fensgrim (u/fensgrim)

fensgrim commented on Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC maruos.com/... · Posted by u/fsflover

tombert · 7 months ago

I really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with.

I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.

fensgrim · 7 months ago

IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too

fensgrim commented on Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF wsj.com/health/embryo-ivf... · Posted by u/Bluestein

michaelbrave · 9 months ago

I can't remember it's name because I didn't get around to reading it, but there was one sci-fi book where something like Gattaca happened but it happend in a very corporate way, meaning you could buy preset options (wealthy would do custom), everyone became mostly the same height and look etc, or they could tell which preset their parents chose etc, the problem was later on when diseases happened it was catastrophic since the genetics were too much the same.

fensgrim · 9 months ago

Looks like Chemical Garden trilogy by Lauren DeStefano might be a fit - but as it seems to be a cross between typical young adult fiction of 2010's and poorly made romance novel, I do hope there's something less.. pulpy.. with the same premise.

fensgrim commented on The wake effect: As wind farms expand, some can ‘steal’ each others’ wind bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

amai · 9 months ago

That really is only a problem if the direction of the wind never changes. But if the direction of the wind turns around the farm stealing the wind and the farm being robbed of wind switch roles.

fensgrim · 9 months ago

Also, isn't it really stupid to treat the wind the same way we do with rivers or with electrical current (which is actually flowing the opposite way to electrons, so not like the river/wind at all)?

E.g. country A is saying that country B is stealing their incoming (upstream) wind, but there's currently a zone of negative pressure (based on the mountains/shore/passing by cyclone/whatever) on the country A's territory which actually allows for the pressure gradient to form through both countries A and B - so there's more energy potential available to tap into on country A's territory?

fensgrim commented on Ask HN: Using IceCC (Or Equivalent) for Distributed AOSP/LineageOS Builds? · Posted by u/sterness

fensgrim · a year ago

There's Incredibuild (paid), might be worth investigating if it fits your scenario (I have serious doubts it'll work with anything other than basic AOSP due to how lineage's ninja behaves during its early build phase of regenerating scripts from .mk/bp's).

Mind if I ask what's your current record on build time for single device/buildtype combination's systemimage on a single node?

fensgrim commented on Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM artemis.sh/2025/02/22/uef... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

gogusrl · a year ago

I found an point-of-sale minipc with a very nice integrated touchscreen (Pipo X10). As I kept getting unrecognized usb device on a usb-serial adapter I entered bios and played with a few usb-related bios settings. Save & Exit and I discovered I just disabled ALL my usb ports with no way to reset the bios or any other available port to plug an input device into.

So yeah, the CMOS battery not clearing the bios + my own stupidity cost me ~150$.

fensgrim · a year ago

Looks like its easy to wipe and flash the bios chip by CH341A plus a couple diodes to get voltage down to 1.8V, likely without desoldering it too; yet finding the bios image seems to be somewhat impossible due to byte rot (adding extra steps to dump the image with the CH341A, locate the start of data blocks, wipe them).

fensgrim commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

aaaaaaron · a year ago

> It doesn't overwhelm you with thousands of packages and dozens of boot services right in a fresh install. On the contrary, it does only what you tell it to do. It puts you in charge and makes you feel like you can understand it top to bottom.

Just like Arch Linux and Gentoo, of course.

fensgrim · a year ago

> just like Arch Linux

and even Arch (Artix) can't be stripped of elogind and such

fensgrim commented on We're Leaving Kubernetes gitpod.io/blog/we-are-lea... · Posted by u/filiptronicek

scarface_74 · a year ago

Are you suggesting that you should enable the employee to move work done on company time and that is the company’s IP to a new company?

And the new company would also be liable for using trade secrets that they shouldn’t.

fensgrim · a year ago

Neither, it's unethical and there's no possibility of doing that in legal way.

However I do write 1-2 hour PoCs on my spare time and my own equipment, using only publicly available stuff - they sometimes come handy at some point later. If we assume 'remote first' development is okay - with no possibility to test stuff locally, well, we're back to either bookmark managers or pet projects to keep at least a bit of knowledge between jobs.

fensgrim commented on We're Leaving Kubernetes gitpod.io/blog/we-are-lea... · Posted by u/filiptronicek

horsawlarway · a year ago

Personally - just let the developer own the machine they use for development.

If you really need consistency for the environment - Let them own the machine, and then give them a stable base VM image, and pay for decent virtualization tooling that they run... on their own machine.

I have seen several attempts to move dev environments to a remote host. They invariably suck.

Yes - that means you need to pay for decent hardware for your devs, it's usually cheaper than remote resources (for a lot of reasons).

Yes - that means you need to support running your stack locally. This is a good constraint (and a place where containers are your friend for consistency).

Yes - that means you need data generation tooling to populate a local env. This can be automated relatively well, and it's something you need with a remote env anyways.

---

The only real downside is data control (ie - the company has less control over how a developer manages assets like source code). I'm my experience, the vast majority of companies should worry less about this - your value as a company isn't your source code in 99.5% of cases, it's the team that executes that source code in production.

If you're in the 0.5% of other cases... you know it and you should be in an air-gapped closed room anyways (and I've worked in those too...)

fensgrim · a year ago

> how a developer manages assets like source code

IMO there are some workloads, where it is beneficial for a developer to have access to a local repository with at least some snippets based on previous projects.

Having a leftover PoC of some concept written for a previous employer but never elevated to team use/production is both handy (at least to confirm that the build environment is still viable after an unspecified period of toolchain updates) and ethical (copying production code is not ethical - even if the old and new products are vastly different e.g. last job was taxi app, new app is banking app).

Making it all 'remote' and 'cloud' will eventually result in a bike reinvention penalty on each new employment - not everything can be rebuilt from memory only, especially things that are done 1-2 times a year; sure there is open-source documentation/examples, but at some point it'll just introduce even heavier penalty for a need to either know a lot of opensource stuff to have some reference points, or to work on a pet projects to get the same amount of references.

fensgrim commented on Direct Sockets API in Chrome 131 chromestatus.com/feature/... · Posted by u/michaelkrem

jeroenhd · a year ago

As long as they don't change the spec, this will only be available to special locally installed apps in enterprise ChromeOS environments. I don't think their latest weird app format is going to make it to other browsers, so this will remain one of those weird Chrome only APIs that nobody uses.

fensgrim · a year ago

> special locally installed apps in enterprise ChromeOS environments

There was https://developer.chrome.com/docs/apps/overview though, so this seems to be a kind of planned feature creep after deprecating former one? "Yeah our enterprise partners now totally need this, you see, no reasoning needed"

fensgrim commented on Ask HN: Tips for hacking a TV? · Posted by u/fewgrehrehre

pabs3 · a year ago

First step would be to contact Samsung and ask for the Linux kernel and other open source code for your TV. Without it you won't be able to replace the original OS properly. Also mention to them that they have to allow you to update Linux on the TV or they have to stop using Linux on their TVs.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/

fensgrim · a year ago

And they will provide it as required per law. Note that the law does not require them to provide that in a form that would be usable for anything practical without doing moderate to heavy amount of reverse engineering (e.g. here's the source, here's the toolchain that was released in approximately same period of time, go figure out if this can even be built without recreating part of their internal build system, missing configs, etc).