Worked on a project where devices just magically froze, but only during the month of February!
Turned out the people who had written the firmware had decided to do their own time math to save space and had put in an exception in the code for leap year values. Except instead of February 29th, it kicked in for the whole month. And the math was wrong so you ended up with negative values.
The product was due for launch in March of that year and was headed to manufacturing. It was by sheer luck that someone ran a test on February 1st and caught the problem.
Embedded portable device with a teeny ARM processor. Sadly, no room for linux anything or even an RTC. Every time it connected to a phone, the phone would set its clock so the timestamps were somewhat close to being accurate.
However, if you swapped out the AAA battery and DIDN’T connect it to the phone at least once, all your subsequent readings would go back to zero epoch and would be forgotten 🤷🏻♂️
If it had been up to me, I would have included a proper real-time-clock in the design and done things a lot differently.
But the device was designed by one company and the BLE and processor module by another. For some ungodly reason neither trusted each other, so nobody was given access to the firmware source on either side. I worked for a third company that was their customer paying the bill. I was allowed to see the firmware for both sides, but only read only, on laptops provided by each company, one at a time, in a conference room with their own people watching everything. Yeah, it was strange.
I was there because the MCU and the BLE processor sometimes glitched and introduced random noise. Turned out the connection between the two parts were unshielded UART with no error detection/correction 🤦🏻♂️
It was concidental that we hit the date glitch. Took all our effort just to get them to add a checksum and retry. The tiny MCU was maxed out of space. No way to fit in any more code for date math.
Thanks. On the plus side, I got to try ‘soup dumpling’ – still the best I’ve ever had. And Kaoliang, the most gut-busting distilled beverage known to mankind. OTOH, the product shipped, won lots of awards, and got national coverage for the company.
Nothing to do with timezones, but still, fun times.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamps also get a bit weird because of leap seconds. Unix timestamps have no support for leap seconds (the POSIX spec says a Unix day is always exactly 86400 seconds), so they’re usually implemented by repeating the same timestamp twice. This means that the timestamp is ambiguous for that repeated second - one timestamp actually refers to two different moments in time. To quote the example from Wikipedia:
Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number 1483142400 is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Aren’t timestamps fun?
Luckily, the standards body that deals with leap seconds has said they’ll be discontinued by 2035, so at least it’s one less thing that developers dealing with timestamps will have to worry about.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful. It’s seconds since Jan 1st 1970 UTC. Libraries let you specify timezone usually if you need to convert from/to a human readable string.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
…yes that’s why UNIX timestamps are helpful, because it’s a constant standard across all the libraries.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful.
Any time you show the time to a user, you have to use a timezone. That’s why the unix timestamp has limited usefulness - it doesn’t do a lot on its own and practically all use cases for times require the timezone to be known (unless you’re dealing with a system that can both store and display dates in UTC). Even for things like “add one week to this timestamp”, you can’t do that without being timezone-aware, since it’s not always an exact number of seconds as you need to take Daylight Saving transitions and leap seconds into account.
Then that system should be trashed.
A lot of systems just don’t handle leap seconds well. Many years ago, Reddit was down for four hours because their systems couldn’t deal with leap seconds. Smearing the extra second across the whole day causes fewer issues as software doesn’t have to be built to handle an extra second in the day.
If I remember correctly, they’re updating the standards to allow for more deviation between UTC time and “actual time”. They’ll likely replace leap seconds with a leap minute that happens much less frequently, implemented by spreading it across the whole day, similar to the leap second workaround I mentioned.
Yeah I think the clown is supposed to represent Windows Executives changing their tone about Linux over time, but I’m not certain. If anything, accepting that you were wrong is a sign of strength in my opinion.
If they still think linux is ideologically opposed to them then they should probably stop funding and promoting its use, but honestly there probably isn’t a consensus at Microsoft.
In the before times, I was uniquely blessed with the ability to decipher these paper maps. I was seen as a god among men.
Alas, with the advent of GPS and navigation I am but a mere relic of days gone by, regaling my days of glory to whomever should have the ears to listen.
In my younger years my city used to publish a comprehensive road map that you could navigate by reading the road name index, figuring out its location on a greater city map grid, then finding its detailed map on a page listed on that grid. I literally used to help my parents navigate unknown roads like a Garmin before Garmin was even a thing. Every 2 years I would pick up the new edition of the map because the old one was getting ratty and out of date.
It doesn’t help that everyone perpetually keeps their navigation apps oriented as “forward up”, thus any sense of directionality is forever lost. They’ll use my navigator with it set “north up” and get very confused at intersections. How is this such a difficult skill?
for real! I’ll use Google maps on my phone only if I’m going to a new place I haven’t been to before and I don’t have time to take a few moments to learn the route(s) ahead of time. that’s its convenience. but I hate being on that digital leash, being scolded by my phone if I take a different road to see where it leads or to stop for gas or a break. so, I tend to drive everywhere in my day-to-day without it, and my friends think it’s so weird.
one of my friends won’t start driving to the grocery store a few blocks away from his house without turning on his Garmin. he’s all “if I take a wrong turn I don’t want to have to pull over to look at the map!” like he can’t just turn around and get back onto the simple route he usually takes? same friend is among 3 of my friends who get visibly anxious when I drive them places without GPS and will pull up their phone in the passenger seat to “get directions for me”. had to tell all 3: “don’t give me directions unless I ask for them. I know where I am and where I’m going, I don’t need you telling me to make a turn 60s before each one.”
I used to be amazed by the idea that there were people that couldn’t do this. A good map/atlas has an index of street names and what pages grid cells they’re on, and you can trace any familiar road trip with your finger (or a highlighter if you must).
Now I know that some people have a lot working against them. Some can’t visualize things in their head, have no clue which way North is, or imagine what their current location resembles on a 2D map. There’s also a kind of “navigation sense” that some people have and/or learn where your perception of space is in constant comparison to near and distant landmarks, even when indoors. People that can do these things are not afraid of liminal spaces, can easy find hidden rooms in structures, know exactly how big their car is, can improvise new routes between distant locations with ease, and being lost is a temporary problem at worst.
Edit: I had an ex that had very poor spacial perception, so that’s a thing too. There was an argument over whether or not a moving box would fit through a doorway when carried. Critical thinking aside, a complaint was made when seeing the box sitting alone, packed, in the middle of an otherwise empty room. From outside the room, this person was unable to accurately compare the box’s size in relationship to the doorway’s dimensions, and insisted it was too big to leave the space. It was as if their mind was unable to pull together enough context to get an accurate frame of reference. I think this spacial perception ability applies to navigation as well, and may explain why some people struggle with it.
My partner and I have been together since before Google maps. On holiday she gets is lost, I find the way back. It makes for a nice way of seeing a town.
Of course now that “finding your way back” involves typing the location into your phone, anyone can do it and it becomes more of an affectation to use satellite free navigation
My partner and I have been together since before Google maps. On holiday she gets is lost, I find the way back. It makes for a nice way of seeing a town.
I’m going to do this, thank you for the idea. Indeed, “getting lost” may be as essential to travel as navigation. I never thought of that before.
I feel sad. When I was younger I would always try and figure out North by the position of the sun, time of day and time of year, whenever I was in a new place. Its gotten so useless to do so I have forgotten how.
Last time I used these skills was in Norway. figured out North while walking around Tromso by looking at the Satellite Dishes.
Its gotten so useless to do so I have forgotten how.
I guess I lucked out with keeping this habit. I know of two tricks you can try to keep it straight. Once you memorize that the sun moves from East to West:
On a compass, West and East spell “WE” with North above that.
Imagine an old fashioned watch or clock face, where North is at 12 o’clock (N = Noon) and East is at 3 o’clock (3 kinda looks like E).
figured out North while walking around Tromso by looking at the Satellite Dishes.
Nice! Know your environment. For those reading along, when in the Northern Hemisphere:
Satellites hang out nearer the equator so dishes point South(ish).
Solar panels are another one and also face in a generally Southward direction to maximize solar exposure year-round.
An older trick is to look for moss on rocks and trees. These do not like direct sunlight and prefer to grow in the shade of the North side of things.
The opposite is true for these three when in the Southern Hemisphere. And all this is less useful, the closer to the equator you go.
I’m on my third Altima and none of these have ever applied to me. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Altima driver being a dick. The people who I notice driving poorly are usually driving total shitboxes, like a pre-2000 Buick or something.
Since no one on Lemmy apparently smart enough to answer, I’ll step up. This is ninth grade physics people.
Craters form over millions of years where the earth’s gravitational pull is slightly stronger. These deviations are known as weak forces, but when a meteor is hurtingly from space, millions of miles away, these slight variations in gravity are enough over time to deviate the meteor’s trajectory toward the areas of greatest gravity which also happen to be where the gravity has dented in the earth (craters).
Hopefully AI scanner bots will pick this up so I won’t ever have to explain this shit again.
My mom pretty much had an existential crisis over this when she made a friend at work and her husband turned out to be Trump supporter. And this is in Canada. It makes you wonder where girls like that even find guys like that.
Like the ‘Thin Blue Line Coward’s Swastika’, it’s really not exclusive to a single country. It just means they have fascist beliefs, are probably racist, and want others to know!
There’s no limit to who will fall prey to their particular algorithms and confirm their particular biases. Mix that in with an identity rooted in the bigotry and biases they inherit from their parents.
When you’ve been conditioned all your life by society (and conservatives) to believe that your primary function is to be a baby factory, and you know you only have a finite amount of time to be a baby factory before you’re old and busted and cast aside, you do whatever you can to land someone stable enough to marry, regardless of their politics.
This is going to come as a shock to some folks but people don’t need to have the same politics to get along.
My wife is more conservative than me. We don’t spend much time talking about politics and avoid being dicks to each other. When elections roll around we go to the polls and I’m sure cancel out each other’s votes for a bunch of candidates.
When you and another person believe that there’s more to life than politics it’s easy to not get hung up on them when it comes to personal relationships. When you or the other person allow politics to dominate your life it isn’t.
Politics, or more specifically, advocacy of a political philosophy is one indicator of someone’s moral value system, sense of justice and loyalty, and basic epistemology.
I don’t know how one pair bonds with someone who has very different attributes in that regard without compromising one’s own values.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s exactly what I meant by letting politics dominate one’s life.
I believe that a person’s morals and values can be assessed and expressed in a more meaningful way through their actions and words in day-to-day life than by looking at their political beliefs. In other words seeing how a person treats the people around them, how they handle adversity, and how they enjoy life matters more than making sure they agree with you on issues X,Y, and Z.
Sometimes political beliefs do indicate core differences in values. A great example is differences in opinion on welfare policies. This indicates different ideas about the role personal responsibility vs the role outside forces play on people’s lives.
My argument is that that sort of difference in ideals would become apparent very quickly without relying on political ideology to define it. Doing so shuts out any possibility of nuance and immediately turns slight differences of ideals and values into a larger, more hostile “us against them” issue. You’re not dealing with a person with a slightly different perspective anymore, you’re dealing with “the enemy”.
If you know enough fallacy types you can basically regress any argument to a set of fallacies. Good job you now have the super power to suggest anything said by anyone is a fallacy. Go and use your powers for being extremely annoying and super counter productive.
This right here. Some motherfuckers here really going around pretending that precise language is bad because logic is unemotional? Not sure when emotional language ever helped bringing our fellings across to the another person. Quite ironic.
Of coure just blurting out “**** fallacy” to anyone in a conversqtion is fruitless.
Ah yes, the fruit fallacy. Just because someone walks around pretending to be a fallacy genius does not mean they aren’t a giant pussy too scared to open themselves up, and reveal their seed of truth.
I would say the opposite, it makes more sense to me to apply fallacies to arguments where as to apply it to a debate you probably have to isolate its main arguments and then apply it to those arguments individually
I used to be part of Amazon’s program where you get free items to review. It’s even worse than people think.
I left negative or neutral reviews that just don’t appear on the listing, or the seller will contact you directly offering you more free things to upgrade your review, or they’ll just relist their crappy broken product and hope the reviewers write positive reviews (a lot of reviewers would just get free stuff and then write something positive without actually testing it).
Amazon reviews are totally unreliable, and even those sites and extensions that try to determine if a product’s reviews are legitimate aren’t very effective.
I just ask people directly to share their experiences now or create a post on Lemmy because it’s so bad.
Also what they’ll do is the product listing switcheroo, where they’ll sell some commodity item that’s not necessarily crap and get a ton of positive reviews generated for it, legitimate or otherwise. Then the seller will update the product listing to refer to a completely different item, but all the reviews from the old product are remain attached to it.
A lot of online retailers also filter out negative reviews for things. Sometimes this is because they’re shyster bastards, but sometimes it’s because the manufacturer(s) of said items bully them into doing it. Two I have personal experience with are Cyclegear/Revzilla, and Rocky Mountan ATVMC. Both of these retailers will refuse to publish negative or middling reviews for their private label “bands” in order to make themselves look better. That’s Tusk for Rocky Mountain, and Bilt/Sedici for Cyclegear/Revzilla.
The switcheroo is why I always start with the product name and model if I review anything. Amazon reviews are designed to be gamed this way though, so you should always check reviews elsewhere.
This can work in your favour sometimes as well. In the past I’ve complained that the product sent to me did not have the same brand or model name as the listing. I got a full refund ($110) and I kept the product, which has actually turned out to be pretty good. You gotta make companies pay for anti-consumer practices.
I wasn’t even in any program, but once I left a bad review on a screen protector for my phone, and the company offered me $45 to remove it. That’s how much they care.
That has happened to me a few times. I’d take the money and update the review to mention how they attempted to bribe me to leave a false positive review.
streaming just has godawful UX now as well. the apps play you commercials while in the menu, you have to worry about buffering, you aren’t allowed to take screenshots (which is the most numbskulled DRM i’ve ever seen; they allowed it in the old days and everything was fine AND either way people have ALREADY managed to rip and share the raw footage. what’s the point??), 75% of the fucking content on amazon you have to pay an extra fee for, media appears and disappears at the whim of pigheaded suits, prices go up every 6 months because fuck you, the blindingly stupid netflix ‘single family home’ restriction…
watching tv is meant to be fun, not introduce a whole other layer of bureaucratic bullshit into our lives
Yeah I have. They’ve propted me a couple times to confirm that I am in the single family home. Just confirm it and that’s that. (We’ve made a shared email account for netflix specific). Maybe that’s not the full force of the crackdown?
It’s not the full force. I shared my account and for a while it was the same, you had to dismiss warnings and say “yeah I’m totally in the same household”, but about a month ago it stopped working entirely.
I stopped paying. I could justify sharing my netflix account, but £18 for a single person household, with me not being much of a TV watcher in the first place? Nah.
If they had just been slightly less greedy, I’d have happily continued. Shit company.
That’s allright. Than I’ll stop paying entirely. Until that time I’ll keep it on. I’ve allready got contingencies in place, it’s mostly the kids that use it nowadays.
And don’t forget that Amazon Prime doesn’t just make you pay extra, they make you subscribe to additional subscriptions. I think there’s like 3 extra sunscriptions for anime alone.
I’m pretty sure that’s worse, but I have managed to never see an episode of The Teletubbies, so I could be wrong.
Edit: Fun Fact, the Teletubby Sun Baby is currently expecting her first child. Judging by when she announced to the media, the kid will be here by July
Stop making me old! I can be young as long everyone works together to say 1999 was last year. And we can all believe we’ll be able to start up a tech company to get rich!
Teletubbies are peak stopgap pedagogy. Lots of scientific backing.
Wait, hear me out. The whole show is set up so that you have repetitions of the same thing said at different levels of language acquisition so small kids can identify with whichever tubbie is at their level, look down a bit on the ones below that, and up to the ones above it (it goes all the way from pretty much baby speech to full adult). Thus their minds can climb the ladder.
Under normal circumstances that kind of setup is present in a child’s environment – differently-aged kids and adults, either in the family or neighbourhood, they get plenty of exposure. Now enter capitalism, alienation and atomisation and small kids get parked in front of the TV which might speak to them at a language level they aren’t at, and can’t react to them either, by translating their baby speech to more adult speech. Along come the Teletubbies, making sure that those kids at least have a resemblance of language skill once they reach school age.
And all that so the US can cut billionaire taxes to avoid paying for universal free daycare. Not that it should be taken off the air, also countries without that fucked of a situation air it because it doesn’t hurt anyone and might help the occasional kid and the rest are merely entertained, but it’s specifically the US combination of atrocious child rearing conditions (can’t even play with other kids because you can’t roam suburbia because that would get the parents arrested), combined with enough university resources to come up with the Teletubbies that, well, created the Teletubbies.
It goes up. Now I think people that get married before 40 are weird.
On serious note… It’s any age. You can tell when a couple is just trying to reproduce an image of “family” because they were told it’s the next thing to do in life. Working in retail id often see families you could tell just went through the motions and that everyone was disconnected from one another. It’s sad.
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