I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I’d go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

    • PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
    • Laptop docking connectors (I can’t find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it’ll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
    • Firewire (if you’re lucky, way too old to be found now)
    • If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)

  • I recommend using a different set of flags so you can avoid the buffering problem @thenumbersmason@yiffit.net mentions.

    This next example prevents all of your ram getting uselessly filled up during the wipe (which causes other programs to run slower whenever they need more mem, I notice my web browser lags as a result), allows the progress to actually be accurate (disk write speed instead of RAM write speed) and prevents the horrible hang at the end.

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/somedisk status=progress oflag=sync bs=128M

    “oflag” means output flag (to do with of=/dev/somedisk). “sync” means sync after every block. I’ve chosen 128M blocks as an arbitrary number, below a certain amount it gets slower (and potentially causes more write cycles on the individual flash cells) but 128MB should be massively more than that and perfectly safe. Bigger numbers will hog more ram to no advantage (and may return the problems we’re trying to avoid).

    If it’s an SSD then I issue TRIM commands after this (“blkdiscard” command), this makes the drive look like zeroes without actually having to write the whole drive again with another dd command.










  • No. Modern FPGAs do not use any UV light or have any windows. For storage they use flash memory (same as what’s used in MicroSD cards, USB sticks and SSDs). Some (most?) require you to provide this yourself externally.

    Old EPROM (not EEPROM) storage had windows and needed UV to erase, but that’s decades old. I’m not sure if FPGA was common nomenclature back then (PAL/GAL/CPLD were probably the market).






  • Projects that attempt to put things in the road tend to fail to be economical or practical. It’s almost always better putting the same (or less) investment into something equivalent that sits next to the road rather than inside it.

    The key features of roads that make them so economically successful are:

    1. They are very cheap per km to build
    2. They are very cheap to maintain (they’re fully recyclable, they get remelted during resurfacing).

    Installing anything in the road surface completely voids these two points.

    Detailed problems:

    • You will need a pickup device on the bottom of your car. To make it efficient you will need it as close to the road surface as possible.
    • Roads are dirty and covered in debris. Your pickup device will get torn and worn.
    • You will need a LOT of road installed with this, which makes it intrinsically much more expensive than roadside chargers. 10 mins of charging at a standstill requires one charger, 10 mins of charging at 40kmph is about 7km of underroad chargers. Intersections might do better, but they’re intermittent and provide unreliable charging opportunities. Even 1km (6kmph*10min) is silly expensive compared to a cluster of roadside chargers.
    • The charging coils underneath the road will need to be as close to the road surface as possible (to make it efficient).
    • Worn or buckled (from truck braking) road surfaces will require specialised work and extended road shutdowns to repair.
    • You can’t ignore this costly maintenance: exposed electronics (even if isolated) will have inconsistent traction and may damage tires.
    • Under-road assets such as communication wires (even just for traffic lights, let alone internet infrastructure), power cables (11kV and up), water, sewage, stormwater and gas will be much more expensive, slow and complicated to install and maintain. More and longer road shutdowns will result.

    The fundamental, core problem of all of these “put solar panels in roads” or “put chargers in roads” projects is that they are romantically and narratively attractive. Roads are ugly wasted space, but if we could put them to better use then wouldn’t it be magic? Sadly this never works. Roads are ugly and wastes of space because nothing else works as well for transport infrastructure (other than railways).





  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.mlethinically ambigaus
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    7 months ago

    I’ve been encountering this! I thought it was the topics I was using as prompts somehow being bad – it was making some of my podcast sketches look stupidly racist, admittedly though some of them it seemed to style after some not-so-savoury podcasters, which made things worse.