I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • On public WiFi I just vpn into my home network. The issue with public WiFi is that it can be sniffed by anyone in range since there is generally no encryption.

    Although pretty much everything we do is over tls these days, and DoH helps protect against even dns sniffing. There’s still at least some risk to working in the clear over a public WiFi network. At least in information gathering, what bank you use, etc.

    But, there’s no real benefit in using a paid vpn over one you own unless you’re downloading illegal content, want to watch another Netflix region, or are in a country with heavy Internet monitoring/filtering.









  • I would have thought so, but I think it depends on how thin the skin of the pipe is. I would also have expected a breaker to trip under that much load. But, based on that happening, I’d not be surprised if there are bypasses and/or broken breakers.

    When we moved into the house we’re in now, the RCD (GFCI) didn’t work at all. I pressed test, nothing. Had the electrician over to change it. He tested the actual actuation using earth leakage. Nothing. So, faults can happen too.

    I want to be wrong, though. Because that’s a pretty bad state to get into, I think.


  • The only way that immediately springs to mind is so unlikely to happen. It requires multiple faults/mistakes.

    1: The chassis of one of the two units became live (connected to “hot” for you Americans) but was also not grounded in any way.
    2: The chassis of the other WAS grounded and created a circuit for the current to flow.
    3: There was no RCD (GFCD or whatever you guys call it) on the circuit.

    In this way, that pipe would be the only thing connecting the two devices, and the resistance is causing a huge amount of heat (just like an incandescent bulb, or a heating element does by design).

    Probably other possibilities, but it’s just the first thing I could think of that could potentially produce this result. But, that’s a lot of safety features to have either failed or just simply not been in place for this to be possible. So, frankly I hope I’m totally wrong.


  • When I was talking about memory, I was more thinking about how it is accessed. For example, exactly what actions are atomic, and what are not on a given architecture, these can cause unexpected interactions during multi-core work depending on byte alignment for example. Also considering how to make the most of your CPU cache. These kind of things.


  • I’d agree that there’s a lot more abstraction involved today. But, my main point isn’t that people should know everything. But knowing the base understanding of how perhaps even a basic microcontroller works would be helpful.

    Where I work, people often come to me with weird problems, and the way I solve them is usually based in low level understanding of what’s really happening when the code runs.