• 1 Post
  • 261 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle

  • I think this was Steve Jobs’ primary skill. He could see a clear vision of the product people didn’t know they wanted. Bottom to top, from the hardware to run on, to the typeface their apps used; he knew that the best user experiences happened when every level of the stack harmonized to create a very finely tuned user experience.

    Unfortunately, the people who are that good usually don’t work for free. We’re very fortunate that Valve is choosing to open source their work and keep their SteamDeck platform an open one.






  • As someone who majored in CS and is now in a software engineering position, the people in tech who come from a completely different field are always my favorite. On top of just proving people wrong about the “right” way to get into the field, they’ve been around, they know how to think about problems from other perspectives, and they’re usually better at working with other people.

    Honestly, I think more people should minor in CS, or if they did their undergrad in CS, they should have to do their grad work in something else. The ability to compute things is only useful if you’re well versed in a problem worth computing an answer to, most of which lie outside of CS.


  • they say the 30s is generally where your love for video games go to die.

    Such a claim is baseless. Video games have been evolving every few years for their entire existence. Such a claim sounds as ridiculous as someone in the 60s saying that people grow out of watching animated shows in their teens.

    Either your priorities have just shifted, or you might be in a bubble where you only see the same old games that have already been done, so nothing piques your interest.


  • I’m actually not sure what TPM can guard against, but I think you’re right, I think if a malicious OS borked with the bootloader, TPM would catch it and complain before you decrypt the other OS.

    Yeah, physical access usually means all bets are off, but you still lock your doors even though a hammer through a window easily circumvents it. Because you don’t know what the attacker is willing to do/capable of. If you only ever check for physical devices, you’ll miss the attack in software, similarly if you only rely on Secure Boot you’ll miss any hardware based attacks. It’s there as a tool to plug one attack vector.

    Also, my guess is the most common thing this protects against are stupid employees plugging a USB they found in the parking lot into their PC. If they do it while the OS is running, IT can have a policy that blocks it from taking action. But if they leave it there during a reboot, IT is otherwise helpless.



  • No point in putting locks on your house, because an attacker can just drive their car through your front door.

    The attacks you mention have their own ways of being detected: usually eyeballs. But eyeballs can’t help you against something hiding in your bootloader. So Secure Boot was made.

    And I don’t really follow your dual boot claim. If you don’t trust one of the OSes, and you boot it up on your hw, you’re already hosed. At that point it can backdoor your bootloader and compromise your other OS. Secure Boot prevents malicious OSes from being booted, it can’t help you if you willingly boot a malicious OS.




  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyztoLinux@lemmy.mlBeginners Guides
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    14 days ago

    I think you and I are using two different definitions of the word “powerful”, or are at least applying them to subtly different aspects of the discussion.

    1. I don’t know if you are familiar with basic finite automata theory, but a Finite State Machine is provably less “powerful” than a Turing Machine. This is the definition of “power” that I’m using, “power” as in “expressiveness”. i.e. The fact that you can literally create a terminal as a sub-element within a GUI if you wanted means that a GUI is provably more “powerful” (or more expressive) than a TUI. And thus the best GUI for a tool will always be better than the best TUI for the same tool. (Comparing the worst GUI vs the best TUI is a waste of time).

    2. But you’re using the definition of “powerful” as in a “powerful programming language”. This is a common use of the term, but is much more fuzzy and harder to quantify. It’s no longer synonymous with “expressiveness”. Generally a language is “powerful” if you can get “a lot done” with relatively few characters or operations. Ex. Python is often considered more “powerful” than C because you can do in a single line what would take dozens or hundreds of lines in C. Similarly, you’re saying that a developer can make a comprehensive TUI using less time and effort than it would take for them to make a GUI that’s at least as good (including integration with other tools afforded by pipes and redirects).

    And I agree with you. But hopefully you also agree with me that a GUI is objectively more “expressive” than a TUI, and in that sense has a higher ceiling for how useful it can be to a user.



  • I see several Amcrest options that look like they have integrated AI object detection. Frigate on the other hand says you should get a “Google Coral Accelerator”. Do you know if Frigate (or RTSP, I guess) has a way to leverage the built in detection capabilities of a camera (assuming they are built in, and not being offloaded to the cloud)? Or am I better of looking at the “dumb” Amcrest cameras, and just assuming all processing for all cameras will happen on my Frigate hardware?



  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyztoLinux@lemmy.mlBeginners Guides
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    15 days ago

    I’m talking about a properly made GUI, you’re talking about most GUIs. I believe I covered this in my original comment: poorly made GUIs are worse than a terminal interface.

    But don’t act like a linear string of characters, typed in one-by-one is the optimal way to interface with a computer. Obviously, a non-invasive neuralink implant that is able to interpret your intentions with 100% accuracy without uploading any of your data to Elon Musk is the ideal Human Interface Device, but we’re not quite there yet.

    In the meantime, I assume you run a window manager of some kind. Why? Do you regularly browse the internet from the terminal? Unlikely. Why not? Have you ever tried non-linear video editing, image manipulation, or 3D modeling in a terminal? How about debugging multi threaded code, or visualizing allocation patterns? Pored over profiling metrics to root cause a performance issue? And if VR/AR is part of your workflow, trying to use a terminal in concert feels sillier than the hacking montage from Hackers.

    Terminals are objectively more limited than a GUI, because that’s literally the definition of a terminal: a very limited graphical user interface. The advantage of a terminal is that it’s easy (especially for programmers who don’t have an artistic/UX-bone in their body, and are thinking in terms of functions and operands) to make a primitive interface that adheres to a set of expectations. But no one commits every parameter for every command line tool to memory, and even if they did, people don’t want to type out a novel when moving a cursor to a specific region of the screen feels more natural and takes a fraction of the time. (Not that it always feels more natural in every circumstance, but in the times when it does, that’s what every sane person should prefer to do).

    So just like I told OP, the goal shouldn’t be to use a terminal; you should instead focus on solving a problem. The terminal is just often the least bad tool that currently exists to solve a lot of problems.


  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyztoLinux@lemmy.mlBeginners Guides
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    15 days ago

    As other’s have said, have a goal. A computer is a tool, use it to accomplish something, try to get something working for yourself that currently doesn’t. If your PC aleady does everything you need it to, great, you’re ahead of everyone else 😅.

    Don’t think of the command line as a good option, it’s archaic, and its capabilities are objectively rudimentary, it’s just often the least bad option because no one has made a convenient GUI for what you’re trying to do (or if they have, they did it poorly, and somehow the command line is still less bad). So you will inevitably have to interact with it.