hey you’re going to see this function show up later. Here are the types for arguments and return. I pinky swear promise you’ll get a definition somewhere else”. You can compile without the definition but the linker will get real unhappy if you don’t have the definition when it’s trying to run. Here you’re looking at a statement of “qualifiers return_data_type symbol(arg_1_data_type arg_1_symbol,…);” Technically in function declarations you don’t need argument symbols, just the types, but it’s better to just have them for readability.

    Structs are different still. Here you’re telling the compiler that you’re going to have this struct definition somewhere else in the same translation unit, but the data type symbol will show up before the definition. So whenever the compiler sees that data type show up in a variable instance declaration it won’t reserve space right away but it has to have the struct definition before compilation ends. This is pretty straightforward syntax wise, “struct struct_name;” (Typedefs throw a syntax wrench into this that I won’t get into, it’s functionally the same though)

    One more thing you can do with variables during declaration is to “extern” them. This is more similar to function declaration, where you’re telling the compiler “hey you’re gonna see this symbol pop up, here’s how you use it, but it actually lives somewhere else k thx bye”. I personally don’t like calling this declaration since it behaves differently than normal declaration. This is the same as a normal variable declaration syntax with “extern” tossed in the front of the qualifiers.

    Definitions have two types: Function definitions contain the actual code that gets translated into instructions, Enum, struct, typedef definitions all describe memory requirements when they get used.

    Structs and enums will have syntax like “struct struct_name {blah,blah,blah};”, typedefs are just “typedef new_name old_name;”, and function definition “qualifiers return_data_type symbol(arg_1_data_type arg_1_symbol,…) {Blah,blah,blah}” (note that function definitions don’t need a ; at the end and here you do need argument symbols)

    Lastly, when you create a variable instance, if you say that you want that symbol to have value X all in one statement, by the standard that’s initialization. So “int foo = 5;” is declaration and initialization. Structs and arrays have special initialization syntax, “struct foo bar = {5, 6, 7};” where the numbers you write out in the list gets applied in order of the element names in the struct definition. You can also use named initialization for structs where it would look like “struct foo bar = {. element_one = 5, .e_two = 6, .e_three = 7};” This style syntax is only available for initialization, you cannot use that syntax for any other assignment. In other words you can’t change elements in bulk, you have to do it one at a time.

    C lets you get real wild and combine struct definition, struct instance declaration and initialization all into one! Though if I was your code reviewer I’d reject that for readability.

    <\wall-o-text>



  • needed to add a mechanic to slow time down

    The devs actually thought of that. There are two auxiliary time control songs. One slows down time by ~50%, the other jumps ahead to the next dawn/dusk. MM3D revised the latter to allow to jump to any top of the hour across the next 12 hours.

    Any of the scarecrows around town teach it to you just by talking to them, but they do so by describing the songs, not teaching you the notes


  • The way I think about Majora’s Mask as a Zelda game is that in addition to exploring the physical world, you’re also exploring time. That does necessitate “backtracking” by forcing time resets and a lot of waiting around if you don’t immediately know what you can be doing in parallel (though the two time control songs make that part easier).

    With the exception of the dungeons themselves, the game typically fast tracks getting you back to where you were when you just reset. Some mechanics like that the game forces on you pretty quickly (song of soaring fast travel), others it lets you figure out on your own (dungeon boss instant warp after beating them the first time).

    Side quests can be a bit more troublesome to deal with if you have to reset part way through, but each interaction point that you have to go through offers you another way to handle things (or to not and let another sequence of events happen).

    To your last point, the game really throws refillable items at you in the overworld, so a lot of times you can skip that (I’m not saying stocking up doesn’t take forever on reset, it does. You just don’t always have to)

    All in all I really love the time mechanic of the game and that let’s me forgive some of the other flaws of the game. If it fell flat, then yeah I can see how the game quickly becomes a chore. But I adore the game, hence the username