Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

  • 0 Posts
  • 72 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 10th, 2023
  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Do I really need DOCSIS 3.1 modem?English
    6·
    6 months ago

    Can’t comment on the DOCSIS, I don’t know enough about it to not be making stuff up.

    Regarding WiFi though… The simple answer is if you’re not having trouble accessing the WiFi in the places you use the WiFi and you’re getting the full speed that you’re paying for, there’s not a ton of a reason to upgrade the router.

    The exception to this is that most routers only get a few years of security updates like most phones… That can potentially leave your network more vulnerable as the router might not properly block unsolicited traffic from making it to your devices. There’s a solid argument that you should just have your devices secured via their own firewalls though.

    The Google routers are nice for the average Joe because they just kind of work and keep themselves updated (and Google tends to keep the hardware they sell under the Nest name receiving security updates a VERY long time compared to the competition). Netgear has been my go to for years but their update mechanism is … fairly manual in my experience.

    I’ve since moved to having a pfSense box for the firewall and routing side of things and using my old negate router in access point mode (I’m much less concerned about this setup).

    I’ll add that I don’t recommend WiFi for gaming… And that most people have more download speed than they really “need.” Files really haven’t gone up in size much (sure games have) but evening else… meh (?). Video streaming is more popular but unless you’ve got a lot of people in your home or you stream at 4k, it’s really not going to be that noticable between 30Mbps and 1Gbps. So like, by all means if you don’t want to spend money, don’t… you’re probably fine.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Headlamp tech that doesn’t blind oncoming drivers—where is it?English
    17·
    6 months ago

    Honestly a huge portion of the problem is asshole drivers that just don’t turn off their brights and their fog lights or that tailgate the vehicle right in front of them while their headlights are mirror level.

    I’ve seen brand new trucks with LEDs that were so easy on my eyes then I’ve seen the exact same model of truck via rearview mirror only after I passed it because the lights were beyond blinding.

    They need to enforce maximum luminosity laws with an iron first; it’s ridiculous that people get away with this stuff.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•AI Cheating Is Getting WorseEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    By integrating everything into it, it has become a good enough medium of communication for almost everything.

    Except that’s not at all what we’ve done.

    The only reason English dominates is because it’s the dominant language of the world super powers following world war II. It’s not because of some special design, principle, or properties.

    English isn’t just “make up whatever rules and put them wherever”, particularly formal English which is what we’re talking about in the context of education.

    Really, a better argument against changing the spelling is the classic “standards” xkcd, where now you’re just making another dialect of English where they spell words differently again, and now it needs to be adopted, fracturing the language further.

    Language will evolve with or without direction. We have the structure in the form of schools to actually evolve it with direction in the name of making things more consistent and intuitive. We should use it, that’s all.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•AI Cheating Is Getting WorseEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I disagree that it’s a fools errand. Misspellings rarely become popular enough to become “proper” because we teach everyone the “proper” spelling and we have spell checkers on our computers that are used for virtually everything.

    There’s no method for the people speaking the English language to put pressure on a word that already exists because we’ve build up this infrastructure to "lock things in’ and insist that “they’ve been this way so they must continue to be this way.” The only way we get language evolution currently is via slang … which is hardly a way to get a better language.

    I know the history of facade, it’s like many other words we’ve stolen from other languages that don’t make a lick of sense in our alphabet. It’s not an infinite list, it’s fixable, but we need to change the mind share that “it has to be this way.”

    We made up official spellings, we can fix them, they’re not an immutable law of nature.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•AI Cheating Is Getting WorseEnglish
    4·
    7 months ago

    That’s something only a teacher would say. As someone who did all their school work and got a fancy engineering job, a lot of it was bogus busy work that 99% of us have completely forgotten.

    You can’t tell me that I needed two teachers having me comb through the book for words that weren’t part of the index so that I could rewrite the word’s textbook definition on a piece of paper verbatim on a weekly basis and that that was a good education experience.

    You can’t tell me my high school study hall where they’d give you something to do if you were bored and forbid you from sleeping or playing games unless the study hall monitor “liked you” was a good experience.

    I mean my high school algebra teacher couldn’t even remember the algebra lesson she’d taught every year for over a decade when I had her. If it was really a life skill or that important, she would’ve remembered.

    In calculus they teach you the hard way to differentiate and then they’re just like “ah but actually you can do it this way and that’s how everyone does it.”

    Artificially raising the difficulty by forbidding formula sheets in math is also just stupid. If you can see the problem, recognize which formula to use, and use it, that should be enough.

    We’re just straight up wasting millions of hours of people’s time with our education system that has very little merit in terms of long term results and retention and negatively affects both people that come out of it “passing with flying colors” and people that flunk out because of various home life circumstances, bad teachers, difficult with the material, or a lack of interest.

    Students are miserable (suicide is at an all time high last I checked and I’m pretty confident it’s not just about social media), administrators are miserable, teachers are miserable, and kids really don’t learn all that much that stays with them into adulthood. We desperately try to shove way too much information into people’s heads in a very dry and uncaptivating way. We need to throw the system out and figure out how to teach what matters and change/replace stuff that doesn’t matter or make sense (e.g. we changed the spelling of various words in the past, why don’t we fix them instead of teaching a bunch of ridiculous spellings that make no sense like facade, ghost, llama, etc).

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•He revealed the secrets !English
    5·
    11 months ago

    I work on compilers (we can’t/don’t even have access to the C++ standard library in my case)… Most of the time, Google can’t help me ⚰️😅

    It was definitely a bit more copy and paste when I was working on web applications… But even then, most of the code I was writing was fairly novel / more application and database architecture problems than trying tying libraries together.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@beehaw.org•He revealed the secrets !English
    1·
    11 months ago

    Be careful with that one. I’m not sure about your experience level, but a mistake newer (and some more experienced) programmers often make is taking DRY too far.

    It’s easy to “dry” something up to the point where it’s spaghetti that’s overly clever about how it reduces lines of code resulting in some crazy inheritance hierarchy even you (the author) are afraid to change a few years down the road.

    There are of course other times when someone just copy and pasted e.g. sort logic all over the code base … but that sort of thing is relatively rare

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolioEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    The phrase Jack of all trades master of none really only applies to people. A company can just hire more people when it has more products.

    Google’s issue is not that they’re “big” it’s that they’ve failed to truly innovate and invest in anything in years. The current leadership kills anything that isn’t an instant money maker despite the majority of the company’s profitable products taking years to become profitable. They’re also in a weird spot because their “magic” was always free services in exchange for advertising money and that’s a model that’s come under attack and been replicated to death by competitors.