Zompist Bboard Again

Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Why does a coffee maker even need an internet connection in the first place? It feels like the tech industry is obsessed with colonizing every aspect of society.

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2026 9:08 am Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Why does a coffee maker even need an internet connection in the first place? It feels like the tech industry is obsessed with colonizing every aspect of society.

So that somebody, somewhere, can make a lot of money from it, and send the unfortunate owners customised advertising.

I've made a new release of zeptoforth, 1.17.1. It's been a bit since I've made a release, but this release brings together a decent amount of updates that have accumulated since last release.

alice wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2026 2:32 pm

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2026 9:08 am Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Why does a coffee maker even need an internet connection in the first place? It feels like the tech industry is obsessed with colonizing every aspect of society.

So that somebody, somewhere, can make a lot of money from it, and send the unfortunate owners customised advertising.

Even so, what sort of data are they gathering from a coffee machine that advertisers would find useful? It seems difficult to imagine what beyond particular brands of coffee or something.

malloc wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 11:55 am

alice wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2026 2:32 pm

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2026 9:08 am Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Why does a coffee maker even need an internet connection in the first place? It feels like the tech industry is obsessed with colonizing every aspect of society.

So that somebody, somewhere, can make a lot of money from it, and send the unfortunate owners customised advertising.

Even so, what sort of data are they gathering from a coffee machine that advertisers would find useful? It seems difficult to imagine what beyond particular brands of coffee or something.

Hey, for people advertizing coffee, that is interesting.

After quite a few years in the industry, the sad thing is I'm not even sure they're doing anything with that data.

Other than that, yeah, probably targeted ads.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 1:19 pm After quite a few years in the industry, the sad thing is I'm not even sure they're doing anything with that data.

Other than that, yeah, probably targeted ads.

So perhaps just force of habit? Interesting.

I doubt anyone's interested in the details, but I'm rapidly developing a very polarised love-hate relationship with the Rust programming language¹.

¹ Not The Rust Programming Language, which is a very good book indeed.

alice wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 2:53 pm I doubt anyone's interested in the details, but I'm rapidly developing a very polarised love-hate relationship with the Rust programming language¹.

Say more?

alice wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 2:53 pm I doubt anyone's interested in the details, but I'm rapidly developing a very polarised love-hate relationship with the Rust programming language¹.

¹ Not The Rust Programming Language, which is a very good book indeed.

Rust is one of those things which is a very good idea, but as implemented has so many gotchas that it's difficult to do anything non-trivial with it without completely breaking the concept with the use of unsafe, which defeats the point. Case in point, you need to use unsafe to create a simple doubly-linked list in Rust.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 3:03 pm

alice wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 2:53 pm I doubt anyone's interested in the details, but I'm rapidly developing a very polarised love-hate relationship with the Rust programming language¹.

¹ Not The Rust Programming Language, which is a very good book indeed.

Rust is one of those things which is a very good idea, but as implemented has so many gotchas that it's difficult to do anything non-trivial with it without completely breaking the concept with the use of unsafe, which defeats the point. Case in point, you need to use unsafe to create a simple doubly-linked list in Rust.

Difficult indeed, depending on what you're trying to do. To use a metaphor¹ which might be more familiar to my readers, it's like trying to do meaningful work in PIE with one of those reconstructions which has voiceless aspirated stops, voiceless and voiced thorn, schwa secundum, and no laryngeals. (But not impossible if you have the patience, as I've found out to my great relief after almost a week fighting with the compiler., which has been like trying to find the precise combination of hard-to-obtain aromatic substances you need to burn to please the Compiling Deity.)

My problem was that if you want to use mocks to keep the parts of your application loosely coupled, you then have to set up traits for everything you want to mock, and those start leaking into your structs as "dyn", which opens its own can of worms because "dyn" things aren't Sized. If only there was something else as expressive and performant as Rust, but less restrictive, which you can compile to .so files.

¹ OK, it's a simile.