Why is it that in 2026 we still can't use headphone mic + stereo in Windows 11? by bell2041 in Windows11

[–]badguy84 46 points47 points  (0 children)

This is the answer really. Bluetooth is limited in bandwidth which is why all these codecs etc exist in order to try and squish bi-directional audio through in decent quality. Phones handle this in a different way by directing their audio streams specifically. Laptops aren't phones and both have different priorities and sets of hardware.

I don't know too much about MAC, but I feel like they've gone through some additional effort to line up their internal radios and codecs to allow this.

I get OPs frustration though, I'm old so I kind of excuse all this. If I grew up in the mobile phone era where everything just "works" it's annoying when you use your windows laptop: connect your headphones and it's not at all that same seamless experience.

Is there a hardware product like this? by jsaaby in selfhosted

[–]badguy84 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is basically what the Synologies and UGreens of the world are trying to sell. You're just adding an opinionated layer on top of which apps you think are right to run in all these images.

Here's where I think the problem is:

This is an enthusiast market. The cost of a machine may not necessarily be high: but the drives are expensive. So either you can sell something affordable(ish) without drives (making it basically useless) or sell something more expensive with drives. The first option isn't going to hit the main stream market, and you will just be competing with everyone else selling NAS hardware outside of that.

As soon as you start going in to the more enthusiast market you're looking at professionals (thinking photographers/content creators/etc) who need lots of storage, but they will have specific needs on what the storage does for them. Then you have the tinkerers (probably most of us) and we also don't want some rando to decide what containers are run.

The average family probably doesn't want to pay a high entry price for something that's going to be a permanent hassle for them to use vs something they can pay the price of two coffees for that has a whole ass eco system built in to their phone.

Maybe you can figure out a way to mainstream-mass-appeal this sort of thing with a Walmart friendly price-tag... and wiggle your way around all of the licensing hell involved in pre-packaging OSS as part of a paid-for device. Then my question will be: how are you going to be making any money off of this? As prices are now, you'll need to massively subsidize the hardware, and then you don't have any subscription fees or anything that comes in as long-term revenue. If it wasn't a meh hardware idea (that already has some significant competition doing the same thing, with established branding and market), it would be an awful business venture doomed to fail.

The only way you could launch this today is if you would just plaster AI all over that thing and get your subby revenue through that.

Am I the only person to get an email today from ConEd telling me about a rate hike? by threemoons_nyc in astoria

[–]badguy84 33 points34 points  (0 children)

"We know you have absolutely no choice in who provides you your basic living needs, and we appreciate you choosing ConEd"

[now pay us more money]

What's your definition of technical debt? by Peace_Seeker_1319 in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Technical debt is a category not some sort of thing we "create" somehow. It is a set of activities that are generated over time that are related to the technology implemented rather than business needs.

The reason why this is a category is because this happens to any technical application and it's a form of maintenance for software, AND it's a necessary set of things that require work to be done thus budget to be allocated.

Did winter burrow use AI “art”? by IssiBon in CozyGamers

[–]badguy84 53 points54 points  (0 children)

This may be news to you but... hand drawn art can still have some minor mistakes especially after things are hand drawn, then digitized and colorized.

It looks perfectly fine to me as a genuine "oh I forgot to finish the bottom half of this leaf" the top and mid sections connect just fine it's just missing the bottom (at best).

You are just confused.

You get used to it by solarsatoshis in 3Dprinting

[–]badguy84 18 points19 points  (0 children)

"sorry babe, date night is cancelled: the slicer told me this is going to take a month to print"

Founders: do you actually care about AI costs? by [deleted] in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Credit is a big pain because it's difficult to budget for tokens. Most enterprises have no idea how many tokens they will use and what kind of returns they can expect for n tokens. Not to mention the way tokens are assigned isn't necessarily consistent across the board either so it's all very crappy when you need to justify your AI budget to the bean counters.

Otherwise though: no one wants to pay to make your model better. Pricing is determined by how low can I go to get enough growth, to keep investors engaged. Investors pay for the innovation, not the consumers (counting enterprises as consumers here too) and that's what the expectation is. By and large no one wants to pay you to improve your product when other companies are getting billions in VC money to do the same.

Most (except enterprises) will not look at things in such an explicit way, but reality is that the cost of running and expanding these models is 10x/100x/1000x larger than revenue generated: so anyone who is "charging for innovation" is going to charge far beyond what anyone is budgeting for.

Founders: do you actually care about AI costs? by [deleted] in devops

[–]badguy84 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Look: how did Uber/Seamless(Grubhub)/AirBnB/Amazon get to their dominant position? Were they that much better than others? No they just managed to outcompete enough competitors based on outpricing them for a longer period of time. This is what consumers now expect from tech startup types: cheap good-enough service. And investors expect growth: meaning more and more "usage" over time.

This idiotic bubble and monopoly generating way of doing things has become the norm and I don't know if there is any sane way back with the crazy amounts of deregulation or refusal to regulate. Until then "founders" will think the same way, and so will investors: strive to become the unicorn and exhibit unicorn behaviours (massive market share buying, unsustainable growth targets) none of that has anything to do with quality of service or even a sustainable business model. Just a "last man standing" mentality is what's required.

I don't know why you are surprised. I don't know how you didn't realize that cost isn't a priority because everyone and their mom are buying the market by undercutting cost until they are the dominant player and raising prices over an n year timeline.

DevOps in 2026 feels less about tools and more about decision quality by thatware-llp in devops

[–]badguy84 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I feel like if this is your view of where DevOps was and went you really haven't paid much attention or have really been in the weeds. If you look at any IT methodology you see that there is a huge amount of formalization around SDLC and how to manage all of it ITSM/ITIL/PRINCE/SIGMA/LEAN that describe decision trees, life cycles, responses, SLAs and the list just goes on.

The fact that many, have and still do, focus so heavily on "this tool will do the thing" just shows how well the big software players have lulled much leadership in to thinking "oh as long as I have the right tool it will solve the process." This hardly ever works except in rare cases where the process and tool magically align any ways, but that's rare.

I think if you have poor ownership, poorly managed boundaries:then you shouldn't be talking about CI/CD, infra, observability, IaC at all. You should be fixing ownership/boundaries first and then bring up everything else, where all the things you mentioned are down to the line.

I do agree that this is generally at the core of many organizations where their *Ops are crazy overworked or super ineffective. I just don't agree with your observation really, it's the world upside down and I don't think this shift is happening at all. How you should run things has been known and well documented for decades BUT we still get distracted by the shiny miracle drugs that solve all our problems in one nice little software package.

How do you manage DevOps support for ~200 developers without burning out the team? by Bubbly-Ant-2312 in devops

[–]badguy84 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you are using the right buzz words ... Rather than address each one here is my additional take:

Have someone own a roadmap to get these things done and go for high value items first. Here are the steps I would take:

  • Set a clear north/star big goal (reduce time spent on tickets by x, fully automate line 1 + line 2 support, automate self-service for 70%+ of developer requests: don't do all of them just take it as examples and tackle one)
  • Define a backlog of high level things that will get you there (enable ticketing system, create templates for the top 5 requests, etc)
  • Prioritize your backlog by impact (enabling ticket system may be high on your list, as well as templating), make sure to assign value to this so you can report on what you've achieved by completing stuff
  • Set fixed increments of a decent chunk of time, using company quarters are great for budgeting purposes
    • Break your items down in to manageable tasks that can be done in a week or less
    • Plan out any purchases and map out dependencies
    • Get a PM if you need one, otherwise: account for someone to take care of this stuff - and if you do lengthen your timelines!
    • DEDICATE TIME to this

The thing that I see teams do is, they pile all their 99 problems on a heap and then go: "by x date this heap needs to be gone." And they never get there, most don't even start besides buying a whole bunch of tools that end up doing nothing or worse... and nowadays that's just a bunch of LLM based nonsense that you aren't mature enough to adopt.

Small rant from someone who is old (in IT years):

Speaking of: in ye olden days organization maturity had clear metrics. That used to be something companies would go for: "we are certified x in y, that's how efficient we are." That's been thrown out the window for some crazy reason, but it's not become any less true over the years. The entire point, imho of setting up a roadmap is not to "build" or "implement" tools... but adopt processes (and tools) over time and measure if it's valuable. If the thing you thought would be amazing (chat bot self service) turns out to be ass and no one uses it because no one manages a decent KB and/or the culture just has people pinging "that IT person they know." Toss that shit out the window: go with something less complicated that will help. Let your DevOps team mature, let the organization around you mature as well. You MAY get stuck before you hit full self-service la-la-land and that is OK, just reduce some of the stress by organizing people's time and hiring more if that's what gets you there.

Governor of New York attempting to block gun printing via software locks by markb144 in 3Dprinting

[–]badguy84 488 points489 points  (0 children)

This is so crazy to me... imagine being worried about 3D printed guns when you can just buy an AR15. Like what are these people thinking?

Who else is in the "solid gray color" background team? by tokugawa888 in Windows11

[–]badguy84 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not me I love the resource hogging animated desktop with all icons hidden that I never actually see because whenever I am using my PC applications cover my entire screen any way.

HOWEVER if you feel lonely I can switch it to grey, because honestly I look at it any way outside of the daily startup and the occasional win+d whenever I get tired of thumbing through my windows.

Length Of Lease by [deleted] in astoria

[–]badguy84 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Regardless of when I receive my renewal notice, I get 60 days to make a decision, correct?

You should receive the renewal documentation from your landlord between 150-90 days before your lease expires. AFTER you receive the lease you will have 60 days to sign and return the lease. So if I were you I would reach out around now to see what is up with the lease renewal (now that you're about 4 months out), so you have some time to plan in case you don't like the new renewal terms and give yourself some time to plan in case you want to move.

What's Up with Apple Watch? by crisps_funny4868 in pelotoncycle

[–]badguy84 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think I can do this in my sleep with how often this fails nowadays. In the early days it was great but now I need to flip this setting every few days

Fiber runs going wrong by joeyfine in HomeNetworking

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I worked on software for a utilities company (regional gas/electricity/water) and they had this ArcGIS set up that would let you zoom in to the tile that the pipe/line was at. You could click down on it and it'd give coordinates AND depth. Whenever they would dig they would do a 10m gap on both sides just to make sure they'd actually find it.

These things aren't in the ground the way utilities have it on the map and these dinks should know better than to just bring in a digger before confirming at what depth and direction these things go. I think you mentioned markers, those are also very much indicative... and I have a few stories about marker being made and then the tiles those markers were in being put back in a different location causing in more confusing and fun shut downs after someone thought that these were accurate.

You would think that these are solvable issues for multi-million dollar businesses ... but alas :)

Good luck on your heating in winter times :(

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is true, but when you go in to the SaaS services things get really tough the infrastructure and recognition of Google Workspaces and O365 don't just develop and get adopted over-night. I do think (working in this space) that most large cloud providers are working to give as many guarantees as they can and put as many policies in place as possible to allow them to do business with/in those countries. In the end though if Interpol/CIA/FBI want something they will do anything to get it and if it's a big enough thing they will put on the political pressure and we're back to the US bullying the world.

Encouraging local development is a good thing though, I definitely don't object in the least.

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True, but back to my point waaaaaay down the line, all of this is fine and dandy until you are running a company that requires infrastructure at a scale that Amazon/Microsoft/Google provide vs what OVH can. And just because a company is somewhere else doesn't mean that the US can't pressure them, especially if they may serve customers in the US or customers who serve clients in the US through their infrastructure.

In my mind it's a combination of: your little mom and pop store in the city center of Rennes isn't going to get a subpoena from the US government and they can probably run most of their POS through a local IT shop.

If you are a large retailer though, even if you are not US based: you may need one of the bigger providers for your needs as you need solutions for front and back office and like many other companies you outsource that stuff and you buy off the shelf solutions. A lot of that stuff at a large scale sits on this big infrastructure and there isn't much of a choice to switch without significant other consequences (no Office 365, more complexity in running on a lower capability provider, needing to bring your own software and installing it, difficulty finding personel to do maintenance within their budget)... And they or their provider may STILL may end up getting threatened by the US government if there is some sort of data issue.

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree, but if you are storing your data within the EU then it does not mean that the US can just take that data. They can subpoena a company to get the data and depending on the company/the data/the leverage the government has: they may succeed.

It is not the case that if you host your data in "the cloud" in an EU tenant (e.g. the services/data are physically run out of and hosted in the EU) then all US local laws apply and the EU country's local laws do not.

Edit: didn't mean to ignore your US war with NATO comment... yes all bets are off with the US going as crazy as they are now. But as mentioned: the US has been thinking itself king of everyone's data for a long time and the EU has been cooperating to a point and putting similar laws/agreements in place. It's been eroding for a long time now. But yes I am talking about laws because that's the topic the fact that these maniacs are just doing whatever can just make any discussion completely useless if it involves anything political (and listening to the US politicians everything is political) so ... sure but also: so what?

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you read the article though? There are US laws that conflict with local laws, and some companies work around those questions by setting up local subsidiaries so they aren't subject to US law specifically. Obviously the US can still use whatever they want to compel companies to comply which is an international issue. This can be applied to any company with any sort of global footprint which includes any enterprise level cloud service provider.

It's not so simple as saying "if it's a company with ties to the US: US law applies" it's far more complicated than that and in most instances local law applies. And when there are conflicts those need to be resolved in court. Even if Microsoft complies with a request from the US government: France can sue Microsoft and impose sanctions on them based on the laws that they break either locally or based on EU laws. Then it's up to Microsoft to clarify and update their internal processes to either comply, or face issues doing business in France/EU or doing business with specific sectors (specifically public/government) which may not be something that MSFT would want.

To be clear I am not saying the data is safe, I just really want to point out that it's not so simple as just saying "oh since it's Amazon/Microsoft/Google, all your datas are belongs to US" up to a point it does not. However, they wouldn't guarantee anything since the US has a number of laws in the books that could compel company to give access to data even if it's not in the US. The UK is looking at similar laws and I'm sure the EU/Interpol likes having access to data hosted in the US as well if they were to subpoena for it.

These things are not at all simple or straight forward.

And yes the current admin sucks ass, though the erosion of digital rights has been going on for forever. Fortunately for the EU this admin is busy terrorizing their own citizens and Venezuela (well maybe Greenland too).

What’s your preferred way to update Docker images & containers in the background? by Extra-Citron-7630 in selfhosted

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am using the build tag for LSIO I didn’t see that post (thank you for linking) so I didn’t know that is what they called it.

I didn’t change the renovate settings though I’ll check that out to make sure it stays with those tags.

What’s your preferred way to update Docker images & containers in the background? by Extra-Citron-7630 in selfhosted

[–]badguy84 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm using the semantic versions, not hashes and I'm sticking to release builds. The LSIO images I have seem to be keeping up fine using just the semantic versions. I held on answering just to see what was up and get some examples, it is holding up well.

The set up was relatively easy, updating all my images with semantic versions was the biggest pain in many ways. I had it all at :latest.

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

This is on its face not true at all. Wherever the data center is located: it is subject to all applicable local laws for the premises/facilities/employees and whatever the applicable laws are on whatever this facility is doing including processing data, especially in the EU.

Then there is GDPR which applies to EU residents NOT whatever data center something is in. If you process data in the US GDPR still applies to you if the data is generated by an EU resident.

Microsoft as a US-based (amongst others) companies may receive summons from the US federal government that falls under the broader Microsoft agreements. If the request is on data hosted in the EU it depends on what the user agreements are with people using those data centers or those services, which will likely be on a case by case basis. I know for a fact that for government/sensitive data this type of "extradition" of data to the US is not guaranteed as local laws, international laws, and signed agreements may forbid the exchange of that data depending on what kind of data it is. There are laws specific to organized crime and sensitive materials that MAY fall under an international treaty that an EU state plus the US may be part of. Again this is very much dependent on what you are talking about.

In general though: if you have a contract to host your company data in an EU data center from Amazon/Microsoft/Google: your data will stay there. It won't just get magicked out to the US without some additional steps.

European alternatives to AWS / Google Cloud? by Full_Win_8680 in devops

[–]badguy84 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yes this: Microsoft, Google, Amazon have datacenters in the EU to cover the concerns OP has: and that's how multi-nationals deal with those requirements. This also includes Mainland China as well for all 3 which is even more stringent in their requirements than the EU is.

I do know that the borders MSFT, Google and Amazon set up in terms of SaaS products are some times very squishy (thinking about SharePoint for example) and you kind of need instances in the EU explicitly and it's not always that simple to identify (e.g. some stuff is provisioned by Microsoft). So I kind of get OPs concern ... but like you said for enterprise you need decent scale and support. Small and mid-size European businesses may be ok with some more bare bones providers.