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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • To me 16 is long haha.

    I usually end up running with 16 characters since a lot of services reject longer than 20 and as a programmer I just like it when things are a power of two. Back in the Dark Times of remembering passwords my longest was 13 characters so when I started using a password manager setting them that long felt wild to me.

    I do have my bank accounts under a 64 character password purely because monkey brain like seeing big security rating in keepass. Entropy go brrrrrrrrrrrr


  • I’ve used cloud based services for password managers for work and “self host” my personal stuff. I barely consider it self hosting since I use Keepass and on every machine it’s configured to keep a local cached copy of the database but primarily to pull from the database file on my in-home NAS.

    Two issues I’ve had:

    Logging into an account on a device currently not on my home network is brutal. I often resort to simply viewing the needed password and painstakingly type it in (and I run with loooooong passwords)

    If I add or change a password on a desktop and don’t sync my phone before I leave, I get locked out of accounts. Two years rocking this setup it’s happened three times, twice I just said meh I don’t really need to do this now, a third time I went through account recovery and set a new password from my phone.

    Minor complaint:

    Sometimes Keepass2Android gets stuck trying to open the remote database and I have to let it sit and timeout (5 minutes!!!) which gets really annoying but happens very infrequently which is why I say just minor complaint

    All in all, I find the inconvenience of doing the personal setup so low that to me even a $10 annual subscription is not worth it




  • Ironically enough Aurora city water consistently wins awards for it’s quality lol.

    I think the legitimate reason is that Aurora is a physically massive city, has lower housing costs than the rest of the metro area, and Denver has a habit of forcing its homeless population out and into Aurora. The police department is also an absolute good ole boys club who are all terrified of city residents to the point where they drive unmarked/undercover vehicles by default (at least it seems that way, I see so few marked police cars but whenever there’s a collection of cop cars with lights going the majority are the undercover)

    Sauce: Current Aurora, CO resident. It’s not all bad


  • If Wells Fargo had amazing management, was a massive and undeniable benefit to humanity, and every one of their employees loved working there, how precisely would that have changed the outcome here?

    The only two things that I can think of that would have changed what happened is 1) Security actively monitored every single person’s activity within the building at all times and make notes so one of the security team would notice that she’s been slumped over for a long time, and 2) management insisted that all team members are in office every single day to ensure that they all can see each other. In today’s work culture, I’d argue that doing either of those things is bad management.

    You say the point is that it happened at Wells Fargo, but let’s be more clear here: is your goal to find any reason to help justify your distaste of Wells Fargo?

    I do believe Wells Fargo has a lot to answer for, but let’s be honest and just in what we go after companies and people for. If we constantly attack entities we don’t like for anything that on first pass sounds bad, eventually we’ll have called wolf too many times and legitimate complaints will get ignored




  • For graphics, the problem to be solved is that the N64 compiled code is expecting that if it puts value X at memory address Y it will draw a particular pixel in a particular way.

    Emulators solve this problem by having a virtual CPU execute the game code (kinda difficult), and then emulator code reads the virtual memory space the game code is interacting with (easy), interprets those values (stupid crazy hard), and replicates the graphical effects using custom code/modern graphics API (kinda difficult).

    This program is decompiling the N64 code (easy), searches for known function calls that interact with the N64 GPU (easy), swaps them with known valid modern graphics API calls (easy), then compiles for local machine (easy). Knowing what function signatures to look for and what to replace them with in the general case is basically downright impossible, but because a lot of N64 games used common code, if you go through the laborious process for one game, you get a bunch extra for free or way less effort.

    As one of my favorite engineering phrases goes: the devil is in the details


  • Having grown up and still have the majority of my family live in rural areas, you’re correct in that there’s a mentality that animals are tools, a means to an end. But I don’t think many with that mentality will be forgiving of her for this.

    With that mentality there is also a general understanding that these are “dumb animals” who can and will fuck up and especially hunting dogs need a lot of training. A dog who fails the training isn’t usually put down, just either given some less strict job, kept as a pet or put up for adoption. Taking her at her word, it sounds like the dog had killed some chickens and had turned towards her and tried biting. But being the dog was only 14 months old, sounds like it had an excited temperament and hadn’t learned just how much bigger than other animals it truly is. Hardly a reason to kill an animal, even if it was just raised as a tool.


  • Yes and no.

    Chess bots (like Stockfish) are trained on game samples, with the goal of predicting what search path to keep looking at and which moves will result in a win. You get game samples by playing the game, so it made sense to have stockfish play itself, since the input was always still generated by the rules of chess.

    If a classifier or predictive model creates it’s own data without tying it to the rules and methods in reality, they’re going to become increasingly divorced from reality. If I had to guess, that’s what the guy in the article is referencing when talking about “sanitizing” the data. Some problems, like chess, are really easy. Mimicking human speech? Probably not




  • I think part of the “what do I do with this” factor for the iPad was that Apple (and other companies still to this day) were so hell bent on making everything smaller and more compact that releasing a larger product was marketing whiplash. Not to mention that smartphones were being pitched as this “do everything device” so why would you need anything else?

    After you get over that marketing sugarcoating, it becomes pretty obvious what you’d use an iPad for. Internet and media consumption at a larger scale than your phone, easier on your eyes than a phone, but retains at least some of the lightweight smaller form factor that separates it from a regular laptop. Sure you didn’t have the stick it in your pocket advantage of a phone or the full keyboard and computational power of a laptop, but there was this in-between that for a modest fee, you could have the conveniences if you can live with/ignore the sacrifices.


  • I don’t think the MacBook Airs launch is a good comparison.

    Sure there was an early adopter tax on being one of the first “thin and light” laptops, but people already know what you can use a MacBook for, there was already a large value proposition in having a MacBook, the extra cost was entirely being more portable than it’s full size counterparts. Everything you can do on a Mac, just way easier to take on the go.

    I’ve read a few reviews on it, watched MKBHD’s initial review, and outside of a few demo apps they point to the vision pro having no real point to it. Which if true, then it falls in line with existing VR headsets that are a fraction of it’s cost and in a niche market, being three times the cost of your competitors is not a good position to be