• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Hey, something I can maybe help with.

    Flatpak IDEs on the main system are not very useful for development. I got rid of mine entirely. I am developing firmware so it might be a bit different from your case, but what I did in have a single arch distrobox where I could install everything embedded-dev-related that had to work together (JLink, nordic tools, code-oss, etc…) on that. Then a few standalone debugging tools like STLink and Saelae logic2 could be installed to the home folder by default and Code could still find them from the distrobox (but they could be installed in the distrobox also). It doesn’t even need to have an init system, but I ran into a few problems like having to manually chmod usb devices to give STLink access. Udev rules are also hit or miss in /etc/udev/rules.d, e.g. the STM udev rules just don’t work, but nordic does.

    High storage consumption is likely negligible (or at least nitpicky) since storage is so cheap nowadays. Your SSD doesn’t care if it has 15GB or 20GB of system programs, especially when development codebases and SDKs, games, and media will likely make up 90% of space and almost never share libraries even on traditional systems.


  • But actual results and bugs have very little to do with corporate firings or open positions, as 30 years of history show us.

    If corporations “think” they can fire people, with AI as an excuse, and put that cost in their pockets, they will do it. We are already seeing it in the US tech-bro sphere.

    Companies will tank themselves in the medium-long term to make short term profits. Which I think is the “dev market” that OP is talking about. It shouldn’t affect the market, but it will because you have MBAs making technical decisions. I could be wrong, but the tech market is very predictable as far as behavior. They will hire a skeleton crew and work them to burnout to fix the AI slop. (Tech industry needs unions now)


  • Isn’t this kind of the opposite? The effectiveness of protests diminishing? Like people are doing shit and trying their best with the limited time and resources they have and people are actively getting involved resulting is the largest protests in american history.

    And yet the needle doesn’t even twitch. People are also doing their best to non-violently show that they are completely against the actions of the government, and yet the government doesn’t even care enough about the will of the people to acknowledge them or their concerns outside of an AI generated meme…

    There are only so many non-violent steps you can take with those in power completely ignoring you. Haven’t we gone through this already throughout history?



  • Yes, but I am also of the opinion that not one single acronym should be used without at least once in the section saying what the acronym is. Many many programing docs with say what am acronym is exactly once, somewhere in the docs, and then never again.

    Also, if there are more complex concepts that they use that they don’t explain, a link to a good explanation of what it is (so one doesn’t have to sift through mountains of crap to find out what the hell it does). Archwiki docs do this very well. Every page is literally full of links so you can almost always brush up on the concepts if you are unfamiliar.

    There seem to be 10 extremely low quality, badly written, low effort docs for every 1 good documentation center out there. It is hard to RTFM when the manual skips 90% of the library and gives an auto-generated api reference with no or cryptic explanations on parameters, for example.





  • I am still relatively inexperienced and only embedded. (Electronics by trade) I am working on an embedded project with Zephyr now.

    If I run into a problem I kind of do this method (e.g. trying to figure out when to use mutexes vs semaphores vs library header file booleans for checking ):

    • first look in the zephyr docs at mutexes and see if that clears it up

    • second search ecosia/ddg for things like “Zephyr when to use global boolean vs mutex in thread syncing”

    • if none of those work, I will ask AI, and then it often gives enough context that I can see if it is logical or not (in this case, it was better to use a semi-global boolean to check if a specific thread had seen the next message in the queue, and protect the boolean with a mutex to know if that thread was currently busy processing the data), but then it also gave options like using a gate check instead of a mutex, which is dumb because it doesn’t exist in zephyr.

    For new topics if I can’t find a video or application note that doesn’t assume too much knowledge or use jargon I am not yet familiar with, I will use AI to become familiar with the basic concept in the terms so that I can then go on to other, better resources.

    In engineering and programming, jargon is constant and makes topic introduction quite difficult if they don’t explain it in the beginning.

    I never use it for code with the exception of codebases that are ingested but with no documentation on all of the keys available, or like in zephyr where macro magic is very difficult to navigate to what it actually does and isn’t often documented at all.






  • I would be interested to see a figure of people with home servers that have had that happen to them. DoS & pwned yes, especially 15+ years ago before there were good resources, TLS, reverse proxies, or authentication front ends.

    I would be very interested to see any stat whatsoever of selfhosters that have gottened murdered specifically because of their server.

    It is extremely important to note that in those days, people just opened their, often out-of-date, servers completely to the internet via a DMZ or port forwarding, let ssh be open to the internet, didn’t harden ssh at all, and most people didn’t use a VPN for downloading.

    That is literally like saying that people who light wall torches in their wooden home burned their house down, so let’s not use lightbulbs or electricity.


  • Well I am learning that hardware-wise, my open source smart watch AFE might require an interrupt pin (apparently the RTC fallback that Maxim says is why a big crystal is required just doesn’t do anything and no docs on how to set up that or polling mode) to work with the algorithm chip. That brings the cost from 20€ for 5 PCBs to 350€.

    So I might need to write a new zephyr driver for the AFE chip directly and then spend months more work making an open source PPG algorithm and adjustable LED gain algorithm to keep the project going.




  • Really depends.

    I am in belgium and for Electronics engineering, there are very few jobs and a lot of candidates (and notoriously difficult to get around via car in belgium). I have 5 year of experience, recommendation letters, and good references.

    20 applications. 9 ghosted, 4 auto rejections, 2 declined by me as not a good job, 1 rejection after hiring manager interview (too far, 1.5+ hour one way in traffic and they had closer candidates just as good), 2 rejections after final interview (one ghosted, the other wanted to take both me and the other candidate on, but couldn’t), 2 offers.

    It is definitely rough in the engineering industry outside of defense.

    On the flip side, I see hundreds of software jobs here and hundreds of electrical/building automation jobs.


  • Me too, and the new one I didn’t even realize this change happened. I saw there were no breaking changes, updated, and saw “oh, it isn’t synced anymore” so I reselected the folders, it ran a sync check on everything, which took a while, and everything works fine again.

    I didn’t even realize there was a difference until now, but I guess there is a start/stop sync switch.