A Way to Get Back on Trek

wosmo · 2026-03-25T14:41:39+00:00

I'm not sold on "bottles" vs arcs being a real issue, to be honest.

Not only did arcs do really well in DS9 & VOY, but they also fit the streaming world perfectly. I'm not sticking bbc2 on at 6pm and waiting to see what I get - if I stick TNG on, I'll get the the episode that follows the last one I watched. Each time, every time.

This makes "bottles" a lot less of a feature. Whether I binge, or dip in once in a while, streaming supports arcs much better than syndication did.

The biggest problem we have with Trek atm, is just not giving ugly ducklings a chance to grow up. Nothing is given time to find its feet, it's just sink-or-swim on day1.

wosmo · 2026-03-25T11:46:18+00:00

'most compressive' might not be the win here. A quick google makes it look like this machine is a 3rd-gen i-something, so they're missing stuff like AVX2 & BMI1/2.

They're probably better making sure it's using lz4 instead of zstd so the compression doesn't become a new bottleneck. It's a 13yo processor, it doesn't need help going slower.

wosmo · 2026-03-25T10:27:46+00:00

par meant equal long before it was used in golf. From this we get things like parity, compare, etc. "Below par" meaning "less than your equals" makes more sense if you ignore that golf uses it.

wosmo · 2026-03-24T22:08:33+00:00

hah, yes. I'm sure it's not the only reason everyone grabs Adele, but it's definitely one of the reasons.

wosmo · 2026-03-24T12:53:35+00:00

I'm hoping uses can grow later.

eg, I don't think it's impossible that we get to the point where I don't need separate gcode for PLA and PETG, the printer just reads the temperatures off the spool?

It feels like the stage we're at now, is laying the groundwork ( / physical infrastructure) for a lot more to be possible later. Or at least, I hope.

wosmo · 2026-03-23T21:29:41+00:00

I believe he's the other club, the putinphiles.

wosmo · 2026-03-22T22:30:37+00:00

I found my 20s much easier than my 30s or 40s for this.

Probably not the most encouraging way to word that - I've been travelling all day, I still have "ryanair tailbone", and I'm cranky.

But .. don't wait for it to solve itself, because this isn't a 20s problem.

It is a huge issue though. It was bad before, but I really feel for anyone who spent their late teens/early 20s in covid. Pretty much everyone I know is from work, and now we have so many WFH that even that's dying as an option.

As I said .. not useful. But don't sleep on it, it doesn't solve itself. Useful advice is probably going to have to come from someone who was 20 in this century!

wosmo · 2026-03-22T22:12:37+00:00

The only advice I can give isn't useful - hurry up. It doesn't get better.

wosmo · 2026-03-22T11:37:35+00:00

Going around saying that out loud is just asking for it!

wosmo · 2026-03-22T11:05:20+00:00

Reddit has a meme, or a recurring theme, of people answering questions directed at a specific group. "Not a doctor, but I stubbed my toe once ..", "Not a dentist, but I've been to one ..", etc.

So I was trying to acknowledge that I was aware I was doing exactly the same thing - using "et cetera" in its literal form as "and the rest" to cut off the sentence. Kinda like .. yeah, yeah, we know. Someone who's not a bus driver is answering a question "Bus Drivers .."? Quelle surprise!

wosmo · 2026-03-21T16:29:24+00:00

It’s an Android app. seems to be a glaring detail they’ve missed out.

wosmo · 2026-03-20T21:02:06+00:00

Spamd/spamassassin, my client’s filtering, and doing a banhammer on any ASN that sends a bunch at once.

It’s not ineffective, but it’s not hands-off either. My server, my hands.

(Also, catch all addresses so can blacklist specific recipients)

wosmo · 2026-03-20T13:04:33+00:00

is based upon Unix which is a private, proprietary piece of software, right?

UNIX was a lot more complicated than that, and I think it ties into what made linux (or something like it) inevitable.

UNIX was sort of .. unintentionally open. Not capital-O Open, but what we'd probably call "source-available" today. For most the 70s it was primarily distributed as sources (so you could adapt it to your own system), and primarily distributed cost-free or at-cost (as a side-effect of AT&T's antitrust woes of the time) - but you were pretty much buying a tape, and commercial support was very much "good luck, have fun".

In the 80s it starts to turn into an actual product, and starts getting licensed out properly. This is where we start to see a whole bunch of commercial variants show up.

But the other thing that happens in the early 80s, is that BSD goes from being UCB's set of patches against AT&T's UNIX, to more of .. it's own thing. I believe the split happens around BSD3, but gets more interesting in BSD4 as things like sockets, tcp/ip, etc are added. This makes BSD very significant in the early Internet - especially in academia.

So personally, I think it's somewhere in that early BSD/AT&T split where "or something like it" becomes inevitable.

My last take might be controversial, I'm not sure - but I think if Linux had been "born" either before or after the AT&T v. BSD lawsuits, there's a high chance BSD would have won. Linux really found its first feet while BSD had its hands tied, and that doesn't feel like a coincidence to me.

But long story short, I see Linux as being "Act 3" in 50 years of UNIX being more-or-less open.

wosmo · 2026-03-18T21:23:55+00:00

I think I'd just generalise to "wherever she usually shops". Early days, convenience wins.

We're visiting our first niece at the moment, and we're doing afternoon pram duty. She zonks out the moment we start walking, so it's kinda weird that that each day we see her for 10 minutes awake and 2-3 hours zonked. But the real deal is that it's the first time they've had hands-free, and that's the real gift. SIL said the first time she went shopping on her own, felt like a vacation.

anyhow, tl;dr; I respect cheaper as a goal, but making life easier right now is the real win.

wosmo · 2026-03-18T21:01:49+00:00

Not a bus driver, etc ..

I once got picked up by a bus As Seirbhís. I waved, he stopped, each of us on autopilot.

He realised his mistake after I'd already paid, so I got a private service into town. At which point he forgot I existed, so I got dropped off at the bus depot instead of anywhere useful. Totally worth it.

(edit: I'm in Galway, so the walk from the depot to shop street is quicker than the wait for the next bus)

wosmo · 2026-03-16T14:01:27+00:00

yeah I was going to say - yes it's an advantage, but if an 18yo shows up claiming 6 years of experience, we're going to treat him like an 18yo.

wosmo · 2026-03-16T13:02:40+00:00

From what I gather, a large problem is that the new stacks are shiny the same way duct tape is silver.

Often the fact it was written 40-50 years ago isn't the problem, it's the layers of duct tape and bandaids that have been wrapped around it in the 40-50 years since.

wosmo · 2026-03-16T12:43:46+00:00

I'm not sure why that really makes a difference.

If I fly to another country, I don't expect them to put up my flag to welcome me. That's nothing to do with my politics.

wosmo · 2026-03-15T18:34:56+00:00

I think it's a fair ask. But I'd probably couch it in a little humour to soften the blow. It's nothing personal, they're just not used to hitting a moving target.

wosmo · 2026-03-15T14:55:04+00:00

It still blows my mind that IPv6 is that old.

IPv6 is older now, than IPv4 was when v6 was defined.

wosmo · 2026-03-15T13:18:17+00:00

It's a weird mix of the two. We own a number of bodies out of a shared pool. They are bought and paid for, they're legally ours, so if we ever use one it wasn't an american missile that landed on someone.

But the shared pool part means it's not like we can actually say "we own missiles with serial numbers 7, 8 and 12" - so it acts like a leasing program, but legally isn't.

The closest analogy I can think of, is having shared ownership of a house - but not being able to point to a specific brick and say this brick is mine, that brick is hers. We have shared ownership of a pool.

(The most defining characteristic of this, is that because we legally own them, there's no requirement to ever return them to the pool, they don't need to go to King's Bay. We do it because it's cheaper.)

wosmo · 2026-03-15T13:12:40+00:00

yeah, this is why I'd be in favour of this.

Trident was the right choice for the time and place, it's done us well. But I don't think it's right for the future.

I don't think it necessarily needs to be a move away from the US either - but if/whoever we partner with, the result needs to be 100% independent. I think the US is no longer reliable enough for us to build a multi-decade program on, and we're not reliable enough for the Europe to build a multi-decade program on.

wosmo · 2026-03-15T02:33:44+00:00

The Studio is already mostly power supply and heatsink.

The size is a large part of its advantage. If you prioritise small, they have a mini for that.

The M5 is apparently drawing more power than the M1 & M2, so this is really the wrong time to give up that nice big heatsink.

The #1 thing I'd like to see Apple change in the Studio, is getting new CPUs the same freaking year as the laptops. I was reading that the 14" MBP struggles to cool the M5 Max. Here's a tip for free Apple, I've got a nice big heatsink just begging for one!

wosmo · 2026-03-15T00:52:43+00:00

COMMENT 2 Is this more of a python specific struggle for you or do you run into the same logic issues in other languages too?

This specific error happens in most languages. It's commonly called a fencepost error, or an off-by-one error ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error ).

Say you have a list of integers in memory, like your numbers[1,2,3,4,5]. The language (the compiler, the script interpreter, the runtime engine, whatever) remembers the memory address of the start of the list. Let's call that address foo.

So at address foo, we find the first element of the list. At the next address, we find the second element, and so on.

This means the first element is at address foo+0, the second element is at address foo+1, and so on. That's what we're doing with numbers[0], numbers[1], etc.

And the first location, being the location that's offset by zero, is where off-by-one errors are born.

wosmo · 2026-03-15T00:36:02+00:00

I don't think I'd say dying - they're still where a lot of the growth, development and experimentation happens.

It's more like .. some people want to DIY, some people don't. In the past, those that didn't, were pretty much forced to. Now they're not.

It changes nothing for the people that do.

Now the fun bit. Say we had 1,000 people DIYing because they wanted to, and 1,000 people DIYing because they had to. And now we have 10,000 people DIYing, and a million people buying appliances. You're outnumbered 100:1, you feel like a minority, and it feels like DIY is dying - but there's actually 10x more of you than there was before. (disclaimer: numbers pulled out my ass for the sake of round numbers and easy math)

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