• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yes, but people are forgetting how it was discovered.

    It was discovered because there was a visible performance impact by running benchmark tests on other, time-critical software.

    Do you know how it was not discovered? By maintainers looking through changes of the software and looking through the code, exactly the way that the commenter and you and others are saying things would be caught.

    If the attacker hadn’t been so eager and only set it to start working after a time delay a year later or multiple updates later? It would have infected almost every server in the world, even if it got noticed immediately, it would have been a giant problem that would have reaped the benefits for the malicious party before it could be regressed and changed.





  • Oh yeah I was quite annoyed with bazzite initially with embedded toolchains… The default arch distrobox also runs vscode variants horribly with tons of freezing for some reason. I had to create a new arch distrobox.

    Also Saleae Logic2 has a Fedora bug where it takes between 2 and 10 minutes just to open because of logfiles and errordumping and timeouts that is very annoying.

    Also menu shortcuts for distrobox only work like for 20% of programs (luckily code-oss is one of them)

    And don’t get me started on running a VM that can see the local network…

    After you get a setup going though, then it is breezy though.


  • So I am in the designing of the circuit and PCB stage right now.

    The usecase is for Meshtastic/Meshcore nodes because those sit outside in a tree or in a high place outside year-round and are solar charged. I am designing it as a RAKwireless Wisblock power module that will be charged by 2, 5V, 200mA small solar panels in series. The whole project will be released on Codeberg like all of my home projects.

    Later I can copy the circuit over to other PCBs for more general formats. One of my future projects is going to be an 8S pack BMS for driving a 12V water pump for off-grid rainwater collection barrels.

    I am targeting 2S systems now because then the entire sodium cell can discharge if the system voltage is set to 3V and I don’t need any buck/boost, just a buck which is significantly cheaper and easier on the batteries.

    I am using an STM32C011 as a custom BMS + buck charger because my original idea of using a very cheap, small mixed signal FPGA (greenpak SLG47105) wouldn’t work well for sodium because it didn’t have enough comparators to have a soft constant voltage region (gradually increasing CV voltage from 3.8V per cell to 4V along with the natural current decrease to prolong charge cycle life), it will have overvoltage/over current protections, 1A or 2A max current, resistive battery balancing, and some safety features and an I2C readout.

    (Sorry, wall of text)



  • We have heat pumps at my job for our factory.

    They are literally useless around of below freezing in the experience here.

    They exchange heat so they blow out air colder than outside air, then their entire radiator gets completely covered in ice, then it has to switch off and then the entire factory cools off while they have to turn on the resistive heaters to defrost themselves, then they turn themselves back on and because they are covered in water from defrosting, very quickly freeze again and the whole cycle repeats while the factory is very marginally warmed up during the cycle.


  • Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn’t fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

    **Commercial things: **

    • Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

    • Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

    • Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

    • MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

    • Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

    • FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

    • RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

    Maybe older, but still great:

    • open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

    • epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

    **Community Projects: **

    • HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

    • Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

    • Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

    • The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc…

    • The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact

    • Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

    There is more, but this is already long


  • Sodium companies closing is incredibly painful because also if you look at the reasons, outside of Northvolt, it is literally all startups where their investors pulled out and screwed them because lithium prices dropped and they wanted to recoup their costs with 30% market share on week 1 of launch (exaggeration of course)

    Proving yet again that rich fucks are complete and total idiots who can’t look any further at all than 4-8 quarters.

    China sodium is luckily going strong, so we have a fallback when lithium prices inevitably spike yet again.






  • They do these types of things, a lot more often than open source projects actually.

    Thread Group:

    • ARM
    • NXP
    • Samsung
    • Qualcomm
    • nest labs (google)
    • Apple

    I will list more that for example google and/or apple are a part of, but not the involved companies to not make a wall

    • OpenID Foundation
    • FIDO Alliance
    • AOMedia (AV1)
    • CSA (formerly ZigBee alliance)
    • Bluetooth SIG
    • Apache Foundation
    • Unicode Consortium
    • WiFi alliance
    • LLVM Foundation

    Not to mention smaller groups that collaborate to discuss strategy over activies like golf or dinners.

    The downside is that very very often, the collaboration involves how best to fuck over consumers and the general public for more profit margin.



  • And this is why I try to recommend to every single person starting their smart home to plan it so that if everything dies, their internet, their router, power gets restarted, and their HomeAssistant gets corrupted, and you die, at the same time, that everything will work exactly as expected, because with MANY smart home systems they will just stop functioning or be stuck in a bad mode until your family hires someone to fix it.

    That’s why I lean hard towards KNX


  • I might catch flak for this, but I understand Fahrenheit made a ton of sense of an illiterate bygone era (well, I guess coming back maybe)

    The vast majority of people were uneducated. Decimals were a non-starter, maybe negatives were also difficult?

    0-100 was very easy. Under 0? Don’t go outside if possible. Over 100? Don’t go outside if possible. >50/halfway? Time for a coat. Having the same scale from -15 to 40 might have been confusing and not centered for them?


  • Well CAD software has made leaps and bounds since then. Anyone who used CAD back in the day would know what an unstable clusterfuck it was and how much longer it took than now.

    A lot of software has gotten much better, including “core” Foss like Linux and FFMPEG. There is just 10x as much software that is horrible, and windows has gotten so much worse to the point that it feels like computers have made no progress when you use it.

    Also, CPUs nowadays use about the same power as they did 20 years ago but with an order of magnitude more processing power, and the idle power consumption is much much much lower. The first Core 2 Duo had a 65W TDP, the same as modern Ryzen 5. GPUs are just out of hand with power consumption because of profit-driven game companies and AI.


  • … Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.

    Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.

    The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.

    Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.