dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
Developer at Meta.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb
- Comment on Ancient 3 days ago:
It really do be like that. I work with some people who are nearly 15 years younger than me (I’m in my mid 30s and some newer employees have just graduated from university) so I feel this.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 5 days ago:
Thanks for the recommendation!
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 5 days ago:
Sandboxing does use some RAM, but it was a big win for security. One site can’t crash the entire browser or use a security hole to get access to data on other tabs. Still, the majority of the RAM is taken by the site itself. The processes do share some RAM - they’re not entirely isolated.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 5 days ago:
I’m not a game developer so I just used the first example I could think of.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 5 days ago:
Most regular players didn’t encounter these bugs though, as often they’re edge cases that don’t occur during regular gameplay. A lot of them were found by people intentionally looking for them.
I’d argue that games today are bugger than games in the past, just due to how complex they are now. Sure, they’re a different class of bug (and arbitrary code execution via buffer overflows isn’t really a thing any more thanks to ASLR and the NX bit), but I don’t think there’s fewer bugs at all.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 6 days ago:
In some cases, the RAM actually is in use by the site. That’s especially the case on sites with heavy client-side logic. In that case, it’s not Chrome’s (or Firefox’s) fault, it’s the website’s fault.
Chrome has a “Memory Saver” feature where it’ll unload tabs that are offscreen/hidden which helps quite a bit. Not sure if Firefox has something similar.
- Comment on My doctor's office now has ads when checking in online 6 days ago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re also using something like Google Analytics to track users.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 6 days ago:
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Apps like Chrome use available RAM if it’s available, but they should be releasing it for other apps to use when there’s high memory pressure.
It’s the same with disk caching. If you have a lot of free RAM, the OS will use all of it for caching files.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 6 days ago:
Games were impressive in this way too. Computers and consoles didn’t have much CPU power or memory, so they had to squeeze every little bit.
This was still happening even with 5th gen consoles. Crash Bandicoot couldn’t fit in the Playstation’s memory so they ended up overwriting system memory and memory allocated to features of Sony’s standard library they weren’t using.
These days, game development is more “boring” in that aspect. Systems are powerful and frameworks like Unreal Engine handle all the core stuff. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though - it lets the game developers focus on the game itself.
- Comment on Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose) 1 week ago:
I’m just joking - it was a reference to the famous Bill Gates quote (that he didn’t actually say) about RAM.
- Comment on Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose) 1 week ago:
480Mbps ought to be enough for anybody.
- Comment on Unsubscribe page that crashes when you try to unsubscribe 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, car mats.
- Comment on Unsubscribe page that crashes when you try to unsubscribe 2 weeks ago:
Trunk/boot mats. Those are mostly the same across brands.
- Comment on Unsubscribe page that crashes when you try to unsubscribe 2 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure this is against the CAN-SPAM act in the USA. If you can’t get it working, email legal@ and complain.
To be honest, Weathertech’s floor mats aren’t even that good. They’re okay, but I much prefer Tuxmat, which are a similar price but feel higher quality and usually have much better coverage. Lasfit is also good, if you want something a bit cheaper.
- Comment on It's not time for your point release yet. 3 weeks ago:
A few basic steps can keep Arch just as stable as anything else.
“stable” in this case means “doesn’t change often”. Is that actually doable with Arch?
- Comment on It's not time for your point release yet. 3 weeks ago:
Debian testing is usually good enough. Packages have to be in unstable for ~10 days with no major bugs to migrate to testing.
Of course, you can run unstable if you really want to live on the edge.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
business class data plan that actually allows hosting
You can get a VPS for $30/year. Self hosting doesn’t mean it has to be at your house. In some cases, using d VPS ends up cheaper than just the electricity cost for hosting at home, let alone hardware costs, internet costs, etc.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
Spam protection is hard given SMTP was never designed with it in mind.
I also self-host my email, but I use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with all that stuff. My server sends outbound emails to a company that’s got that all figured out. Maybe that’s not “true” self hosting, but it’s really no different to people that self-host but put Cloudflare in front of their server.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
I think the most feasible solution is municipal internet, where the city owns the fiber lines and essentially runs it like a non profit. Good cities that do this don’t see it as a profit center; they see it as providing a service to their residents.
Palo Alto California is doing this. They’re modernizing their electricity grid, so they’re also running fiber at the same time as running the new electrical lines. Electricity in Palo Alto is run by the city, and as a result, electricity there is less than 1/3 of the price of electricity with PG&E, the investor-owned utility company that supplies most of Northern California.
More community run mesh networks
That’s kinda what settlement-free peering at an IX (internet exchange) is. Multiple networks agree to connect to each other for free. Of course, the networks are usually large ones, so that kinda goes against your other points.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been self hosting my email for a long time, but I use an outbound SMTP relay so I don’t have to deal with IP reputation. The more interesting part to self-host is the receiving part, not the sending part.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
How does Docker reduce security?
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
Just some parts of it. github.com/bluesky-social/pds
- Comment on Based on a true story 5 weeks ago:
But for there to be used cars, there needs to be new cars… How do the people that buy new cars pay for them?
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 month ago:
Nobody is doing anything malicious.
How do you know that though? VPNs are very commonly used to send spam, perform ransomware attacks, DDoS attacks, etc.
What’s probably happening is they’re worried too many requests are coming from one ip address and you might be scraping their precious data to train your LLM.
This is definitely also a possibility.
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 month ago:
The issue with a VPN is that it’s likely that other people using the same exit node are doing something malicious. A site like reddit or a bank or whatever sees a lot of attacks coming from one IP (or a range of IPs) and mark it as malicious.
You’d likely do the same thing with your own site - something like Denyhosts or Crowdsec that blocks people trying to brute force a password will end up blocking anyone else using that same VPN exit IP.
- Comment on Definitely didn't waste half an hour making this 1 month ago:
I used number 5 throughout high school and university and they always served me well. Sometimes I thought about trying the fancier ones with gel grips, but old reliable BIC was always there for me. I trusted the BIC.
- Comment on Win win 1 month ago:
Yeah, CTP. I never drove or owned a car in Australia so I’m glad I got it right haha. I lived in Melbourne and used public transport all my life. I didn’t learn to drive until I moved to the USA.
- Comment on Win win 1 month ago:
being for profit companies
I think the approach in Australia is a bit better - bodily injury coverage is provided by the state and is part of the registration fee for the car. It only covers injuries to people, and does not cover repairing cars (you need to get separate insurance from an insurer for that) but it’s a good first step I guess. It means that as long as your car is registered, medical costs for both you and anyone you hit are covered.
- Comment on Nicole in my lemmy DMs be like 1 month ago:
A lot of Lemmy users are getting spam messages supposedly from someone named “Nicole”, from various Lemmy accounts.
- Comment on Is 33 cents a small amount of money? 1 month ago:
I’ve heard it in Australia too, which has the same tax bracket system as the USA. I think the fact that this stuff isn’t taught in school is a major issue.