TheMuffinMan

Wait, I was totally with your comment until the bit about Incredibles 2. Why did you find it bad?

I’d been waiting for the sequel for ages, and while it didn’t top the first one (doubt anything could), I still really enjoyed it.

Wow, I’ve never hated something more. I don’t know why I get such an intense ick from this, holy hell. Sorry lol.

Tried to balance out some of the downvotes! Obligatory fuck the IDF, but I otherwise agree.

I’m sorry that happened to your girlfriend, but anyone is capable of rape. You seem to be fixating on the trans part because it affirms your biases.

I actually totally agree with this; I just think the solution is holding these companies to account rather than forcing all users to submit very personal identification.

I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.

I grew up with the Internet of the noughties and saw some screwed up stuff. That should have been on my parents, but I turned out okay anyway.

Canada’s just the latest to join the mass surveillance club.

What is the purpose of counting channels? A handful of servers I’m in have one.

However, triggering multiple cameras at once at the exact same time was a similar experiences with additional trigger lines and multiple discussions with the manufacturers application engineers.

100% this; synchronisation challenges are the bane of my existence. There are also a lot of cases when it would have been really helpful if data output from a device were timestamped (even with something incomplete like “number of milliseconds past the minute”), rather than having to timestamp it on receipt and make some iffy assumptions about latency.

Depending on the command the byte order also had to be swapped which was not documented at all and I had to find it by trial and error.

“Determining endianness is left as an exercise for the reader” type logic, honestly lol.

So I’m not sure if it’s the military grade that makes it such an experience. Industrial grade seems like a similar experience.

It’s quite plausible (and disappointing to hear) that it’s a broader issue with industrial grade hardware; my own experience is limited to products specifically aimed for military/defence applications.

I guess a lot of consumer devices also do shit like that under the hood but hide it in firmware and drivers.

Yep, but I think there’s also a broader point about work that is niche or “cutting edge” versus industry standard. The example that comes to mind is the quality of code written in academia versus in industry, the former often being significantly worse. I think part of it is that code quality is far less emphasised compared to the higher level technical concept it’s used to demonstrate. I honestly believe that a sizeable chunk of the professors and lecturers from my university would struggle to produce work that is “up to standard” in a regular software eng role, at least initially.

Allow me to explain with a practical example: you have a camera on the network, and you want to automate taking snapshots in response to some arbitrary trigger (e.g. every minute, or whenever a separate motion sensor is activated). There are standards and conventions for type of integration, but military grade hardware often wants you to do things from first principles.

Typical consumer/IP camera: the camera has a REST API for its command set, so you can formulate a HTTP request like GET http://my-camera-ip/command/snap?stream=0 and the server will respond with image data. You can knock this out in maybe < 30 mins and < 100 lines of code. If you’re a bit crafty, you can add support for multiple different camera models, which may vary in URI formation and authentication.

On the other hand, trying to do this with a military grade camera, the experience is usually something like this: The camera comes with proprietary client software that is closed source. In UI you can click a ‘snap’ button to take an image, but no viable route for automation. You try to reverse engineer it with WireShark, but it appears to be a WebSocket connection with constant data transfer, which makes dissecting the ‘snap’ command difficult.

You check the manual, and the only mention of how to directly command the camera is via a serial line. That’s the first problem: you don’t want to run a long cable from the server running your automation, to the camera itself. So you buy a small serial device server, and run a serial cable between it and the camera. It will forward any byte sequence that is sent to it over your LAN, to the camera’s serial input.

The manual references a separate document that explains the communication protocol, which should explain what byte sequence to send to ‘snap’ an image. You hunt down this document, and. Uh-oh. It’s 344 pages long. Ctrl+F, you look for “snap” and find it’s in section 17. It references some earlier sections about sync bytes, message headers, and checksums. You finally work out that the full byte sequence you need to send to trigger a snapshot is00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A. You write code that sends that sequence over TCP to the serial device server. But there’s a problem: you’re not receiving any bytes back. Where is the resultant image?

You go back to the manual and it mentions that “snapshots and recordings are stored on the internal SD card” and “SD card contents are available via FTP”. It doesn’t give a spec, or even a filesystem, for the SD card. After trying a bunch of different ones, the camera finally detects your SDXC card formatted as exFAT: the magic combo.

There is no explanation of the FTP functionality in the manual, so you try the default FTP port, and make some educated guesses for the right username/password combo. None of them work, so you contact the manufacturers for help. 2 weeks later, they respond with the credentials. Finally, you’re in, and you’re seeing new image files showing up whenever you send the byte sequence. Success! Now, your code does something like this:

1. Send 00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A via TCP to serial device server
2. Wait a moment
3. Connect to camera FTP server and download image file from SD card

A week later, your boss walks in and says that a new competitor, manufacturer B, has cameras with much more impressive IR sensors for nighttime surveillance. The existing cameras will be replaced starting next week. None of what you have built is reusable for manufacturer B cameras; it’s time for a new adventure.

It’s mind-boggling. It’s like the manufacturers’ engineers have not spoken to anyone who has written any software in the last 20 years.

Having additional virtual network interfaces on VMs is completely normal, ens18 does indeed sound like the right one you should be looking at.

Seconding the other commenter who mentioned the possibility of a second DHCP server.

Is your Proxmox host wired via ethernet to the pfsense? Or are there WiFi APs in the mix anywhere

As someone who works in defence & surveillance as a systems engineer (so by every measure a civilian), I’m still the one on the right… military grade hardware is a fucking nightmare to integrate into larger systems.

You are totally right of course. Vaping weed is the way to go. I misplaced my dry herb vape when I moved houses several months ago and it hasn’t cropped up yet, which is why I’m back on spliffs for the time being. (Dry herb vapes are spenny as you probably know)

The only other slight quirk is that vaping weed uses it up pretty fast and it hits fast too. I’m an enjoyer of the process itself rather than just being high (which is why things like pipes and bongs never appealed to me either); the way spliffs let me pad/space out the intake matters to me more than I’d like it to.

I will switch back once I find my vape, but in the meantime I’ve found using activated charcoal filters instead of roaches does cut out a lot of the nastiness of tobacco. It does weaken the effect of the weed a bit too, but that’s nbd.

Not once in my life I heard a smoker say “my first one was awereesomeeeee! I love this!”.
Real lmao.

Ex-smoker, picked it up at uni, and the first handful of times I’d tried it, it was vile. The first time it felt OK or possibly good was probably when withdrawal started to kick in. Really should have stopped before that, but I was stubborn and had to learn from experience. Thankfully I was never that heavy a smoker, maybe 3 fags a day, up to 10 or so if on a night out and drinking.

I do still use it in spliffs, but begrudgingly (can’t find anything else that isn’t too harsh to smoke, nor do I like pure joints).

Serious question: can anyone vouch for a search engine today that prioritises… searching? and does it well?

I used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years, but I’d found the result set frequently lacking compared to Google. I’m currently on Brave search (+ Brave Browser), and it’s good for text, but it does shove an LLM response at the top and is pretty bad for image results.

I’m bi and hooking up with myself would be the absolute dream lmao

I’m also very insecure in general, so I don’t think it’s an ego thing - more that any sense of vulnerability would likely disappear.

Struggled to read this - lots of words and not enough Subway Surfers.

Ah, that is indeed what they wrote but that interpretation didn’t even cross my mind! That is hilariously bad lmao. Thanks

Assuming they were in brackets after people’s names, why is that silly? It’s just so you know how to address them.

Behind every decision to replace staff with yet another LLM is endless frustration for customers and clients.

I had an urgent leak to deal with earlier this week, and when I called my rental agency they told me they couldn’t do anything until I’d logged it in their online system. I logged it in detail with photos, then it took me to an LLM. When I told the LLM I wasn’t interested in further chatter and just needed a plumber sent over ASAP, I got a text saying my request wouldn’t be dealt with because I “did not complete the conversation with [their] agent.” All the while my light bulbs were dripping… I felt like I was taking crazy pills.