One too many words on AT&T's $2,000 Korn shell and other Usenet topics
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whbboyd's recent activity
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Comment on Without looking, do you have a vague idea of your coordinates? in ~talk
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Comment on Treadmill advice in ~health
whbboyd Link ParentHonestly, I think this is the answer here. The cost of a half-decent treadmill would pay for like half a decade of cheap gym membership. And then when you murder your knees from running too much,...Planet fitness has super cheap memberships?
Honestly, I think this is the answer here. The cost of a half-decent treadmill would pay for like half a decade of cheap gym membership. And then when you murder your knees from running too much, you can switch to an elliptical without needing to buy another expensive piece of exercise equipment. ;)
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Comment on Suggestions for uses of old computer hardware? in ~comp
whbboyd LinkSomething to note in general (although probably not for a computer less than ~10 years old these days) is that running old hardware is rarely practical. Sure, you can plonk Linux or NetBSD on an...Something to note in general (although probably not for a computer less than ~10 years old these days) is that running old hardware is rarely practical. Sure, you can plonk Linux or NetBSD on an ancient Pentium III system and have it run useful services, but a Raspberry Pi will be faster, more convenient to fit in your house, better-supported, and use a tenth the energy.
For a 2018-vintage desktop system, though, this is somewhat less true. Sure, the Pi is more energy-efficient, but it's also significantly slower, and arm versus x86 architecture will limit what software you can run on it. (I would strongly advocate for only running open source software where this is unlikely to be an issue, but arm will make that decision for you.) My homeserver is actually somewhat older than that: the core of it is a midrange gaming PC from 2011, which a handful of updates and a pile of hard drives attached.
Some things to do with a homeserver:
- My experience has been that you'll find uses for a fileserver if you have one, even if you don't have anything in mind right now. It's a convenient way to share up to medium-sized files between different computers (or phones!); makes a great second device for 3-2-1 backups; and hey, if you decide you want a media server, you're already set up for it.
- Do you want to dabble in home automation? You probably shouldn't, but if you do anyway, you'll certainly want a server to self-host a coordinator.
- Other folks have mentioned that your home server can also serve as a router and firewall. It'll be harder to set up for this than a dedicated consumer router (even if, like me, you immediately flash it with OpenWRT), but does offer a ton of flexibility.
- You can tunnel connections from an external gateway (typically a cheap VPS, though I imagine there are even cheaper hosted options) over wireguard, and then the sky's the limit. Want to self-host calendars or contacts? Git? A personal Mastodon server or Matrix homeserver? A TTRSS instance? All possible.
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Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games
whbboyd Link ParentYeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. ;) I think the reason not to bake turn-based into the definition is that it simply makes the term less useful. The purpose of genre...all roguelikes need complex tactical turn-based gameplay
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. ;)
I think the reason not to bake turn-based into the definition is that it simply makes the term less useful. The purpose of genre labels is to distinguish different works; and for that purpose, we want labels to be somewhat broad and partly overlapping. It's more useful to describe Rogue as a "turn-based roguelike" and Diablo HC as a "real-time roguelike" than Rogue as a "roguelike" and Diablo as a "real-time procgen+permadeath hack-and-slash", since there are way, way more of the latter (and many orders of magnitude more players) and therefore a greater need to subcategorize. In fact, one reason not to include "turn-based" in the definition is just that "turn-based roguelike" is an incredibly niche, insular genre, which would make the term closer to jargon than a generally-usable genre label.
And if you don't include turn-based in the definition, then there's really not much qualitatively to distinguish Nethack from Diablo. Obviously Nethack is a far more complex game, with a massive truckload more game mechanics, but I don't think "how many disparate systems does a game need to be a roguelike" is a road either of us wants to go down.
Here's a question: is Noita a roguelike? It's not turn-based (or tile-based, if you don't take an incredibly perverse definition of "tile"), but ticks pretty much every other box: it has procgen+permadeath, tactical gameplay, and a huge variety of deep, diverse systems.
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Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games
whbboyd Link ParentI think the "consequence" to death specifically has to be that you start over, thus exercising the procedural generation. So softcore Diablo isn't a roguelike, because while there are absolutely...I think the "consequence" to death specifically has to be that you start over, thus exercising the procedural generation. So softcore Diablo isn't a roguelike, because while there are absolutely consequences to death, starting over isn't one of them; you respawn in town and can immediately walk back into the same generated landscape you died in.
(Hardcore Diablo is a roguelike, though. Fight me.)
I think this game design feature dyad—procgen plus permadeath—is coherent and relevant enough to merit a term of its own, even though it's present in a pretty diverse group of games (e.g. turn-based, tile-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, Nethack, or Crawl; platformers like Spelunky; whatever Noita is; management sims like Dwarf Fortress or FTL; and yeah, hack-and-slashes like Diablo). "Roguelike" seems like an acceptable term for that to me, since we've got other terms to clearly identify the other distinguishing traits of Rogue.
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Comment on Can I hope to defeat telematics in a new car? in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentI was looking up how to do it on my Crosstrek, and found a whole bunch of people asking about it who clearly did not own the car. Sixteen-year-olds asking how to keep the car from ratting them out...I was looking up how to do it on my Crosstrek, and found a whole bunch of people asking about it who clearly did not own the car. Sixteen-year-olds asking how to keep the car from ratting them out to their parents, sort of thing. And they were, rightfully, getting told off. But, like, I'm an adult who actually does own my car, and have very good reason to want it absolutely disconnected from the Internet¹, and so those responses are super unhelpful to me.
This thread is pretty much the best and most mature and productive discussion I've found so far. It's for a different car, but ah well, can't have everything. =P
¹ If it can hurt or kill you, it absolutely must not be connected to the Internet. It's not even a privacy thing, though I have those concerns, as well. If you're not terrified for your safety of your car being remotely accessible, read this article. I'll grant that Subaru is not Chrysler (thank god, lol), but the entire automotive industry is absolute dogshit at security.
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Comment on Moana (2026) | Official teaser in ~movies
whbboyd Link ParentOkay, but Mulan is literally about defying gender norms. It's not quite explicitly trans, but it definitely is explicitly about 80% of the way there. Can you really call that trans "coded"? ;)Reflections
Okay, but Mulan is literally about defying gender norms. It's not quite explicitly trans, but it definitely is explicitly about 80% of the way there. Can you really call that trans "coded"? ;)
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Comment on AGI and Fermi's Paradox in ~science
whbboyd Link"AGI" is 100% hypothetical at this point, so any properties you choose to ascribe to it are fanfiction. (To be somewhat fair, this is true of essentially all discussion of the Fermi paradox and..."AGI" is 100% hypothetical at this point, so any properties you choose to ascribe to it are fanfiction.
(To be somewhat fair, this is true of essentially all discussion of the Fermi paradox and Drake equation.)
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Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science
whbboyd Link ParentFriggin' Spanish has 100%-consistent orthography. (Ten-year-old me loved that. The irregular conjugations and arbitrary ser/estar distinction, not so much.) English is, to the best of my...Friggin' Spanish has 100%-consistent orthography. (Ten-year-old me loved that. The irregular conjugations and arbitrary ser/estar distinction, not so much.) English is, to the best of my knowledge, somewhere between the only language with the problem of incredibly inconsistent pronunciation, or the only language where it's so severe that it's directing educational policy.
(Yet another surprise consequence of being Actually Five Other Languages In A Trench Coat, I guess.)
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Comment on The algorithm failed music in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentI keep FLAC versions of my music archived essentially in case I ever want to re-encode. The files I actually listen to are Vorbis-encoded (which achieves roughly 85% compression over FLAC with no...I keep FLAC versions of my music archived essentially in case I ever want to re-encode. The files I actually listen to are Vorbis-encoded (which achieves roughly 85% compression over FLAC with no degradation I can hear), since e.g. I only have a few tens of gigabytes free on my phone. But non-portable bulk storage is very cheap, and even lossless audio just isn't that heavy storage-wise (a literal chronological year of FLAC audio is roughly 2.5TB), so the confidence that I can re-encode to some newfangled format without compounding losses is easily worth that.
(Now I guess I should caveat that my actual music library is a terrific mishmash, and includes stuff like mp3s shared with classmates from high school and college, audio ripped from Youtube videos, albums and soundtracks which were only offered in lossy formats, etc., etc. Most of my FLACs are actually ripped from CD. But my ideal format is FLAC for archival and Vorbis to put on devices to listen to.)
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Comment on Tips/guides to turn my home into a smart home? in ~tech
whbboyd (edited )LinkHere's my advice for smartening your home: DON'T. Oh, you're ignoring my blunt, uninformative, unconstructive advice. How surprising. =) Okay, so while that is my real advice¹, if you're going to...- Exemplary
Here's my advice for smartening your home:
DON'T.
Oh, you're ignoring my blunt, uninformative, unconstructive advice. How surprising. =) Okay, so while that is my real advice¹, if you're going to do it anyway, I'd lay down one supreme guiding principle:
- Never, ever, under any circumstances, allow a device whose software you do not 100% control to access the Internet.
I, personally, strengthen this a bit, because it makes my life easier (even though it makes shopping for devices harder): I don't purchase any device which is physically capable of connecting to the Internet. No risk of your lightbulbs getting hacked into a botnet if they can only speak Zigbee.
You can, in fact, set up a 100%-offline smart home with exclusively Zigbee or Z-Wave-based devices², and a hub that never feels the gentle shine of wifi or the soft click of ethernet. You'll need a lot of smart switches for this to work. However, most people would find this kind of dissatisfying (also configuring the hub without connecting it to an isolated LAN will probably prove impossible, which sets you up for "my commercial hub connected to its corporate overlords in the fifteen seconds it was online and now won't work without a permanent uplink"-style accidents), so in practice, you're going to be running HomeAssistant as your hub.
Now, I cannot emphasize this enough: HomeAssistant sucks to administer yourself. It's brittle, fiddly, likes to upgrade constantly and break every time it upgrades. I strongly discourage anyone from running hass. But it's still way way easier than rolling your own with MQTT or the like (especially if you're not up to doing a whole lot of programming just to get your lights to turn on), and it won't scan your local network, sell your data to advertisers, or rug-pull your hub in six months when the manufacturer runs out of money or pivots to some other sketchier business model.
In terms of setting it up: if you're going happy-path, my impression is that hass's tutorials are pretty accessible. You'll need some sort of connection to your non-wifi device network in order to control all your devices, which can't speak wifi; for Zigbee, you apparently want this one? I bought mine many years ago, and it's out of production and now considered obsolete. Should you go with Zigbee or Z-Wave (or something else)? I don't know! Zigbee will let you attach Philip Hue and Ikea devices to your network, but both protocols have their adherents.
Alright, devices! Your choice of radio protocol will guide your choice of devices. Just buy anything that doesn't speak wifi and does speak your radio protocol. You can google "<devicename> homassistant" for compatibility checks, but I've found support is pretty good. (Strictly speaking, many devices require device-specific "quirks" to work with homeassistant, but popular name-brand devices almost always have them and sketchy junk from alibaba or amazon is more standard-compliant.) Specifically, I have a bunch of Hue devices, but I wouldn't actually recommend them because Philips is anti-consumer. If I had to give a recommendation, it would probably be Ikea. You can get extremely good prices on weird-brand specials from Ebay or Amazon, but keep in mind: at least lightbulbs are plugged into 120V current and can be a definite fire hazard!
¹ I will explain more, down here in a footnote where it doesn't interfere with the bit. ;) Some of these are implied by the comments above, but IMO good reasons to avoid integrating "smart" devices in your home infrastructure include:
- Corporate devices will try to leverage you for additional revenue streams (e.g. selling your data to advertisers) and don't care at all about your uptime. We're talking about your lightbulbs here, so the ability of a third party which at best doesn't care about you to disrupt their functioning is a big deal. This isn't hypothetical! "Smart" device rug-pulls are so common they're basically memetic at this point.
- It's an expensive habit.
- It's a pain in the ass. If you don't love computer-touching, keeping your smart home network working smoothly is going to be incredibly painful.
- It's a security disaster if you don't carefully firewall everything from the Internet (and not great even if you don't). The "'S' in 'IoT' is for 'security'" joke… really isn't a joke.
- It makes your home infrastructure a lot more fragile! Even if you avoid corporate malfeasance or hackers, having a cryptographic radio protocol and a whole-ass computer in the path between your light switch and your lights is literally millions of more things that could realistically go wrong.
² The marketing and documentation for Matter, at the time anyone was talking about it, was so appallingly bad that I honestly cannot tell you if it's tunneled over IP or not. If it's not, you could use that too; but if it is, it's also verboten, and I personally am not fucking around with buying devices just to suss out their tech specs.
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Comment on What are some interesting landmarks in your neck of the woods? in ~talk
whbboyd Link ParentOh wow, I remember the Statue of Liberty from field trips to Harrisburg. Never occurred to me to try to look up its history, though. (Also, this would have been around the turn of the millennium,...Oh wow, I remember the Statue of Liberty from field trips to Harrisburg. Never occurred to me to try to look up its history, though. (Also, this would have been around the turn of the millennium, so at the time that research would have itself required a field trip into Harrisburg to page through archives of local newspapers…) Now I know!
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Comment on Forgot Chrome's unusable, any recommendations? in ~tech
whbboyd Link Parent128 was and 140 currently is the "Extended Service Release" (ESR) version of Firefox, and was/is fully supported by Mozilla. (Honestly, even if you're using Firefox, I would highly recommend...128 was and 140 currently is the "Extended Service Release" (ESR) version of Firefox, and was/is fully supported by Mozilla.
(Honestly, even if you're using Firefox, I would highly recommend running the ESR version. It will insulate you from a lot of the churn and dumb misfeatures at tip.)
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Comment on Botnet blankets US ISPs in record denial-of-service attack in ~tech
whbboyd LinkRemember, kids, the "S" in "IoT" is for "security"!Remember, kids, the "S" in "IoT" is for "security"!
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Comment on Indecision: Get a camera despite having a phone in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentYeah, I basically agree with this. A dedicated camera will take much better pictures, but only if you actually have it with you, and long gone are the days where phone cameras always produced...Yeah, I basically agree with this. A dedicated camera will take much better pictures, but only if you actually have it with you, and long gone are the days where phone cameras always produced noisy mush.
There's one other point I'd make: for me to go from zero to taking a picture with my phone takes at least a couple of seconds (dig it out of my pocket, open the photo app, frame up, hit the shutter button, wait for shutter delay). For an SLR on a neck strap, it's under half a second (put it up to my eye—there's no electronics in the viewfinder path—the camera takes a few hundred milliseconds to come out of standby when you half-press the shutter button, then autofocus is another hundred milliseconds or so and shutter delay is negligible). So if you want to be ready for (that is, ready to photograph) anything, a dedicated camera will serve you far better just from response time.
Also, while Canon and Nikon both make excellent 50mm prime ("prime" meaning "not zoom") lenses, my recommendation to start out would be to stick with the standard kit lens (usually an 18-55mm zoom or so). Enthusiast photographers will pan them, and you can do a lot better (if you spend a whole pile of money), but they're extremely flexible and loads better than the tiny chip of glass that can fit in a smartphone camera.
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Comment on What happens when the internet goes out at your work? in ~tech
whbboyd LinkSo, I have a few different answers here. For context, I'm a software engineer, so I'm generally working pretty closely (but not at the IT/ops level) with the relevant equipment. WFH Currently,...So, I have a few different answers here. For context, I'm a software engineer, so I'm generally working pretty closely (but not at the IT/ops level) with the relevant equipment.
WFH
Currently, like several others here, I work from home; so if the Internet goes out "at work", it's gone out at my house and fixing it becomes my top priority. Even if I could work offline, nobody else will fix it, and I'd be fixing it as soon as I signed off for the day regardless. Until recently, I was with "horrible ISP monopoly du jour" (or "HIMDJ" as I'm going to call them going forward) and this process generally consisted of:
- Confirming that I had connectivity to their shitty modem
- Power cycling the modem
- Calling and scheduling a tech visit
- Canceling the tech visit an hour later when the problem fixed itself.
I'm now with a local fiber ISP, and have had zero outages of note so far (a better record than HIMDJ despite only a few months of service). I suppose when I do have one, the process will be similar. When I'm unable to resolve the issue, I have a "5G modem" (an old cell phone) which I can tether to my router via USB to connection share, which works great as long as you don't have anything that automatically snarfs a ton of bandwidth if it decides all wifi is unmetered.
(As I've mentioned a few times in previous comments, it's possible to set up automatic uplink failover in OpenWRT, and I did in fact do that at one point and it worked great. I got more use out of the plan by putting the SIM in a different old phone and using it as a "pager" for work, though, so this changeover is currently manual, which hasn't really been an issue.)
Office—just Internet
I… actually can't remember this happening? Most offices I've worked in have had redundant uplinks and reasonably professionally-managed local networks, making Internet outages pretty rare. What did happen was:
Office—power outage
I worked for several years at a job whose office lost power hilariously frequently, something like four to six times a year on average. If the outage went for more than half an hour or so, everyone went home. This was before laptops with a whole work day's worth of battery were commonplace, so you probably couldn't work for more than a few hours with no power, and the UPSs for network equipment wouldn't last even a fraction that long. (This building actually had a generator in an enclosure, but I never saw it running. Maybe we weren't paying the landlord enough for backup power?)
There's another somewhat related case, though:
Major Clod Service Provider outage
Remember the big AWS S3 outage in February 2017 that took down a solid chunk of the Internet? I sure do, because all our infrastructure at work was on AWS, so we were 100% down for the duration and could do absolutely nothing about it. We updated our status page to blame Amazon and everyone went home. I could in principle have written code offline, but most of my day-to-day work required some interaction with our hosted infrastructure (debugging customer-reported issues, for instance), so in practice, without having prepared to work offline, there wasn't much I could do.
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Comment on America's dumbest crop: grass in ~enviro
whbboyd Link ParentYeah, this is pretty much where I am. I hate doing yard work; I can pretty easily pay someone to mow it every few weeks, but it would be a lot harder (and a lot more expensive) to hire someone to...Yeah, this is pretty much where I am. I hate doing yard work; I can pretty easily pay someone to mow it every few weeks, but it would be a lot harder (and a lot more expensive) to hire someone to put in and maintain a xeriscaped yard. It doesn't get any maintenance other than mowing, but turf grass is pretty resilient (much like the invasive English ivy some long-previous owner planted in the neighborhood, thanks a lot Fifties Developer Dude), so it basically just sticks around.
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Comment on Connor McDavid puts his money where his mouth is with shockingly-low contract in ~sports.hockey
whbboyd Link Parent"Centi-" definitely threw me for a minute. "Wait, this professional sports player is a ten-thousand-aire? Oohhh…" The problem with "hecto-" is that the only common unit to use it is the hectare,..."Centi-" definitely threw me for a minute. "Wait, this professional sports player is a ten-thousand-aire? Oohhh…"
The problem with "hecto-" is that the only common unit to use it is the hectare, which is a special form and doesn't actually contain the whole prefix.
Despite the Wikipedia argument above, I think the standard way to say this in English is just "hundred-millionaire".
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Comment on I need headphone/mic recommendations for gaming before I rip my hair out in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThis is not to excuse bad product design, but you can fix blue status LEDs with a little piece of electrical tape. (Supposedly, nail polish also works if you don't want to totally black out the...This is not to excuse bad product design, but you can fix blue status LEDs with a little piece of electrical tape. (Supposedly, nail polish also works if you don't want to totally black out the indicator.)
Now to convince every dumb trend-following designer the world over that blue LEDs look cheap and ugly…
30-something north by 76-something east?
checks
Alright, I was off by roughly 10° of latitude and 1° of longitude. No idea why my recollection of longitude was so much more precise than latitude. Regardless, for both of them, it's basically trivia. I've never had a practical use for directly knowing my coordinates (although obviously, carrying around a device which keeps track of them is extremely handy).
There's a hacker joke about these sorts of coordinates (although note that to deliver an ICBM to someone's door, you ideally want elevation as well as lat/lon).