While we need to earn money, our focus is on only doing projects where we can be proud of engineering-wise. If we don't have a chance to become the best in something, we won't even start.
Me and my company also try to not out-source anything, but to do everything ourselves, as learning new stuff is fun.
Personally I love Object Pascal and assembler (yes, I am that old), and am the opposite of a "full stack" "developer". Written my own TCP/IP stack and webserver with a total binary size of 1MB and zero dependencies (besides a Linux kernel).
I am also part of the international "demoscene" community, a UNESCO-recognized art form that starting in the 80ies had the focus to get stuff done with computers that nobody believed would be possible to do. I've organized the world biggest demoscene event for a decade, and still am very active.
Also, I pretend to be a DJ, doing wild mashups mostly related to UK Hardcore (once called "Happy Hardcore"). And I have train drivers license. Why? Because it was fun to learn.
- What I am missing in this pyramid are brain worms. Brain worms are real food! Don't fall for the ultra-processed glue sniffing practice all scientists wrongly had been recommending you. Have a proudly american-made brain worm instead.
- People should finally understand that LLMs are a lossy database of PAST knowledge. Yes, if you throw a task at it that has been done tons of times before, it works. Which is not a surprise, because it takes minutes to Google and index multiple full implementations of "Tool that allows you to right-click on an image to convert it". Without LLM you could do the same: Just copy&paste the implementation of that from Microsoft Powertoys, for example.
What LLMs will NOT do however, is write or invent SOMETHING KNEW.
And parts of our industry still are about that: Writing Software that has NOT been written before.
If you hire junior developers to re-invent the wheels: Sure, you do not need them anymore.
But sooner or later you will run out of people who know how to invent NEW things.
So: This is one more of those posts that completely miss the point. "Oh wow, if I look up on Wikipedia how to make pancakes I suddenly can make and have pancakes!!!1". That always was possible. Yes, you now can even get an LLM to create you a pancake-machine. Great.
Most of the artists and designers I am friends with have lost their jobs by now. In a couple of years you will notice the LLMs no longer have new styles to copy from.
I am all for the "remix culture". But don't claim to be an original artist, if you are just doing a remix. And LLM source code output are remixes, not original art.
- Then this is what you should point out. In this case the file names in your promo visualization should NOT contain the search keyword.
So if a search for "fashion upcycling" also returns "case_study_on_how_to_turn_PET_into_clothings.docx", then that's a great USP, and that is what you should point out in your pitch and visualization.
This is because in real life most people already fail at finding good search terms. Many people are not even able to come up with a collection of words to put into the google search box. And the word(s) they may choose could be too specific, or not specific enough. So any kind of "unsharp" search is helping those kind of users.
- I assume that someone has been mighty proud about the website. But I am sorry, it is terrible. Loading my "experience" took over a minute. An my "experience" is not even cached, it was loaded from scratch on the second visit.
Also, while it looks visually stunning, it is really not helping much introducing the product. I find it rather confusing, really.
The first thing I noticed - when you searched for "upcycling", all results that you have shown hat the exact match keyword "upcyling" in their filename. If this is just a text grep, then the product is redundant: "everything" exists.
In case you really would get results for "upcycling" based on an internal LLM-based summary of disk content, that would be great - but your live demo does not show that.
Also, later down my "experience" you try to show how user input is handled. But as the "experience" is fixed size and can not be zoomed in, it is impossible to read any of the blurry text.
Again, I understand that this "experience" looks impressive. But it is a complete distraction and does not help at all to introduce your product.
I spent 5 minutes looking at this, one of that looking at a loading spinner like it's 2005 again, and I have no clue what your USP is.
And to be honest: Your HN post here also is not helping. Think "Dropbox + NotebookLM + Perplexity" - what? That makes no sense. It is a complete distraction. Explain what your product/service is, what it's USP is, and what value it provides to me.
Instead after a wall of text you are explaining me that one can select files by clicking on them.
- I don't know in which part of this planet you are living in, but: 14 years ago you might have lived a free society where your ideas and thoughts could not cause you to get arrested, deported or killed.
Yeah, back then Apples iCloud might have been the best suggestion.
If you are trying to extrapolate from the past - which is a good thing in general - do not go back ONLY 14 years from now, but try a bigger time span, too.
I was born in Germany. When I extrapolate from the past on ANYTHING, I at least always start in the year 1933.
No, not a good idea if you expect that within your lifespan some entity might be able to be forced to tell a regime where you are hiding right now.
Taking control of your own data is shitloads of work, I and understand people do not have time it, and have other priorities.
I am just making my point here on how to better extrapolate and project from the past towards the future.
- Ahahaha.
I can confirm that if I change my Accept-Language headers in my browser from "en" to "en-US" I get the other version of that page. Actually, for everything else I tried other than "en-US" I get the evil version.
Synology press team Achievement unlocked: Confuse all global IT press outside of the United States.
- As German IT news media has retracted the "Synology reverses" story based on the content they are reading in the press release link, I suspect there is some Geo-stuff involved here (I tested this from multiple German IPs now and always get "the other version").
- Because I am no longer sure people are all getting shown the same content for that URL, here is what is shown to me (no local caches or proxies):
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series
Details
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
- I do not know if we are getting served different content for the same URL. Content I can see, with server-side timestamp of 2 seconds ago:
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series:
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
- Just commented here to point out that this news story spreading is wrong (and that other IT news outlets have since corrected/retracted it), don't have any eggs in that basket, but:
Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.
There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only subject.
- This is not "my" link. That link is part of their press release.
- Last self-reply on this, I promise:
If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:
AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.
So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
- Exec summary for those who think their time is not worth this evil madness:
The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-no.
No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.
The liked article specifically is wrong here:
"Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"
No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.
Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't learned the lesson. :(
Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their customers...
- NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read:
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
- Did not mention facts to counter you but to provide... facts.
Parent comment by mine by the way also did not claim anyone invented anything, but that Windows once HAD and FOLLOWED human interface guidelines that made the system optimized to be used by... humans. While now MS is fighting their human users.
But to give you feedback: Sometimes it is nice to sit on a shady park bench on a Sunday without an apple fan boy running by with a loudspeaker "AND DID YOU KNOW? JOBS INVENTED BENCHES!!!".
- [For those who are not into the LTSC IoT stuff: Basically it's a decrapified Win10 with support and security updates until January 13 2032. Yes, 2032.]
I am seeing the exact opposite. It's not just that my tiny company has completely moved to Win10 Enterprise LTSC IoT, but every newly bought computer gets Win11 nuked and that installed. In Germany (shady) resellers of Win10 LTSCblabla licenses are popping up.
Pretty much everyone in the embedded electronics industry that has to use Windows is doing ass covering right now by buying the LTSC licenses while you still can.
The departures time table on your airport or train station is not going to be replaced because M$ claims that Win11 is incompatible with it. It will be moved to LTSC if it's not already on that for long. Same for ATMs, the strange machine my dentist uses together with her drills etc.
Of course I have no clue how/if Win10 LTSC market share is or can be detected at all. But from inside the embedded electronics industry I can say: Panic buying of Win10 LTSC licenses going on.
Not a contradiction to what you wrote, by the way: "Nobody" ) is buying Win10 Pro or Ent anymore. But they are buying LTSC in heaps according to sadly only anecdotical evidence.
) Well, not in their online shop, but if you ask, you very well can still buy new Thinkpads with Win10 installed from Lenovo, for example.
- Accepted.
- Not true really. You will hit regulatory hurdles if your rockets explode in other countries too often :)
And: RF spectrum is HIGHLY regulated.
Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.
Yes, you have read that correctly: 17 Billion for 300 MBit/s.
- Well, as this is standard practice the movie would be a ... documentary? ;)
I wasn't clear here enough: The device at this point enables you to typically see all devices on the LAN and WLAN on L2. Which means you can do ARP spoofing and all that kind of stuff. One of the first things you then would look at is what printers are available to infect. People often print interesting things :)
And yes, of course the USB keylogger is the cheap lazy solution. These days due to second factors not that useful as it used to be, but still... you can deploy it in seconds pretty much in every office, shop or governmental institutions.
But to not further drift into off-topic:
I am serious about all this. Should Grapevine be successful and for example one day put out a press release like "Procter & Gamble is now using our services", you will have in addition to state actors (China, Russia, Israel) a thousand kids looking up that P&G makes a profit of $15 Billion or whatever per year, and that they surely will pay 1% of that for not having all of their company data published.
If you look at existing knowledge management system that are deployed in physical-world-companies, you will see that they actually are not allowed to index all the data, but as you would be running against a lot of laws and management best practices if in the next coffee brake everybody would laugh about poor Tony who once had a really stupid concept, created a draft document of it, but then noticed that it won't work and make him look like a fool.... Thought not giving it to his manager would solve that "problem", but it got indexed as company knowledge..
So, erm, yeah: Existing knowledge management systems to a large extend are about NOT sharing knowledge.
Sorry for this raw brain dump of mine into this thread :)
- And this link form wired is about something completely unrelated - getting more stable coverage by using multiple different providers. It does not even mention Lasers.
You also clearly do not know what Layer 2 on the ISO/OSI model is.
But you are in total rage mode.
Triggered because the actual data invalidates what your cult says? :)
Sorry, will ignore you from now on. Again: Religion is not my cup of tea, bold claims on powerpoint presentations neither, I prefer to use data. We simply do not share a model of the world that is compatible to discuss these kind of things. No harm done, but no thank you :)
- You are aware that you are giving more weight to photos done of a powerpoint presentation over actual data points?
Sorry, that's not a path I am willing to follow. Religion is not my cup of tea.
- Not sure. If they would actively read that telemetry data they would notice that the market share of Win11 due to their actions is shrinking, not rising.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
- Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured.
How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias?
It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats.
And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer.
It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet).
If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover.
You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that!
So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. `
Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.
- "The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work."
Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...?
The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc.
Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim.
As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :)
Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
- I do remember to have read a couple of years ago that the Windows Ui team got replaced and now only consists of Mac users, never having used Windows themselves.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
- Mad respect!
- Can not reply to your anymore, guess we are nested too deep now?
I think we are simply talking about two different things here.
I mentioned 802.11r not due to the key exchange implementation details, but to point to the general point: Seamless handover requires shared state between cells.
This is not about static vs dynamic routing, you are thinking on the wrong layer here. We are in L1+L2 land.
On Starlink, the last time I tested a handover between two Sats in 2025 still involves a downtime of at least 5 seconds, and both L2 info and NAT state being lost.
In regards of axes: I am not much into emotions. Of course the data says that Elon Musk is the cancel cell that will play a huge part in destroying the western civilization. But as I do not like the western civilization and humans in general much, this does not trigger much emotions.
And even if I hated Elon Musk: We are talking about technology, R&D and implementation details here (which I enjoy!). I do not have emotions on IP protocols and such :)
No, in reality it's really very simple: My data says that Starlink just is not worth it. It is not commercially feasible. It pollutes the space with tons of trash that will harm productive future space missions and projects. It's highly overrated and overhyped. It's very hard to find positive reviews that haven't been paid for.
Or, executive summary: Starlink is a dead end, and without the Elon cult nobody after looking at a hypothetical business plan would invest.
And finally: Anecdotical evidence collected from my own tests and those of friends all says: It's just shitty. However: That of course depends on your use case. For some an 8 seconds drop-out might mean "patient dead". For others it might be "I will retry loading this after grabbing a cup of coffee". My peer group might have higher standards than others.
Of course Sat internet has its place as a niche business. But as you surely are aware in the US it was and is tried to steal tax money meant to build fiber by claiming Starlink would be equivalent. And you might also remember that if someone would not have pulled the emergency break, you know would have air traffic controllers seeing planes with 100ms+ of latency AND every now and then losing contact to all airplanes for 8 seconds.
And all of this has been tried before. Over in Europe, we 10 years ago had those fights where Viasat & co claimed to be an alternative when we got the "basic human right to broadband".
My first car I got in Germany was a C15. I used it to transport server racks, but also had a mattress in the back and had my first sex on it. On muddy festivals where others cars got stuck, I was able to get out easily. Repairs were dirt cheap. It also had a tow bar, and was able to pull a 1.5 metric ton trailer to get equipment to a computer party.
And I still was able to do 160 km/h (100 MPH) with it on the Autobahn. With or without server racks, with or without sex.
Best car I ever had.
It is really insane that these days cars on average weigh 25-40 times of their load. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.