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I've been working on a SDN software for mikrotik routers (and wireguard, etc) and Fable dies when working with any kind of wireline protocol or potentially implementing any authentication mechanism.

It's too the point where I just stopped using it. If you do generic stuff, it's fine. But the second it tries to start debugging protocols (which may include auth) that's where it begins to fail.

Businesses have been anti-human for a while now.

If you think AI is bad, wait until I tell you about the horrors of social media who profit on controversy and division, US health insurance which profits on rejecting claims, and big pharma profiting on the opioid epidemic.

And it's not like this is new, either. Upton Sinclair was writing about this stuff a century ago with books like The Jungle.

The only difference between then and now is we "think" we're not evil today. We've lied to ourselves that "We're so much better than we were back then." Facebook wanted to bring people together originally, but they ended up providing the most toxic social media experience known to man. Facebook forgot to tell us they cared more about profit than people.

Please spare me the argument AI is the straw to break the camel's back here. The system has been broken a long time before that.

I have list of issues with SQL. Not composable. Unable to detect query errors at compile time because the schema is only loosely coupled to the code base. And as you yourself point out, SQL is not standardized, which is also terrible and leads to things like Oracle vendor lock in.

And frankly this list hasn't changed in 30 or maybe 40 years now.

And DBA's were so notoriously egregious that Martin Fowler made his "NoDBA" blog post over a decade ago now. And the movement to NoSQL definitely made things worse.

I wish the SQL community would stop treating ORM's like the vietnam paper did 20 years ago, and embrace them for what they are, as a stepping stone, and maybe as a useful tool to help people understand SQL itself.

In amateur radio there was a famous DXpedition there this year.

https://3y0k.com/

There are some videos on facebork but you have to trade your data to see them apparently.

Alternatively there's some pictures on this page, so you can get the idea of the remoteness and weather they have.

http://ict-kuwa.net/3Y0K/latest%20news.htm

More likely they'll convince congress they will need their own. Only it will 20-200 times more expensive and the US taxpayer will be paying for it but won't get access.

Honestly those are used as weights now in some kind of obscure calculation (or maybe not so obscure calculation but I still don't understand it).

What I really learned during that time is that mail servers have well known IP addresses and reputations. And you can say all you want SPF/DKIM fixes that, but the reality is when google sends your email (even with your custom domain) it gets received.

Honestly, I think the biggest enjoyment I got from this thread is that programming culture is often toxic in ways that people aren't really ready to admit on this site which is dedicated to computers and programming.

I can hear them now: "Surely, you can't be happy with your decision, Mr. Ralo. You're leaving so much money on the table!"

And you're saying calmly: "Yes, yes I am."

Best of luck to you and your efforts.

Have you thought of opening your own truck repair shop? Often there are places where trucks break down and the solutions are slim to None. A good repair shop in the right place might make decent money.

I did that too years ago, but the management of it was kind of annoying. DKIM was just getting introduced when I stopped using it. SPF had controversy. I understand both of those are awesome now.

The biggest issue was if your ip address got listed in a RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), and then nobody would talk to you. Some were easy to get off, others were permanent blocks, and I found those to be constantly interfering with the delivery of mail. At least the rejection would usually tell you which RBL blocked you.

The more and more rude interactions like ghosting we have, the less human we become. Relationships become transactional instead of meaningful. On the other hand, talking to people as humans and leading with your humanity first makes you a better human.

So is this in lieu of using permissions to protect apis? Because it seems like API's should have some kind of permission mechanism around them anyway.

I was writing MCP servers, now I just write tools for agents to consume. It's often easier to simply write the tool you need and suggest to it to look at the tool to do that thing.

I was also surprised to find out Claude knew how to use the gitlab api with pointing it at the token var in the environment. But for corporations it might make more sense to use a cli to keep the secrets separate from the agent.

Is that true with the mac book airs? My understanding is that they're completely sealed, and they use the case as a heat spreader.

I met Simon for the first time this year at pycon. Wow, what a great guy.

I remember seeing laser cutter drivers which only ran on Windows XP, but the cutters themselves were still in use and worked great.

For (ham) radio programming software which often only supports windows, getting the programmer working on reactOS seems like a win.

I've been in the process of cutting the DC side of power bricks and crimping anderson power pole (APP) connectors onto both sides of the wire. For camping and ham radio, it's really nice to hook up to a battery without the AC inverter taking DC -> AC and the power brick sending that to DC again.

The only thing to be careful with is connecting different voltages to different connectors, but it's at least possible with the APP connectors to "Build your own" with different color housings and different ways of combining the housings.

So maybe 13.8v is red/black and something that's 5V is black/white, etc.

There was a point in the 1990's where microsoft word wasn't truly WYSIWYG. IIRC it was like an infinite page and the line breaks and page breaks were "estimates"

Further many docs from that era are plagued with abandonware.

TeX did one thing well for an era when often the only interface to the machine was over a Xyplex terminal server connecting to a tty at 9600 baud.

Companies are mulling about how many software engineers they can get rid of and replace with AI instead.

Agree. However the key word there is "voluntarily". If a war gets too ugly, the supply of volunteers will dry up. And then you're looking at a draft.

It's been a while since the vietnam war, but we (the general public in the US) have forgotten how ugly a war can be.

No argument from me, other than: All those things can be also be said about corporations.

You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.

Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4

Your point is noted.

But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.

Because of the split. But your right, meshtastic does have dumb routing. And I haven't used meshcore, but I probably won't now until the dust settles on this for a while.

I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.

1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.

2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.

3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".

FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.

For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.

If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.

I was getting very good signals with this one [1].

[0] http://kiwisdr.com/public/

[1] http://21959.proxy2.kiwisdr.com:8073/

On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.

Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.

I remember being a teenager and building forms using the Lotus 123 WYSIWYG graphics.

And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.

Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.

I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).

My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.

OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.

A lot of startups are cults. Tesla maybe the final form of a culted startup where the stock owners don't care about anything anymore.

That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.

em-dashes help flow ideas better than other means. For whatever reason, it's easier to process in my brain a comment with an em-dash rather than trying to split the idea into separate succinct sentences.

You can do small succinct sentences, but style-wise it sucks for longer passages.

I like the em-dash as well as it provides visual space more than just a "-" or a ";" or a ", and".

It's not just data, right? Power can be abused as well. That person has power to control the narrative and can make a large bet on the number of times he can say the word.

So now it's public servants military power, congressional power, and they look to enrich themselves with making (or lobbying for) decisions which affect the outcome of a bet.

You could imagine an army general that lobbies for the bombing of Iran knowing the president has his ear, and then bets on the bombing of Iran by March 2026.