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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The “key” of an m.2 defines what the pins mean, basically what signal they carry (PCIe, USB, …). There’s a nice table here, if you scroll down a bit. Some are extensions to others, and are pin compatible (meaning the things they have in common are on the same pins).

    A key and E key are very similar, while E just provides a few more interfaces, but importantly A doesn’t provide anything the E doesn’t. So any card that can work in A can also work in E. This is why A+E is so common: they don’t require the Mainboard to provide E, only A, but both will work so both notches are present.



  • Maybe they down vote because they think I don’t like the research or think it’s pointless (far from it). The only thing I dislike is the reporting about it, and even there mostly the clickbaity headlines intentionally misrepresenting the facts. It’s clearly intentional, because when reading the articles it usually becomes quite clear that the author was well aware.

    I can also imagine that articles like that stop at least a couple of people here and there from adopting solar for their home, cause they read what they think means that there’s about to be a 10% efficiency increase for panels. Clearly that’s a time to wait, not to buy! The number is people that only read the headline is probably uncomfortable high, but I got no clue what the actual percentage is, or if those that don’t click through take the headline at face value…


  • That’s pretty definite by any measure.

    Not really, sorry. The complaint still is that the announcements are of some magical huge improvement that is just not real. They might work in a prototype, maybe in a laboratory, or the thing just disintegrates after being exposed to water or something. Of course the results influence existing or future products, that’s how the real world improvements come about.

    By the time you modify the prototype (or whatever) into something that is actually real world production viable, with a reasonable lifespan and production costs, there’s barely anything left in common with the hyperbolic announcement about fantasy stuff.

    I stand by that statement you highlighted. And the fact that it isn’t hyperbole. With all of these achievements being released as clickbait news articles, somehow when something exciting it’s actually everything the market, it’s crickets. Like solid state or “salt” batteries are starting to become products, seen any articles on those posted here recently? Or in news outlets in general? I haven’t, but I honestly could’ve just missed them, or they didn’t gain as much traction.



  • You guys really seem to have a hard time to understand my point, so that’s on me. Clearly I didn’t explain it very well. First, look at my reply to GreyEyedGhost. Let me reemphasize from that post: I have never said or intended to imply that there were no advances made in the last 20 or 30 years. I have no idea why you keep bringing up long term (price) developments at all. It wasn’t even about price at all, please go back and read my comment again.

    Let’s address your points: Of course stuff has gotten cheaper, as that’s how “scale of production” works. That’s how the price AND the “doubling of installed capacity every 3 years” were achieved. Nothing about that is a technological breakthrough, it’s just production capacity you need for this.

    Of course there were improvements in technology (solar efficiency, battery density and others, wind “stuff”, …). But none of those were anywhere near those claims that you read in these pseudo-news. It’s a percent here or there. Look at the nice graph on Wikipedia. See how those lines go up very very little per year? Yet in the article that sparked this thread, it’s a whopping 10%! Unfortunately, the cells fall apart when they get warm. No idea how a solar panel would ever get warm. But hey, let’s make another headline claiming amazing gains, can’t ever have enough of those!


  • We’re saying the same thing with different words. Your prespective it’s “its’s so great”, mine is “it’s gotten slowly better”. I’m sick and tired of reading about some irrelevant technological breakthrough with +10% solar efficiency or +30% battery density in some laboratory every 2 weeks. Actual change comes in (very) low single digit percentages for efficency of panels per year (or similar for battery density). Not once in the last 30 years did we have an actual jump for stuff you can buy (within a short timeframe) that comes close to the hyperbole in these reports. The advancement in price can probably be attributed to scale of production most of all though. Who would buy

    why are you reading posts in a technology community? That seems self-destructive. Go actually look at that community maybe? Only the energy-pseudo-news in here is like that. The rest is mostly actual (relevant) news around technology and/or companies in that space. That’s my ENTIRE POINT. Thanks for emphasizing it. It’s not just that: renewable energy news has been like that for actual decades, no other field has this problem as far as I can tell.


  • All these news about in-development technologies in the renewable energy sector are causing real fatigue for me. This would be great news if it was commercialy viable, but it isn’t. It never is. If all the news about amazing new battery technologies were viable, we’d have 10x the capacity by now with cells that have zero fire risk and last 10 million cycles. But it’s always laboratory conditions.

    Gonna be honest, I kinda stopped paying attention to news like this, it’s a flood of theoretical advancements. I care about it when I can buy it.

    That being said, obviosuly the state-of-the-art technology has made significant advancements in the last 10 years, but it’s been incremental (it always is) and nowhere near the numbers that are thrown around in reports and articles like this.


  • I agree that the current state of laws is overkill by about an order of magnitude, and that’s obviously bad.

    But you do need some amount of protection for works created. Imagine being a photographer, you can’t make money. You make some nice photos, and how do you sell them? If you send a sample to someone, they can just print that and you can do nothing. There’s no copyright after all. It isn’t somthing you can protect legally, so you can’t stop them or sue them for compensation. There’s also a flip side from the corporate perspective: You might find employment as a full time photographer in places that need them, but what about all the companies that just need an occasional picture? You can’t contract it out, because you have no way to negotiate anything if their work isn’t protected, you can’t even look at samples cause nobody would ever dare showing any or they might just be used.



  • It highly depends on the job. Some companies run fully on Windows, no exceptions. There it obviously would not help. But many still either host various services on Linux, or buy hosting/cloud commuting that is Linux based. There it might even be necessary.

    It also depends on what you mean by “power user”. I would generally advise you to look into the server side of things. In my work, there are zero Linux machines that have a GUI of any kind installed. t The 50 or so Linux machines are all administered through SSH and Shell.






  • Ah so it’s a linux problem when the gpu driver causes instability, cause NVidia is making a shitty and proprietary linux driver and the market share is too small to warrant putting more effort in. Linux doesn’t have it’s own fully-featured graphics driver, so that company has to come in and provide their own since linux can’t supply it. And mistakes happen. Roughly the same logic.

    That’s not linux fault. Neither is it Microsofts fault when a company selling a security product decides it has to run in kernel mode and then they don’t properly test a release and just decide to yolo it.




  • As far as I’m aware, the aegis database format is only used by them. You also can’t do an automatic import (only export), so keeping multiple systems in sync (particularly more than 2) can only be tedious.

    If that’s what you’re after, just use a KeePass database, in particular if you’re already using one anyway. Most clients can sync with a remote storage (like Keepass2Android or KeePassXC on multiple platforms), and I do mean real sync: Both sides can have modifications, and it’ll consolidate them correctly (of course unless both have modified the same entry, then you’ll be prompted). Just throw the database onto a nextcloud or something, as the clients can also usually talk to that directly without another app doing the file transfer (at least Keepass2Android can).

    BitWarden has a pretty good reputation, and is a frequent recommendation as well. But then again, so was Authy… With your own VaultWarden as the backend (if you can easily host that yourself) it would be a no brainer as a near universal solution. And this would probably also be “secure enough” for normal, everyday purposes. It can import and export a KeePass database btw, if that helps.

    Since I haven’t actually said anything about how I’m handling this, here’s a quick summary: Critical accounts use a complex password (stored in my password manager) and the 2FA is only stored in Aegis. There are generally backup codes on paper stored “somwhere safe”, if this is supported by the service (google does, steam does, …). On any account that just happens to require 2FA, but I don’t use it for anything critical, the TOTP is just stored inside my password manager, for convenient auto-filling. Examples are a Twitch account (I don’t stream, I just happen to have an account for chat and stuff). My password manager is also KeePass-based and used on multiple systems, sync’d via nextcloud and with a mf’er of a password (plus an additional factor). I generally don’t reuse passwords anymore, at all, ever: They are generated, at least 24 characters long (usually longer) unless the service prohibits passwords of that length (yes, this happens, surprisignly often actually). The password database is of course backed up in like 3+ different locations, and some are located somewhere physically different (i.e. not at home).


  • Well to be frank, the fact that you’re asking this shows you haven’t really understood what makes something secure or insecure, or it isn’t as important to you as you claim. If you want your stuff to be secure, your phone is the only “thing” that generates the 2nd factor. Especially things that are critical shouldn’t have duplicate devices being able to also generate codes. If you do want to generate codes for less critical accounts somewhere else, you should register a 2nd TOTP generator with that service and use one each per other machine. That way, if something gets compromised, you can just revoke those devices preventing any damage without having to re-setup existing 2fa again for the devices that weren’t compromised.

    Now aegis is Android only, like you said. It also has no way of syncing with another instance (by design). It’s local only, it can just do backups. Having it send the highly critical information anywhere kind of defeats the security-purpose of it being local only. It adds a whole communications protocol that has to be secured, and somehow you have to authenticate the other side and so on. This also probably doubles the complexity (or at least size of the codebase) for the project, which then makes audits harder et cetera. Aegis currently does one thing (generate TOTP codes), and does this very well and as secure as it can without compromises.

    Now for an actual answer: Most password-managers can also generate TOTP codes, like KeePass or KeePassXC to name two open source ones. But it’s their secondary purpose, with the primary obviously being storing the passwords. I’m not going to get into the implications of storing a TOTP code generator secret together with the password of the account it protects, let’s just say there are some. Since the actual secrets are stored in a (secured) database, you can sync these between devices. Or you can just create multiple TOTP generators for a single service and keep them separate.

    Or we circle back to something server based, like BitWarden, which is primarily a password manager but also does TOTP. It’s a commercial, server based solution that is free for individuals. I’m not sure what the current limitations are for those accounts, like number of entries or just who you can share stuff with and so on. There is a open source implementation of their protocol called VaultWarden, where you can self-host the back end and not rely on the company securing their servers properly (and/or not being collateral damage in a breach of some kind). Again, combining password + TOTP-storage in the same service that is accessible online should be done with considerable thought to how it’s secured, but you could use this to only store the 2fa aspect as well.