gwbas1c

I once was dragged into a meeting after a security audit where the audit flagged in red that we weren't encrypting a SQLite database.

I basically said it was bullshit, pointed out that this was not industry best practice, and that we weren't storing any sensitive information.

The meeting ended quickly (and it became clear that the auditors were full of hot air.)

This article keeps coming to the front page every few years; and every few years I keep opening it to look at the pictures.

It's just that fascinating!

I would have liked a 3-row SUV based on the Cybertruck; but the Cybertruck was just too expensive to be competitive. At least the Model Y's price dropped (right after I bought one) to something more reasonable.

What's most frustrating is that I had to trade in my Model 3 for a 3-row SUV, and Tesla just didn't have anything competitive in that segment.

Honestly, I've found it's easier and cheaper to just pay for content; instead of having my content peppered with annoying ads and then buying junk I don't want to support the content.

I very rarely watch Youtube videos more than once. Sometimes I download concert videos (because I like to collect those), but otherwise the vast majority of content that I watch just isn't "worth it" for me to archive.

> Cooyright is just too long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will simply be lost in the coming decades.

What we need is compulsory licensing and a more reasonable timeframe to enter the public domain.

Many people in the news industry were complaining about this situation. It's very well known.

> I think most people who use JSON don't want strong typing or to use schemas.

Pretty much anywhere I've come across JSON (and xml before that,) everyone expected strong typing. The fact that JSON (and xml) can represent different data than they anticipated "did not compute" in their heads.

In many cases, they were treating JSON (and xml) as dumb serializers and not even paying attention to the output and corner cases.

To know that, you'd have to know the pattern of days that it's active.

If it's someone who lives there, it would be different than a shift worker.

Ok, I'll be 100% specific:

You are a troll.

There, are you happy?

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for?

My employer pays for copilot, business plan. It also pays for Gemini.

2) Are you using models outside (or instead) of those subscriptions?

Gemini, company-wide. I mostly use it for general research, making clip art, and occasional programming questions / technical questions. I don't use it everyday, but when I use it, I really like it.

I no longer use ChatGPT or Claude's general-purpose chat bots.

3) What coding harnesses and interfaces are you using? Are you sticking with the default CLIs or IDE integrations, or using alternatives like OpenCode, Pi, Aider, Muse Code, or custom-built harnesses?

IDE integration with Visual Studio, and Copilot code reviews on Github. I mostly use agent mode; sometimes I use ask mode, and sometimes I use plan mode. (One very important thing is to instruct copilot, in .github\copilot-instructions.md, to only use its edit tool and not use Powershell to edit files. Otherwise you need to babysit it and approve cryptic find and replace commands.)

For Copilot in Visual Studio, I almost always use Claude Opus 5.5. Some of the GPT models "appear" to work well, but they leave the code harder to maintain.

We now do a round of Copilot reviews with our pull requests in draft mode before asking others to do the review; and we're not spending as much time "reading" code when looking at pull requests.

We don't (yet) have agents running unattended with high-level instructions and then making pull requests.

4) Are you using any agent orchestration or swarm tools?

No

5) Are you using broader agent platforms like OpenClaw / Hermes Agent / Grok bot / Dots / Muse?

No

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One important thing: I'm after my boss to dedicate time (1-2 weeks) for me to set up and learn more of the hands-off tools. I love working with co-pilot, but it's best for work where I need to be hands-on. I really need to be able to offload simple work, or work where lower-quality results are okay, to a bot that I don't need to supervise.

Stop trolling: "a very vocal minority that really, really doesn't like abortion" is very different than people who think it should be illegal.

I'm referring to people who pray outside of abortion clinics, put up gravestones for aborted fetuses, sponsor billboards, ect, ect.

It's an important aspect of American culture, and provides context to a possible anti-abortion agenda of the article, and contrast to Icelandic pro-abortion culture.

That is the definition of minority.

They were RealVideo, very low bitrate

I remember that Nickelodeon had a contest where the winner was given a videophone and was part of some gameshow. I suspect it ran on ISDN.

Edit: There was also video CD, but that was higher bandwidth than ISDN. I also used to download South Park episodes over my dialup modem. They weren't quite real time (IE, it took longer than the playback time to download,) but they were a low multiple. (IE, a 20 minute episode took ~30-40 minutes to download).

That's still very ambiguous. As defined, "unintentional napping" could be a narcolepsy or symptoms of sleep apnea.

In the US, there is a very vocal minority that really, really doesn't like abortion.

Some of them actively publicize that people with Down's lead happy, healthy, and independent lives, without significant support. (As we see Gabe does in the article.) They generally stay away from the moral debate.

For people who follow the abortion debate in the US, when people say "as long as it's not used for Eugenics," what they really mean is that they are ok with abortion as long as it's not used to abort Down's fetuses.

About halfway through the article.

One of the things I like is the article really gets through the facade into understanding who Gabe really is. It doesn't focus on quirks, and instead humanizes Gabe.

> Friction is good.

The nameless exec said that to me the last time we met, roughly a week before they were pushed out; precisely for that belief. (And at first I suspected you were the exec.)

And yes, the product that I worked on did have a ~600 ticket deep backlog, and plowing through it wouldn't have made the product better. At the time, the product was in a steady growth phase, where addressing customer pain points was just as important as building features.

Where the exec goofed (by jumping on the mobile bandwagon) was misunderstanding disruption, market needs, and how mobile would effect us. Ultimately, we were a "bolt-on" accessory, and the incumbents in our industry slowly pushed us out until our niche, (which had nothing to do with mobile) was our core differentiating feature.

Basically, the issue was allocation of resources. Too much were put into mobile, not enough into building features where we could compete against the products we were "bolting on to," and not enough into addressing customer pain points. The "friction is good" approach also severely hurt us, because too much time was wasted haggling instead of doing. (I specifically told the exec, the last time we met, it felt like he was running the air conditioner and heater at the same time.)

This exec is making a similar mistake by basically giving a small team unlimited tokens, instead of understanding how other players in the industry tackle these same problems with AI. It's not that their overall idea is bad, it's that they are probably starving the rest of the business on an unproven experiment / poorly chosen risk.

I would take this with a grain of salt.

Recently I read about a company (nameless for reasons that will become clear) that was giving a small team unlimited tokens to work on a very ambitious project. (IE, they'll probably spend a few million on tokens.)

Here's the thing: I once worked with the (nameless) exec who was named and interviewed in the article. (And I have a significant amount of respect for this exec.) The problem is, the exec (when I worked with them) significantly misinterpreted the mobile trend and nearly killed the company jumping on the mobile bandwagon. (We had a desktop product that only needed a simple companion mobile app. This was painfully obvious at the time.) This exec is blindly jumping on another bandwagon again, wasting money that might be better spent elsewhere.

Why do I say this? I question if a lot of big AI spenders are really getting value from what they're doing with AI, or is it just for show?

Yeah, for my last few laptops, (Mac) I didn't replace them because they were too slow; I replaced them because they stopped getting software updates. (I don't want to switch to Linux on them.)

I suspect that on-device AI might drive some of us to upgrade, though. I really don't like that AI requires a network connection (and subscription for non-trivial use.)

This CVE has nothing to do with leaving random ports open. "Tightening up" will not protect vulnerable servers.

Make sure your TV and device enable CEC. (Allows your device to turn the TV on and off, select the input, and control the volume.) I know the NVidea Shield can do this, and the Chromecast can do this.

Then hide the remote from your TV and only use the remote from your device.

It's a little slow, but for me, it's nice that I can turn on my Switch from the controller and it turns the TV on; or that I can put a disk in my Bluray player and it turns the TV on.

No, we need to know how the study defined them, not how you interpret them.

In medicine, sometimes semantics are more important than you think.

I think we need to understand what intentional vs unintentional napping is.

It really depends on what the product is, what the 3rd party library is used for, and what the alternative is. Unfortunately, some people are too biased towards using 3rd party libraries and don't understand the tradeoffs.

For example, a few years ago I removed a rather large 3rd party mathematics library because we were only using it for a single mathematical function that was very easy to replicate.

Remember, 3rd party libraries need to:

1: Be periodically audited to make sure you are in compliance with the license terms, and preferences of your company.

(1.5: This becomes important during an acquisition as someone will always come around doing due diligence.)

2: Be periodically updated (in case of security bugs)

2.5: Be updated on short notice when a security issue is revealed.

In the case of the mathematics library, replacing it with roughly 20 lines of code and 100 lines of tests is a significantly better tradeoff than constantly reviewing it every time one of the above things happens.

Now, at what point is it "worth it" to use the 3rd party library? In our case we'd need to make much heavier use of the library, probably at least 20 different mathematical functions from it.

I bought a Windows PC to run my TV before Android TV was a thing. It came with a remote, Bluray software, and a TV tuner.

The whole thing just felt half-assed. I'm not going back. MS really missed an opportunity, because if it wasn't for quality issues, it would have been halfway decent.

Prior to that I used a mac mini with a TV tuner. The TV tuner software was horrible; the UI for programming the DVR was like writing SQL queries. I have a degree in computer science so I could understand it, but there was no way I'd try to explain that to someone who wasn't interested in databases.

Exactly: If you're super paranoid, the best approach is to pick a quality TV, never hook it up to the internet, and use an external device that you trust.

Consoles like the NES are tile based: They work by placing tiles are particular coordinates on the screen, with a particular pallet.

My theory is that the emulator could swap in a higher resolution tile without needing to port the game.

The code still sees the original RAM.