I don't think such usage is malicious, so much as ignorant - it's sometimes hard to know that a behavior _isn't_ part of the API, especially if the API is poorly documented to begin with.
I maintain a number of such poorly-documented systems (you could, loosely, call them "APIs") for internal customers. We've had a number of scenarios where we've found a bug, flagged it as a breaking change (which it is), said "there's _no way_ anybody's depending on that behavior", only to have one or two teams reach out and say yes, they are in fact depending on that behavior.
For that reason, we end up shipping many of those types of changes ship with a "bug flag". The default is to use the correct behavior; the flag changes the behavior to remain buggy, to keep the internal teams happy. It's then up to us to drive the users to change their ways, which.. doesn't always happen efficiently, let's say.
This strategy was actually used during World War II, to ensure pilots could come home safely. Weather forecasting not being what it is today, meteorologists determined what conditions would result in the _most_ lives being lost, then together with mission commanders "designed" missions to simply not meet those conditions.
Obviously this is a total aside, but can anyone explain what’s going on with that? Is it just explaining terrain mapping in an intentionally obtuse way, or is it some kind of parody? It’s really frustrated me because lots of people like to trot it out like a meme in the same way it was here.
It's a joke (meme, copypasta) but it's also accurate.
As I understood: Missile uses gyros and accelerometers to figure out how far it flew already towards the target. This is not 100% accurate.
So it additionally uses terrain mapping to figure out how it looks down there. Compare ground (am I flying above a slope?) to its internal maps and it can figure out where it is and adjust path if off course.
So it figured out the position by knowing that the position is most likely not the position where it's supposed to be.
> Is it just explaining terrain mapping in an intentionally obtuse way
AFAIK, yes, that's what it actually was (or the basic sentiment actually came from). It was some part of training video in the US army/navy (don't know exactly), but the actual story or origin remains a bit unclear. At least my search within the web did not yield any (assumingly) valid source. I think at some point it just got to "it is what it is now" because it is a very, very complicated way to explain this stuff.
I also "boycott" many such systems, and I completely empathize with the author on not really being sure why I'm doing it. It's, sadly, more for myself than it is in belief that anything will change, because many of these systems are ingrained, and it's not reasonable to expect that the others around me are also going to give them up.
Some examples:
I haven't ordered anything on Amazon since 2014. I hope the rationale is pretty obvious. I lean heavily into brick-and-mortar and especially local stores, where possible (I'm blessed with many local book and music stores). I do use eBay, and occasionally (maybe 1 in 10 purchases) I find out that the seller is actually just doing arbitrage from Amazon - they buy a $10 item on Amazon for $5, and have Amazon ship it to me using the "gift" feature. $5 profit for them; lots of bad feels for me.
I don't subscribe to any of the streaming platforms. I believe that I should have a tangible video that can't be clawed back, so that means buying a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays. Blu-rays, I know, are a tower of cards, since my ability to play them back indefinitely relies on leaked keys. If I want to watch a "Netflix exclusive", like Stranger Things, it means I'm organizing a watch party with friends who have subscriptions, where I'll provide food and beverages to at least attempt to offset that I'm benefiting from a streaming platform.
I listen to a local college radio station, instead of Spotify. I love that there are human DJs curating the playlists. They're creating community (the station actively engages the community), and since they're mostly college students, they're learning a valuable skill for their futures as well. Since laws around public radio prevent them from selling advertisements, I donate to the station in excess of what I'd pay for Spotify, since I value it. For buying music, my preference order is Bandcamp (DRM-free FLAC; the artists actually get a decent cut on the sale), followed by physical CDs (see the tangibility comment, above).
I run my own e-mail - both inbound and outbound. This is because I am stubborn, and have done it for twenty years now. I know Gmail and Outlook are on the receiving end of 90% of the e-mails I send, so they have a copy of most every message. The maintenance makes it a Pyrrhic victory.
I abstain from social media entirely. Hacker News comments are about as "social" as I get in the public sphere these days, as they capture the spirit of what I loved about the Usenet/forum days. I do participate in some professional Slack networks. Much as all of those networks would prefer _not_ to be on Slack, it'd be too hard to up and move the communities.
I could go on, but the gist is that I know these decisions are helping me, more or less exclusively - they don't even register in the overall trend.
> However, listing an item on eBay and then purchasing the item from another retailer or marketplace that ships directly to your customer is not allowed on eBay.
* A Hauppage WinTV HVR-950 tuner, connected to a Kubernetes cluster in the basement.
* NextPVR, scheduled on the appropriate node in the cluster (yes, it's non-redundant, even though I have three nodes). This handles DVR scheduling, and transcoding should I want to watch TV off-network.
* Kodi Media Center, running on a PC in the living room, and a Raspberry Pi 3A in the kitchen. Both pass through the full MPEG-2 stream. I additionally have an XSPF playlist link on my laptop and phone that open VLC to the transcoding-capable playback URLs for NextPVR.
* FreeNAS with a _significant_ amount of buffer available (at least for my one-hour-daily recording schedule), backing the DVR capability over NFS.
I'd argue this setup is actually _better_ than what I'd be able to do with a simple VCR/DVR. It's like having a robotic tape library, but without the physical space required.
Is OTA better quality than streaming services? Several years ago when I looked into this OTA was there highest quality, especially close to a big city.
Initial roll-out of OTA digital was amazing. I remember watching Tori Amos on PBS ("Austin City Limits"?) and I was almost crying for how beautiful it looked.
Fast forward and OTA started instead using their bandwidth to instead run 4 or 5 lower-bitrate channels. Bummer.
Not sure, but I've noticed that especially sports are way better on cable, compared to streaming. It doesn't seem like streaming can keep up in sports like soccer or hockey.
Even Tour de France just looks better on cable. It might just be me, but in terms of specs I should have the better TV between me and my dad, but the details just gets lost somehow in many sports. Only difference I can think of is cable vs. streaming.
You're making an even stronger case for poverty level minimalism than I think I ever could. The freedom you lose by having to maintain all of that... No thanks.
Oh the suffering of... running one program in the basement with the usb thing, and running a different program to view everything?
If it caused any difficulty at all to use different viewing programs on their different boxes, it would be trivial to cut down to one. If using NAS network storage caused problems, it would be trivial to remove it. And they're running kubernetes entirely for fun, making it the opposite of "have to maintain".
The part that actually makes this system tick is quite low maintenance.
To your point though, a simple box you plug in that "just works" would be nice for the rest of us. (Yeah, not an Apple TV though and nothing with a subscription.) Perhaps someone has already done something like that on GitHub.
I love the first issue and went to follow the site's RSS feed, but the four posts on the feed seem like spam? They each start with "Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis..."
Apologies, I use 11ty for most of my personal projects. It’s primarily a static blog generator, but I also use it for plain web pages. I forgot to delete the example blog post pages that came with the template. It didn’t even occur to me that someone might want to use the RSS feed!
By 2040, I suspect not much will have changed. In the US, most engines that required leaded gasoline rolled off the assembly lines in the 1960s, with the legal phase-out beginning in the 1970s, and finally ending in the 1990s.
As I have a classic car that I intend to keep running, I suspect eventually (e.g. not by 2040), buying fuel for it will be similar to buying pre-mixed fuel for small two-stroke engines, like leafblowers and chainsaws: go to Auto Zone and buy a few gallons of fuel. Auto Zone and friends won't be going anywhere - EVs still need wiper blades, brake pads, and other incidentals.
There were several years (late 2015 to mid 2017) where I did a much less extreme version of this. I stopped because, as many commenters have noted, I was (to quote this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097) "living off the economic surplus of [others]", and perhaps even taking opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I did.
Some anecdotes from that time:
I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).
I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.
I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.
And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.
Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).
I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money".
I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.
A few years ago, I had a three-day power outage. Unfortunately, at the time I worked for an e-commerce company, and Black Friday was in two weeks - not the time for me to be off work. (Mind you, this was 2021, and temporarily returning to the office was questionable at best at that time).
Most of my neighbors seemed to have up and left. The immediate neighborhood was quiet. I ventured out and saw what had happened: a large tree had come down, taking the power lines and the road with it. So I assumed the recovery process would be something like:
1. Remove the tree - one company on one schedule
2. Re-pave the road - another company on another schedule
3. Put the telephone pole back up - the phone company (the poles are owned by Verizon in my area)
4. Restore electrical cables - the power company
And I realized that this would not be a quick process.
I threw a 100-foot extension cord out my second floor window, and hooked it up to the 400-watt inverter in my car. (Yes, I know this is terrible for my engine. The silver lining was that somehow the folks at BMW made an engine that got up to operating temperature while idling.) The other end got plugged into the three monitors and laptop on my desk. I hotspotted my phone, and... just kept going at Black Friday readiness.
At one point, I got an interesting sideways glance from the CEO on a Zoom call, as if to say - "Why are you wearing a jacket and fingerless gloves indoors? Do we pay you enough?" I'm just glad the smell of not showering wasn't transmissible through Zoom.
Although I lost most of the contents of my fridge, and I ended up eating a lot of peanut-butter-and-jelly and protein bars, I did find some ways to keep it interesting during the day. I put my moka pot on the charcoal grill for coffee in the morning, and at one point I made a grilled-ish cheese on top of the engine block.
I used a handheld flashlight and an LED lantern for light after the sun went down. And I did treat myself to dinner with friends all three nights, charging up two UPSes at their homes while we went out, so that I could in turn run some other appliances without running the car. I seem to recall at one point watching the 10:00 news on TV thanks to those UPSes.
I would not have wanted this experience with a family like this person did, for sure, but I actually found it somewhat fun and interesting.
Could you tell me more about why the car shouldn't be used as a generator, why an engine might not warm up at idle, and how you kept jelly at room temperature? Thanks
> You can technically store opened jams and jellies at room temperature—but only in a cool, dark place and for about a week after opening, says Lee. Here's why: Jams and jellies have high sugar and acid levels, which protect against spoilage. But there are still certain microorganisms, called osmophiles, that are resistant to these conditions and can cause spoilage over time,
I grew up on a boat with no refrigeration, and we kept open jars of jams for several months. As long as you don't contaminate it (don't use the same knife for multiple condiments!), it's generally fine.
Same thing with jars of Mayonnaise - that one gets you strange looks.
Homemade jam, and some commercial jams will keep at room temperature for a looooong time. The main form of spoilage is mold growth, so try to keep the lid on as much as possible. Close the lid back before you spread the jam on your bread. It only takes a couple spores falling in to start it going moldy.
As I understand it the main thing is a lot of jams not having enough sugar in them anymore to prevent spoiling.
Jams and jellies existed before refrigeration and were used to preserve fruit year round. Root cellars kept things cool and you would just inspect your food before eating. Pickles is another thing. They used to be stored in a big barrel and people would reach in and grab a room temp pickle, safe and preserved. Today, they're always fridge after opening. It's safer, but it's a spectrum of risk, not binary.
I maintain a number of such poorly-documented systems (you could, loosely, call them "APIs") for internal customers. We've had a number of scenarios where we've found a bug, flagged it as a breaking change (which it is), said "there's _no way_ anybody's depending on that behavior", only to have one or two teams reach out and say yes, they are in fact depending on that behavior.
For that reason, we end up shipping many of those types of changes ship with a "bug flag". The default is to use the correct behavior; the flag changes the behavior to remain buggy, to keep the internal teams happy. It's then up to us to drive the users to change their ways, which.. doesn't always happen efficiently, let's say.