whbboyd's recent activity
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Comment on Tips/guides to turn my home into a smart home? in ~tech
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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…
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Comment on US solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after in ~enviro
whbboyd Link ParentInteresting! Shows me for being Americentric, I suppose. =) Everywhere (all in the US) I've ever paid electricity, the delivery charges have been per kWh. There's definitely downsides to a...Interesting! Shows me for being Americentric, I suppose. =) Everywhere (all in the US) I've ever paid electricity, the delivery charges have been per kWh.
There's definitely downsides to a per-unit-time connection fee, like, as you note, it reduces incentive to conserve energy. Regardless, if it already is established in some places, I imagine that makes it much more likely to spread, rather than needing to be established totally from scratch in a likely-hostile customer base.
(Also, a minor nit: the unit of energy in which electricity is typically denominated is the "kilowatt-hour", abbreviated "kWh". "kW/h"—that is, "kilowatts per hour"—has a physically meaningful interpretation, but isn't very applicable to everyday use, and in particular is not a unit of energy. I would prefer we used megajoules for this—1kWh = 3.6MJ—but alas, here we are.)
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Comment on US solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after in ~enviro
whbboyd Link ParentThey're called "delivery costs" on my bill, but the critical thing here is, they're charged per kilowatt-hour. If I get 90% of my electricity from solar panels on my roof, I'm only paying the...They're called "delivery costs" on my bill, but the critical thing here is, they're charged per kilowatt-hour. If I get 90% of my electricity from solar panels on my roof, I'm only paying the electric company a tenth the delivery costs, but their cost to maintain that infrastructure is essentially fixed. Trees don't stop growing into power lines just because they're underutilized.
A connection fee is a flat fee per unit time. This brings the customer's cost structure in line with the utility's, which is generally desirable, but is a big change for electrical customers, and also appears to penalize light users of the utility's power. (Strictly speaking, those light users' infrastructure is subsidized by heavy users' delivery costs, and a connection fee eliminates that subsidy.)
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Comment on What are some of your personal misheard lyrics? in ~music
whbboyd Link ParentMy childhood was in the '90s and early '00s, but my parents listened to oldies stations on the radio (which at the time meant mostly '80s music), and my personal tastes were more towards classical...My childhood was in the '90s and early '00s, but my parents listened to oldies stations on the radio (which at the time meant mostly '80s music), and my personal tastes were more towards classical and… Weird Al. And so something like 70% of my knowledge of '90s and '00s pop music is from Weird Al, not the original artist. There's a lot of songs that I instantly recognize but don't know the actual words to.
(Also Smells Like Nirvana is highly relevant to this topic.)
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Comment on UK's Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack shutdown to hit four weeks in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentAs a point of… clarity? Additional confusion? IDK. But anyway, Jaguar ("Jaguar Land Rover", "JLR") outsourced their cybersecurity to a company called "Tata Consultancy Services", or TCS, which is...As a point of… clarity? Additional confusion? IDK. But anyway, Jaguar ("Jaguar Land Rover", "JLR") outsourced their cybersecurity to a company called "Tata Consultancy Services", or TCS, which is also owned by Tata Group, the umbrella company. It's not clear to me (and probably, intentionally, to anyone) if this was JLR's MBAs stupidly jumping at a sweetheart deal offered by their owner; Tata Group handing down a decision to further consolidate their holdings; or just run-of-the-mill corporate incompetence.
TCS has, obviously, completely and utterly failed at their job, but it's very important that nobody be allowed to scapegoat them. Whoever pulled the strings here made the intentional decision to gut JLR's security, and they should be the ones held to account for the harm done.
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Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement
whbboyd (edited )Link ParentHue bulbs which are off but powered use on the order of 0.5W. The bulbs are active Zigbee routers, so they're constantly listening for and forwarding messages to other devices on the mesh. (This...Hue bulbs which are off but powered use on the order of 0.5W. The bulbs are active Zigbee routers, so they're constantly listening for and forwarding messages to other devices on the mesh. (This is actually an important role; Zigbee is intentionally very short-range, so routers are needed to span a home.) I imagine you could design light bulbs which aren't routers and save quite a lot of that idle usage, since Zigbee is designed for low energy (as /u/tibpoe noted, battery-powered devices can get years of runtime on a single coin cell); but you'd have to start thinking about where to place routers or your network would be unreliable, and it's understandable that manufacturers don't want to impose that on users of already extremely fiddly smart home tech.
I have roughly 20 total light bulbs in my house; if all of them were Hue bulbs (and money grew on trees, lol), that would be an idle load of about 10W, or roughly a single additional LED light bulb left on all the time, or 90 kWhr over the course of a year, or $15/year at average US electricity prices.
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Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement
whbboyd LinkFYI (not to try to derail your finally-attained lighting nirvana), you can connect Hue bulbs directly to Homeassistant via Zigbee, no Hue hub in the middle. If you're going to control them from...FYI (not to try to derail your finally-attained lighting nirvana), you can connect Hue bulbs directly to Homeassistant via Zigbee, no Hue hub in the middle. If you're going to control them from hass, this setup is much better, as you avoid the delay from hass talking to the hub. (Given that my bulbs all have a few hundred millisecond transition time set, the delay is imperceptible to me.)
Technically speaking, this setup is what I would recommend to anyone with Hue bulbs looking to do home automation, since it lets you avoid Philips's consumer-unfriendly practices. However, it must be noted that Homeassistant can be extraordinarily unpleasant to set up¹, as you're surely aware. But IMO the entire field is a big continuum between "enshittified", "garbage", and "difficult"; my recommendation for normal people would be to invest in some decent-quality dimmers and bulbs which change color temp with brightness (annoyingly, Philips makes the best—only?—bulbs like this).
¹ It comes by the unflattering nickname "h-ass" honestly.
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Comment on Are touchscreens in cars dangerous? in ~transport
whbboyd Link ParentIt frustrates me greatly that people with your attitudes are allowed to share the road with others. Tesla's "autopilot" is L2 automation, which means it is never doing the actual driving. (This is...It frustrates me greatly that people with your attitudes are allowed to share the road with others.
the Autopilot is commonly the one doing the actual driving
Tesla's "autopilot" is L2 automation, which means it is never doing the actual driving. (This is true of every system below L4, by the way.) You are responsible for paying attention to what your car is doing, and when your car runs over a pedestrian, you have just committed vehicular manslaughter.
You need to be present in case of something going awry, but only casually.
No, you need to be paying complete attention at all times, exactly to the same degree as if you were operating the steering and throttle yourself. There are two reasons for this:
- the vehicle's automation may not recognize that something has gone awry; and
- a situation where the automation gives up control may require the driver to react within tenths of a second. A driver who isn't paying attention will take at least multiple seconds to understand the situation, long after their car has decapitated them with a tractor trailer.
Situations in which airplane autopilots (systems which are several orders of magnitude more reliable than anything ever installed in a consumer car) disconnect are a rich source of plane crashes, for precisely this reason.
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Comment on California attorney fined for using twenty-one AI hallucinated cases in court filing in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentYou can't actually get this. There's not a knob between "obsequious bullshitter" and "obstinate realist". You can train models between "obsequious" and "obstinate", but they always bullshit (it's...You can't actually get this. There's not a knob between "obsequious bullshitter" and "obstinate realist". You can train models between "obsequious" and "obstinate", but they always bullshit (it's a fundamental property of being a language model—they don't "know" anything in any reliable sense); obstinate models will refuse to answer more often, but when they do, you definitely shouldn't assume the resulting output has any real-world validity.
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Comment on Is OpenWRT worthwhile at home? in ~comp
whbboyd Link ParentYeah, I agree with this take. I use and am very happy with OpenWRT on my home LAN. It's not so much these days because it's way more powerful than stock firmware on high-end consumer network...Yeah, I agree with this take. I use and am very happy with OpenWRT on my home LAN. It's not so much these days because it's way more powerful than stock firmware on high-end consumer network equipment¹; rather:
- Hardware support window is extremely long. I use a Buffalo WZR-600DHP², which was released in 2012 and for which Buffalo's latest firmware is (apparently?) from 2018.
- There's negligible risk of OpenWRT deciding to brick, cripple, monetize, or otherwise degrade my router with updates. Even if they tried, the project would be forked immediately.
- Generally speaking, I have a strong preference that any software on my network be open-source. Am I going to rebuild the kernel to do ad blocking at the network layer? Probably not—but the capability is important, and not there with proprietary OEM firmware.
It's way less involved than running OPNSense or building something bespoke. And I'm not a Ubiquiti customer, so take this with a grain of salt, but my impression of the gestalt is that Ubiquiti has fallen far the highs of the 2010s as a purveyor of pro-quality equipment to consumer users.
¹ Although I assert that it is in fact more powerful than almost all OEM firmwares. For example, it was very straightforward for me to plug an
old cell phone5G modem into the USB port on my router, share network through it, and configure uplink failover. Can you do that on, like, a stock TP-Link? Maybe, I don't actually know, but I kind of doubt it. But it's obviously possible on OpenWRT, because it's just a Linux box.
² I actually have two, lol. One is the router, the other one sits at the far end of the house and is just a "dumb" WAP. Both run OpenWRT. Turns out the cheapest, easiest option for a consumer-grade WAP is just a consumer-grade wifi router configured not to do any routing. =P -
Comment on The day return became enter in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThe author literally wrote the book on the topic.The author literally wrote the book on the topic.
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Comment on What's a question you could ask to determine if someone is an expert in your line of work? in ~talk
whbboyd Link ParentNonsense! Solving security problems with technical solutions is extremely straightforward: go into the basement and take diagonal cutters to all the uplink cables. Now, solving security problems...Nonsense! Solving security problems with technical solutions is extremely straightforward: go into the basement and take diagonal cutters to all the uplink cables.
Now, solving security problems while keeping a bunch of oblivious pigheaded stakeholders happy (or at least, just sufficiently not mad at you not to take it up the chain), that's a much thornier problem. ;)
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:
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:
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.