litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others

  From the perspective of a user, why would they care about development speed? A user, by sheer definition of wanting to use the software, can only use software that is already developed. If it’s not actually developed yet… they can’t use it. So either they see the software at the end of the development cycle, or they never see it at all. Development speed simply isn’t relevant to a user at that point. (exception: video games, but I’m not aware of any desktop game developed using a web framework)

  As for platform consistency, again, why would the user care? Unless each user is actually running the same software on multiple platforms (ie a Windows user at work, Arch at home, and BSD at their side-gig), this is a hard sell to get users to care. A single-platform user might never see what the same software looks like on any other platform. Even mobile apps necessarily differ in ways that matter, so consistency is already gone there.

  What I’m getting at is that the concerns of developers will not always be equally concerning to users. For users to care would be to concern themselves with things outside of their control; why would they do that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing into the abyss - need a service⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Was this question also posted a few weeks ago?

  In any case, what exactly are the requirements here? You mentioned encrypted journaling app, but also gave an example of burning a handwritten sheet. Do you need to recover the text after it is written, or can it simply be discarded into the void once it’s been fully written out?

  If encryption is to protect the document while it’s still a draft, then obviously that won’t work for handwritten pages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens if an instance gets down?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At least for Lemmy – I have no idea about kbin or other ActivityPub software – there isn’t a user-accessible way to back up one’s account on an instance, nor to preserve any communities that you’re a mod for. So yeah, if the instance goes down unexpectedly like due to data loss or an FBI raid, the communities and users that were on that instance will disappear.

  It’s true that other servers will have a cache of some of the existing community posts and the users on the departed server. But it’s exactly that: a cache, which will eventually be evicted.

  A similar situation occurs when a Lemmy instance changes domain name: all prior posts to the community (and the community itself) were homed to the old domain. So a new domain cannot have the same identity as the old; it will simply be a separate entity, even if all posts were somehow preserved and reposted on the new instance.

  Is this Lemmy-specific? No, Mastodon and I think all other ActivityPub software, plus BlueSky have this property, because they anchor identities to DNS names. From that, the posts to a community are anchored to the instance, and the instance is anchored to DNS.

  So if the domain is lost, then it’s game over. But if the domain is still there but the disk got wiped, then it would be a matter of recovery from a backup. You do have a 3-2-1 backup strategy, right?

  I will note that Mastodon has a user-initiated export feature, which functions as a backup, something that Lemmy doesn’t have. A Mastodon user can export their data and then move their identity to a new instance. Lemmy can’t do that today, but it should be possible. Though in both cases, only the saved account is preserved. To restore a Lemmy community would require a disk-level backup image.

  (this is all conjecture based on my limited knowledge of Lemmy. A better answer would come from an instance admin or one of the Lemmy devs)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Managed Switches & Openwrt AP Hardware Choices⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash

  FYI, RAM sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it’s only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you’re using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it’s the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.

  I wish you the best of luck in your search.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  some people

  they say that it’s definitely a thing

  To borrow a phrase from the largest encyclopedia project in the world, citation needed.

  This is not to say that you, OP, need to provide the evidence of a problem. But rather, whoever you’re hearing this from needs to proffer up more than just weasel words.

  There is only so much time before each of us shuffles off our mortal coil, so why spend it contemplating nebulous “issues” when the real issues are readily visible: a pattern of physical violence against LGBTQ+ communities. It’s not exactly difficult to do a web search for “lgbtq violence”.

  And to be abundantly clear, proof of “a pattern” has to show a pervasive, widespread, or organized/systemic series of events. LGBTQ+ violence easily meets this criteria, sadly. Where violence against white people because they’re white or violent against straight people because they’re straight doesn’t meet this bar.

  Demand better evidence from your vendor of talking points.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I decided to convert from [insert lack of religion] to Amish, would they allow me to bring my Casio graphing calculator to continue my math studies?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends on which Amish community, since they all adopt different degrees of self-sufficiency. See nebula.tv/…/hai-how-amish-people-get-around-not-u… (or on YT).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Windows still bloated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When looking through the history of Windows, some of the major milestones included the very concept of a windowed user interface in 3.1, refining the concept into a complete desktop-oriented (as in, a physical table top, with files and folders and a recycling bin) experience in Windows 95, huge backend improvements in the kernel (eg networking) by merging in the NT kernel (last used intact in Windows 2000) and giving us Windows XP.

  Note well that XP was the first juncture between a consumer-oriented OS (a la Win 95/98) and a business-oriented OS (a la NT Server or Windows 2000). The missing link here is Windows ME, which was the next consumer OS after 98 but it flopped so hard when it became apparent that this artificial consumer/business division wasn’t going to scale. Specifically, the Windows 9x kernel had too many DOS-isms whereas the NT kernel had no such issues. Hence, Microsoft undertook the massive effort to bring the two kernels together for XP.

  In that sense, XP coupled a newer kernel with a polished UI. In essence, the company bet all its chips on XP. And fortunately for them, it paid off. But this came with a cost: XP has to carry the lineage of both the DOS/95/98/ME and NT/2000 into the 21st Century. This means the same OS has to support things like Active Directory (a feature only used by corporate customers) and Fax for Windows (used by anyone that wanted to use their dial-up modem for faxing, but also on fax servers, which are somehow still relevant today), while also supporting DirectX for the consumer gaming segment, plus multi-user support for “home computer” customers that still share a single machine for a household, despite a market trend towards personalized computing, and everything else under the sun.

  And that’s before we get to some of the backwards-compatibility support they still have to upkeep, like 32-bit support on the x86 family of CPUs, and BIOS (in spite of UEFI being a decade old). Notably, Windows on ARM has never kept such backwards compatibility, with ARM32 being completely deprecated and only ARM64 being supported by Windows 10 and beyond (hence, Windows on Raspberry Pi).

  And then, of course, the Microsoft own-goals and mistakes: somewhere around 8.1, they decided to meet the tablet/touchscreen market by having Windows be touch-oriented. But as was blitheringly obvious then and now, the desktop concept cannot possibly be similar when the controls (keyboard/mouse versus touchscreen) are swapped out. Thus, this compromised the desktop experience in pursuit of a relatively niche target market.

  A better execution might have been to port Windows for ARM (which is what most/all phones and tablets use today) earlier than they did, use that as the basis of a tablet-experience OS (like how Windows Media Center was just an application atop Windows XP), and then later introduce compatibility with desktop apps (like how Apple can now do full-speed x86 emulation using special ARM extensions baked into their custom silicon). That said, the latter was only technically achievable in the 2020s, but seeing as Microsoft was the market leader well into the 2010s, they would have been in the same position as Apple is in today.

  So to summarize my long-winded comment, Windows carries a lot of weight. It is the result of successfully merging two very-real market segments into one product (business users and consumer users), then MSFT dropped the ball by chasing the Next Big Thing and adding more diametrically-opposed objectives to an over-burdened OS, with nary a plan for how to eventually relieve it. Had they instead did a separate OS for tablet and mobile (rip Windows Phone), they could have merged that one into the XP-based kernel and got the refined best-of-both-worlds.

  Instead, they now have the worst of both. The Windows 11 desktop experience sucks, with bad icons, near-invisible text boxes, confusion where there wasn’t any, and all while pushing consumers towards web browser-based apps. And to make it sting harder, because they’ve been feeding this mess to their corporate customers, those customers now demand that everything be kept the same (“better the enemy that you know”) which prevents Microsoft from making XP-level wholesale improvements.

  They’re stuck, they know it, and they can’t really fix it unless great leadership shows up to take command of the ship. But similar to Amazon (which makes most of its revenue through AWS, not selling/shipping products), Microsoft makes the majority of its revenue in two segments: Azure cloud and Office 365. It’s hard to revamp Windows when it’s now playing third-fiddle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The absolute first thing is to establish the jurisdiction of this scenario. The answer will be vastly different if the jurisdiction is California/USA than if the jurisdiction were South Susan. No shade against South Sudan, but we are talking about criminal and civil law, so the details might be very different.

  But supposing this is a jurisdiction that follows in the Anglo-American common law (such as California, and I’ll proceed using California as the setting), then we can make some generally-true statement, some of which confirm what you’re already written:

  1. Criminal law exists to punish bad acts committed against society at-large
  2. Criminal law can only punish the persons or entities which have committed an act or omission that is proscribed in law, and only those persons or entities within the territory
  3. Dead people or dissolved corporations are beyond the reach of criminal law
  4. The notion that the next-of-kin will “inherit” the criminal liability was abolished long ago; see US Constitution “Bill of Attainder” prohibition, and equivalent in other jurisdiction like the UK or Australia
  5. Anyone that is still alive and collaborated to aid or supply the dead assailant can be pursued using criminal law
  6. In parallel to the criminal law system, civil lawsuits can be filed against the remaining property of the dead assailant. This is known as the “estate” of that person, and the lawsuit would be captioned as "XYZ v the Estate of [dead assailant]"
  7. A civil lawsuit can only win as much property as the respondent (ie person being sued) has, or any insurance policy they had which might apply, or any debt which was owed to the respondent at the time of their death.
  8. Mass murder commonly result in civil lawsuits that do not obtain anywhere near the full amount to compensate for the victims’ families’ loss.
  9. As a result, the target of civil lawsuits can be expanded to include adjacent parties, such as the manufacturer of the weapon or materials used, under a claim of product liability or something similar. This is not a guaranteed result, but they often have deeper pockets and good insurance policies.
  10. Civil lawsuits can only bring a monetary compensation. The law cannot revive the dead, cannot erase or amend history, and cannot salve the void left when victims are removed from this world unjustly.

  With all that said, the entire line of inquiry into the dead assailant’s will, or to their parent’s will, or anything like that, is entirely inapplicable. Children or parents do not inherit the sins of others, at least where criminal liability and civil lawsuits are concerned. Unless, of course, the parents participated somehow or willfully neglected a duty to report (very few of these exist in California, unless the victims were undoubtedly known to be children; see mandatory reporting laws). Thus, these other people cannot be sued nor criminally punished.

  The other commenter correctly said that what we call the “justice system” is more accurately called “harm reduction”. That’s not wrong, but I would post that the crimimal law system is about harm reduction (nb: I do not endorse the carcereal state of imprisoning huge segments of the population, disproportionately by race), whereas civil lawsuits are about equity and compensation.

  Both systems exist in tandem to prevent people from achieving a bloodier form of justice in the streets, like in days of yore: pistols at dawn, dueling in general, “bigger army” diplomacy, midnight slaughters of whole families, and other such unpleasantries. It’s definitely not perfect, and it needs reforms in many parts, but the structure serves a purpose and so far, it’s what we have and the best that we have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't my shit and urine stink while they're inside me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this would easily qualify for !brandnewsentence@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I vibe coded a driver to monitor and control the temperatures and fans in my Aoostar WTR PRO.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve even seen people vibe code ethernet drivers for freeBSD.

  Please make sure to read what considerations that developer had before undertaking that effort using an LLM: github.com/Aquantia/aqtion-freebsd/issues/32#issu…

  Specifically, they (the human) were kept in the loop for the entire process, which included referencing the working Linux driver to do a clean-room reimplementation. This already means they have some experience with software engineering to spot any issues in the specifications that the LLM might generate.

  Also, Aquantia (before the merger) already had a published FreeBSD driver but it hasn’t been updated. So this port wouldn’t have to start from zero, but would be a matter of addition support for new NICs that have been released since, but Aquatia hadn’t updated the driver.

  This is very much not an example of an Ethernet NIC driver being “vibe coded” from scratch, but a seasoned engineer porting Linux support over to FreeBSD, a kernel that already has a lot of support for easily adding new drivers in a fairly safe manner, and then undertaking a test plan to make sure the changes wouldn’t be abject slop. That’s someone using their tools with reasonable care. In the industry, this is called engineering.

  Admiration for what people can do with the right tools must always be put into the right context. Even with the finest tools, it’s likely that neither you nor I could build a cathedral.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes

  This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn’t bother writing out a CoC.

  it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to

  Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it’s hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.

  this guy might have just decided to make a project

  Starting any project – as in, inviting other people to join in – is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don’t think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what “open source” means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term “free speech” and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.

  Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.

  The second concerns “norms” that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work – until they don’t.

  Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie “political”) but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.

  So laying that foundation, I address your points.

  Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing.

  This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights (“we al have the choice to use it or not” and “anyone can write anything”) with open-source values (“for fun or seriously” and “doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful”). The statement of “open source means open” does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.

  To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that’s a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that “Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project” means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.

  How they were contributing is irrelevant

  This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that’s also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).

  We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

  I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted”. Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.

  To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Considering self hosting my own git repositories. What are some options?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don’t want the repos to be checked out, use “git clone -n” to not do that. It’ll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.

  You won’t have PR features nor a web UI though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Programmers are wizards then what are Computer Architects?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Castle builders

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can one use someone's previous argument against themselves in a different legal case?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Anglo-American common law, if a party has previously argued a position in one of their own cases, and later argues a different position in a subsequent case that they’ve a party to, then the doctrine of equitable estoppel would foreclose on certain claims from that party. As usual, the devil is in the details.

  Firstly, they must be a party to both the prior and prospective case. A motorist that is injured in a multi-vehicle pile-up cannot assert different facts when suing each of the participants in the crash. However, an advocacy group that files a petition on behalf of another is, by definition, not the party that is bringing suit. Nor is anyone that offers an amicus (ie “friend of the court”) brief that advises the court on how a case ought to be decided.

  Secondly, the exact things which are foreclosed will depend. The most common benefit available under equitable estoppel is the loss of a presumption of good faith. So if party A is a corporation and claimed in an earlier employer/employee case that their CEO’s crass, sex-pest behavior was a result of substance abuse (in an attempt at a medical defense or a defense about temporary inability to perceive the situation), then that assertion – irrespective of whether it actually won them that earlier lawsuit – could be used against them in a later case litigated by the shareholders. If the company is sued for the CEO not conveying accurate business info, the defense that their CEO acted in good faith is not going to carry water, if the events coincided in time.

  As you can see, the exact remedy that equitable estoppel provides isn’t exactly clear-cut in every instance. But the goal is to prevent the same litigant from abusing the judicial system. One cannot come into court on Monday claiming the sky is blue when it’s convenient for them, then claim on Wednesday that the sky is not blue when it’s inconvenient for them. Two-face assertions are not allowed.

  To be clear, these must be actual assertions. Sometimes a civil case can be won merely by the likely possibility that someone else is at fault, making it impossible to determine fault. And so no assertion may be needed as a defense. If a pedestrian is struck and injured by a hit-and-run motorist driving a red car, and five red cars are identified later, any of those motorists can correctly state that there were four other such cars in the area. Pointing out facts unfavorable to the plaintiff is exactly what the defense is supposed to do. But if a motorist actually says “I didn’t injure her”, then that’s an assertion. And judicial estoppel means they may not later claim, for some reason in a later case, that they did do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's going to happen to gas stations as cars electrify?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Predominantly in Texas, Buc-ees is nominally a chain of gasoline stations but they’re known for the stores attached to the station, selling all manner of kitsch but also fast food. Ok, they’re also known for having 100+ pumps at each location. But that’s important because it means they’ve always been located at the periphery of city boundaries, usually on the highways into or out of town.

  When the gasoline business dries up, Buc-ees still has other business interests to keep them going in the road travel market, and they have real estate along major corridors that could be redeveloped. One option is to invite businesses that occupy motorist’s time while parked charging their electric cars, like wayside attractions (besides Buc-ees itself, obviously). Another would be to entrench themselves: develop a hotel so that visiting business people always stop at the Buc-ees before leaving.

  So while neighborhood fuel stations would see a slow demise, Buc-ees can turn their fuel locations into new cash cows. This is why diversification is so important.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whole sections of the country that are zoned for suburban single family housing would not exist as they are today. Not because they’d be illegal or anything, but they’d be incredibly unpopular if most people didn’t own a car, which is needed to basically get to or from a suburban neighborhood.

  I understand the question to be something like: what happens if a majority of people are unwilling/unable to own a private automobile. And I think the immediate answer is that suburban neighborhoods cease to exist, at least at the current density levels. Either a neighborhood must densify so that transit options make sense, or they must aim to become rural living. This also means that things like suburban schools either turn into walkable urban schools, or into small one-room rural schools.

  I don’t actually think rural living will go away, because the fact is that the grand majority of people – USA and abroad – do not prefer rural living. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century trends are that people tend towards urban areas, where services and jobs exist. There will always be people that want to live in the hills on 20 acres, and therefore need an automobile. But that has never been the majority, so if a majority of people refuse owning an automobile, they will also mostly refuse rural and suburban living.

  There is no plausible situation where over 50% of people willing decide to: 1) not own a car, and 2) live in a suburb or rural area. This is from the fact that all other modes of transport into a suburb or rural area are either: 1) nonexistent (ie metro rail), or 2) ludicrously expensive (ie Lyft, or transit with 15% fairbox recovery) if the cost was borne by the people living there (as opposed to being subsidized heavily by other taxpayers… Ahem, America).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Earbugld question: Does anyone actually like to silicone tipped earbuds over the solid plastic ones?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I too have issues with silicone earbuds, and also with them falling out. Which is why I was over the moon when I discovered wireless clip-on earbuds. They meet my criteria of being convenient (because wireless) while also not falling off (because clip-on). The specific ones I bought (Anker Soundcore c30i) are not noise-cancelling, but I found that I can adjust their position up or down my ears to meet conditions. For example, I wear them high up when out in public, to hear wayward automobiles that might run me down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what is this⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m so confused on what the point of such a hash would be. If the time that an email was sent was so important, would existing DKIM timestamps also work? Is this basically the digital equivalent of including today’s newspaper in a ransom note?

  Not to say that DKIM as-used is perfect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I get my oscilloscope to read voltage correctly?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish you the best of luck in your automotive endeavors. But specific to that field, be advised that automobile power can have a lot of voltage spikes, most notably right after the starter motor shuts off after ignition. So if you’re not probing during this dynamic event, then your scope will likely still be useful.

  I will also note that a used benchtop scope can be had for about $200, often with good tactile controls and acceptable bandwidth and voltage capabilities. A cursory search on eBay shows a 2-channel 50 MHz Siglent SDS1052DL with 400 volt inputs. For general technician and hobbyist diagnostics work, that’s a good deal for an instrument that is one step above what a competent DMM can provide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I get my oscilloscope to read voltage correctly?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I read your question and was wondering how an oscilloscope could be giving such widely-differing values, with the widest being 0.4 volts against itself and nearly 0.8 volts against a separate instrument. Then it dawned upon me that this oscilloscope is a PC-attached scope with some unique operating limits. I say this having come from a background of using only benchtop digital scopes.

  The first limitation is that your scope has a very narrow input voltage range, with the manual listing it as +/- 5 volts but damage would only occur at +/- 35 volts. This is voltage measured at the input BNC connector, so it’s before any probe multiplication is accounted for. Whereas if we look at an inexpensive benchtop oscilloscope like the now-fairly-old Rigol DS1052E, it has an input voltage range of +/- 40 volts. The practical result is that to measure something like a laptop power supply, the Hantek must use attenuation probes, whereas the Rigol can measure that voltage directly.

  Attenuation probes are great for measuring wider voltage ranges, but they come at the cost of both precision and accuracy. The loss of precision comes from the fact that the resolution of the oscilloscope is unchanged, but the voltage range is wider. In concrete terms, both the Hantek and Rigol use an 8-bit ADC, meaning that the span of input voltages visible on the display are mapped to 256 discrete values. If the ADC is imprecise by 1 bit, then that will amount to the reading being off by a certain number of millivolts. But something like a 20:1 attenuation probe causes that millivolt error value to be multiplied by 20x. Whereas the Rigol doesn’t need attenuation probes, and thus doesn’t suffer this penalty.

  Furthermore, the Rigol has a neat trick: it uses a separate, more-precise internal attenuation circuit for voltages smaller than +/- 2 volts, and then uses its normal-precision input circuit for all other voltages up to +/- 40 volts. The ADC is unchanged in both modes, and the scope switches seamlessly between the two (though usually with an audible click), but this means that a 20x scope measuring a laptop charger would actually cause the Rigol to switch into its precision circuit, which means the Rigol might never pay the penalty that the Hantek might. Perhaps the Hantek has a similar feature, but it is not listed in the manual.

  As for accuracy loss due to attenuation probes, this is not affected by the amount of attenuation, but rather is a function of how accurate the attenuation is. When a probe is marked as 20:1, it could actually be 19:1 of 21:1 or anywhere around there, depending on the manufacturing tolerances. However, accuracy issues can be resolved through calibration, which you’ve done.

  Overall, it seems that you are operating at the very limits of what your Hantek scope can deliver, with its 8-bit ADC and limited input range. Yet your test calls for a voltage 4x higher, so some error is to be expected from the 20:1 probe. With the 10:1 probe, the error is a bit smaller, but now you’re outside the affirmative safe voltage range of the scope. Calibration can only fix accuracy issues, but I think your error is now predominantly due to loss of precision, which cannot be resolved after-the-fact.

  If your intended use is to measure signals in the range of a laptop charger and require faithful analog voltage measurements, I’m afraid that you may need to find a different instrument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is amperage more "obscure" than voltage (or watts)?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For an example of where constant current sources are used – and IMO, deeply necessary – we can look to the humble LED driver circuit. LEDs are fickle devices, on account of their very sharp voltage-current curve, which also changes with operating temperature and is not always consistent from the factory. As a practical matter, the current through an LED is what predominantly controls the brightness, so constant current sources will provide very steady illumination. If instead an LED were driven with a constant voltage source, it would need to be exceedingly stable, since even a few tens of millivolts off can destroy some LEDs through over-current and/or over-heating.

  For cheap appliances, some designs will use a simple resistor circuit to set the LED current, and this may be acceptable provided that the current is nowhere near overdriving the LED. Thing of small indicator LEDs that aren’t that bright anyway. Whereas for expensive industrial LED projectors, it would be foolish to not have an appropriately designed current source, among other protective features.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is amperage more "obscure" than voltage (or watts)?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a nutshell, voltage incompatibility is generally more damaging than current mismatch, typically in a frightening or energetic manner. Many Americans tourists find this out when they bring their 120v AC hairdryers to an overseas hotel with 230v AC power. If there is only room for one number to be emblazoned on an outlet or plug, it should be the rated voltage, first and foremost.

  For current protection, we’ve had thermal fuses since the 1890s, and thermo-magnetic circuit breakers since the 1940s. There are even more fancy transistor-based current protections available for industrial equipment that can shut off extremely fast. In a sense, protection against over-current has basically been solved, in the scenarios where there’s enough of a risk of humans or property.

  Whereas voltage mix-ups still happen, although consumer electronics are now moving to automatic voltage detection (eg an 18v electric drill battery charger refuses to charge a 12v battery) and through actively negotiated power parameters (eg USB PD). And even without human error, under- and over voltage transients still happen in residential and commercial environments, leading to either instant damage or long-term product degradation (eg domestic refrigerator motor drive circuits).

  It should be noted that a current starvation scenario, such as when an ebike is current-limited per regulations, does not generally cause a spike in voltage. Whereas in a voltage starvation situation, resistive loads will indeed try to draw more current in order to compensate. Hence why current protection is almost always built-in and not left to chance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Element/Matrix Official Docker Install Method?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Firstly, I wish you the best of luck in your community’s journey away from Discord. This may be a good time to assess what your community needs from a new platform, since Discord targeted various use-cases that no single replacement platform can hope to replace in full. Instead, by identifying exactly what your group needs and doesn’t need, that will steer you in the right direction.

  As for Element, bear in mind that their community and paid versions do not exactly target a hobbyist self-hosting clientele. Instead, Element is apparently geared more for enterprise on-premises deployment (like Slack, Atlassian JIRA, Asterisk PBX) and that’s probably why the community version is also based on Kubernetes. This doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but their assumptions about deployments are that you have an on-premises cloud.

  Fortunately, there are other Matrix homeservers available, including one written in Rust that has both bare metal and Docker deployment instructions. Note that I’m not endorsing this implementation, but only know of it through this FOSDEM talk describing how they dealt with malicious actors.

  As an aside, I have briefly considered Matrix before as a group communications platform, but was put off by their poor E2EE decisions, for both the main client implementation and in the protocol itself. Odd as it sounds, poor encryption is worse than no encryption, because of the false assurance it gives. If I did use Matrix, I would not enable E2EE because it doesn’t offer me many privacy guarantees, compared to say, Signal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Obligatory mention: !keming@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why is the beginning on the left and the end on the right?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Approximately 90% of people are right-handed. In European writing systems that use quills and pens, left-to-right makes more sense so that you can hold the pen in your right hand and drag it rightward, not into the ink you just laid down.

  In East Asia, before writing on paper was a thing, they wrote using inscribed bone, but then eventually moved to vertical wood boards, bound together by string. Each character on the board would be ready from top-to-bottom, and then move to the next board. The most logical choice for a right handed person is to stack the wood pile on their left, and use their right hand to draw the next board to meet their gaze, then set it down on their right. For this reason, the historical writing system common to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for centuries was read right-to-left. But the native Korean script is left-to-right, as is the modern Vietnamese script. And Chinese and Japanese in the 20th Century switched to left-to-right. And yet, Japanese books are still ordered “backwards” so that the title page is what Westerners would say is the back of the book, and manga panels are read from the right side toward the left.

  It all boils down to right handedness, but it depends on whether your hand is moving, or the page is moving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Admittedly, I haven’t finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both.

  And what I learned – esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon – is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.

  My opinion is that mesh networking’s most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off cell towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic’s flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn’t already receive the initial message.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic – I’m changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now – but this is quite a neat thing you’ve done here.

  As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could have SSH to securely access your remote machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What powers does the Secret Service have and exhibit to protect the POTUS?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve only heard bits and pieces of this from friends and strangers through some specific events so far

  Can you tell us what bits you’ve heard, so that we don’t have to give redundant answers?