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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • A lot of my development experience is actually about handling people. Both management and other developers. Ego is indeed a big problem. I wish my job would be just programming/designing/debugging/testing, but this is not the nature of most of the jobs. Instead it is managing expectations, estimations, negotiating specs, features, explaining what is realistic, what is not, what is possible and what is not and why. It gets tiring quickly and is also thankless as often arrogant people who aren’t actually helpful or working in the best interest of the company get mistaken for rock stars and get to do even more damage you need to fix. You also need to deal with that from time to time.


  • Oh, great, my country is in the news again. Oh, wait, it’s bad news, again. Here’s some better news: the students have blocked all the universities and other people are joining the protests in hopes of overthrowing the authoritarian regime. The corruption has reached peak levels and is actually killing people. The government is doing it’s best to stay in power, but no real, mass violence has been applied just yet. People have given up on elections because they are demonstrably fixed and can’t change anything. I don’t know how this will end.










  • From my small experience with Qualcomm in the past, I’m not too hopeful. In a company I used to work for, we wanted to use one of their SoC with Linux, which they claimed they supported. It was many years ago. But was full of closed binary blobs which even when signing NDAs, we couldn’t get the source for. We’re talking user-space drivers, sensors offloaded to a separate core with closed source firmware etc. It’s Linux, but it’s not Linux in spirit, it feels so closed and proprietary and secretive. They’re coming from Android, which google architecturally enabled vendors to close their drivers by utilizing HAL. It’s the single most significant blow to Linux by any corporation so far. It enabled thousands of vendors to close their shitty driver in user-space and not maintain it for newer kernels (kernel driver is just an IO proxy for user-space drivers). I get that without it, there wouldn’t be Android phones we have today, but I expected them to slowly open up. 10+ years later, almost nothing changed, in fact - things seem worse to me.








  • One of the bigger reasons is ZigBee is capable of mesh network forming, which is useful if you want more devices to be smart. It’s also low power. And the devices are in their private network isolated from the internet, which is also a desirable quality. In summary, ZigBee is built for smart devices, whereas wifi not so much.