Author Archives: pappp

I no longer trust The Great Suspender

Posted on 2021-01-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Aren't mandatory auto-updates great? You have some software you like and/or depend on, upstream gets taken over by some shady fuck, or just decides of their own volition to do something shitty, and now you have a broken workflow and/or automatically loaded malware.
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ThinkPad 560E + OpenStep 4.2

Posted on 2021-01-19 by pappp
Photo of Thinkpad 560E System, running OpenStep 4.2
One Fancy Commercial Unix Portable Battlestation, ca. 1997

I’ve now tried out a few of the things I bought the Thinkpad 506E I posted about a while ago to try, and there are some interesting notes to share before the semester gets underway and I run out of energy again.

I decided amid some resultant discussions (Hi HN!) from my last post on this machine to give myself a conduct of not physically opening the hardware while I play with it, unless the HDD dies or the like. Doing so is making me exercise some long-dormant skills, which has been extremely fun.

So far I’ve amassed a pile of compatible accessories, booted into NetBSD and imaged off the original HDD contents, installed OpenStep 4.2, fixed the drivers, updated to Patch4, and very briefly taken it online before an irritating networking problem arose. I’ve also run into a problem getting RhapsodyDR2 on, which will likely be the next time-sink.

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GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA for source code of torrent tracker nyaa.si

Posted on 2021-01-19 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hello Right to Read/ War on General Purpose computing bullshit! RIAA just got smacked down for trying to DMCA youtube-dl, so the obvious thing to do is try an even more tenuous "Generic file-distribution tools = infringement" claim.
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Everything you need to know to design your own CNC router

Posted on 2021-01-18 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There are details I would quibble about (I can claim experience, I've had 3-ish machines myself and helped others with several more) - only discussing grbl derivatives for machine control, no bldc spindles, no discussion of coolants/blowers, etc. - but it is, generally speaking, a really nice intro that covers most of what someone should be thinking about if they want a baby CNC machine.
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Software effort estimation is mostly fake research

Posted on 2021-01-18 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I consider most of "software engineering" to be a fake/failed field, but that's more egregious than usual.
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Router Replacement: Asus RT-ACRH13

Posted on 2021-01-18 by pappp
RT-ACRH13 being flashed.

I’ve been running a TP-Link Archer C7 flashed with OpenWRT at home since early 2016 (and a TP-Link 1043ND with OpenWRT for years before that), but since I moved into my current place over the summer it has been falling over every couple weeks. It hasn’t been logging anything (I have a flash drive mounted that it persistent logs to) but goes down until hard reset, most likely just because of the load of two heavy stream/video-conference/file-sync users (…and probably not because of my kitten chewing on the antennas. Probably.) Rather than updating/diagnosing I decided that was a good excuse for a new faster router.

TL;DR: The Asus RT-ACRH13 is an excellent current-production OpenWRT host for ~$65 with only minor install challenges, and represents a significant upgrade over the Archer C7.

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The richer you are, the more likely you’ll social distance, study finds

Posted on 2021-01-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Imagine that, the people with the (financial) resources to hole up, the space to hole up comfortably, and the (generally higher-prestige) jobs that can be done as tele-work has a better time holing up than people who needed to go do their manual labor/customer facing/etc. jobs in order to get by. Perhaps _everyone should have known that_ and formed pubic policy to deal with that reality.
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Machine Learning: The Great Stagnation

Posted on 2021-01-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hey, someone else calling out "ML Research" as an attractive-nuisance hack subverting academic research.
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WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source

Posted on 2021-01-13 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The ecosystem of FOSS-firmware network devices really has been a delightful thing that I wish more industry sectors would fall in on/stop fighting. I just picked up a new router (that supports OpenWRT, of course), but I haven't swapped it in so I'm not going to suggest it yet.
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Are Experts Real?

Posted on 2021-01-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The fact that credentials and prestige are decoupled from any reliable or meaningful measure of competence or value, and once something shows utility it will be gamed for advantage until it doesn't, is kind of the ur-problem.
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