I, for one, have never needed AI for anything ever in my life.

AI has, however, made my life noticably worse. Especially when dealing with braindead robot driven customer "support". But also in making it financially impossible to buy more RAM or upgrade a GPU.

I think we'd be better off without yet another bubble.

Were you born yesterday? Phone AIs being dumb didn't take LLMs at all. They were always stupid and frustrating to deal with substitutes for customer support.

Except now they also pretend to respond to email. Basically email support became /dev/null with cream and icing on top.

AOSP is NOT "open source" by any definition.

It's "some sources available"

AOSP = Android Open Source (Partially)

More likely a prank.

I think it's most likely testing the waters for a real offering. It's not that weird. Many colo data centers already have policies about hosting laptops because it's already something that happens. It just isn't common and usually isn't for hosting servers.

If the battery in the laptop is still good, it comes with it's own UPS. My MBPs haven't had an ethernet port in a minute, so do you have to supply your own adapters as well??? You could fit ~15 MBPs on their edge in 9RUs. That'd be an interesting looking rack. Not quite a blade chassis. It'd be rather boring looking as there's no blinky-blinkies

Putting a UPS in a rack is a prosumer/corporate IT thing, it’s not done in real datacenters.

They typically have their own UPS in another room and multiple power lanes. And it’s going to be much more reliable than a laptop battery.

I read the reply to your comment not as much as an answer to your statement but a general warning to anyone who might be reading.

A laptop battery would be a huge liability if it caught fire.

And yet most homes and offices are full of them. Laptop batteries don't usually catch fire. At the colos I am familiar with (which have pretty strict rules, generally), you can have equipment with batteries as long as you regularly inspect them.

If you got creative with cable management you might be able to double up front and rear. It would probably be a PITA to manage but you could probably get some halfway decent density

Looks like they were proposing supplying usb Ethernet adapters, which doesn’t seem crazy, they’re cheap.

> You could fit ~15 MBPs

15 MBP x €7 = €105 for 9RU with power and network. Not in a million years.

Hetzner rents you 42RU for €199 plus power and network. If we assume they can fill the entire rack, that's 4 9RU units for about €50 plus power and network.

If we assume an average power draw of 20W per laptop, that's 300W for each 15 laptop unit, or about €57/month in Hetzner's Finish DC (including aircon)

Not sure about network. A 1Gbit uplink with 10TB traffic (and €1/TB after that) is provided. Upgrading that to 10Gbit is probably similar to the €51/month cost for the same uplink for dedicated servers, so another €15 for each 15 laptop unit. Plus around €2/month/IP, but you can probably bring your own if you find a cheaper subnet to buy

So yeah, you are right that the math does not work out. But it is pretty close to break even. I think you can break even on this if you find a more space efficient way to cram them into the rack and don't pay yourself any salary

https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/

I would like to put my Raspberry Pi Pico in colocation, would it work?

There are a number of places that colocate normal Raspberry Pi.

https://lowendbox.com/blog/little-machines-in-big-datacenter...

I am sure that some of them either already colocate Pico ones too, or are willing to do so if asked.

The Pi Pico doesn't have networking capabilities, so that would be silly. You're probably thinking of the Pi Zero.

There is a Pico W

Odds are high the distro maintainer will lose hair trying to package it

I ran ntop on a router in 2001. It had a highly insightful overview of traffic with nice looking diagrams and everything. There hasn't been anything like that since as far as I'm aware.

ZoneAlarm otoh, was snakeoil. Programs that ran at the same privilege level (typically everything) could bypass it in various ways.

The C++ looks messed up. I have yet to come across a keyboard that can type an arrow.

It's just a programming font ligature. If you copy and paste it you'll see the actual characters e.g.

   auto main() -> int {

(It's also modern C++ trailing return type.)

I enjoy that because I have my browser monospace font set to be one that also has those ligatures, your comment isn't enlightening at all (I set it up that way though, so it's not a problem for me :P )

Why would anybody think more words more better?

    int main() {

The trailing return type pattern was added to the standard, IIRC, to make it easier for templated functions to have return types that depend on the types of the arguments, such as in this example:

    template <typename A, typename B>
    auto multiply(A a, B b) -> decltype(a * b) {
        return a * b;
    }

Its easier for the compiler to parse everything if `decltype(a * b) occurs _after_ the definition of `a` and `b`. Once this pattern was added and people started using it for that purpose, people also started using the pattern for all functions for consistency.

Yes, in that case I completely agree. Using it everywhere is a mistake IMHO. I know there might be a stylistic reason for using it everywhere, but I believe less code is better, unless more code makes it easier to understand.

Some developers like ligature based fonts. They combine 2 characters into one glyph

Thank you and the others who were kind enough to explain this. I've avoided such fonts like the plague. Didn't know it did arrows like that.

Any keyboard can type “→” if you set up a compose key :)

It's just "->" - the ligature font just renders it as a unitary arrow

Computers should abide by their owners. Any computer not doing that is broken.

Its a simple solution in law to enable. Force manufacturers to allow owners of computer to put any signing key in the BIOS.

We need this law. Once we have this law, consumers csn get maximum benefit of secure boot withiut losing contorl

But that's how it already works.

If you install Windows first, Microsoft takes control (but it graciously allows Linux distros to use their key). If you install Linux first, you take control.

It's perfectly possible for you to maintain your own fully-secure trust chain, including a TPM setup which E.G. lets you keep a 4-digit pin while keeping your system secure against brute force attacks. You can't do that with the 1990s "encryption is all you need" style of system security.

It's funny, but I just encountered this for the first time the other day - feels like I had to do a lot of digging to find out how to do this so that I could add my LUKS key to my TPM... really felt like it took some doing on the HP all-in-one that I was trying to put debian on... maybe because it was debian being debian

Not really. There are many laptops where you cannot rrally get rid of Microsoft key and also cannot put your own key.

Most embedded processors sadly don't have a BIOS, and the signing key is permanently burned into the processor via eFUSEs.

Yes, BIOS is really a PC-thing, AFAIK. Embedded processors have "bootloaders" which often serve a similar purpose of performing the minimal viable hardware initializations in order to load the OS kernel.

> Its a simple solution in law to enable. Force manufacturers to allow owners of computer to put any signing key in the BIOS.

...it's already allowed. The problem is that this isn't the default, but opt in that you need quite a lot of knowledge to set up

I have set it up on worst laptops. There are laptops like hp x360 which doesn't allow modification at all.

I make the analogy with a company, because on that front, ownership seems to matter a lot in the Western world. It's like it had to have unfaithful management appointed by another company they're a customer of, as a condition to use their products. Worse, said provider is also a provider for every other business, and their products are not interoperable. How long before courts jump in to prevent this and give back control to the business owner?

This gets tricky. If I click on a link intending to view a picture of a cat, but instead it installs ransomware, is that abiding by its owner or not? It did what I told it to do, but not at all what I wanted.

We dont need to get philosophical here. You(the admin) can require you (the user) to input a password to signify to you(the admin) to install a ransomware when a link is clicked. That way no control is lost.

What if the cat pictures are an app too? The computer can't require a password specifically for ransomware, just for software in general. The UI flow for cat pictures apps and ransomware will be identical.

A computer that can run arbitrary programs can necessarily run malicious ones. Useful operations are often dangerous, and a completely safe computer isn't very useful.

Some sandboxing and a little friction to reduce mistakes is usually wise, but a general-purpose computer that can't be broken through sufficiently determined misuse by its owner is broken as designed.

If you connect your computer to the Internet, it can get hacked. If you leave it logged in unattended or don't use authentication, someone else can use it without your permission.

This isn't rocket science and it has nothing to do with artificially locking down a computer to serve the vendor instead of the owner.

Edit: I'd like to add that no amount of extra warranty from the vendors are going to cover the risk of a malware infection.

The ransomware can encrypt the files in your home directory just as well with secure boot enabled.

This is just another example of how secure boot provides zero additional security for the threat modes normal users face.

You could bridge the ipp server of cups over webrtc to a native listener that talks to the usb port. Webrtc to localhost might raise some red flags, but could be a neat alternative to the chrome requirement. Use at the very least some hmac key pairing to ensure others can't easily piggyback on the listener. I just saved you a few bucks.

This looks seriously impressive. Also, I wonder what the a11y implications are. I don't miss Macromedia Flash hell at all. This is HTML5, so with a bit of effort it could look beautiful and still cater to the visually impaired.

Edit: I can't scroll any of the showcases. Probably deliberate, but a cut-off UI can be annoying.

Edit2: I opened the yellow car on the production line and going back the page got all offscreen and looks messed up

Thanks! The a11y angle is something I want to tackle properly. Noted the bugs too, the car one is a known issue.

I turn of scroll events except on home assistant. You can enable or disable depending on your needs

If Android, try going into accessibility settings and set display size to maximum. Then see if you still like HN and many other websites with shitty unresponsive CSS.

Why would I do that?

IDK. In my case, instructions are much more readable in osmand while driving. Better readability is kinda the whole reason why such a setting exists. I certainly hope I'm not the only one trying to break my own work by adjusting a11y settings in the os. Computers are meant to support people, not the other way around.