Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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  • 485 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’m assuming that moving the power poles is also difficult due to property lines. I don’t know the rules in Australia, but in the US you’d have to convince the property owners to grant an easement to allow someone to install a power pole and perform routine maintenance on it. The easement is attached to the property, meaning the next owner of the property would be subject to the easement whether they like it or not. This can have a bad effect on property values and (I think) can have more significant legal ramifications.

    I doubt this… “roundabout” is the product of pure incompetence. To me, it speaks of a disconnect between the project’s requirements and resources. There’s still plenty of room for incompetence there, but if you give someone an impossible task, they’ll generally do whatever it takes to tick the boxes in the “definition of done.”

    source: I’m an incompetent person who has ticked boxes and suffered for it.

    EDIT: I should clarify that this is all based off of the assumption that the power poles don’t have anywhere else they could move to without going on private land. Maybe that’s a stupid assumption. Maybe you work with power poles frequently and I’m a gibbering fool. If that’s the case, then I can only agree.



  • I dunno, I’d slow your roll on that. Hanlon’s razor came to notoriety in the field of computer science for a reason. I’ve done software dev professionally for over ten years now and you wouldn’t believe the stupid shit I’ve seen people write. The only thing that sucks more than a computer is the human writing software for it.

    For those unfamiliar, here’s Hanlon’s razor:

    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

    EDIT: After a quick look at the CVEs, this definitely sounds like a big ol’ fuckup. It sounds like there might be some unsafe defaults in polkit as well?

    EDIT: Here’s the report from the actual researchers which is MUCH more cogent than OP’s article: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/06/17/4

    It’s chaining two separate oopsies together. This overview on GitHub also provides more details about the libblockdev side of things: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-mpgj-hch9-5rvx

    Specifically, this section:

    However, a local attacker can create a specially crafted XFS image containing a SUID-root shell, then trick udisks into resizing it. This mounts their malicious filesystem with root privileges, allowing them to execute their SUID-root shell and gain complete control of the system.

    That really doesn’t sound like something intentional to me. That sounds like a HUGE oopsy-woopsy fucky-wucky, to get technical about it.


  • Absolutely fucking yes w.r.t. the characters being stupid in the show. In the books, the people from Preservation are incredibly competent.

    TV SHOW AND BOOK SPOILERS

    As an example, book Mensah would NOT have had a fucking panic attack dragging a sensor up a mountain alone because she would not have been foolish enough to put herself in that situation. Book Mensah does not take needless risks. She only does inadvisable things when her moral code requires her to do so.

    Mensah and the other preservation folks are acting too much like the corporates. The books show you that living under a corporate boot makes you stunted and limited because that’s a natural consequence of the profit-focused environment they create. Preservation cares about people, so the people from there are well rounded and don’t do stupid things quite as often.

    It’s really hurting my enjoyment of the show. Why can’t we have competence porn like we used to with shows like TNG and DS9?






  • I wonder what the maximum theoretical efficiency is. The article says the current system is 20% efficient, which is not exactly good. I’m not a physicist so take this all with a grain of salt. They’re going to have to overcome generation losses (this article says diode lasers can be 60% efficient but have Problems™), transmission losses (the inverse square law is a bitch, and they’ll have to contend with atmospheric absorption and scattering), and receiving losses (they’re using PVs which are famously not super duper efficient). I’m sure they’re working on all of this, and it seems reasonable that you might be able to get power transmission up to, say, 50% efficiency. That’s great and has its uses, but it’s not going to replace transmission lines, batteries, solar panels, and gas generators. Plus, we’re talking about sending 10 kilowatts of power across 200 km via light. Can you imagine how dangerous that would be? Like, what happens to anything in the path of that laser beam? What happens if the light gets reflected? a 10kW CW laser is no fucking joke!

    EDIT: I could see this being useful for recharging/powering drones or something. It also seems like it would be much more useful in space where atmospheric scattering becomes a nothing burger.




  • Each VM can be sized appropriately for the demands of the container. With docker desktop, you can’t have a container use all of your system cores without making the VM have access to all of your cores all the time always. One of the biggest benefits (imo) of running containers on a Linux workstation is that if you don’t define a CPI limit, a container can use all the compute/memory on your system. You just can’t do that with Docker desktop. This also affects multi threaded container builds when you’re using buildkit.

    Being able to spin up a vm to build a container with all cores accessible to it, and then run the actual container with a smaller number of cores would make container builds so much faster.

    EDIT: I’ve looked, and it appears that podman desktop also does 1 big VM, rather than having 1 VM per container.