• 11 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle



  • A problem that only affects newbies huh?

    Let’s say that you are writing code intended to be deployed headless in the field, and it should not be allowed to exit in an uncontrolled fashion because there are communications that need to happen with hardware to safely shut them down. You’re making a autonomous robot or something.

    Using python for this task isn’t too out of left field, because one of the major languages of ROS is python, and it’s the most common one.

    Which of the following python standard library functions can throw, and what do they throw?

    bytes, hasattr, len, super, zip








  • Not quite. Their “malicious” extension only got a few hundred installs. Using the data gathered by that extension and via other means they were able to locate other actually malicious extensions. Those total in the millions of installations.

    Through this process, they have found the following:

    1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
    8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
    1,452 running unknown executables.
    2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.
    

  • To add, let’s do some math!

    Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.

    s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.

    We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.

    For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.

    If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.

    In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.









  • GT4 is better than GT3 imo, but if you have to spend money on it, it might not be worth.

    I’m mostly into RPGs, and it doesn’t seem like you are from this list. If you are, then FF10 and 12 are available. So are KH1 and 2, and also Wild Arms 3, Personas 3 and 4, Disgaea, Shadow Hearts, Okage, Okami, Star Ocean, Dragon Quest, Devil May Cry, God of War, and so on.

    Viewtiful Joe 1 and 2 are silly and fun side scrolling beat 'em ups. Tony Hawk needs no introduction. Silent Hill 2 and 3 if you’re into horror. Resident Evil 4 if you’re into action horror.

    Shadow of the Colossus is great if you’re into a quiet, contemplative adventure game.


  • I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don’t know enough about the particulars.

    However, I think the “user choice” argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn’t be.

    For instance, in this case, it’s not the user’s choice at all, but a developer’s choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.

    I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it’s already been done for me.

    There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I’m generally receptive to those arguments way more than “user choice.”