sxan

sxan, 1 year ago

<span style="color:#323232;">if (launch) {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">   landOnMoon()
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

What’s so hard, Japan?!? Sheesh.

sxan, 1 year ago

The EU, despite (valid) criticisms and pravacy mis-steps, is right now the only large, powerful organization fighting for consumer rights. I wish I, as an American, could support them, because the laws the EU is passing benefit me as well.

Go EU, indeed!

sxan, 1 year ago

Foundation. Such awesome design, great acting… but such awful writing.

sxan, 1 year ago

Wouldn’t be a bad idea for potential customers to write Haier and let them know they’re on a personal blacklist.

Is there an OSS-hostile list, like the opposite of the Awesome-XYZ lists?

sxan, 1 year ago

If it doesn’t work, force it; if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

This simple advice has saved me from countless analysis paralysis problems.

sxan, 1 year ago

Yeah, it’s off. M.A.S.H. would be Gen X. Old Yeller got both Boomers and Gen X; I’m not sure which TV show would have gotten only Boomers.

sxan, 1 year ago

Quality-wise, Makita > DeWALT ≥ Milwaukee > Ryobi, at least, if you watch teardowns by guys like AvE.

Power tools are like cars; companies hold several brands and target them to different market segments, like Porsche and VW.

Ryobi is owned by the same company as Milwauki; it’s the budget line, Milwauki being their premium line.

DeWALT and Black & Decker are owned by the same company; DeWALT is their premium line.

The exception in this list is Makita, which is its own company. They’re also objectively more well-built than the others (here), and correspondingly usually more expensive.

The premium lines are better quality (not just more expensive) but also tend to have smaller battery-tool options. Despite being a budget line, I mostly own B&D because most of my tools these days are 24V and there are more tool options there. The few, select, DeWALT tools I have are noticably better quality.

I don’t use power tools enough to justify Makita, but also, their battery-powered line is comparatively tiny. As someone else said, there’s a lot of motivation to pick a (compatible) lane, whichever it is. For most home-gamers, the quality difference will probably not matter much. If I were made of money, though, I’d have everything Makita except for the things they don’t make.

sxan, 1 year ago

Great write-up! I agree with all of your aesthetic picks. I first saw A New Hope when I was 11, and even at that age - having grown up on a cinematic diet of WWII films - the DLT-19 stood out as a wierdly familiar and out-of-place gun.

Enjoyable read, thanks!

sxan, 1 year ago

Nearly every day. There was a time when I’d reach for Ruby, but in the end, the stability, ubiquity, and portability of the traditional Unix tools - among whom awk is counted - turned out to be more useful. I mainly underuse its power, though; it serves as a column aggregator or re-arranger, for the most part.

sxan, 1 year ago

Probably not testing, but rather demonstrating to potential buyers (the pig in the background). It sells better, and demonstrates the seller’s conviction that the product works.

sxan, 1 year ago

Humans. Where is my snow?

sxan, 1 year ago

Social engineering. The more information they have about you, the easier you are to immitate.

The threat isn’t in any one piece of information about you; it’s in the corpus of knowledge, the profile they can build. Your tastes in music - at the granularity of not only what you listen to, but how much, and at what times - can help narrow down:

• how old you are
• where (in the world, and maybe to the time zone) you live
• your mother tongue
• probably your socio-economic status

These are just the things I can tyink of off the top of my head, and I’m not in infosec.

sxan, 1 year ago

It cracks me up that they’ll sell chainsaws to anyone.

sxan, 1 year ago

All the aid that Isreal lets through, which is almost nothing.

sxan, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.

Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.

Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.

If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.

Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.

The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.

sxan, 1 year ago

What’s “futanari,” uncle Joeldebuijn?

sxan, 1 year ago

The entire fucking web worked with no ads for literally years. I do not feel bad, and won’t lament if companies can’t afford to pay people to cram even more JavaScript into web pages.

Sorry, web developers. Your masters are making you do evil things. It isn’t your fault, but I hate your jobs.

sxan, 1 year ago

And it shouldn’t be. Sure, there are some new features you may want to take advantage of, but it’s lamentable that GTK doesn’t try harder to maintain backwards compatability.

You know who does major version changes well? Go. Excellent backwards compatible over a decade of very active development, and when there are recommended or required changes, the compiler provides tooling to update source code to the new API.

sxan, 1 year ago

But

https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/8ecbe896-f498-4403-9011-ee6f4d76a1b0.jpeg

sxan, 1 year ago

One great thing about this joke is a that I doubt there’s anyone left who doesn’t know how to exit vim.

sxan, 1 year ago

I’m doing my part!

sxan, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I think it’s gotten better, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the countless times MacOS was too stupid to recognize a file type, and absolutely rejected all attempts to tell it what it was. I almost always found a way around it, but it would sometimes take dozens of minutes of fighting with the OS; these times almost made me long for Windows.

Apple’s position that users are fucking idiots may be usually justified, but they consistently violate the “… and make the uncommon possible” rule. The philosophy that the OS is always right is frustrating.

sxan, 1 year ago

Guy: I wish I had a flying car.

You: Invent one then.

sxan, 1 year ago

It’d be nice if we could easily point out in the comic that the “why” is based on who’s speaking.

In panel 1, it’s the government. Who stole land from indigenous people and gave it to settlers. In two, it’s largely private individuals or small companies. In 3 and 4, it’s large property developers who’ve bought up land on speculation, and have had enough resources to hold through rough markets and helped drive up property values.