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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  • 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.



  • 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.”





  • What if you need to file a bug? What if you have a question on the config that’s not easily answered by the docs? If you never, ever find bugs and never, ever have questions, then sure, separate the two. There are genuinely people like that, but they’re not common. If you’re one of them, then I’m genuinely glad for you.

    My opinion is this: You use software. You don’t use people, but you sure as hell rely on them.





  • 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.




  • I imagine that part of it comes down to motivation. I pretended to be an adult on a special-interest forum when I was twelve years old because I needed an escape from my miserable existence. At that time, I had no control over my life and every morning I woke up meant I had a new chance for traumatic shit to happen. I desperately needed to be someone else, so I took my time, researched shit, and avoided any conversation where I might be outed. I’m sure I didn’t fool everyone, but I got some shocked responses when I went back as an adult and owned up to it.

    Kids doing it for the authority boost or just as a childish fancy will be easier to spot. Kids doing it as a coping mechanism for their horrible lives will probably blend in a lot better.


  • I always just derive the interface name from first principles. Like, if I want to know which interface will be used to get out to the internet in a script, I’ll just find the one that’s L2 adjacent with the default gateway. If I’m given an egress or cidr, I’ll just find the interface that has that IP. Modern iproute2 has a JSON output option which makes getting this information pretty trivial. Doing that means that it doesn’t matter what scheme your OS is using.

    I personally prefer the persistent names for Ethernet, although I don’t like them for WiFi. Luckily, it seems like my wireless adapter always just ends up as wlan0. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but it works out well in the end for me.