Last weekend my PC didn’t start up, it was beeping an error code. I was so scared of it being a memory issue while diagnosing.

But luckily it was a video error code. And after swapping out the GPU and still getting the beep, even more luckily, it turned out to be the display being stuck in a bad state and just needing a reboot.

Only permanent solution is to stop using smartphones altogether.

Just make sure your pagers are not backdoored with Semtex either.

Oh I remember. There are tons of events and associated handlers. Even just switching to landscape view stops and restarts an android view I think. Friends at uni handled that problem by disallowing landscape view instead of handling it hahah

The bad config file is somewhere in the middle of the chain of causality.

They changed database permissions, revealing a dormant bug in a database query, leading to config files being generated badly with duplicate lines, making them too large for intake by the bot detection service, which didn’t have good input validation and made the process panic instead, ruining the service.

This seems like old news to me. The consultation period to the VÜPF revision ran early this year. I remember because we voiced our issues with the revision through our business association Asut. Just looked it up, it was 29. Jan to 6. May.

Almost all the big parties were against it, only The Centre didn’t submit a statement : https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehmlassung-komplett-durch-20250507

And the organization Digitale Gesellschaft has since collected 15000 signatures for a petition to the Federal Council : https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/2025/05/18/petition-demokratie-statt-ueberwachungsstaat-an-bundesrat-beat-jans-vorsteher-des-eidgenoessischen-justiz-und-polizeidepartements-ejpd/

I’m not against Tuta also taking a stance, it’s good if they do. Its just a bit weird that they marked it “Breaking News”. I just wanted to give some context that this is not a new thing, and people are working against the proposal already.

shaped to look like a bone

I hope you mean wing otherwise that makes even less sense to me

When riding trains I look at the concrete cable canal running along the tracks thinking about whether we rent any fibers in that one or not.

Oh nice those 40 bit addresses, just what we needed to spice up our IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack world

With the short variable you probably also get shadowing. That’s super fun in a new code base.

Or another favourite of mine: The first time I had to edit a perl script at work someone had used a scalar and a hash with the same name. Took me a while to realize that scalars, arrays, and hashes have separate namespaces, and the two things with seemingly the same name were unrelated.

It may act on the whole market, but it doesn’t have the same impact on every OEM.

It’s a bigger issue for Valve than the console competition, who have established supply chains potentially with fixed prices for certain terms or at least more significant volume discounts, and proprietary compatibility hurdles binding their customers, so they can sell hardware at a loss if they want to.

If Valve sells the computers at a loss they run the risk of people buying them for other uses, without generating corresponding Steam profits.

I reckon it works a bit like Unix.

But seriously unless you’re a systems engineer with 15 years of experience you probably don’t know how any popular OS works (note, I’m not either, I don’t know shit). They are huge beasts with astonishing complexity.

I spent a semester writing a microkernel OS with three other students. We got the init sequence working, memory management working, a shell accessible over UART, FAT32 on an SD card, a little bit of network, and a minimal HTTP server for the demo. And this was considered a big accomplishment worthy of top grades.

And that’s only the scratching the surface of what makes an OS, just think of all the other things you need. Journaling filesystems, user and rights management, hundreds of drivers for devices and buses* full networking support, with dual stack, DNS, tunneling, wifi, then things like hibernation, sleep, power management in general, container and virtualization support, NUMA support, DMA support, graphical output, clocks and time sync, cryptography primitives and TPM support, etc etc

*I did USB only for mass storage once, that also took me a semester, and I bet PCIe is much harder.

I must have a weird sample then. My uncle specifically wants that because he doesn’t want to have a separate phone. So he has a Galaxy Tablet. And a colleague at work recently inquired how she would log in to the phone company website to charge the prepaid plan if she can’t get the login SMS.

MacBooks are pretty practical. ARM laptops like MacBooks have genuinely ridiculously good battery life; I was genuinely shocked the first time I used one.

Yeah agreed, have one at work. I just really dislike their software.

iPads cant even send SMS or make calls. The most gimped of tablets.

The rest of your list seems reasonable

Except for the exact spelling I already share a last name with a war criminal president. But since I’m in a different country and the name has a positive association with an author here, it hasn’t really seemed like an issue.

“drauf” fehlt noch :-)

Bavaria gives a shit about climate protecting iniatives

“giving a shit” means “caring about”, I think you meant the opposite

Yeah I don’t know why anyone entertains the idea.

Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you’d have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can’t keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that’s more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.

Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.

The energy I don’t know about really, but at least it doesn’t sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You’d have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don’t see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.

Haha does this mean they removed only the BypassNRO script, but not the underlying regkey?

I realise you have to be somewhat off the rocker to be a billionaire CEO, but Pat is showing more of that than I expected here.