That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.

So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.

A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.

Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!

My type is a dying breed too, the guys who do their best to write robust code and actually trying to consider edge cases, race conditions, properly sized variables and efficient use of cycles, all the things that embedded guys have done as “embedded” evolved from 6800 to Pic, Atmel and then ESP platforms.

Now people seem to have embraced “move fast and break things” but that’s the exact opposite to how embedded is supposed to be done. Don’t get me wrong there is some great ESP code out there but there’s also a shitload of buggy and poorly documented libraries and devices that require far too many power cycles to keep functioning.

In my opinion one power cycle is too many in the embedded world. Your code should not leak memory. We grew up with BYTES of RAM to use, memory leaks were unthinkable!

And don’t get me started on the appalling mess that modern engineers can make with functional block inside a PLC, or their seeming lack of knowledge of industrial control standards that have existed since before the PLC.

Gut an AC from the dump. Replace the condenser with a tube in tube heat exchanger, using your cold water as a heat sink. Brazed plate HX if you’re feeling rich. Replace the cap tube with a TXV for better load tracking. Recharge with R290.

T Sure this is even further beyond your skill level but is the best possible way to use a source of cold to chill your apartment. You can locate it anywhere convenient, not just by the window. You could likely get a COP over 5 and be discharging the water in a fairly modest stream at around 30-40C.

Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!

“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that

To be fair proper integration of an aftermarket VoIP app requires almost every permission a phone has, especially if the app wants to mirror your caller ID, and supports SMS and attaching various media.

Digital ownership, not storage. As in DRM, GaaS licensing and always-online launchers.

A ROM cartridge was physical ownership, if you had the cartridge, you could play.

A CD-key was also a form of physical ownership, install the game and type in the key from the case, you could play.

All the tradesmen in here to bootfuck this guy with our steel toes

Am farmer, can confirm. I also have my chequebook with me… Non-farmers, when was the last time you wrote a cheque, aside from rent? I feel like we’re the only ones still using them.

“I’m drunk”

Nah, it’s easy as this project would be like most mining startups - you just need a liar and a hole in the ground

Nah you just need to find some suckers idiots investors who want in on this innovative and brilliant idea.

Then honestly you don’t even have to build the pipe

Even with external volumes, I don’t think there should be any mechanism where a container can escape a bind mount to affect the rest of the host fs? I use bind mounts all the time, far more than docker volumes.

As I said,

C/++ with renewed appreciation

No such thing as eval in non-interpreted languages. Unless you’re crazy enough to invoke the compiler and exec() the result.

I used eval too in my Perl days which is why I specifically called it out. IMO any time you see eval used there should be another, more proper way to do it.

I love the term “write-only code”, it’s perfect. I used to love Perl as it felt like it flowed straight from my brain into the keyboard. What a free and magical language.

So it turned out I had ADHD. Took meds, went back to C/++ with renewed appreciation, haven’t touched Perl since as it horrifies me to look at it. What a nightmare of dangling references and questionable typing. Any language that allows you to cast a string to a function and call it really needs to sit down and think about what it’s doing.

Aspartame itself is completely safe, but recent studies have found all artificial sweeteners have metabolic effects. It’s not that the chemicals themselves are hazardous, as you say aspartame in particular has been very rigorously studied, but that it appears the body uses the sweet taste as a signal to change insulin production.

Is it better to have a diet pop than sugar pop? Definitely and I prefer Diet Coke these days, Classic feels like drinking syrup.

However it’s even healthier just to drink water, or non-caloric, unsweetened drinks like coffee or tea. Soft drinks are supposed to be a treat and not a food group, I drink maybe one a week.

If you don’t want memory-safe buffer overruns, don’t write C/C++.

Fixed further?

It’s perfectly possible to write C++ code that won’t fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it’s far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.

I’ll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.

I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I’ll be honest I’ve forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.

I just bought an old diesel Mercedes that I’m hoping will last me until the next era of car technology. I can’t believe how easy it is to work on, almost as if it was designed to be maintained instead of to discourage the owner from doing so.

Currently it’s had only 200k of its reputed million miles used up, so it has a long way to go yet!

A million tiny decisions can be just as damaging. In my limited experience with several different local and cloud models you have to review basically all output as it can confidently introduce small errors. Often code will compile and run, but it has small errors that can cause output to drift, or the aforementioned long-run overflow type errors.

Those are the errors that junior or lazy coders will never notice and walk away from, causing hard to diagnose failure down the road. And the code “looks fine” so reviewers would need to really go over it with a fine toothed comb, which only happens in critical industries.

I will only use AI to write comments and documentation blocks and to get jumping off points for algorithms I don’t keep in my head. (“Write a function to sort this array”) It’s better than stack exchange for that IMO.

I tried using AI tools to do some cleanup and refactoring of some legacy embedded C code and was curious if it could do any optimization or knew any clever algorithms.

It’s pretty good at figuring out the function of the code and adding comments, it did some decent refactoring of some sections to make them more readable.

It has no clue about how to work in a resource constrained environment or about the main concepts that separate embedded from everything else. Namely that it has to be able to run “forever”, operate in realtime on a constant flow of sensor data, and that nobody else is taking care of your memory management.

It even explained to me that we could do input filtering by using big arrays to do simple averaging on a device with only 1kB RAM, or use a long long for a never-reset accumulator without worrying about what will happen because “it will be years before it overflows”.

AI buddy, some of these units have run for decades without a power cycle. If lazy coders start dumping AI output into embedded systems the whole world is going to get a lot more glitchy.

Definitely small calibers have terminal performance issues. They lose energy fast at long range, barrel length and weight are critical, quality control is just plain not as good on cheap rimfire ammo. We had a guy in to butcher a batch of lambs for us awhile ago and his .22 misfired over 5 times…

That’s why .22 is banned for hunting in most places because while it can easily be deadly, it’s not reliably so.

When we do it ourselves I use .22 Magnum even on small animals like lambs because it’s MUCH more deadly, it’s never failed me.