We did this at a local makerspace on an old medical laser for tattoo removal (we wanted to use it for non medical purposes). It was pretty trivial, the credits mechanism was as low tech as you might expect :) it used a mifare classic card in a slot and simply deducted credits from a counter until 0.
A lot of hospital and lab equipment has worked like this for a long time. Often done with “credits” on a mag card, smart card, usb, or something downloaded. I definitely recall seeing floppy disks in use for it way back…
This is because, in some cases, the machine is actually rented or leased and the maintenance and supply costs are charged based on usage rather than as capex. Maintaining these machines is not cheap, especially calibration and testing.
The leased + remote diagnostics model is widespread across pretty much every sector that uses equipment which needs specialist maintenance. Even things like jet engines are moving from manual data uploads to two-way networked comms.
Aw, so caring of them to introduce a subscription model to help the hospitals, and for a reduction in income. The only true saints left in the tech sector.
Being exactly in GP situation, I would give a more charitable take.
We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.
Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!
I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.
> I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid...
No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.
I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.
But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.
Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.
(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)
>I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs.
Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.
You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.
And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.
Frankly, based on the description above, it's very hard to separate the two. If someone is that unkempt in their day to day life it's very hard to believe they'll have their shit together at work for years and years. It's fine to wear the wrong type of clothes, but clothes that don't fit right and not showering are really bad signals.
I spend most of time in meetings and updating excel sheets.
Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.
I suggest that while many people might express that they have no interest at all in art, that doesn't mean that they don't passively recognise it and reap the benefits of high-quality design.
Same for Germany, but those don't get picked up, you go and throw them into different bins at a collection point (which is why you usually have all the glass in one bag). I'd say Germany has way more separation than Zürich. We have 4-5 at most.
Just stumbled on this on YouTube and was compelled to share. This is the best (relatively) short form piece I’ve seen on avoiding AI slop while simultaneously embracing the gifts of AI
Interestingly I’ve used Zigbee for well over a decade, tried easily over a hundred different devices, built others homes, and I’d never encountered this battery size until this project!
Well that’s fascinating. The answer is a small amount was Claude written, like one of the image captions when I had it find the render and insert it, and I had it do a brief grammar and spelling check, but very little. Most of those chunks that tool has flagged were 100% handwritten.
FWIW, we've been finding that tools like grammar checkers far more imprints on text than people intend when they use them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It is one of the two most common reasons why text gets classified as genai even when the author didn't use tools to generate their text. (The other is automatic translators.)
It’s in there, specifically noting that I am going to be watching that over the coming weeks.
The BLE tags I previously used lasted about 2 years of a CR2045. These are much larger CRs, and I have tuned it right down on the report timing when stationary, so I am anticipating more than 2 years.
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