• 2 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle


  • Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.

    And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.

    Canada was built by immigrants. But I don’t care what colour someone’s skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can’t even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?



  • 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.






  • More like “novelty pricing” IMO. Pay a premium to drink the exotic milk of the day.

    Oat milk is just oatmeal in disguise, it’s as cheap as they come. The sad thing is that as overpriced as it is, as fake milks go, it’s pretty much the best! My ex drinks it because she’s lactose intolerant, and unlike almond or soy it’s actually palatable IMO.

    Real Asian style fresh soy milk is excellent btw because it doesn’t pretend to be cow milk. It’s more like a hot creamy bean soup. Makes a great breakfast, if you happen to be in Taiwan





  • There’s no point in having incredibly qualified MPs if they’re all whipped on every vote. And that’s the way Canadian politics works - an MP is just a glorified seat filler.

    Get us an electoral system that breaks up the majority rule and allows MPs to actually represent their constituents, and I’ll fully support a gratuitous salary.

    For now, I think paying the median wage in Canada would serve just fine to try to motivate these mushrooms to improve the working conditions of the 99%.




  • 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 actually run my own streaming setup where I stream off my computer through VPN, local buffering on the phone, it works really well in the truck where service is usually not interrupted for that long.

    However a lot of people don’t realize just how many hours of music you can burn through when you’re putting in 12hr+ days in the field or even the mental effort in picking what to play next when your eyes are up front (I don’t run autosteer on anything). So just turn on the radio and get the job done!