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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • I work with SoC suppliers, including Qualcomm and can confirm; you need to sign an NDA to get a highly patched old orphaned kernel, often with drivers that are provided only as precompiled binaries, preventing you updating the kernel yourself.

    If you want that source code, you need to also pay a lot of money yearly to be a Qualcomm partner and even then you still might not have access to the sources for all the binaries you use. Even when you do get the sources, don’t expect them to be updated for new kernel compatibility; you’ve gotta do that yourself.

    Many other manufacturers do this as well, but few are as bad. The environment is getting better, but it seems to be a feature that many large manufacturers feel they can live without.


  • If you’re messing with ACLs I’m not sure deduplication will help you much; I believe (not much experience with reflinks) the dedup checksum will include the metadata, so changing ACLs might ruin any benefit. Even if you don’t change the ACLs, as soon as somebody updates a game, it’s checksum will change and won’t converge back when everyone else updates.

    Even hardlinks preserve the ACL… Maybe symlinks to the folder containing the game’s data, then the symlinks could have different ACLs?





  • I’m sure the developers are competent, but the reason I care about the design decisions is the same reason the electric brakes on cars don’t interface with its infotainment system; the interface inherently creates opportunities for out of spec behaviour and even if the introduced risk is tiny, the consequence is so bad that it’s worth avoiding.

    If you have to have an airbag be controlled by software (ideally the mechanism is physical, like a pull tab), it should be an isolated real time device with monitoring your accelerometer and triggering the airbag be it’s only jobs. If it’s also waiting to hear back from another device about whether your subscription ran out before it starts checking, the risk of failure also has to consider that triggering device.

    It can be done perfectly, but it’s software so of course it has bugs.



  • Yes, but also from an implementation perspective: if I’m making code that might kill somebody if it fails, I want it to be as deterministic and simple as possible. Under no circumstances do I want it:

    1. checking an external authentication service.
    2. connected to the internet in any way.
    3. have multiple services which interact over an API. Hell, even FFIs would be in the “only if I have to” bucket.

  • Typically no, the top two PCIE x16 slots are normally directly to the CPU, though when both are plugged in they will drop down to both being x8 connectivity.

    Any PCIE x4 or X1 are off the chipset, as well as some IO, and any third or fourth x16 slots.

    So yes, motherboards typically do implement more IO connectivity than can be used simultaneously, though they will try to avoid disabling USB ports or dropping their speed since regular customers will not understand why.



  • hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

    I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

    I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

    I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.