Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I used Google maps to get these values. I’m using Google’s estimated walking distance and will also include Google’s estimated walking time.

    • Convenience store
      • Distance: 800 m
      • Time: 11 minutes
    • Chain supermarket
      • Distance: 1.1 km
      • Time: 15 minutes
    • Bus stop
      • Distance: 230 m
      • Time: 3 minutes
    • Park:
      • Distance: 450 m
      • Time: 7 minutes
    • Big supermarket (Walmart)
      • Distance: 1.7 km
      • Time: 23 minutes
    • Library
      • Distance: 2.7 km
      • Time: 37 minutes
    • Train station (local light rail)
      • Distance: 3.1 km
      • Time: 43 minutes

    I’m in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren’t great, but they’re far better than some places I’ve lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.

    EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it’s different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it’s in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don’t have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.



  • Ugh, I hate ChatGPT. If this is Bash (which it is, because it’s literally looking for files in a directory called ~/.bashrc.d), then it should god damned well be using syntax and language features that we’ve had for at least twenty fucking years. Specifically, if you’re writing for Bash (and not POSIX shell), you better be using [[ ]] rather than [ ]. This wiki is my holy book I use to keep the demons away when writing Bash, and it does a simply fantastic job of explaining why you should use God damned double square brackets.

    ChatGPT writes shitty, horrible, buggy ass Bash. This is relatively decent for ChatGPT (it even makes sure the files are real files and not symlinks), but I’ve had to fix enough terrible fucking shitty AI Bash to have no tolerance for even the smallest misstep from it.

    Sincerely, A senior developer who is known as the Bash wizard at work.

    EDIT: Sorry, OP. ChatGPT did not, in fact, write this code, and I am going to leave my comment here as a testament to what a big smelly dick I was here.



  • I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.

    I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.


  • Yeah, I’ve been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

    I’ve heard that batteries (can’t remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

    EDIT: To avoid spreading misinformation, I’m providing this edit to say that the batteries absolutely were not the cause of the explosion. This was a supply-chain attack. Explosives were inserted into the pagers. The batteries in these pagers cannot be made to explode like this. I was overly excited when I made this comment.





  • Nah, the slow hop-hop-hop is like a jog. Mustelids can fucking zoom if they’re in danger or after prey. Like, even dopey-ass domesticated ferrets can get going pretty damn quick when they’ve been hurt or feel threatened. Nobody has posted what species of otter attacked this lady, but river otters can reach speeds of 47 kph (29 mph) on land. Sea otters are slow and fat, but these weren’t sea otters.

    You aren’t outrunning a pack of otters in a sprint. It’s no question that you could outrun them over a long distance, but mustelids are zoomy little fuckers.

    (note that I like mustelids and had 4 ferrets, so please don’t mistake my tone as being sour on them)

    EDIT: holy shit, ferrets can be bred and trained to run at like 22 mph. That’s insane!



  • Badabinski@kbin.earthtoLinux@lemmy.mlGoldilocks distro?
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    19 days ago

    For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

    I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.

    Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.




  • I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can’t seem to get a link to it, so I’m just going to repost it here since I feel it’s relevant. My kbin client doesn’t let me copy text posts directly, so I’ve had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn’t emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/12147

    I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

    I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

    Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

    Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they’re very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don’t have to change from “I’m writing code” mode to “I’m reviewing code mode.”


  • Jesus wept. I’ve always had a morbid fascination with weapons and this one definitely “satisfies” the morbid part. I agree with the other person. This is better than cluster munitions since it will result in far fewer civilian casualties, but it’s also tremendously fucked. It makes me feel about as icky as thermobaric bombs do.

    I hate to think what the improvement to this idea will look like. I’m sure it will be improved upon, since Northrop now has plenty of field data showing the effectiveness of this design.




  • Badabinski@kbin.earthtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldOlympic casual GigaChad
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    2 months ago

    Your eye is still open under that flap though, no? I dabbled in Olympic pistol shooting back when I was doing across-the-course service rifle, and I was told to always keep both eyes open by the dude teaching me. Same for service rifle (and later palma). I always found that closing one of your eyes fucks up your focusing. If you don’t have the little flappy dealy, you just do your best to defocus/deprioritize the view out of your non-dominant eye. I actually went for quite a while without any sort of cover because it helped me avoid cross firing (which is probably more of an issue with across-the-course than with Olympic pistol).

    You’re absolutely right about the lack of spectacles though. This guy is one hell of a marksman.