zackmorris (u/zackmorris)

zackmorris commented on The Therac-25 Incident (2021) thedailywtf.com/articles/... · Posted by u/lemper

zackmorris · 14 hours ago

Our power went off a couple off weeks ago due to wind probably knocking a branch into a power line. Now our Frigidaire microwave runs with the door open.

Supposedly there are mechanical switches that prevent that, but evidently "modern" microwaves can control the gun through the logic board.

The engineering failures that led to this, from conceptual to design to internal control, boggle my mind. I'm not even sure where to send a complaint or if it would result in any kind of compensation. Because billion dollar corporations know that they'll never have to face any kind of corporate death penalty because they're protected by limited liability. So we'll just buy another $150 microwave instead.

Are smaller companies better at engineering safety? Evidently not.

zackmorris commented on The GitHub website is slow on Safari github.com/orgs/community... · Posted by u/talboren

zackmorris · 17 hours ago

GitHub moved to a JavaScript rendering mode almost as soon as Microsoft bought it. Previously, I had been able to browse it with JavaScript disabled on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13. So even if I enable JavaScript, I can no longer browse GitHub, because they didn't bother to make their build compatible with browser versions as old as mine.

It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success.

I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.

zackmorris commented on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions github.com/ghostty-org/gh... · Posted by u/freetonik

zackmorris · 6 days ago

Um, no.

Doesn't anyone see that this can't be policed or everyone becomes a criminal? That AI will bring the end of copyrights and patents as we know them when literally everything becomes a derivative work? When children produce better solutions than industry veterans so we punish them rather than questioning the divine right of corporations to rule over us? What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?

I wonder if a lot of you are as humbled as I am by the arrival of AI. Whenever I use it, I'm in awe of what it comes up with when provided almost no context, coming in cold to something that I've been mulling over for hours. And it's only getting better. In 3-5 years, it will leave all of us behind. I'm saying that as someone who's done this for decades and has been down rabbit holes that most people have no frame of reference for.

My prediction is that like with everything, we'll bungle this. Those of you with big egos and large hoards of wealth that you thought you earned because you are clever will do everything you can to micromanage and sabotage what could have been the first viable path to liberation from labor in human history. Just like with the chilling effects of the Grand Upright Music ruling and the DMCA and HBO suing BitTorrent users (edit: I meant the MPAA and RIAA, HBO "only" got people's internet shut off), we have to remain eternally vigilant or the powers that be will take away all the fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent#C...

So no, I won't even entertain the notion of demanding proof of origin for ideas. I'm not going down this slippery slope of suing every open source project that gives away its code for free, just because a PR put pieces together in a new way but someone thought of the same idea in private and thinks they're special.

zackmorris commented on EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum cointelegraph.com/news/eu... · Posted by u/6d6b73

sackfield · 22 days ago

This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?

zackmorris · 22 days ago

This is the same problem in the US. Legislation (that protects the environment, minorities, the ability to compete in the market, etc) that took years, even decades to get signed into law, is getting repealed today by the current administration via executive order or simple majority vote. Because sabotage is much easier than building something.

Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.

I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:

https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...

zackmorris commented on Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance whitecoatinvestor.com/fin... · Posted by u/wallflower

drstewart · a month ago

So through that lens how do you explain the healthcare situation before the start of tariffs, or is your entire worldview shaped based only on the news you read in the last three days?

zackmorris · 23 days ago

Sorry for my late reply.

I believe that the US healthcare crisis started in 1973 when Nixon signed the HMO Act, which had the effect of tying health insurance to employment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Maintenance_Organizatio...

The alternative would have been some kind of single-payer option where US tax dollars would fun Medicare and/or Medicaid for all. Here is an explanation I found:

https://medicaiddirectors.org/resource/understanding-managed...

This differs from a public option, which would be a generic insurance offered by the government at a substantial savings over private:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/07/why-a-public-opt...

A public option likely would be 20-50% less expensive than private due to the 80/20 rule and the fact the European healthcare is about 1/2 the cost of US healthcare, so a current $400/month plan might be $200-320/month:

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...

https://nashbio.com/blog/healthcare/the-healthcare-divide-pr...

Unfortunately Obamacare (Romneycare) forced everyone to get insurance or face a tax penalty mandate, which was lifted by Trump in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017:

https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/affordable-care-a...

-

Knowing these facts, what's really going on? Two things:

* Obamacare did little to address the natural monopoly aspect of healthcare, so costs exploded

* Republican concerns about government overreach into our private lives (knowing our info and determining who receives care) and negative impacts on private health industries have not been heard

Natural monopolies are things that everyone needs, such as water, sewer, trash, electricity, education, healthcare, etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Meaning that eventually running a capitalist system results in 1 or 2 companies controlling the entire market and charging whatever they wish, since high cost of entry prevents competition. Without competition, there is no supply and demand curve to counteract price increases. In other words, whoever controls the water can sell it at any price. Or insulin, or Epipens, or Hepatitis C treatments.

The only way to bring costs down on a natural monopoly is through regulation. Society chooses which firm(s) will supply the good or service, and how much it will cost. Overages are paid through subsidies, which can be high, but are at least under public review, unlike when private industry controls a market.

These are the reasons why healthcare got so expensive. But the meaning behind it, that's more nuanced.

The US is very into individual responsibility. Our belief is that a strong citizenry ensures a strong nation. Because we defeated not just fascism in WWII, but the rise of socialism and communism during the Cold War. Our privately funded athletes beat state-funded athletes in the Olympics. Our private industry runs more efficiently than (for example) national construction projects in Russia and China which built cities that nobody lives in. We have our own pork barrel projects, but they tend to be limited by public scrutiny, unlike in communist nations.

The US is also very into privacy. We have medical privacy laws like HIPAA which may not exist with state-funded medical care. Now, this is a half-truth, because Europe has arguably the same or better privacy than we do. Because there is little incentive to sell medical information there, unlike here.

What it really comes down to is that people who are used to paying through the nose for US health insurance after a lifetime of hard work aren't ready to see others receive it for free through the government. They don't want someone determining how long they have to wait for care, or if they receive it at all. They perceive government red tape as making health providers even more expensive or putting them out of business. As in, why would doctors go to medical school merely to be paid little more than teachers and other public servants? Yes, privacy may be impacted with single-payer. But in the US, the answer is usually about $$$.

Sadly, this debate has resulted in the lose-lose we see today: rising costs with no backstop, and threatened privacy due to regulatory capture by health companies which have misaligned incentives and are too big to fail.

-

My solution to this political impasse would be a gradual transition to single-payer healthcare (probably Medicare for All) on an opt-in basis, either at the state or individual level. Knowing that taxpayers who opt in may pay a higher rate for a time to supplement those on private insurance. Until enough people are in the single-payer system that it becomes self-evidently better and the majority switch to it. Similar to private school vouchers, except going the other direction: public healthcare vouchers.

People could still buy private insurance to supplement Medicare for All and go to the front of the line. I don't like it, because I believe that healthcare is a human right that shouldn't depend on money, but this is America. If someone has the money to pay doctors overtime, then it probably makes little economic sense to stop them.

Medical research should go back to the previous university/publicly funded model. So grants would be available for companies pursuing billion dollar cures for cancer and other diseases which diminish quality of life or its duration. Then medications would be sold at close to wholesale price. This eliminates the current problems where pharmaceutical companies sell treatments instead of cures, that tend to start out very expensive.

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Sorry this got so long. I believe that you'd receive a similar summary from an LLM, and that without this context, a debate would fall into dogmatic attacks that lead nowhere.

Edit: fixed small typos.

zackmorris commented on Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance whitecoatinvestor.com/fin... · Posted by u/wallflower

toomuchtodo · a month ago

There seems to be no will to replace this dysfunctional arrangement with a social safety net unfortunately.

zackmorris · a month ago

Because injustice is corruption.

So every area of our lives that feels like it doesn't work like it used to - cost of living, healthcare, education, antitrust enforcement, journalism, accountability at the highest levels - represents a segment of the economy which has been corrupted.

Through this lens, socioeconomic policies start to make sense. For example, if your goal is to skim a fraction of the income from everyone in an economy and redirect those funds to specific goals/organizations/individuals, you could put tariffs on common goods and pass the funds collected on to companies granted large government contracts. Then the largest companies like GM and Ford see their profits reduced or even show a loss, while Grok and Palantir have all the money they need for mass surveillance.

Explanations for regulatory capture aren't normally this reductive, but wealth inequality has reached such monumental proportions that the simplest answer tends to be the right one when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

zackmorris commented on The hit film about overworked nurses that's causing alarm across Europe theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/mykowebhn

zackmorris · a month ago

"Nurses should be at the very top of our social hierarchy but we live in a world where it’s just the opposite," she says. "This film is a love letter to the profession."

I moved furniture for 3 years in the early 2000s to support my shareware business. Something like 500 moves, sometimes 9+ hours per day, occasionally 6 days per week. It made me who I am today, but also broke me in countless ways.

I witnessed single mothers giving us $20 tips each (around $40 today) while wealthy people didn't even offer us water. I saw the best and worst of the human condition, sexist pay policies, how workers are exploited by not being provided a schedule for the next few days so they have to call in each morning, how truck fuel costs more than workers' pay, how Right to Work states allow businesses to throw employees away on a whim, how tax brackets at the bottom create the impression that any additional pay gets skimmed by the man, among a great many other injustices, and how all of those conspire to keep the working class down so that a handful of individuals can become fabulously wealthy.

With every improvement in tech, I see the gulf widening. We can talk about how poor people now have cell phones and flatscreen TVs, while conveniently ignoring how people with a net worth over $10 million who couldn't spend that money in a lifetime are now buying politicians to shred the social safety net, among other dubious endeavors.

I say with complete confidence that the arrival of AGI will bring about ultimate wealth inequality. I foresee a world where 10 billion people work performatively to survive long after robots can do the work better, while less than 1 million people live like gods, free even of senescence. Assuming that we stay on this timeline and don't shift to a more equitable one.

I went into computers in the late 1980s to eventually build an android like Data. I didn't know that Turing test-passing AI would arrive 20 years early, or that I would spend the first quarter of the 21st century hustling to make rent due to unfortunate geopolitical realities driven by unmitigated greed and regulatory capture.

Now I'm not so sure that I even want to stay in tech anymore. It has been anything but kind to me. Every time I level up, so does the world, and expectations upon me just grow for the same pay. My people-pleasing has cost me my health on a number of fronts. I know that someday, I'll have to choose computers or my life.

After all of that, one might think that I'm all doom and gloom. But I'm not. I've come to treasure my time at the warehouse as a teaching tool after a great deal of shadow work. I admire my foreman for being the provider that I can only hope to be someday. I look in awe upon the borderline homeless vets, deadbeat dads and ex-cons who showed me what it is to give without expectation of reward. I see them in all of us, even the people I disagree with, and that gives me hope that maybe we can come together and avoid the iceberg that's about to sink this ship.

I'm reminded of this scene from Jaws which always stuck with me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xQQIqAiTYA

And I just watched Mountainhead, here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27cN2_k0JF0

I see a world divided into two camps: one that does much for little, and one that does little for much.

It makes me wonder where we all sit in relation to this. What kind of impact we could have on the future, and how that might help everyone to self-actualize.

I don't pretend to have the answers. Some of my best years happened when things were at their worst, and vice versa.

But I do know that everything is upside-down right now, and always has been, since the dawn of civilization. I feel that tech won't really be tech until it addresses and undoes that injustice.

That's why I write this malarky when I should be working. For all the other working people who don't have time to say what needs to be said.

zackmorris commented on Dumb Pipe dumbpipe.dev/... · Posted by u/udev4096

flub · a month ago

Fragmenting datagrams (or IP packets) is generally not a good idea. All protocol designs have been moving away from this the past few decades. If you want unreliable messages of larger than the MTU maybe taking some inspiration from Media-over-QUIC is a good idea. They use one uni-directional QUIC stream per message and include some metadata at the start of each stream to explain how old it is. If a stream takes too long to read to end-of-stream and you already have a newer message in a new uni-directional stream you can cancel the previous streams (using something like SendStream::reset or RecvStream::stop in Quinn API terms, depending on which side detects the message is no longer needed earlier). Doing this will stop QUIC from retransmitting the lost data from the message that's being slow to receive.

zackmorris · a month ago

Right, I should have been more clear about that. Window logic was perhaps the wrong term, since I don't care about resends.

The use case I have in mind is for realtime data synchronization. Say we want to share a state larger than 1500 bytes, then we have to come up with a clever scheme to compress the state or do partial state transfer, which could require knowledge of atomic updates or even database concepts like ACID, which feels over-engineered.

I'd prefer it if the protocol batched datagrams for me. For example, if we send a state of 3000 bytes, that's 2 datagrams at an MTU of 1500. Maybe 1 of those 2 fails so the message gets dropped. When we send a state again, for example in a game that sends updates 10 times per second, maybe the next 2 datagrams make it. So we get the most recent state in 3 datagrams instead of 4, and that's fine.

I'm thinking that a large unreliable message protocol should add a monotonically increasing message number and index id to each datagram. So sending 3000 bytes twice might look like [0][0],[0][1] and [1][0],[1][1]. For each complete message, the receiver could inspect the message number metadata and ignore any previous ones, even if they happen to arrive later.

Looks like UDP datagram loss on the internet is generally less than 1%:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15060180/what-are-the-ch...

So I think this scheme would generally "just work" and hiccup every 5 seconds or so when sending 10 messages per second at 2 datagrams each and a 99% success rate, and the outage would only last 100 ms.

We might need more checklist items:

  ( ) Doesn't provide a way to get the last known Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)

And optionally:

  ( ) Doesn't provide a way to get large unreliable message number metadata

zackmorris commented on Dumb Pipe dumbpipe.dev/... · Posted by u/udev4096

zackmorris · a month ago

After writing a response about using this for games below, it occurred to me that most tunneling solutions have one or more fatal flaws that prevent them from being "the one true" tunnel. There are enough footguns that maybe we need a checklist similar to the "Why your anti-spam idea won’t work" checklist:

https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wo...

I'll start:

  Your solution..
  ( ) Can't punch through NAT
  ( ) Isn't fully cross-platform
  ( ) Must be installed at the OS level and can't be used standalone by an executable
  ( ) Only provides reliable or best-effort streams but not both
  ( ) Can't handle when the host or peer IP address changes
  ( ) Doesn't checksum data
  ( ) Doesn't automatically use encryption or default to using it
  ( ) Doesn't allow multiple connections to the same peer for channels or load balancing
  ( ) Doesn't contain window logic to emulate best-effort datagrams over about 1500 bytes
  ( ) Uses a restrictive license like GPL instead of MIT

Please add more and/or list solutions that pass the whole checklist!

zackmorris commented on Dumb Pipe dumbpipe.dev/... · Posted by u/udev4096

CGamesPlay · a month ago

> QUIC which looks like a reliable, ordered protocol as opposed to the unreliable, unordered nature of UDP which is what many games need.

This isn't right, as a sibling comment mentions. QUIC is a UDP-based protocol that handles stream multiplexing and encryption, but you can send individual, unordered, unreliable datagrams over the QUIC connection, which effectively boils down to UDP with a bit of overhead for the QUIC header. The relevant method in Iroh is send_datagram: https://docs.rs/iroh-net/latest/iroh_net/endpoint/struct.Con...

zackmorris · a month ago

It would be nice if dumbpipe revealed the local and remote IP and UDP port numbers via something like STDERR or a signal so that apps could send UDP datagrams on them with ordinary socket calls. I'm guessing that QUIC uses a unique header in its first few bytes, so the app could choose something different and not interfere with the reliable stream.

A better solution would be to expose the iroh send_datagram and read_datagram calls somehow. Maybe if dumbpipe accepted a datagram flag like -d, then a second connection to a peer could be opened. It would recognize that the peer has already been found and maybe reuse the iroh instance. Then the app could send over either stream when it needs to be reliable or best effort.

This missing datagram feature was the first thing I thought of too when I read the post, so it's disappointing that it doesn't discuss it. Mostly all proof of concept tools like this are MVP, so don't attempt to be feature-complete, which forces the user to either learn the entirety of the library just to use it, or fork it and build their own.

IMHO that's really disappointing and defeats the purpose of most software today, since developers are programmed to think that the "do one thing and do it well" unix philosophy is the only philosophy. It's a pet peeve of mine because nearly the entirety of the labor I'm forced to perform is about working around these artificial and unintentional limitations.

Ok I just looked at https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.sh

  if [ "$OS" = "Windows_NT" ]; then
      echo "Error: this installer only works on linux & macOS." 1>&2
      exit 1
  else

So it appears to be linux and macOS only, which is of little use for games. I'm shocked, just shocked that I'll have to write my own..