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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s hard because it’s not a perfect linear relationship between battery voltage and battery percentage. When the battery is 80% full, the voltage hardly changes at all as it drains. But it can change significantly with unrelated factors, like age and temperature. So they have to use the integral of current consumption to calculate the battery level. There are other tricks, too, like using temperature to check battery percentage (when the battery is charging, it heats up if it’s nearly full), and some lithium ion batteries have a third wire for measuring the temperature.




  • Last company where I faced external suppliers, I had to take a training where they said we couldn’t accept any item worth more than like $20, except food or alcohol during a presentation. But we could accept such items on behalf of the company, and they would be raffled off to a random employee. One time a guy in purchasing got a giant brass horse head from a Chinese supplier. I guess nobody signed up for the raffle, so it became a permanent fixture in the cafeteria.








  • My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can’t install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.

    It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.

    I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.

    I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.









  • Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I’m really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it’s only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone’s mind with lies, for hardly any cost.