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Anyone else scan their random junk that has QR codes to see where it goes? I've found a fair number of stuff has codes that do nothing. Bought an extra garage door opener remote, qr code on it does nothing. Got some SwitchBot gear, qr codes do absolutely nothing.

QR codes, like other barcodes, store information. They never "do" anything.

Or are you saying the ones you found failed to checksum?


QR codes were invented for inventorying and labeling. Sending links to your phone is a side effect.

No. They were invented for whatever reason and then the ability to be a link a phone can scan became their primary function when everyone on Earth started carrying phones. Pokemon cards have QR codes - every kid scans them, do you think they think whatever you do? I had a startup in 2012 that extensively used QR codes to make a game kinda like Pokémon Go and various "Scan to Win" games (I had in 3 bars and were scanned 50k times in their 1st month in a town of 12k people) I over invested in the local area and I ultimately failed bc of a handful of Boomers that literally believed smartphones were a "fad" and convinced several organizations to spend their marketing budgets on literally the newspaper and convinced several organizations to back pedal their investment and cancel deals already made. This post and all these comments proves most people still have no idea what a QR code actually is - none should ever be made that can't be changed at will later 1st off - they should also all be AR codes - bc a smartphone just needs to look at them with the camera open and you can have any graphic you start want start playing as they look at it without needing to scan. They are the easiest link in reality to the digital world - nothing has come of them bc people severely lack imagination.

AR codes does not seem to be that seamless, but I am a Boomer by heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARToolKit


I work in hardware manufacturing. Our PCBs have QR codes both on the silkscreen and on stickers, but they don't encode websites. Rather, they are part numbers and serial/lot numbers for traceability and to assist manufacturing/inventory. Unless you know our (and our upstream manufacturers') specific patterns, they'll be irrelevant to you.

I used to in the mid 2000s but they kinda lost their magic for me at some point. They briefly regained the magic when I realized I could encode arbitrary text and make my own, but then I had so much trouble scanning the giant QR code I made (from printer paper) that the magic was gone again.

>qr code on it does nothing

It's like in the 2000s when you opened an .exe and nothing seemed to happen ... bad news.


They likely encode not URLs for the public, but internal identifiers that are only useful internally.

I have M2 Air with 8 and don't have problem either. Even runs WoW ok.


Snow Crash's Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities.


Also a Torment Nexus.


As an IT person, I wonder what it's like to work for a company like this. Where presumably IT stuff has a priority. Unlike the companies I've worked for where IT takes a backseat to everything until something goes wrong. Company I work had a huge new office built, with the plan it would be big enough for future growth, yet despite repeated attempts to reserve a larger space, our server room and infrastructure is actually smaller than our old building and has no room to grow.


As a former CF employee, I'd say it's a mixed bag.

There are plenty of resources , yet it's somehow never enough. You do tons of pretty amazing things with pretty amazing tools that also have notable shortcomings.

You're surround by smart people who do lots of great work, but you also end up in incident reviews where you find facepalm-y stuff. Sometimes you even find out it was a known corner case that was deemed too unlikely to prioritize.

The last incident for my team that I remember dealing with there ended up with my coworker and I realizing the staging environment we'd taken down hours earlier was actually the source of data for a production dashboard, so we'd lost some visibility and monitoring for a bit.

I've also worked at Facebook (pre-Meta days) and at Datadog, and I'd say it was about the same. Most things are done quite well, but so much stuff is happening that you still end up with occasional incidents that feel like they shouldn't have happened.


To me I really liked the fact that when you made your character in SWG (1 per server too), you are just a civilian. There's no light/dark side or rebellion/imperial choice to make, you're just a regular person in the galaxy. You are NOT the hero.


A bunch of the mech eng at my work have switched from 2 monitors to big tvs for doing their CAD stuff.


Reading on my 8gb M2 Air that I have not once ever felt is lacking.


Glad you’ve had a good experience, maybe we just got a bad computer. But I know what I saw ultimately and what it was was a brand new M3 machine running like crap.


Try installing Vitals.app open source app to see what's going on:

https://github.com/hmarr/vitals

Stats is another good one too:

https://github.com/exelban/stats


Why not just use Activity Monitor


Vitals.app has a great feature that you don't see in Activity Monitor.


…what is it?


Keeps the CPU percentage history of every process running or recently exited.


Honestly combed it over and it didn’t tell us anything other than high mem utilization/pressure. I’m not sure what the deal is but I’ve found AM on Mac’s almost…deceptive? It feels like I’m not getting the full story sometimes. We use one at my office for live streams and the math on resources often does not check out. Our head of engineering agrees that his experience with the silicon chips has been that they do not like to let go of tasks/processes and can be a little opaque about what it is doing in the background.

I know it sounds a lot like vibes, because it kind of is, but it’s just what we’ve seen.


Why are the tools you linked better though, they mostly use the same APIs


I think you’re mixing me up with sys. I didn’t link anything


Why is there always a comment on everything from somebody who has to proclaim "its not new"?


That's not new. It's been occurring on HN since 2011 at least.


Makes me think of an episode of Better off Ted, when the company sends out a memo that employees must NOW use offensive language (instead of NOT).


It's like Youtube adding a section of videos you've already watched and have nothing to do with your search, in search results.


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