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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 26th, 2023

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  • The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

    However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

    However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

    They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.




  • Delegates have been determined prior to the convention for as long as I can remember. That is the entire point of the primary.

    In this case, the person who won the primary has withdrawn. The presumptive nominee is now the person who voters expected to be his VP pick; so they should have understood that their vote for Biden was a vote for Harris if something happens to Biden.

    Additionally, Biden has endorsed Harris. Most of the delegates are pledge to support Biden. While they are technically free to vote their conscious, the argument of “I should support the person endorsed by the one I was sent here to support” is pretty persuasive. As is the argument of “no one is running against her”

    The issue with Clinton was the presence of super delegates, who were not required to follow any primary election results. An open convention turns all delegates into super delegates.



  • Biden tried to restart the deal back in 2021, and has been trying ever since.

    However, it turns out that the US is not the only party involved in international treaties. We can’t just pick up the ball and go home mid game, then come back in a year with a new coach and expect everyone to continue playing like nothing happened

    The original deal was a difficult achievement on its own. Now, we need to not only repeat that, but also deal with the fact that Iran does not trust us to follow through with our end of the deal. Overcoming that needs good negotiation, and a lot of concessions we did not want to make.

    This is why administrations of both parties have historically upheld deals made by the opposing party that they didn’t like. Unilaterally breaking deals every 4 years because of who wins an election makes the US a non-credible partner in negotiations. You can’t just wave a wand and fix that.


  • I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.

    I don’t work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.

    It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.

    Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting “run as administrator”, so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.


  • In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:

    • monitor
    • keyboard/trackpad
    • charger
    • windows 11
    • active cooling system
    • enclosure

    I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.

    Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)

    [0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).




  • At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …

    And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.

    4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.


  • Because the thing people refer to when they say “linux” is not actually an operating system. It is a family of operating systems built by different groups that are built mostly the same way from mostly the same components (which, themselves are built by separate groups).




  • Sudo is a setuid binary, which means it executes with root permissions as a child of of the calling process. This technically works, but gives the untrusted process a lot of ways to mess with sudo and potentially exploit it for unauthorized access.

    Run0 works by having a system service always running in the background as root. Running a command just sends a message to the already running seevice. This leaves a lot less room for exploits.