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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Tests.
    Target the “business logic”.
    You can structure your code to facilitate unit or integration testing.
    Setup tests for the key functionality. Whenever a bug gets reported, create a test or test case to address that bug, fix the bug, and ensure the test now passes.

    Have a staging environment, so the site can be interacted with and tested without touching anything in production.
    You can push to this often, and request some help with QA to ensure nothing is broken.

    Have a testing environment. Again, a complete duplication of the infrastructure.
    Set up end-to-end tests. These automate interactions with the entire application.
    Have tests that run against key features. “Setup appropriate state, load form page, fill in form, click button, check that database entries are correct”… “setup appropriate state, check that submission summary shows correct data”.
    These are quite handy, but a lot slower and fragile than unit and integration tests.

    There are automated testing platforms that can capture a “good” state of a website, then use image matching to ensure further runs visually match what it should look like.
    These are normally expensive and finiky.

    Hopefully you will get to a stage with your testing that your unit and integration tests catch 90% of your potential bugs, and e2e tests will ensure the core functionality is working correctly.
    Then, as you do a bunch of work, you can run your tests, see they all pass, and be confident.

    Finally, I will say that tooling like frameworks and typescript can catch a lot of these errors quite quickly.
    However, these won’t catch logic bugs - which is what tests are for.


  • DVI and HDMI are actually the same video signal. Which is why adapters are so cheap.
    DP can carry an HDMI encoded signal (and thus a DVI signal), which is why DP->HDMI and DP->DVI adapters are so cheap. It’s called DP Dual Mode or Multi Mode or something like that.
    I haven’t encountered a device that outputs DisplayPort that cannot output the Dual Mode HDMI encoded signal as well.

    HDMI/DVI->DP is an active conversion - ie it is re-encoding it. Which is why the converters are significantly more expensive.

    However, it’s all digital. If the signal quality degrades, it will be very obvious because it stops working (sparkles on a black screen, lines, flashes, all sorts).





  • I will say that a good scammer will circumvent a lot of the “earning trust” stage.
    Through social engineering or just sheer luck, they will catch you at a time when your guard is down and they will manipulate a sense of urgency.

    “Hi mom, my phone fell in the toilet and I really need it for work tomorrow. I’m using a friends phone right now, all my bank access was on that phone. I’m so stressed. Can you send me $800 via (dodgy website) so I can buy a new phone and get to work”.

    Instantly hits on an emotional pressure point. Adds a huge sense of urgency, with good reasons for an untrusted number and a dodgy payment method, and makes it seem difficult to corroborate with the mom’s kid.

    “Hello, this is your real estate agent. Unfortunately there has been a complication with the purchase of your new house. Due to extra fees, $10,000 needs to be transferred to X by midnight, otherwise the banks will reject the purchase/mortgage/whatever. Sorry for the out-of-hours contacts, I’m currently in (city) on other business and not in the office”

    Another hugely stressful scenario. Massive sense of urgency with a disastrous deadline.
    People don’t buy houses every day, and may not be fully aware of the process. They might take this as an unexpected but legit part of the process.
    Obviously, this requires significant social engineering to set the scam up in the first place (knowing someone is buying a house and roughly when). But the payout can be significant.

    The biggest piece of advice I can give is:
    If someone is applying a sense of urgency on any decision: STOP.
    Take a breather, think about the scenario. And then contact “the person/company” via another way through means you research yourself.

    If it’s on the phone, ask for a case number, Google the company and phone them directly. By text or email, same thing. Find their phone number via Google.
    If it is legitimate, an extra 30m isn’t going to harm anything. Especially if you say “sorry about that, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam or not”.


  • Go to steam, right click the game and browse local files.
    Navigate to something like Deep Rock Galactic\FSD\Content\Movies and delete (or move) them.

    I’ve played other games with annoying intros. Normally, deleting the files means the don’t play on startup.
    Where they are depends on the game. A quick Google found this solution.

    You will probably have to re-delete them after an update, and after running a “verify local files”.
    I’ve done this with EAC games without issues (incase you are worried)




  • I can tell you that big data centers likely have a 4 year hardware cycle, where it is all under warranty and service contract.
    After which, it gets sold to refurbishers who refurb it and resell it. Or the datacenter may repurpose it for labs, OOB hardware, or donate it to schools.

    A lot of smaller companies don’t need the latest and greatest, and are quite happy running old 2nd hand hardware.

    Even after they are done with it, there are plenty of hobbyists that will buy it. I have a couple 8 year old servers that run absolutely fine for what I need.

    Old servers are also kept around as parts for companies that refuse to update old hardware (and will just keep buying spares, or like-for-like replacements).
    The last step is ewaste, where the good stuff gets boiled in acid to extract the gold, or whatever they do.

    The only things that are generally destroyed during hardware cycles are the storage, and that’s normally for compliance reasons.