I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

  • 1 Post
  • 329 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle



  • The only thing stopping them doing this right now, is that they know it would get regulatory pushback. It has a real chance of causing laws to be made about when and how advertising is appropriate, and those laws might stop some of the things they’re doing now. So they sit as close to that line as they can without crossing it so they can keep self-regulation.

    The moment they believe world governments wouldn’t stop them doing it, is the moment they’ll do it.

    And in terms of benefit for the advertisers and service providers, it’s a no-brainer. Advertisers know that a large percentage of people tune out, or even leave the room when an advert is on. I think it’s part of the reason they kept them so short on youtube, because if they showed you that there’s 1:30 ad break you might go to the toilet, get a drink, or anything else that takes you away from the ad. If they show you 15seconds, well you’ll probably just sit that one out.

    An advert they know people are actually watching is worth a LOT more to advertisers.





  • There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.

    You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.





  • I think this overall is a better idea. I’m going to say this because, I thought I’d look into rust today. So I installed it, setup vscode to work with it etc. And it’s all up and running. I thought I would port over a “fairly simple” C# project I wrote recently as a bit of a test.

    While I’ve generally had success (albeit with 30+ tabs open to solve questions I had about how to do certain things, and only making it about 20% into the task) I’m going to say that it’s different enough from C, C++ and C# (all of which I can work with) that I really don’t think it is fair to expect C developers that have day jobs and work on the kernel in their spare time to learn this. It’s fundamentally different in my opinion.

    Now, I don’t condone any bad attitude and pushing away of rust developers from the project. But there’s no way they’re going to want to do anything to help which involves learning a new language. It’s just not going to happen.

    Likewise, C is not a language most new developers are learning. So, I feel like over time there won’t be so much of an influx of new kernel developers and any Rust based kernel could find itself with more contributors over time and taking over as the de-facto kernel.

    In terms of Redox (not looked into it yet). So long as there’s a different team working on the userspace tools. I would say the main task should be getting a solid kernel with drivers for most popular hardware etc in place. The existing GNU tools will do until there’s a kernel that is able to compete with the C one. But that’s just my opinion.


  • Here’s what I think. Both opinions are correct.

    Rust is sufficiently different that you cannot expect C developers to learn rust to the level they have mastered C in order to be working at the kernel level. It’s not going to happen.

    I don’t really know too much about rust. Maybe one day I’ll actually mess around with it. But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was. It’s just different enough to be problematic that way.

    So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

    Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.



  • I mean, while they can block most things, to give people a usable experience they’re going to allow http and https traffic through, and they can’t really proxy https because of the TLS layer.

    So for universal chance of success, running openvpn tcp over port 443 is the most likely to get past this level of bad. I guess they could block suspicious traffic in the session before TLS is established (in order to block certain domains). OpenVPN does support traversing a proxy, but it might only work if you specify it. If their network sets a proxy via DHCP, maybe you could see that and work around it.

    I did have fun working around an ex gf’s university network many years ago to get a VPN running over it. They were very, very serious about blocking non-standard services. A similar “through” the proxy method was the last resort they didn’t seem to bother trying to stop.




  • Well, I would say it SHOULD bring overall prices down. If the cost to build the top of the line model comes down to say the same as the mid-range model AND more people are say buying up. It means that competition would push overall prices down.

    But of course not, it benefits the companies most, and given the choice of lower prices or more profit, they’ll choose the profit every time.

    If they go subscription only (because recurring revenue is the current business buzzword, so of course they will go subscription only) then overall cost for the life of the car will definitely be higher yet “feel” more affordable.



  • Now, I can “kinda” see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.

    As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I’ve visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it’s quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.

    So, there’s probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn’t be worthwhile.

    However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it’s possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.

    What I don’t like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I’d much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.

    So I think my point is, the argument “the hardware is there anyway” doesn’t really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.

    They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.