As embedded dev, the stack trace alone scares me. It would be funny to watch the Java runtime blow the 8 frame deep stack on a PIC18 tho

I had a boss who would send audio messages constantly. I’d be having a conversation with him, he’d get a text message on his phone, stop talking to me to mess with this phone, do a voice recording, mess it up cause he’d whisper it so others wouldn’t hear him (we still totally could), repeat it, rinse and repeat until he got it right, send it, then would ask me what we were talking about.

I’m convinced people who use voice messages have no situational awareness and are potentially psychopaths

As someone who learned Ada for a defense job years ago, I’ve been wondering how long it was going to take until I saw others comparing Rust to it, both in the sense of the language “safety” goals and the USG pushing for it.

While the rust compiler is leagues better than any Ada compiler I ever had the misfortune of dealing with, the day to day pain that Rust incurs will probably always be a thorn in it’s side

Unfortunately not, I’m in the space side of aerospace. If it flies in the atmosphere and isn’t accelerating to orbital velocity I’m afraid I don’t know

Sidebar: What you’re saying is genuinely interesting and I’m glad to have read it today, but can you back off on the italics usage? It made reading your comment kinda difficult :(

• a fellow italics connoisseur

Why not Minot?

I was taught this too growing up in rural america. Did it myself at some land my grandparents had.

Best explanation I’ve heard for why it “works” is that when looking for places to first install pipes the location tends to be obvious or intuitive, so then years later when someone needs to find it again we naturally trend to the same rough area, pull out those stupid rod things and when they randomly cross there’s a pipe there cause we’re already standing in the general right spot. Get a high enough success rate and our brains start to think there is causation to the correlation.

For me, I view Apollo as the highschool quarterback winning the homecoming game.

In the context, its a great achievement. A lot of time, effort, and luck all came together at just the right moment to create an entertaining spectacle. The school is all happy and celebrating, students will remember that moment for years to come. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big of an achievement since everyone there will move on to bigger and greater things, except they won’t have a student body cheering them on.

I think saying the Apollo program is one of the greatest achievements of mankind falsely puts it on a pedestal and forever sets up all other achievements as being lesser. Makes us all feel like anything that isn’t chasing that glory isn’t worth it. It’s an achievement for sure, but not the biggest. If I had to give the greatest achievement in space technology to anything, I’d give it to either GPS or GOES.

Short answer: it’s not that we don’t have the technology, its that we don’t have a reason to. With very few exceptions, if you can do it on the moon you can do it on earth or in Earth orbit

Long answer: in the space industry/field the moon is incredibly boring, relatively expensive to get to, and adds an extra step of logistics to an already complicated mission profile. Most space related technology advancement efforts have gone into doing things in orbit and there is more to do there than on the moon, it’s logistically simpler, and cost is orders of magnitude less. Stuff is still advancing there, think Hubble vs James Web, GPS 1 vs GPS 3, the entire GOES system. In terms of technical challenges, they’re far more interesting than anything on the moon, but it’s not as flashy/headline grabbing so it’s not talked about much.

The US going to the moon in the 60/70s was a rare combination of a win for scientists, politicians, and the people. The political incentive went away since as the USSR space program collapsed so too did political pressure to continue to put men on the moon and “prove 'Murica is better than those damn commies”.

In modern times the political incentive is returning with the continued efforts by China to do more stuff in space so we get the Artemis program, but the incentives aren’t that strong which is why the program has moved so slowly.

To me 16 is long haha.

I usually end up running with 16 characters since a lot of services reject longer than 20 and as a programmer I just like it when things are a power of two. Back in the Dark Times of remembering passwords my longest was 13 characters so when I started using a password manager setting them that long felt wild to me.

I do have my bank accounts under a 64 character password purely because monkey brain like seeing big security rating in keepass. Entropy go brrrrrrrrrrrr

I’ve used cloud based services for password managers for work and “self host” my personal stuff. I barely consider it self hosting since I use Keepass and on every machine it’s configured to keep a local cached copy of the database but primarily to pull from the database file on my in-home NAS.

Two issues I’ve had:

Logging into an account on a device currently not on my home network is brutal. I often resort to simply viewing the needed password and painstakingly type it in (and I run with loooooong passwords)

If I add or change a password on a desktop and don’t sync my phone before I leave, I get locked out of accounts. Two years rocking this setup it’s happened three times, twice I just said meh I don’t really need to do this now, a third time I went through account recovery and set a new password from my phone.

Minor complaint:

Sometimes Keepass2Android gets stuck trying to open the remote database and I have to let it sit and timeout (5 minutes!!!) which gets really annoying but happens very infrequently which is why I say just minor complaint

All in all, I find the inconvenience of doing the personal setup so low that to me even a $10 annual subscription is not worth it

Jesus dude, what brand TV do you have?

My LG issues a few hundred blocked requests throughout the day with heavy usage. I’ve never seen it wake up and phone home (my Nintendo Switch does it every hour for some stupid reason)

Combination of anti large company sentiment + people feeling entitled to get things for free if I had to guess. It also usually feels wrong when a corporation threatens a lawsuit over a single person since the US court system heavily favors the person with more money and it’s probably a true statement to say that Nintendo has more resources than the lead dev.

Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube had an interesting take in that by stifling emulator development now it will hurt the industry in the long run because Switch exclusives will become increasingly difficult to play once support ends (an argument I myself don’t find all that compelling)

Nerrel on YouTube has a well put together and researched video on emulation where at least in the US it’s been tested in court several times that emulators are legal, but obtaining the code for the emulators to run is almost always not since you usually have to make a copy and that violates the publisher’s right to copy

“… and no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe, and he never, ever, got noticed by anyone”

This line has been the basis of several career changing events for me, and overall it’s worked out pretty well

One I quote often:

“What do I do?”

“FIND HIM AND KILL HIM”

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

I really don’t think Wells Fargo has any blame in this, this just as easily could have happened to any company. Perhaps it is a problem with corporate America, but what would you say they’re actually negligent of?

it may sound callous and cold, but logistics does end up asking strange questions like “What is a reasonable amount of time to notice that an employee passed away at their desk in a corporate office?” Or “How do we verify that every employee in the building is still alive?”

It’s unfortunate and sad what happened to this woman, but I don’t see how Wells Fargo played any part in this other than to be a rage-bait headline

God dammit, I lost my ocarina!

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