Programming

I'm writing to follow up on the QP tool here- because I posted before, and it was incredibly helpful. Thanks to those who helped out with all the directions.

RECAP:

Been building a tiny tool to share structured thoughts fast- no tabs, just type and share.

It’s called Quickpoint → https://quickpoint.me/

Curious what people think it's for. Some use it like a notepad, some for demos or quick specs.

If you gave it 30 seconds:

**- What’s your gut sense of what this is?

• Would you actually use it for anything?
• What would stop you from using it twice?**

Thanks — Trying to see who might use this and for what and adapt accordingly.

Really appreciate any feedback that you can give.

I use vscode for my personal projects (c++ and a fully open source stack, compiling for both Linux and Windows).

I'm using the proprietary version of vscode (via the aur) for the plugin repository, but I've always envied the open source version...

Are there any tools that have made you excited?

Bonus points if they have some support for compiling with MSVC (or if you can convince me to ditch it for something else).

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250515190754/https://ppaolo.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-move-in-tech-right-now

I am experiencing a bit of a whiplash here at work. To be fair, I am getting paid very well (and got a significant raise last year, that was good), but we have had positions be open for years now with no hiring. And we are having more and more projects being proposed without finishing the projects themselves. Its the classic they want to do more with less scenario. The top brass just announced a hiring freeze so new devs for a while.

The execs are floating the idea that AI can be used to replace or supplement the people leaving. On all of our propitiatory code-base/solutions....yeah that will go well.

So yeah anyone else dealing with this?

I have been familiar with Monero for many years now, so I have to address this problem urgently:

I have noticed a fatal issue with Bitmain's “I am not an ASIC” ASIC, the Antminer X5: Even though the device is all about CPUs and RAM sticks, it is still the most efficient device. It beats all miners that rely on conventional CPUs (EPYC or RYZEN) in terms of price and efficiency. As a result, Monero mining has become completely dependent on a single company within just a few years. Entrepreneurs who want to mine Monero are faced with one of the toughest competitions there is. They will therefore use the most efficient equipment. The X5. Am I the only one who seems to have noticed this so far?

Monero's ASIC resistance was meant to not be dependent on one company. Now we are. How can we wriggle out of this noose?

I would also like to ask you not to fall for assumptions that someone at home is simply mining for the good Monero with their own computer. The percentage is probably the smallest. In truth, it is an advanced industry.

I see the recent hashrate growth as particularly critical when looking at the hashrate chart as a whole. Often these increases came before a prominent ASIC came out of the shadows and was presented to the world, while it had already been mining for years. (Like in 2018 and 2019)

If the hashrate drops dramatically again, this could lead to a significant vulnerability of Monero.

Moneros Hashrate Chart: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-hashrate.html#alltime

I work a lot with Monero, so I wanted to share these thoughts with you.

I usually address problems for which I also have solutions. But frankly, I don't have any ideas here. Because adjusting the mining algorithm would not throw Bitmain out of the race. After all, they have only built a very efficient CPU miner.

As if they were spitting at the developers' feet, even based on an open source chipset (RISC-V).

What do you think?

I'm trying to wrap my head around how media player websites work.

This might not be fully programming, but idk where else to post this question

Some video sharing sites uses blob objects to send the video in chunks, instead of letting the browser download in full. Usually there's mpd or m3u8 files that we can use to download the whole video

But some sites don't use those files. They send mp4 chunks, but those mp4s can't be played and seem encrypted.

How is the webpage's video player able to play the video? Is there a decrypter or something in the webpage/video player? Am i able to download all mp4 chunks and run them through some decrypter in the webpage served to me and create the whole video from it?

https://github.com/jdvillal/parser

Hi everyone,

yesterday, we released iceoryx2 v0.6, an ultra-low latency inter-process communication framework for Rust, C and C++. Python support is also on the horizon. The main new feature is Request-Response-Stream, but there's much more.

If you are into robotics, embedded real-time systems (especially safety-critical), autonomous vehicles or just want to hack around, iceoryx2 is built with you in mind.

Check out our release announcement for more details: https://ekxide.io/blog/iceoryx2-0-6-release

And the link to the project: https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2

Pointers in C can often be difficult to understand—I certainly had a learning curve and am continuing to learn. However, I had a thought that may help some by comparing a common experience and wanted to share.

A pointer in C behaves just like a word in any spoken language which refers to a physical object or multiple objects and the uniqueness of each object (e.g Skippy the dog, Mittens and Tiger the cats, fork number 5). The word itself does not contain the physical object and its uniqueness but only communicates the existence of the physical object and its uniqueness. The pointer itself does not contain the physical address and its value but only communicates the existence of the physical address and its value.

Hello,

I am making an open source privacy-first fitness band for myself and I am writing the firmware now as someone relatively inexperienced at firmware development (I am an electronics engineer by trade). I get it done but sometimes I run into concept issues, especially when I start overthinking, like now that I need help with.

I have a macronix SPI NOR flash on-board that I want to use as offline activity saving, backup at low battery, etc... I am dreaming up the data structure for it. Here is the values I need to save to not lose information and what will be required for my supported features in the Bluetooth Physical Activity Monitor Service:

struct memory_map_nor {
    time_t timestamp;
    uint16_t sub_sess_id;
    uint32_t steps: 24;
    uint8_t bpm;
    float16_t spo2;
    uint16_t pulse_inter_beat_interval;
    uint16_t cadence;
    uint16_t speed;
    uint16_t activity_level;
    uint16_t activity_type;
    uint16_t temp;
};

So from this datastructure, it has a total of 28 bytes of data. This has to fit on a 256 byte page, which means 9 "rows" of data can be written per page, 144 per sector, 2304 per 64 bit block, and 147456 in total for a 32Mbit NOR.

But, I am getting confused while reading about memory structures in "normal" processors that need to read everything in 4/8-byte words via the parallel interfaces. This means that conventionally, everything has to be padded to neat structures that are divisible by 4 (32-bit) for QSPI reading. In that case, I would either have to add another 32 bits of data or pad 32 bits to every "row", making a neat 8 data "rows" per page.

OR, because I am only using single lane SPI, would this not matter and I could shove an extra datapoint in each page. The difference is 147456 data rows vs 131072 data rows. At 3s polling rate, that is 5.12 days vs 4.55 days. For my application, the difference might be useless anyway, but the band goal battery life is 2 weeks or so.

Again, maybe I am overthinking this and can just pad the data to make everything neat and fit well. Anyone have any opinions? Thanks!

I couldn't sleep last night and ended up working on a terminal-based recreation of the old Starry Skyline screensaver we had on our computers when I was a kid (part of the After Dark suite of screensavers). It's been a lot of fun to work on and I'm enjoying thinking of what else I can add to it beyond the simple office windows and stars. I just got finished adding fireworks and I'm real pleased with how they turned out.

https://github.com/Whelk/asciiskyline

This is my first time working with curses so it's serving as a useful learning experience. Hoping to throw together some TUI utilities once I'm comfortable enough with it.

Lessons from event driven architecture

IP tells you where the request comes from, that’s it. It doesn’t tell you what language the user speaks. It looks like Google thinks otherwise, and many programmers are blindly repeating it for Google with no idea how do it properly.

An update from GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159123#discussioncomment-13148279

The rates are here: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api?apiVersion=2022-11-28

• 60 req/hour for unauthenticated users
• 5000 req/hour for authenticated - personal
• 15000 req/hour for authenticated - enterprise org