I'll echo what other people are saying, that you should just not connect the smart tv to your wifi, but I am nervous about smart TVs that ship with cell chips to connect to the manufacturer's servers when people don't hook the device up to wifi.
I'm not sure how to determine which models do or don't ship with cell chips.
That's not a thing. Do you seriously believe OEMs would ship a 4G/5G modem and bundle an unlimited data plan with low margin consumer electronics, just to earn a few dollars per year from ads?
And man, oh man, wouldn’t we all just love a device with a free cell modem and a data plan ripe for the hacking?
IOW, if it has been done, hackaday, et al., would have already shown us how to bypass the weak obfuscation and get free data. Or at least an article on “my new Samsung TV has a cell modem that they don’t advertise. ‘da fuq?”
You can fiddle with the interface and tweak some layout parameters in the sidebar somewhat.
By the time I got it to something I liked, it severely violated the spirit of the experiment, lol (was too big and sparse, with lots of padding between items – the opposite of what it was trying to show): https://share.cleanshot.com/0xD9bPcWD1CL5wDvlVhB
And I still don't know how these numbers are used. I wouldn't be able to keep track of even 3-4 numbers at once, much less the dozens here.
I read about half the article before giving up, but is there any information what Israeli officials actually did to shape US discourse? Besides having meetings.
"It included 80 programs already under way for advocacy efforts “to be done in the ‘Concert’ way”, he said.
The “Concert” remark referred to a sprawling relaunch of a controversial Israeli government program initially known as Kela Shlomo, designed to carry out what Israel called “mass consciousness activities” targeted largely at the US and Europe. Concert, now known as Voices of Israel, previously worked with groups spearheading a campaign to pass so-called “anti-BDS” state laws that penalize Americans for engaging in boycotts or other non-violent protests of Israel.
Its latest incarnation is part of a hardline and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back at student protests, human rights organizations and other voices of dissent."
To me, the article is littered with detailed concrete examples of how Israel has sought to suppress and manipulate US public opinion and prevent or dampen normal democratic discussion, protest and actions. The above quote is in the opening few paragraphs.
> worked with groups spearheading a campaign to pass so-called “anti-BDS” state laws
What kind of groups did they work with? What kind of work did they do with them? For all I know they're funneling money to non-profits owned by family members of government officials.
Nothing special, and an exceeding amount is above board. Everyone is playing the same game, using mostly the same tactics. Get wealthy people on board, use that to get policy makers on board while buying up advertising to target and sway people one way or the other.
All foreign powers will try to do the same thing, through the legal channels, and the not so legal channels. The current order enforced on the back of the US dollar is simply too powerful to not do that. Americans are broadly naive about this, so it's relatively easy to "shock" them into caring about it.
> Knowing very little about USB audio processing, but having cut my teeth in college on 8-bit 8051 processors, I knew what kind of functions tended to be slow. I did a Ctrl+F for “%” and found a 16-bit modulo right in the audio processing code.
That feeling of saving days of work because you remember a clue from previous experience is so good.
This is very true, and we need these moments. Lately I've been struggling to figure out where my place is, how to maybe get back into freelancing, what I'm technically good at etc... lots of ruminating since I've been out of work for a year.
But.. I met someone at the gym who's been struggling with an esoteric problem on an ancient piece of software for over a decade, and they approached me to ask if I could solve it. I said "maybe", sat on it for a few days, and then replicated the issue on my machine and solved their problem in about an hour. I asked for $50 and they gave me double, which was wildly more rewarding than being paid $100k to write react all year, not that that salary is on the table any longer.
$50 for a one off thing, for a gym buddy is fine. in the blue collar world, that would be a 'case of beer' for helping me out.
But in business, you need to charge an honest / fair amount. (sure, sometimes that 1 hour bug fix had $100K of 'value', but we could argue about honest / fair).
You mention being an employee at $100K a year. Double that, gives you a contractor rate of $100 an hour. That is the floor of what you should be asking floor; as in the absolute lowest. Another $50 or $100 an hour is still fair and honest in todays economy.
F-that! That's one of those times where I re-enact the scene from the Bond Golden Eye film where the guy jumps up extending both arms yelling "Yes! I am invincible!" Of course I totally expect the hubris to be short lived, just maybe not with liquid nitrogen
I've been known to inform people that the person that wrote the incredibly horrendous code that caused whatever problems to occur should be fired immediately knowing good and well that I was the only dev to write any of the code.
"Research shows" (I read long ago) that the happiest men are those take their wives' advice — that's certainly been true for my own N=1, for coming up on four decades now. I'd imagine we could replace "wives" with "spouses" and get comparable results.
I prefer "Why did I need to see this subtlest detail to resolve the bug, modern software sucks" and "Why do we not have better tools that would have prevented me from writing this bug in the first place, modern software sucks".
Any top-tier C compiler will optimize modular division by a constant into a more efficient operation(s). It is better to keep the intent of the code clear rather than devolve it into increasingly obtuse bit-twiddling tricks the compiler can figure out on its own.
As a total newbie I saved my company a quarter million dollars in Oracle licensing in a single afternoon by rewriting a PL/SQL function. That change was a few lines of SQL. Seniors don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.
Salary is driven by market conditions and nothing else. It is not an approximation of merit or even delivered value.
This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.
A good junior will write a hundred lines of code in a day. A good senior will delete a hundred because they realize the user dictated a solution instead of detailing their problem, asked them, and figured out that they can solve that problem by changing a config variable somewhere.
Violent agree on variance in value produced. Violent disagree on that junior, senior or other titles or roles have such strong correlations. For very simple reasons: we can’t measure value, and we absolutely can’t measure value within a performance review cycle.
The most devastating value destruction (aside from the rare intern deleting the prod db) that I’ve seen consistently is with senior/rockstars who introduce new tech, takes credit, moves on. There’s a reason for the term resume driven development. Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.
How does violent agree/disagree work? Like after you conclude you agree/disagree to this internet text, do you then proceed to scream out on your balcony that which you agree with / smash up your apartment in rage, respectively?
I don't know, I think where I work we have a pretty good idea for the value each person brings. I don't know how much they're paid, but I do know how good each person is (including whether they tend to complicate things, to use exciting technologies, etc).
But that’s the entire point you’re missing. The pay is not proportional to contribution or technical skill. It’s proportional to market forces and negotiation skill.
I know what level each of our people is, and levels are compensated fairly evenly. The fact that I don't know exact numbers doesn't mean I don't have a proxy.
> This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.
This particular case sounds like someone got incorrectly hired as a junior. Maybe they didn't have enough "real world" corporate experience and that is why they weren't offered a senior position?
It's true, not "laughably false". I've seen with my own eyes the most effective developer in a company being paid in the bottom quartile, as well as a vice versa case.
In the former case, we basically had to demand management raise his salary to the low end of his market value, over the cause of six months, until they finally gave in. It was just so disgusting to us we couldn't let it go.
The reason comes down to a skill bias - it's a different skill set to navigate other people into getting yourself a good salary, versus navigating the ins and outs of coding. The skills don't overlap, so time spent on one detracts from another.
In the end he finally got the message we kept ramming in to his head, applied to work at a brand-name tech company, and instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
This stuff is the norm. I've been a manager having eyes on salaries while also having eyes on people's performance (although unfortunately not much of a lever on the former), and rest assured it is often a very jarring experience. Like "that person should be let go immediately / that person should job hop immediately".
> instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
So it's not true, then?
The GP claims this is universally true. All I need to do is post a counterexample, and I did. Yes, there are shitty companies that try to keep salaries as low as possible, not realizing that that will lose them their best people. Don't work for those!
My view as a burgeoning senior dev is that the "senior" bit is generally less about coding and more about domain knowledge.
Understanding the business processes of your industry, how to solicit feedback from and interact with end users, how to explain things to management/sell on ideas.
If you put a junior dev in front of a panel of executives and ask them to explain requirements for a project odds are quite high they will info dump tech mumbo-jumbo. A senior should be able to explain risks, benefits, timelines, and impacted areas of the business in a manner that non technical people can easily grok.
I'm mid-level engineer. Honestly, several staff+ engineers may not be spitting tech mumbo-jumbo, but they do dump all other kind of BS. Political BS, "tactical tornados"[1]. May not necessarily mean they were good at engineering, but just good with people skills. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but I would say many are.
For me, "senior" just counts the amount of time they've been doing something. If someone isn't very good at something after putting ten thousand hours into it, they just might work at microsoft.
Statistically speaking a senior (more experienced) engineer is more likely to consistently deliver time saving results, while a junior is more likely to occasionally do it, if ever.
Proving it’s not a one time thing is what pushes you in the salary and seniority ranking.
Senior engineers have less opportunity to write time consumingly careful code because they get paid so much. Much easier to throw new great hardware at it.
The corporate structures that reward people who prove especially good at building the product with more meetings and less time building the product are perhaps not optimal in their deployment of resources.
Maximising the fraction of the product built by people who don't know what they're doing would however explain the emergent properties of modern software.
Not a monopoly, but a majority. Many juniors who do have that potential don't ever get put in such a situation.
Junior/senior isn't necessarily about skill level; I'm sure many can find a senior with 1YOE ten times over. It's about trust both in technical and sociopolitical navigation through the job. That's only really gained with time and experience (and yes, isn't perfect. Hence, the aforementioned 1x10 senior. Still "trusted" more than a 1 year junior).
why is this not considered a compiler optimization and/or language problem? it seems to me that compiler optimizations for expressive programming languages should be able to handle something like this
What would you hope a compiler to optimise x % y into?
Higher level change-the-algorithm aspirations haven't really been met by sufficiently smart compilers yet, with the possible exception of scalar evolution turning loops into direct calculation of the result. E.g. I don't know of any that would turn bubble sort into a more reasonable sort routine.
If y is always a power of 2 (as suggested in the comments), then I'd expect it to turn into an AND of some sort.
And more generally, with older architectures, integer division was much slower than integer multiplication, so compilers would generally transform this into a multiplication plus some shifts [0]. For context in that timeframe, MUL on Sandy Bridge introduces 3-4 cycles worth of latency (depending on the exact variant), compared to DIV introducing 20+ (per Agner Fog's excellent instruction tables [1]). So even computing x - y * (x / y) with the clever math to replace x/y would be much faster than just x%y. (It's somewhat closer today, but integer division is still fairly slow.)
> So even computing x - y * (x / y) with the clever math to replace x/y would be much faster than just x%y.
That only works when y is constant. Otherwise, you need to work out what to replace x/y with… which ultimately takes longer than just using the DIV instruction.
Excellent point! That said, that was the case in this particular example.
> This 16-bit modulo was just a final check that the correct number of bytes or bits were being sent (expecting remainder zero), so the denominator was going to be the same every time.
(Libraries like libdivide allow you to memoize the magic numbers for frequently-used denominators, and if on x86 you have floating point operations with more precision than you need for integer division, you can potentially use the FPU instead of the ALU: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/11/16/fast-exact-integer-divisio...)
It seems like the main source is a documentary-type video about the study, rather than any of the published follow-ups with the kids. A summary of a summary.
I'm curious to see the output. Most of the time I specifically avoid using the SDK published by the API provider because it's thousands of lines of code when all I need is ten lines wrapping fetch.
We try to keep it to a minimum, especially in JS (though we have some nice improvements coming soon when we deprecate node-fetch in favor of built-in fetch). The package sizes aren't tiny because we include thorough types and sourcemaps, but the bundle sizes are fairly tidy.
Here's an example of a typical RESTful endpoint (Lithic's `client.cards.create()`:
We raised chickens when I was a kid. They had a pretty good life, plenty of room to roam plus I fed them every day. When their time came, we gave them a quick painless death. No regrets
What is the issue with it? If they lead fairy nice long lives, I don't get it?
You must fundamentally have a problem with existence because nearly any creature that lives in the wild is going to have a very gruesome, painful lonely death.
If the worst thing that can happen is a chicken is protected, fed, given medicine when sick, have offspring and then eventually slaughtered in a rather human way after adulthood, I don't really see how it's so terrible.
But where does that stop: I can replace chicken here with your kids; still ok? What’s the difference? Dogs? Chimpansees? Dolphins? Why chickens ok and the rest not in the same example?
If a much more intelligent species comes to earth and says, we'll kill you all now , or we'll farm you for organs, at age 70; However, we'll help your species have a fairly good life and chance of survival overall ? I'd take it. Even if my kids were impacted.
Then imagine if they said: "it's likely that due to advancements in science, in 50 years we won't need to do this anymore because we'll have lab grown organs so we'll just leave you guys alone when we have what we need". I would double take that deal. This is likely where we are now.
The major difference with all of this discussion though is that obviously, animals are conscious, I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal. We're capable of understanding that our kids will be slaughtered for organs in 70 years from their birth. We also have strong emotions tied to this. So we'd be upset about it so I think that makes it a worse deal. Not the worst possible deal in such a theoretical circumstance, but it would be better than annihilation.
Definitely not saying this means this is ideal for anyone, animals or humans, nothing is perfect, I just don't think it's catastrophic.
What we have in animal agriculture is more like if the organs were farmed at age 20, and humans bred at puberty to produce more babies to feed the organ farm. Not sure why you chose age 70 in your example.
>If a much more intelligent species comes to earth and says, we'll kill you all now , or we'll farm you for organs, at age 70; However, we'll help your species have a fairly good life and chance of survival overall ?
This line of reasoning begins with a false dichotomy.
>I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal; suddenly the rationale seems a little flimsy when we consider taking mentally disabled people and 'harvesting' them simply because they don't understand it's a raw deal for them.
I wish I could articulate it generally (newborn, low on sleep atm) but there's something here about mixing levels of consciousness when determining morality that seems flawed.
From some intelligent specifies like squids we don’t know: maybe they are disturbed by it and fear and hate humanity and plan their lives to be far away from them. They do plan and they remember things over generations. Not believing they can reason or proving they cannot reason are different things.
I was fishing once, and I saw squid maul the face off a small yellow tail fish, I think the thing was still alive, it was a hideous way to go either way. It was one of the first times I realized how cruel the world can be. I used my sharp knife and made sure the little thing out of it's misery. But yeah, imagine that, being hugged by a squid and having your face chewed off by it's beak ? When I take the same fish, I use a fish spike, it's instant.
Anyway, if Squid are conscious and have such high levels of thought as you describe, then they understand the game and are likely undisturbed by it. If squid went vegan, then I'd feel worse.
This is why I think hunting is a much more fair way of obtaining protein. We're playing a much fairer game, factory farming and raping the ocean with super trawlers isn't.
Squids don’t have the option and we, admittedly, do. Nature is intrinsically and deeply cruel, but we could choose not to contribute. I think that if we do contribute, we should admit we do it for the pleasure of eating nice tasty meat and just call it worth it. I do agree with the whole hunting is better thing, but I don’t think there’s any objective reason, just vibes.
I also think that, if we can grow like lab meat in the future, we should switch to that. It’s not gonna be viable for a long time tho.
1. If you have the time to cook the required amount of vegetarian food (not easy from experience).
2. If you can digest legume based protein without issue.
3. If you want to participate in social or culture events where eating meat is part of having a social life.
Are you a full time vegan / vegetarian? I did it for 2 years, I actually would call it a "luxury".
I moved to a country where it's not yet "hip to be vegetarian" and it's virtually impossible to survive in that place. There is no "Whole Foods" in many parts of the world.
But if we have to hunt our food then all those ‘ma meat must have ma meat’ dudes living in shitty small overcrowded city apartments wouldn’t be able to get their meat and they would get very angry. Probably to the point of them starting to eat other humans as those are perfectly hunt-able in big cities.
They don’t know, that’s the difference. A human would be haunted by that for their entire life, in the same way that humans suffer because of fear of death. Chickens, dumb or not, don’t seem capable of knowing that that’s going to happen, so they enjoy their constructed lives more than a human would.
This was my line of thinking when making the comment. Obviously there has to be some balance, but in general I'm a fan of consistency, even if I'm not a big fan of the things we are being consistent on.
I think the problem with cargo culting isn't usually the stuff the cargo cult preaches
It's the constant churn of dropping the current thing for the new cargo cult whenever it comes along. Cargo culting destroys consistency by constantly seeking the next new hotness
I'm not sure how to determine which models do or don't ship with cell chips.