gregmac (u/gregmac) - Readit News

gregmac commented on Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again) devblogs.microsoft.com/do... · Posted by u/IcyWindows

a1o · 20 days ago

My guess is if you build with .NET Framework you can just forever run your builds, but if your source code is based on newer .NET you have to update to a new version each year, and deal with all the work in upgrading your entire project, which also means everyone in your team is also upgrading their dev environment, and now you have new things in the language and the runtime to deal with, deprecation and all that. Plus lots of packages don’t update as fast when version changes occurs, so chances are you will probably take more work and use as few dependencies as possible if at all, which may cause a lot of work. Instead it’s best to, if you need to depend on something, to be a very big Swiss Army knife like thing.

I think node is just more flexible and unless .NET Framework like forever releases or much longer term support make a come back, there’s no good trade off from node, since you don’t even get more stability.

gregmac · 20 days ago

> if your source code is based on newer .NET you have to update to a new version each year

.NET has a really refreshingly sane release life cycle, similar to nodejs:

- There's a new major release every year (in November)

- Even numbers are LTS releases, and get 3 years of support/patches

- Odd numbers get 18 months of support/patches

This means if you target LTS, you have 2 years of support before the next LTS, and a full year overlap where both are supported. If you upgrade every release, you have at least 6 months of overlap

There's very few breaking changes between releases anyway, and it's often in infrastructure stuff (config, startup, project structure) as opposed to actual application code.

gregmac commented on IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products ikea.com/global/en/newsro... · Posted by u/lemoine0461

niceguy1827 · a month ago

I've seen somebody on Reddit using LoRa stuff for the home.

The problem with these wifi based sensors is that you eventually run out of IP addresses (yes you could get fancy with subnet setup but still). Another problem is that at some point you might want to swap routers -- I had to swap out a faulty Netgear router, and the re-set was a major PITA. For these reasons I've been moving to Zigbee.

gregmac · a month ago

It's good to move to Zigbee/thread/z-wave anyway because they're all better protocols for smarthome stuff. Plus wifi means you might be buying stuff that relies on cloud, which is a non-starter for anyone that doesn't like buying future paperweights.

But your criticisms are strange. You have more than 254 devices connecting (which implies a complex setup) but can't increase the subnet size? Or does your router just have an absurdly small default DHCP range?

I also don't understand the swap your router problem, unless you're also using default SSIDs and not changing it. Configure the SSID and PSK to be the same as before and everything will just work.

gregmac commented on IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products ikea.com/global/en/newsro... · Posted by u/lemoine0461

cameldrv · a month ago

I really like the idea of an open, local standard for this stuff. I have been a little annoyed at the matter standards immaturity still. Two things I’ve noticed is that there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi. What you’d like to do, for example for a battery powered sensor, is to go into deep sleep and disconnect from the WiFi and then wake up periodically and report the sensor reading. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, you can’t really tell a matter hub that you’re going to disconnect from wifi and when you expect to reconnect and not have matter mark the device as missing. There are some things you can do with certain WiFi routers, but they’re not universally supported and they have time limits.

The device type catalog is also somewhat limited, for example there’s no garage door device type.

gregmac · a month ago

> there’s not good support for very low power devices that use WiFi

That's why we have Thread. Wifi just isn't a very efficient protocol for using with deep sleep. The radio takes more power to run, the overhead of connecting is higher, and the device needs a full IP stack. Even with power save mode (if supported by client and AP), the radio is on for hundreds of milliseconds to send a message.

Thread has "sleepy end device" profile built-in where the hub will queue messages and expects the device to be in deep sleep most of the time. And since it doesn't have so much overhead, the radio only has to be on for tens of milliseconds.

gregmac commented on It's the “hardware”, stupid haebom.dev/archive?post=4... · Posted by u/haebom

_vaporwave_ · 2 months ago

> The iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design. It was because it packed everything we needed every day—phone calls, music, internet, photos, maps—into a single device.

Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.

gregmac · 2 months ago

When I first saw the iPhone I remember thinking how silly it was that a device calling itself a "phone" only had the phone function as of many apps. Other phones had internet and other features, sure, but their "home" screen, so to speak, was a phone UI. You had to hit "Menu" or something else to see the other apps, which were clearly secondary to the primary phone function.

The iPhone felt more like a general portable computing device that happened to also function as a phone.

Even the Blackberry up to that point still felt more like an "email/phone device" primarily (though funny enough, I never had a Blackberry myself until after the iPhone came out).

The irony now, and I suspect many people are like this, is my "phone" is barely ever used as an actual phone. It's a computer with a data plan. I am way more likely to use some kind of internet-based voice/video chat than make or take a phone call.

My phone icon is still on my home screen, but only because it is something I want to be able to get at quickly in an emergency. I'm certain it's the least-used icon on the screen, though.

gregmac commented on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year skyfall.dev/posts/slack... · Posted by u/JustSkyfall

rectang · 3 months ago

I imagine that a lot of people who make their living selling bad deals to suckers agree very strongly with you that the fault lies with the sucker.

gregmac · 3 months ago

It sounds like you think I'm victim-blaming here and that's not my intent at all.

Part of being in business is anticipating risks and having a plan -- which could be deciding to accept the risk. What sucks is you're implicitly accepting the risk of anything you didn't think of, even if the seller is quite aware or even counting on it. It's a harsh lesson when something this happens.

Slack are leveraging their position and it makes them assholes (or capitalists, I suppose, depending on your point of view), but you can't control what they do. You can only control your choices.

gregmac commented on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year skyfall.dev/posts/slack... · Posted by u/JustSkyfall

wpm · 3 months ago

I can sympathize, but this was always the end deal for cloud SaaS apps. Give em a taste, get em hooked, get years of institutional knowledge and process embedded in the app, refuse to let them export it, and crank the price up.

It's not only guys named Larry who are lawnmowers. Don't stick your hand in. *Own* your shit. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you not to. If it's "easy" it might come back to bite you.

Even if some self-hostable software stack does a rug pull and changes the license, you just don't have to update. You can go log into the database and export to whatever format you want.

gregmac · 3 months ago

> refuse to let them export it

Honestly, it's hard to feel too bad for people making the choices to use this stuff without considering an escape plan or safety net and then getting burned by it.

You choose to not get fire insurance on your house, your house burned down... like yeah, that sucks, I do genuinely feel bad that happened to you. But also, you took a risk presumably to save money and it bit you in the ass, and now you unfortunately have to pay the price.

Sometimes SaaS really does make the most sense. Having your people doing part-time, non-core operations of an important service they are not experts in can be a huge distraction (and this is a hard thing for us tech people to admit!).

But you need to go into SaaS thinking about how you'd get out: maybe that's data export, maybe it's solid contracts. If they don't offer this or you can't afford it... well, don't use it. Or take the risk and just pray your house doesn't burn down.

gregmac commented on Making Postgres slower byteofdev.com/posts/makin... · Posted by u/AsyncBanana

KronisLV · 5 months ago

I really like the idea of finding what dials can be turned and then doing so and seeing how much headroom you normally have and how far away from things breaking you are.

Plus, those sorts of artificial limitations can be really helpful in finding where your systems bottleneck and what are the main optimizations that you should do (for example, I've seen N+1 problem sneak past because at the time the performance was good enough but once there was enough data it crumbled).

gregmac · 5 months ago

> for example, I've seen N+1 problem sneak past because at the time the performance was good enough but once there was enough data it crumbled

This is a super-common problem I've had to help with many times. It generally happens with teams working on single-tenant (or single-database-tenant) products, and basically always comes back to the dev team working on a database with hundreds of things, and there's a handful of customers using 10,000+ things when it starts getting slow.

You acquire a bunch of small customers and everything is great, and it can months later before you really start to see performance impact. And often with these types of problems it just gradually slows down until finally the system hits a wall where the DB can no longer compensate and suddenly performance tanks. "It must be caused by something we just added, but it's weird, because this problem is in a totally different part of the system."

gregmac commented on Web3 Onboarding Was a Flop – and Thank Goodness tomhadley.link/blog/web3-... · Posted by u/solumos

gregmac · 5 months ago

Am I the only one struggling to decipher this?

I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.

There is not a mention of that in the article.

Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that?

Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."

gregmac commented on We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube ksagar.bearblog.dev/vjepa... · Posted by u/alexcos

jrimbault · 6 months ago

A routine gesture I've done everyday for almost all my life: getting a glass out of the shelves and into my left hand. It seems like a no brainer, I open the cabinet with my left hand, take the glass with my right hand, throw the glass from my right hand to the left hand while closing the cabinet with my shoulder. Put the glass under the faucet with left hand, open the faucet with the right hand.

I have done this 3 seconds gesture, and variations of it, my whole life basically, and never noticed I was throwing the glass from one hand to the other without any visual feedback.

gregmac · 6 months ago

And you're used to the weight of the glass, which you instantly recognize when you pick it up. If it was a different weight than you were expecting, you'd probably slow down and be more deliberate.

If you were to just do the exact same robotic "throw" action with a glass of unexpected weight you'd maybe not throw hard enough and miss, or throw too hard and possibly break it.

gregmac commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

krembo · 7 months ago

It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.

gregmac · 7 months ago

> It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware

Bloatware is unwanted software, usually pre-installed or otherwise not installed by the user, that slows down your computer and takes up space.

So if a user wants Office, it is, by definition, not bloatware.

Even if we do consider it bloatware -- pre-installed, unwanted by the user, and using up system resources -- that isn't an explanation of why Office itself is slow.