[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 164 points 2 years ago

Obviously I don't know the business in question, but it's quite possible that the company has a bunch of longer running contracts that would become a loss if the inputs become much more expensive.

Of course, businesses will use the opportunity to charge more, but sudden price hikes are a very real problem.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 112 points 2 years ago

Imagine being a doctor in this scenario. You could save them. You have the tools, the capabilities, the facility. But you have to let them die or risk ruining your own life. There are no winners here.

64

I'm trying to get an old Windows game running for a friend.

It seems to be a 16bit macromedia app and I kind of got it running in a Win 98 VM using Virtualbox. DOSBox seems to get confused by it being a Windows app.

Thing is, the friend is very much not good with tech and I want to set everything up for him to "just work". Installing VBox might be a bit too much.

Apparently, you can install Windows inside DOSBox, but is that really stable and usable for layman? Are there any other approaches?

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 94 points 2 years ago

As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called "these stewarts". If there's no context added, it's impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 77 points 2 years ago

It's not just capitalism. I'm from east Germany and you wouldn't believe how much crap was buried, fumed into the air or pumped into the water in the name of peace and socialism.

Don't forget, Chernobyl happened because of a cost saving measure.

BTW, you forgot alcohol, tobacco, vapes, stress and enforced sedentary lifestyle in your cancer list.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 98 points 2 years ago

If it looks fishy, it probably is. Simple as that.

A proper business should have proper addresses, imprint, contacts.

38

I have a small homelab running a few services, some written by myself for small tasks - so the load is basically just me a few times a day.

Now, I'm a Java developer during the day, so I'm relatively productive with it and used some of these apps as learning opportunities (balls to my own wall overengineering to try out a new framework or something).

Problem is, each app uses something like 200mb of memory while doing next to nothing. That seems excessive. Native images dropped that to ~70mb, but that needs a bunch of resources to build.

So my question is, what is you go-to for such cases?

My current candidates are Python/FastAPI, Rust and Elixir, but I'm open for anything at this point - even if it's just for learning new languages.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 99 points 2 years ago

Train nerds are a weird bunch.

Please never change.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 100 points 2 years ago

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 228 points 2 years ago

Not "unfortunately", but rather "exactly as intended".

This entire business is essentially a money laundering scheme.

1

I asked a while ago, how to build an automatic light switch and finally got around to actually building it.

My board is an ESP8266 mini D, and ignoring all the sensor parts, my problem right now is powering the actual light.

It's just a small LED array and I connected it directly to the 5V and GND pins (controlled via a transistor).

Measuring from the wall (so including the PSU), this whole setup pulls about 3W (so far expected), however, one small component close to the USB connector gets uncomfortably warm, and I'm not sure, whether that's ok.

The hot component is one of the two small thingies circled in the picture. I thought the 5V get pulled directly from the USB plug, so I'm not sure, why there is any circuitry involved.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 119 points 2 years ago

It's security theater through and through.

Apart from the obvious failings of these checks, think about what kind of damage a single backpack of explosives can do to a packed airport during holiday season. You can literally put a ton of explosives on one of those trolleys, roll it into the waiting area and kill 200 people easily. No security whatsoever involved.

Reality is, most security measures are designed to keep the illusion of control. Nothing more. Penetration testers show again and again that you can easily circumvent practically all barriers or measures.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 98 points 2 years ago

What's really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.

Yet Reddit spends millions on development every year, for no discernable improvement whatsoever, while still turning no profit.

Where is all that money going? Seriously, Reddit is a very simple site. There's nothing that hard about it. The amount of data is tiny, since the content is external, none of the resources are that time critical, a lot of content can be cached.

What are the devs doing all day?

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 78 points 2 years ago

Had that once. Never again.

We had meetings with several people about 30min tasks being booked using the wrong category, despite both being part of the same budget. Absolute insanity.

1

I'm trying to build a very simple, stupid light switch for my grow light. Essentially, I want to turn on the light, if it gets too dark outside, so that my plants can survive the northern winter.

Since I'm a software guy, my first thought was an ESP32, but that seems excessive.

My current approach would be something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/313561010352 In conjunction with a relay, both powered by a USB-PSU.

If the light level is low enough, the logic DO pin should send a signal and that should be enough to trigger a small relay, so that the relay then closes the circuit to switch on the lights.

Is that idea completely stupid? With electronics, I'm usually missing something very obvious.

The lights themselves are already just usb powered and only draw 5W, so that shouldn't be problem.

What I'm concerned with is the actual switching. Is the logic signal "strong" enough to activate a relay? Would simple transistor maybe sufficient?

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 79 points 2 years ago

This is what's happening in highly complex software over time. Every larger system has corners like this.

I've worked on a system that required that you send invalid XML, because some bloke 10 years ago didn't know what he's doing and hardcoded a certain structure.

Easy fix, but our clients relied in the old behavior, and nobody bothered fixing it.

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leisesprecher

joined 2 years ago