icameron

THIS should be the top comment. So much of our value comes from those bespoke VBA bowls of spaghetti code that get shit done perfectly the same way for the past 20 years that keep the business going. Even the big banks are like this. Someone else said “load bearing excel sheet” that’s pretty good.

For real! I’m so tired of hearing “don’t ask me I just work here…”

I’m going to hope they can figure things out and improve their uptime. It’s so engrained in my teams workflow at this point, tearing it out and switching to anything else would be extremely disruptive.

I did work for a group using Atlassian bitbucket once, and that had its own problems at the time. I’m still pretty sure even a degraded GitHub beats it. That is to say I don’t know what alternatives for GitHub even are

Conditional comments are still part of HTML email templates. Though soon will be dead I hope. Thanks "classic" Outlook!

Do any web servers have meaningful updates? It’s pretty standard stuff. IIS can do quite a bit of the same things. It’s common in my industry. We set up URL rewrites, reverse proxys, asp.net, even node.js or python (flask) based apps using WSGI. Separate app pools for everything all on the same server sometimes. It’s never been a bottleneck because it’s pretty streamlined code. Haven't had any security issues with the web server ever. It’s nice there is a GUI but when you start looking at the configuration (xml based) a lot of the directives are familiar if you’re used to nginx.conf or httpd and with htaccess (web.config) in site directories.

Not OP but the API limits are for the earth imagery tiles which cost paid credits from Google. Not the flight info.

The event could be when fair pricing comes from the model providers. We're still at the cash burning stage. When the economy crashes a little and departments start monitoring their spending, and the prices for inference are 10x what they are, there will be less tolerance for employees to substitute constant AI usage for understanding.

I was in the space 10 years ago with a product. Primarily Bluetooth, later BLE and WiFi. At that time most consumer devices were constantly discoverable. About 3-5% of traffic would have a disoverable MAC. These days not so many. iPhones never are discoverable unless you are in pairing mode. BLE broadcasts beacons much more consistently and generates a lot of data to filter, but they also change MACs.

Most WiFi chipsets use hardware based MAC layer, so promiscuous monitoring / sniffing is not possible on virtually every embedded module. There were a few chipsets, known as SoftMAC where linux drivers did the MAC layer, in which you could truly sniff the air for all traffic and capture a whole lot of MAC addresses. That was much more useful, but requires more CPU and specific older hardware. If you have a permanent power source like in a ALPR that isn't as much of a concern. I don't know of any companies that really did this though. Almost all our competitors used solutions that only supported the usual device discovery, which relies on BT being discoverable, or AP mode WiFi in order to track a MAC address. It's really easy to market though, it sounds great on paper. In practice the results are less than stellar and with time got even worse as vendors stopped being discoverable by default, and handsets started using used dynamic MAC addresses

You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.

Does it alter you mind more than just your appetite for healthy food like you said? Is there a buzz or general mood lift as well?

I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.

It’s tacky. Here’s my kid sitting on a bar.

It lists Magic Wand under Features [1] https://github.com/groverburger/grobpaint/blob/e249c7553f4c8...

I can’t stop myself from chewing on the little rubber cups that come in the ends of earbuds. I guess the slightly sweet synthetic taste is BPAs.

Yes yes. You’re right. I am saying at some places devs don’t own production- there’s an IT/Ops/non-dev person in the loop. Especially common if you’re a consultant in non-tech industries

I completely agree. I really worded this poorly. I was trying to say it’s great to have CI/CD to production. There are places I’ve worked who don’t have it due to their bureaucracy/regulation/security. Not because we don’t know how it set it up

That’s a tough policy to only update prod biweekly! It would be super frustrating if you had a bug crawl out and not be allowed to patch it for 2 weeks. This post really expresses the frustration of working in a bureaucratic environment where developers don’t have full access to change production.

That being said CI/CD is a luxury for coders at lean startups, but there’s still a lot of jobs where you have to work with some DevOps Team to deploy your code to prod. Organizations past a certain size have more hoops to jump through, for reasons.

Of course as a dev it’s ideal to have full access!

Sturgeon. Maybe lamprey (I've never tried it)

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

Page crashed after downloading and extracting. On safari iPhone that’s a few years old, latest iOS. I was really interested in trying / why I waited Ed: tried again it crashed at 66% loading (after 100% loading)

Sure, if there is increasing or evolving utility being offered. But it’s also fair to charge for upgrades in that case.

Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

When I first heard the advice to ditch your phone when you go a protest, I thought maybe that's a little extreme. But it's a real threat. We already knew post Snowden there is an extensive big brother apparatus. We saw post 911 that all rights can be taken away in the name of counter-terrorism. Now with a government that's operating outside the law and labeling peaceful protesters as terrorists, I don't think we can rely on telcos to protect our identity. The mass surveillance will fingerprint a device, and the telco will know your name so it's not at all an extreme precaution to ditch your phone.

Is there any other way to deal with comcrap? I’ve been doing the annual ritual of calling them to say the bill went up by 50% give me the best rate again. Every year it’s always a short term promo. This year took a lot longer to get through to a human

Yeah it’s really kinda overconfident, aggressive and rude I’ve found. It says it has a solution to a problem caused by Microsoft updade November 2025 and “hundreds of users have been using it for 6 months” obviously that’s impossible

The market was down for AI related stocks especially, while down only over 3% it’s the worst week since April, and there’s no single event that is to blame it just looks like market sentiment has shifted away from the previous unchecked exuberance.

You have over a 100,000 servers? How is this? This is wild to ponder. I can only guess your monthly bill is in the millions. Are you able to say the company?

Thank you for the rescue, I loved mp3.com for discovering new artists and genres. I created an artist account and they sent me stickers and a tote bag, I thought those records were long lost, but finally just found them here!

I believe this site helped post hardcore emo break into the mainstream in the very early 2000s. Bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday rose on the mp3 charts with their Demos before they were signed. At least that’s how I remember it.

During my college undergrad CS series we had a practicum with a real engineer from HP or somewhere. Our project was to help the world find and download printer drivers over the web. The project was to make a Java web service send XML that conformed to a schema, which would be turned into a webpage by a transform aka XSLT. It seemed convoluted at the time. The teacher showed us “the how” but I guess “the why” was left as an exercise for the reader. I never understood the big picture- at the time it seemed rather complex. But now I realize this probably would have scaled quite well on turn of the century hardware.

While not the uranium phones and tee shirts, in the real world just last year we got Operation Grim Beeper, where Mossad remotely detonated thousands of custom made pagers with a few grams of plastic explosive, followed by two way radios the next day. AFAIK they didn’t make tee shirts but they did go on 60 minutes, in disguise, to brag about the operation. Just saying, it seems pretty on brand.