Fallacies of Distributed Computing: Automotive Edition

So our 2016 Subaru Outback has been having horrible battery drain issues for a couple years now. We got the attached service bulletin recently that explained the issue.

It turns out that the Data Communications Module that powers Subaru's Starlink service (emergency assistance/safety/etc. service) now causes a battery drain because it is trying to talk to a 3G network that is no longer there, and it just tries its little heart out.

You can bring the car in to get the DCM reprogrammed to not do this anymore which will fix the problem, and they will also cover batteries killed by the issue.

But my favorite part about this is that this happened because they didn't account for the first Fallacy of Distributed Computing:

"The network is reliable".

A bunch of vehicle computers each connecting to a home network sure sounds like distributed computing to me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2024/MC-10251111-0001.pdf
#Subaru #DistributedComputing #Lesbaru #cars

launching your enemies into the Sun:
>extremely difficult, most of y'all do not grasp just how daunting a task this is. no existing launch vehicle could accomplish this
>you either give them months of food provisions for the journey (who can afford that?) or else they starve to death long before reaching the Sun and then what was even the point? you could have starved them to death on Earth
>you can't eat the rich if you are converting them into plasma at the bottom of the biggest gravity well around
>they get to forever be remembered as the first humans to travel to the Sun

marooning your enemies on the Moon:
>doable with existing Artemis hardware plus a halfway functional Lunar lander which at least one of the passengers can willingly provide
>they have to stare hopelessly at the distant Earth they know they can never return to
>once any part of life support fails, will boil alive or freeze to death depending on time of month
>bodies will be perfectly preserved, a feast for the first actual Lunar colonists later
>not the first to go there so history will forget their names

Doing a large refactor in a code base you didn’t write feels like being trapped in a maze of Chesterton‘s fences.

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you *don't* have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale *without* paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

What’s worrying is that all of it sounds like a joke, but it’s all real 🫠
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aWfYxg-Ypm4

Every now and then I take a look to see what might be a suitable replacement for my Honda Fit, and there really aren’t many options!

RE: https://mastodon.world/users/davidho/statuses/112274788414798295

This ad looks like shit.

So a funny thing happens with the web:

Whatever becomes abundant loses impact for conveying value. High res photography was once a way to make a site look valuable. But Unsplash made it abundant and free, so premium sites move on from photos to illustrations.

“Premium” is a moving target.

AI-generated images will become synonymous with low-quality, low value. A smell of junk no (reputable) brand will want on them.

urllib3, #Python's most-used HTTP client library, is fundraising to add HTTP/2 support and ensure long-term sustainability of the project.

Retoots and shares are appreciated 🙏

https://sethmlarson.dev/urllib3-is-fundraising-for-http2-support

Not a new concept for most of my circles, but I do like the name: “limitarianism”.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/04/ingrid-robeyns-limitarianism-makes-case-capping-wealth/677925/

If you love #Murderbot, and imo you should, you will also probably love reading this talk by @marthawells about it and other things:

https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649804.html

H/T to @gvwilson for bringing it to my attention.

1/ Once you look past syntax and "paradigms", many programming languages (Java, Python, Racket, …) share a common semantic core. But students seem to understand it very poorly, which leads to endless confusion (as often seen on here). What to do? ↵
https://blog.brownplt.org/2024/04/12/behavior-misconceptions.html

I ran into a bug in a program but logging is off. I'll just enable logging and run it again, surely I'll quickly run into the same bug again, it'll definitely reoccur!

Behold, a fool.

The real reason that a minute isn't an official SI unit is that it's actually a highly variable length of time. I've been working for 3 days on a job that I was assured would just take a minute

Feeling better both about ditching Kagi during the whole Brave thing in hindsight.

RE: https://hackers.town/users/lori/statuses/112255132348604770

She will forgive almost anything once. Twice, if you’re lucky.

On the third transgression, there will be consequences.

Once, she could be easy. Once, she could be a childhood pet, a mother’s maiden name, an elementary school’s mascot. Once, she was unbreakable. Now, she is become endless strings of letters and numbers, incomprehensible, unpronounceable, holy and profane. Speak her secret names aloud and wake the end of days.

Continue: https://leemoyer.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/automata-hari-small-god-of-passwords/

I stay subscribed to the BabyBuddy DST issue if for no other reason than to relish S being old enough so that I’m not awake at those times to run into those bugs anymore.

Also another reason self-hosting open source software is so great - I actually did fix one of those DST bugs that I ran into with S. I mean, what else are you going to do at odd hours of the night/morning anyway, right?

i love ruby

Question: what's the most common byte on your (decrypted) hard drive?

I wrote some rust to calculate this https://github.com/tahnok/byte-counter and on my mostly full ext4 debian partition it's....

`o`

full result: https://cdn.tahnok.ca/u/sda-sorted.csv got by running it over `/dev/sda`

SPL announces massive closures this spring as city goes all in on austerity for everyone but cops https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/04/11/79463199/the-seattle-public-library-announces-1500-hours-of-closures-in-the-next-eight-weeks