Just wait until we see what China can produce for a war
Add about two zeros to what the West collectively can build.
Readit Newsthrowaway9870 commented on French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar politico.eu/article/soar-... · Posted by u/dClauzel
throwaway9870 commented on ZeroMQ – Relicense from LGPL3 and exceptions to MPL 2.0 github.com/zeromq/libzmq/... · Posted by u/excerionsforte
What does it mean to assert in this context? I assume not the same thing as C's assert macro; is it the EE sense of "pulling a pin high / low"?
I literally meant the library would call assert() on incoming data. I am fairly certain that has been removed for a long time, but it can be hard to get past first impressions.
throwaway9870 commented on ZeroMQ – Relicense from LGPL3 and exceptions to MPL 2.0 github.com/zeromq/libzmq/... · Posted by u/excerionsforte
> It asserted on received data, which in a network application is a super newbie mistake
What do mature network applications do instead?
What I mean is literally have an assert with incoming data as the parameter:
> assert(data_buf[4] < 8);
While your protocol might guarantee that data_buf[4] should always be a value less than 8, you don't use assert() to check it because it aborts the program if the check fails. The proper thing to do is a range check that returns an error for a protocol error (malformed data, etc.).
ZeroMQ literally called assert and any bad data coming in over the wire would cause your app to abort. Insane.
Here is an example bug report:
https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/issues/186
Keep in mind this was a LONG time ago! So this is not an indictment of the current project!
So much of our industrial tooling has been optimized for mass manufacturing. It's incredible what can be done to push unit prices down for large volume production.
Because of the focus on mass manufacturing, hardware is incredibly expensive to change. The industry seems to have centered around doing more planning up front.
But we (software people), learned 20 years ago (from select Hardware companies) that this is backwards. If the cost of change is high, and that's where your pain is, change more frequently. Mitigate that pain and make it a strength. (See: Toyota Production System)
I have a product with an addressable market of something like 300 to 500 units per year. That puts me in the Defense/Aerospace/Medical area, where unit economics are completely insane.
And yes. It does feel like being ripped off when someone puts ~30 minutes ($20 max) of Western labor into something and then turns around and charges me $800 for the privilege of supporting an American company.
> I have a product with an addressable market of something like 300 to 500 units per year. That puts me in the Defense/Aerospace/Medical area, where unit economics are completely insane.
I have manufactured in that area and while you are not going to be in the mass volume pricing levels, you don't have to be in the defense level either. You just have to build the product with the right trade-offs and design the appropriate manufacturing processes. Few seem to know how to do this.
Edit: let me expand. Don't injection mold if you can avoid it. Do resin castings or thermo-forming, neither require as expensive of tooling. 3D print parts with a good material like PC CF. Metal fabrication is easy and cheap these days. You can get a shop to laser cut, form, insert PEMs and powder coat for very reasonable prices. We are starting to get a lot of machined parts from China. You can source wire harnesses from China also. Do assembly with a small team. Use as much off-the-shelf electronics as possible, but don't be afraid to make small and simple PCBs if it makes your product cheaper and simpler. Leave the complex boards to a vendor initially because while they might seem simple to design, they can be complex to debug and production test properly.
throwaway9870 commented on ZeroMQ – Relicense from LGPL3 and exceptions to MPL 2.0 github.com/zeromq/libzmq/... · Posted by u/excerionsforte
Back in 2014, I was rebuilding the core of an event processing engine. At the time, the decision was between Apache Kafka and rolling our own. After investigating Zookeeper, we decided to roll our own and chose ZeroMQ as the messaging layer as our on-prem customers probably didn't want to own and manage Zookeeper.
ZeroMQ was absolutely solid and stable; incredibly trouble free and the only issues we ran into were when IT teams didn't open the ports we documented in the configuration procedure. (The resultant architecture actually looks a lot like Flink)
In any case, ZeroMQ is a fantastic piece of technology that I feel like I don't see out in the wild quite enough. It's dead simple and incredibly stable from my experience.
The problem is that it started out as any but stable and reliable. It asserted on received data, which in a network application is a super newbie mistake. When I looked at it, the pub/sub socket would hang forever if the other end interrupted the connection. So the zeromq guide which said "look how easy it is" was only true if you ignored errors. If you are writing network code and ignore errors, well, good luck. That was a long time ago (~10yrs) so if it is better now, good for them. Also, both founders have left the project. One passed from cancer, the other didn't like what he built and started over in C. Not that they can't be replaced, but transitions can be hard and take time.
I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion
User Story:
As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use.
I think the above describes the product that everyone wants
It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me
Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever?
edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...
Because the product engineering isn't as important as the community and organization. I got excited about Firefox when it forked from Netscape, but since then I have been unimpressed.
throwaway9870 commented on OpenSSH 9.5 released with keystroke timing obfuscation lwn.net/Articles/946497/... · Posted by u/surteen
Somehow I've never heard of Curve448 or the company Rambus. It's giving me (unfounded) Crypto AG vibes.
Rambus is an interesting company. I can't vouch for their crypto offerings, but they have been around since the 90's and at one point pioneered high-speed DRAM interfaces. Lots of what we see in DDR today is based on ideas and concepts they pushed forward in their proprietary interface. Early on, they definitely did innovative work.
IIRC, their interfaces were used in some Sony play-stations and also some Intel systems.
throwaway9870 commented on D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect axios.com/local/washingto... · Posted by u/saguntum
>From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers.
If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives. Most of the stores I shop at won't actually be able to sell me anything, because none of the products have price tags and I sincerely doubt that any of their staff are trained to revert to pen-and-paper accounting. Even if they did manage to keep things running, they'd likely run out of change by the end of the day. The grocery stores are JIT and have no more than a few days of stock of anything; again, I doubt there's a manual backup to their reordering system.
Maybe things are different in countries with less reliable infrastructure, but I just can't think of a scenario in which cash would gain you any appreciable amount of resilience without much wider systemic changes. So much other stuff beyond payments is wholly reliant on technology. I'm not sure that would be a wise investment versus improving the resilience of power distribution and network infrastructure.
Have you never walked into a store and they said you can't use a CC because their reader is down? It is nice to have a few dollars in your pocket for times like that.
I find it interesting that all the answers using hardcoded values / if statements (or while) are all doing up to five comparisons.
It goes B, KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, EiB and no more than that (in all the answers) so that can be solved with three if statements at most, no five.
I mean: if it's greater or equal to GiB, you know it won't be B, KiB or MiB. Dichotomy search for the win!
Not a single of the hardcoded solutions do it that way.
Now let's go up to ZiB and YiB: still only three if statements at most, vs up to seven for the hardcoded solutions.
I mention it because I'd personally definitely not go for the whole log/pow/floating-points if I had to write a solution myself (because I precisely know all too well the SNAFU potential).
I'd hardcode if statements... But while doing a dichotomy search. I must be an oddball.
P.S: no horse in this race, no hill to die on, and all the usual disclaimers
Your comment and mine are basically the same. This is what I call terrible engineering judgement. A random co-worker could review the simple solution without much effort. They could also see the corner cases clearly and verify the tests cover them. With this code, not so much. It seems like a lot of work to write slower, more complex, harder to test and harder to review code.
I don't understand. There are 7 suffixes, can't you pick the right one with binary search? That would be 3 comparisons. Or just do it the dumb way and have 6 comparisons. How are two log() calls, one pow() call and ceil() better than just doing it the dumb way? The bug being described is a perfect example of trying to be too clever.