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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • What i find funny are people building golang binaries without cgo and still wrapping them in full distro containers. Your binary uses nothing from the container and still it gets packaged that way…

    Seen so many developers incur a huge headache trying to figure out overly complicated container setup when they could just run their already static binary without any drama…



  • It’s funny because that’s true that an old Linux binary is likely to have issues under Linux, but an similarly old Windows application might work better under Wine on Linux than modern Windows.

    libc is actually relatively less likely, glibc is awfully conservative about changes, but there are a maze of likely service and library dependencies that were abandoned or didn’t regard backwards compatibility with the same importance.



  • Oh cool, let me install this software, what, it won’t install because it’s missing quicktime? Oh it needs directx 8 runtime? That could be a problem. Let’s advance the clock, 2004, that should be fine… What do you mean you can’t run .NET 1.1 applications and so that won’t run?

    Ironically, wine is more likely to have a path to easily run those programs under Linux, but if you had a Linux binary from that era you’d likely have a hard time getting that to run, probably harder than the microsoft scenario. So old Windows software is more likely to run under Linux than old Linux software…


  • AI in vim is actually often convenient.

    :set ai
    

    Cool, now it will keep track of my indentation.

    Now sometimes that gets in the way, and while you can:

    :set noai
    

    Usually it’s best for me to:

    :set paste
    

    And that’s my take on the utility of AI in vim. (that is what you meant right, there isn’t some other AI people are thinking of right?)


  • If you use it to make sure your deployment is sane and that your dev system didn’t have an invisible component that you assumed as a dependency, great. Containers are a great tool for simulating minimalist clean setups and not incurring surprise hidden dependencies.

    If your application carries a whole container with it for the user to use and that’s the only way to use the software, that’s going to be annoying. ‘docker style’ for bloat, flatpak/snap depends on the app but sometimes the application functionality is broken by the container boundaries. Admittedly flatpak/snap is frequently acceptable, really depends on if the program has a lot of interoperability features that get broken in the flatpak/snap runtime model.

    If your application only is deployable as a pod… I’m almost certainly going to want to avoid it if at all humanly possible. Pods as a self-hosted approach to do what you want, ok, fine and I own all that. If a third party pod is happening, I tend to see some part of it fall over it and no one can figure it out because the application is microserviced into oblivion and no human actually understands the whole flow… It’s possible also to do this with ‘traditional’ application delivery, but a pod is a very high sign that no one even bothered thinking hard about how it should come together and play nice with others.


  • Yeah, wifi is a crapshoot as to whether it might expect a cloud connection, so I have to research those devices carefully. I’m satisfied with my OpenGarage being on Wifi because I know it has no internet aspirations. I hope that Matter over Wifi devices are similarly local friendly, but I haven’t actually had anything to buy since that was an option.


  • Indeed, nice and layered.

    If internet, wifi, internet, and zigbee/thread/zwave up, fully functional, can close my garage door from miles away

    If internet is down, then everything still works within wifi range.

    If local connectivity is down, well, all the local controls still work almost the same as a non-smart (the ‘on/off’ switches sit in the middle instead of being ‘on’ or ‘off’ since physical and logical state could otherwise disagree, but switch down to off, switch up to on still works).


  • It’s a bit of a curse, so often I come in and things magically start working… But that’s hardly satisfying, and the person that needs help just knows it’s going to bite them again… So I get to guess why it broke before it behaved for me and hopefully figure it out and fix it despite it currently working right now.



  • Same for me. In Linux, I plug in USB-C and both monitors in the chain light up every time without thinking.

    For some reason, dual boot into Windows and it always disables one of the two by default until I manually go in and tweak it alive, and then it will do it again next time I plug in.

    Now back in the day, futzing with XFree86 config files and CRT monitors and absolutely lots of ‘voodoo’ to match what Windows pretty simply did with display configuration. But nowadays at least with kwin wayland compositor on nVidia proprietary drivers, it always does exactly what I expect without asking, and Windows is the one that assumes that I don’t want to use all the displays that are connected.

    Windows seems pretty clunky by comparison nowadays when it comes to display configuration.

    Now juggling my bluetooth audio… I think Windows still has the advantage. I have no idea why sometimes my bluetooth microphone just doesn’t work under Linux. I do appreciate the ability to manually select the bluetooth codec in Linux where in Windows it ‘guesses’ and often guesses wrong, throwing it into ancient headset codec territory when I’m trying to listen to music, because who knows what has made Windows think the microphone device is open…

    Networking… Linux wins hands down with VPN connectivity, much much easier to manage all my VPNs in one place in the ‘casual’ user scenario instead of a litany of competing ‘endpoint managers’ in Windows. When VPNs step on each others routing tables, well no OS makes that easy but at least Linux network namespaces makes it possible for me to have multiple network ‘worlds’ in one place to reconcile the conflicts…

    Probably the other area where Windows has a bit of an advantage is a consistent binary driver model. In Linux if you are an out-of-tree driver, it’s going to suck to keep up with changing in-kernel APIs to keep your source compatible, let alone have a module running without a recompile after a minor kernel update. I guess the silver lining is almost everyone decided to have their drivers ‘in-tree’ to make sure they are maintained and don’t need a lot of ugly #ifdefs to contend with multiple kernel behaviors… Then there’s nVidia and some commercial filesystems that either cannot or will not go in-tree…


  • AMD is largely left behind. They are trying real hard to pitch their MI products as an nvidia alternative, but no one is biting. Strangely some of their line is even more exotic to try to host than the highest end Nvidia gear.

    So they are relatively less exposed to a crash than nVidia. On top of not doing that lending to their customers…



  • At least taking their figures at face value, about 75kwh to generate a gallon of gas, and let’s say 67 kwh to get a an EV 200 miles (assuming some losses between the generation and the actual battery capacity, and 3 miles/kwh which is on the low-ish end of EVs, but realistically close). The most aggressive hybrids getting 50 mpg so we end up with it being about 4x worse than charging an EV with that energy source.

    At least at residential rates where I live, that’s about $10, so it would only really make sense when gas gets to $10/gallon, otherwise, go to the pump for the fossil fuel. That’s ignoring the cost of the station itself.

    So maybe nearer than one might imagine, but still highly impractical. Maybe if they doubled the efficiency and gas eeks up without residential electricity rates going up…

    But all this is assuming it will work exactly as well as they say it is, and I’ve learned to have a healthy dose of skepticism… Here though I can be as optimistic as they like and it’s still a tough sell…


  • Well, I don’t know if the reason given is that significant, they’d just plan around the fixed weight. The issue being the energy per unit volume/weight being so far behind hydrocarbons that some applications do demand it.

    So while stationary/grid applications may lean battery since size/weight hardly matters, and EVs are debatable good enough for many scenarios, I will grant that for aircraft, boats, and some heavy equipment it’s hard to beat hydrocarbons.

    Unfortunately, on that front it has to compete with extracted hydrocarbons and doesn’t seem like it can compete as yet. It however may give hope for a more resource constrained future that the battery-hostile scenarios may still be fulfilled in a sustainable way, just at higher relative expense than today. Or they iterate on their processes to have cheaper equipment and/or increased efficiency to come closer to competitive with extracted hydrocarbons. Or a viable thing to reference for some governments mandating sustainably sourced hydrocarbons when they are really needed.


  • How much do we have an over generation problem in general though? I suppose the argument would be that solar is curtailed because they don’t want to deal with the potential for overgeneration, but we already have a number of approaches for energy storage. Their pricing for generating at most a gallon a day is a price exceeding a battery system of LFP that could do a lot more than a gallon of gas. This is ignoring the rather significant potential of Sodium batteries.

    So this doesn’t look to be cheaper than battery systems, it looks to be way less efficient than battery systems. The biggest use case as energy storage in general seems to be if you want it to spend a few months (but not too many months, fuel degrades in the tank after all). The more narrow use case is to cater to scenarios where you absolutely need the energy density of gasoline, so boats and airplanes critically so, maybe some heavy equipment. I’ll grant that, but if particularly sodium batteries will be an acceptable approach, it’ll be better than this solution in that very wide variety of circumstances.