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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Tbf that could have been done by tenants who figured the landlord would use that damage to argue they should lose their entire deposit despite not costing nearly that much to repair properly.

    Not that it wouldn’t be plausible that the landlord did it themselves or hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing but were willing to do it cheap, like Ricky.




  • It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn’t be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.

    Or your internet is slow and it’s taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.

    Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.

    Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.

    I joke but any one of those might actually be what’s going on.


  • Yeah, this is the impression I got when he talked about spending so much time training for the problems, especially the bit where he said it was all about hoping you’ve already seen and memorized the problems while pretending it’s the first time you’ve seen them. That’s the whole point of obscure problems like that: to show how you can handle a new problem.

    I’ve interviewed for technical positions and I don’t even really care if you get the right answer as much as I care about how you approach the problem.

    Shit like this will just make it harder to figure out who the real programmers are and separate them from the people who are only there because they know tech skills means money but didn’t actually develop any tech skills because they were too busy gaming the system. I don’t want to hire someone who spent hours memorizing things they think I want regurgitated on command. I want to hire someone who can understand the overall picture of what’s going on and what needs to be done because it’s interesting to them.









  • Passive cooling could be enough. Even a bunch of ssd chips wouldn’t take up all of the vertical space, so top of the case could just be a heat sink. Though it might need instructions to only install it in an enclosure that has a fan blowing air past it (and not use the spots behind the mobo that don’t get much airflow).

    A lot of motherboards come with metal styling that acts as a heat sink for nvme drives without even using fins, though they still have more surface area than a 3.5" drive and only have to deal with the heat from one or two chips.

    But maybe it isn’t realistic and that’s why we don’t see SSDs like that on the market (in addition to price).


  • Yeah, nvme drives show how little space the storage takes up. Just stick a bunch of them inside the 3.5" format, along with a controller and cooling, and that would be great for a large/slow (relative to NVME) drive capped by SATA speeds.

    I don’t miss the noise hard drives make, plus it’s nice to not really worry as much about what kind of magnetic activity might be going on around it, like is my subwoofer too close or what if my kid somehow gets her hands on a powerful magnet and wants to see if it will stick to my PC case.





  • Ah that’s interesting. If you can swap the devices from one pi to another, try powering it all up on machine A, then swap the devices to machine B and power that on. Might tell you if the issue is with on the pi side or with the devices.

    Is latency higher on the first boot than on subsequent ones? I’d be looking into race conditions if you’re seeing a bit of lag cascade out into bigger problems. Race conditions are the worst, especially when the race most often goes the right way and just occasionally goes the wrong way. Though you can force the wrong way by adding delays in your code, if you have an idea of where the race is happening.


  • Or, after weeks of debugging an issue the user has logs proving they are having weird performance issues despite having a strong GPU, it turns out their parents wouldn’t let them take that GPU out of the family PC so they rigged up a PCIe to USB to wireless transmitter that hooks up to a wireless to USB to serial port that exploits a signal leaking from serial port to PCIe bus bug on the family PC motherboard to act as if the GPU is on their own machine, which both impresses and horrifies you.

    And when you try to get approval to drop the issue as unsupported, your manager gives you shit and it takes another week to convince him that it isn’t a use case that you should support. And they only agreed in the end because a more senior technical person happened to overhear you pleading with your manager one day and only had to say, “that’s crazy!” for your manager to 180 immediately on the issue. But it’s still cited as a negative on your next performance review (“you spent weeks working on something we don’t even support!”).


  • Another angle to try is to set the date one day ahead and see if the bug shows up then. Might need to disconnect from network and set it in the BIOS for the test to work properly.

    I could be wrong, but I figure after being off for an hour, all capacitors should have discharged by then, so it’s probably not based on how long the hardware has been unpowered.

    Though one other angle I just thought of, if you have something that runs periodically, maybe the bug is related to that period being missed once or n times. Or it could be related to something that is meant to wake the computer to run some job and then go back to sleep but instead just sets it in a bad state.