She/They

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • For context, American. Those were the best 6 weeks of my life as far as work trips go. Having to go by German law was amazing. Unlike the 80-100 hour weeks I was doing at times in the UK for the same customer. The PM on the US side tried to encourage some of the team to work in the hotel after hours, or on their days off, but not let on with the customer who would send you home if they found out. That didn’t go over well. Screw you, I am going to a museum, having delicious schnitzel, beer, and touching some grass.

    Let’s just say that we pretty much begged for future jobs in Germany. Never got to go back, but was definitely one of the few jobs I can fondly look back on.



  • UL certification can mean different things, depending on the product and type of mark. It also isn’t that expensive to get UL listed as it isn’t like every single item you produce is tested. Each product you design is tested, but not each item you produce.

    There are 3/4 types. UL listed, UL recognized, and UL classified. Certified is newer and more stringent.

    • Recognized is mostly for machinery and components within machinery. It isn’t terribly difficult to get, but annoying. I have dealt with this type as we design and build electrical panels. Usually you hand the design to a panel builder and they will get it certified before delivery.
    • Listed is for products and appliances, and is fully tested for safety. This applies to most consumer electronics.
    • Certified Enhanced is also for products, and you can read up on it here: https://www.ul.com/news/qa-uls-enhanced-certification-mark
    • Classified is for products and is half ass tested. All it means is that some requirements for UL were tested and passed, but not all.

    If a product is Classified by UL, this can mean its testing meets the particular requirements for a single test with a published result, but has nothing to do with all the other tests that may form part of a Standard (i.e., UL 181).

    As for pricing for UL listed, it can be just a few grand for a single product. Not much when you are selling thousands. I am sure Classified is even cheaper. I wonder how many of these cheap ass lamps say Classified.




  • We had a student run server for piracy at my University to get copied textbooks from, but even then we had to sometimes look elsewhere. I often couldn’t afford books and not all professors allowed the cheaper used previous editions.

    Science textbooks were the worst with their stupid fucking online code bullshit so we could do homework. They even made it where you could buy just the code, which was something like $70. Still better than 300+, but JFC. Having to spend over $1000 for books that you are only going to use for 10 weeks was nuts.

    The last saving grace we had is all textbooks were required to have at least one copy in the library that could not be checked out/removed. You could photocopy the homework pages that way. If your classmates were nice, they would let you borrow theirs to copy any pages too. You could also buy your textbook, copy what you needed, and return it within the return window.








  • I do a lot on my M1 air and I haven’t even considered I would have RAM issues with 16GB. Windows, I would be getting 64GB to not be miserable. I don’t run as much as you all the time, but having a container or two going, far too many browser tabs, PDFs, 3-4 intellij projects, discord, teams, and probably other things I am forgetting about is the norm. I even have AutoCAD open sometimes.

    The biggest difference is Mx is arm based, which goes a long way into getting better performance and battery life. I really need to look up again how Apple manages memory, swap, and performance in general. I just checked Activity Monitor and even with most of the memory showing as used, I don’t even notice. If my laptop were to die tomorrow due to my clumsy fumbling, I am getting another Mac. My only wish is getting Vulkan support. That would be amazing. Not going to hold my breath on that though.

    Now, 8GB is a crime and it is not something I would recommend for any laptop/desktop, no matter what it is running. Not saying it wouldn’t work ok on a Mac for someone who only uses it for web browsing, but it is utterly ridiculous that 8GB is even an option these days. This is a dumb hill for Apple to die on and 16 should be the absolute minimum.

    I have a debloated W11 VM on my proxmox server that I have used only once and is only there for some unknown emergency. With a little fiddling, I got it to idle under 4GB. I don’t plan to run servers on my laptop and invested enough on a little server rack to give me things like file servers, VMs, more permanent containers, and somehow got talked into making a gaming VM that I use at LAN parties. The 3U case for the main server travels very well.

    Personally, I would try and get some of your server stuff off your machine. You can even take a look at some docker swarm or similar k8 concepts to reduce your container load. RPis are another good choice for some lower load server operations. I have a little RPi swarm that is powered by PoE+, though I plan on trying k8 on them soon to get some experience. RPis are also small enough that you could throw one in your bag if you needed something portable and are fairly inexpensive. Just a thought and may not be possible with your server applications.