MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, whenever I tell the kids “WiFi is down” what that really means is “Comcast has killed our link, again.”
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 2 weeks ago:
Low power requirements, battery + solar power source… this isn’t science fiction anymore.
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 2 weeks ago:
WiFi goes down and people sometimes NEED to communicate instead of streaming Netflix.
This is just an alternate channel, if Eheran doesn’t have the imagination to understand how low bandwidth can still be extremely valuable, as compared to, say, screaming at the top of your lungs to attempt to be heard 5 miles away, then… I’m not really interested in what they think.
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 2 weeks ago:
If I wanted to transmit, for example, temperature and humidity from a sensor once every 5 minutes, would the network be willing to carry my signals?
- Comment on Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations 2 weeks ago:
The Netherlands are 20 years ahead of the US in this respect: en.wikipedia.org/…/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
to the point where non-programmers can solve their problems
I had a period of about 10 years where I bounced from company to company fixing non-programmers’ code so that it could actually be used in commercial products that brought in revenue.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
legit concern I hear is its environmental impact.
Commuting my fat ass to a climate controlled office, out to lunch, back home, parking spaces, highway lane miles, fuel, periodic vehicle replacements… that all has environmental impacts too, if I can do my job in half the time, that’s a big win for the environment.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
I have been doing this stuff for over 40 years, the tools get faster and the ecosystems get more complex.
What would be really nice is a return to simplicity, using the fast tools to make simple stuff fast-squared, but nobody seems to want that.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
If you ask something longer than 20 lines, there’s a very high probability that it won’t work on the 15th round of corrections.
Try Claude by Anthropic. I noticed Copilot and Google getting hung up much faster than Claude.
Also, I find that if you encourage a good architecture, like a formalized system of variables with Atomic / Mutexed access and getter/setter functions, that seems to give a project more legs than letting the AI work out fiddly access protection schemes one by one.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
I got one up around 500 lines before it started falling apart when trying to add new features. That was a mix of Rust and HTML, total source file size was around 14kB, with what I might call a “normal amount” of comments in the code.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
Once my business is in a more profitable place I’ll bring someone on to fix up the code
AKA: technical debt. I actually approve of this approach when you’re testing the market and don’t have any paying customers. Where it gets ugly is when customers start placing trust in your product, trust that might be costly if your code fails, and management doesn’t budget the resources to actually fix up the code. I was very glad to leave the place that was doing this…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
The problem is when people assume you can actually build an entire software/service architecture of any complexity just through vibe coding.
Welcome to CEO handling 101. It’s an art, a very soft skill, and not for the faint of heart. I worked for a mid sized (50 employee) company once where I’d “speak truth to power” in our weekly meeting, get shot down rather enthusiastically by the CEO during the meeting, then after I and the rest of R&D left his office, he’d go out to production and have them start implementing all the concepts of my pitch - as his own ideas, naturally.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
That’s a great tip: having it review the security of code that an earlier context generated.
I plan on having it write unit tests, or at least try to…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
You need to be able to read it to understand that it’s going a little off the rails.
At least 2/3 of the time I spend with AI coding is getting it to compile without errors - that’s more than a little off the rails, but it’s also much more helpful when you finally do get to a working example that you can look at, instead of beating your own head against the Stack Exchange archives hoping for inspiration, let it try for you.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
AI coding is actually a very powerful tool, almost like a light saber. Do you notice how many amputations and artificial limbs there are in that galaxy far far away?
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 2 weeks ago:
Because: for $20 per month to the AI company, you can output poor code much much faster.
- Comment on Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US 3 weeks ago:
For a more extreme example, look to the Principality of Monaco. Being so much smaller, it can be much more extreme.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 3 weeks ago:
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn’t. When they rug-pulled the “otherOS” feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no “Smart” TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content…)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they’re happy where they are.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 3 weeks ago:
I may have seen it, but it “felt wrong” from the start - never considered it anything of interest.
- Comment on Password manager by Amazon 3 weeks ago:
If you keep the book secure, it’s probably safer than any computer based record system - right up until someone untrustworthy gets their eyes on the book.
With a physical book, you can store it in a safe deposit box when you don’t need access, make partial copies, copies take (everyone, bad guys and good) significantly longer to make even with a photocopy process… most importantly, people intuitively understand the vulnerabilities of a physical book.
Now, the physical book won’t stop keyloggers…
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 3 weeks ago:
Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 3 weeks ago:
I imagine the draft for WWII was a little different…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Pet of the month from the 1980s… lost track of her in the 90s, pretty sure she looks different now.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Any time I have tried using my middle name as the name printed on my credit card, the banks 100% consistently refuse to do it.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Your trolls were lightweight. Trolls in my schools would have doubled, or tripled down on Willy - knowing that it bothered him.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Both of my grandfathers went I.O. initials only, including when they were drafted for WWII. One would use his first name about half the time, but only reveal what the middle initial stood for maybe twice in my lifetime. The other: I.O. all the way, to his grave nobody I know ever heard what those initials stood for.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Our IT intake asks “is there another name you prefer to be known by” - and I have gone by my middle name since I was 12, so I told them, and they cheerfully complied… on half the things in their system, the other half use my first name - things like the name under my picture during Teams calls. But, my e-mail address uses the middle name, so that’s nice.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Background checks are big into “A.K.A.” listings.
Joe, Joey, Joseph, Jar-Man…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Not always… I knew a girl once…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 4 weeks ago:
Can you use any of them on a credit card?