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itsbenweeks

61 karma · joined May 23, 2008

website: itsbenweeks.com twitter: @itsbenweeks github: @itsbenweeks
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itsbenweeks··on The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
Much better to have the world disappear from the bag.
itsbenweeks··on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel
I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.
itsbenweeks··on GitHub is down
I'm guessing so, given the breadth of the outage.

(It's always dns.)

itsbenweeks··on Proton announces Proton Pass, a password manager
Curious why you're looking to switch from KeeWeb. Been using KeeWeb for several years and have been really happy with it for my desktop.
itsbenweeks··on The Peecyclers. Their Idea to Help Farmers Is No. 1
This is a good regression to practices that were abandoned once the Haber Bosch process was discovered. Unfortunately, we've also started medicating ourselves more heavily in the intervening years. A urine reclamation system will need to remove hormonal pharmaceuticals from medicated persons' urine or else using it will wreak havoc on the local ecology [1].

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4213589/

itsbenweeks··on Starlink Premium
My way around this that's less than $500/mo and indefinite wait times is to have an EC2 image running as a jump box. Then anything downloaded is already on AWS's network, making ECR uploads much faster.
itsbenweeks··on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W external antenna mod
I'm curious if you could desolder and use one of the resistors further down the trace to avoid having to scrape off the mask.
itsbenweeks··on I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
Agree. Having this function exit if any arguments are passed to it seems like a good safety measure.
itsbenweeks··on MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
That fair. I suppose its about the same as a graduate certificate until you take the extra steps to get a degree.
itsbenweeks··on MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
Its even less than that. This micro masters is sold as an entry point for a full-fledged masters program. The order of operations is something like:

1. Complete the micromasters courses at your speed.

2. Get a passing grade in a proctored exam.

3. Get accepted to a masters program with 1/2 of your credits taken care of.

4. Finish the masters degree on-campus.

itsbenweeks··on MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
I was originally worried at how dishonest seemed to faculty and TAs who have spent years creating many textbooks' worth of content for edX. Something akin to MIT Press selling their catalog to Elsevier or Pearson wouldn't be tolerated by the faculty. But, in the press release they do mention that MIT faculty can opt-out and operate in a MIT-only instance & fork of the Open edX platform:

"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.

MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."

With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.

itsbenweeks··on Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
Seems like there's too much bait-and-switch happening here to trust GitLab anymore. They enacted an account-locking change to their MFA reset policy without so much as an e-mail to effected users over the summer, and now they're increasing their pricing. There must be a way for GitLab to grow that doesn't involve them inconveniencing existing users like this.
itsbenweeks··on Facebook News
Anybody else having their browser history busted by visiting the link? Looks like it opens a new window for this page, and then closes the old one.
itsbenweeks··on A small restaurant owner on Google, DoorDash, and Grubhub
I wish it was just this. A friend of mine works in an upscale deli here in Boston. Their employer doesn't partner with DoorDash, yet GrubHub --interchanged because they both do this-- still lists them. What happens instead of a printed order from their system? They instruct the delivery person to place an order at the counter, wait for it, and then deliver it. All this seems fine, if DoorDash wants to hire people to proxy face-to-face interactions so they can up-charge 20% for a caprese sandwich on ciabatta bread, more power to them. I understand the value of it. But it gets squishy in places.

What happens if an ordered and paid for item is out of stock? My friend's deli has excellent ciabatta and it sells out daily. DoorDash leaves this problem to the delivery-person, and delivery people can't cancel orders.

Why can't delivery people on GrubHub cancel orders? For the same reason that Uber Drivers can't see their fare's destination until they get in the car. DoorDash doesn't want their delivery people to cherry-pick only the costliest orders with the choicest tips. That would leave a good portion of customers without food.

So, the delivery people are left to call whoever ordered on their phone about this. If there's any confusion from the delivery person and their ability to convey the nuances of this problem --that GrubHub promised something they couldn't deliver-- then the delivery person is left to pay for orders that DoorDash users don't cancel.

My friend has been given more than one upset delivery person's phone which has an angry GrubHub customer on the other end. So, while a DoorDash customer may have wanted to avoid a phone call, the customer is now hungrier and upset at somebody who would have been able to sell them their sandwich for 16% less and had actual knowledge about what kind of bread was still available because they wanted to avoid the phone call that they're now having. Usually not a big deal, but if you're already working a crowded deli-counter during the lunch rush; it certainly cements the uselessness of these platforms.

itsbenweeks··on Cats Cannot Taste Sweets (2007)
A friend of mine was born without the ability to taste sweet things. That doesn't stop their body from reacting to it, though. Most of their favorite foods are incredibly sugary.
itsbenweeks··on $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home
And it's still a valid point. It's good to mention that a <20% down payment has caveats, too.
itsbenweeks··on $100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home
Sort of. You'd be left paying the difference of 3.5% to 20% (16.5% or $49,500) in a FHA Mortgage Insurance Premium (MIP). This means another loan that you need a 1.75% down payment for (making your downpayment ≈ 3.8% or $11,400) that adds another payment (≈ $400) in addition to the mortgage. MIPs last the entire life of the FHA loan, too.
itsbenweeks··on A New Blend of Rock and Plastic Is Forming on a Portuguese Island
I think this will definitely occur. In the same way that organisms could not work with wood fiber's lignin during the carboniferous period, we're seeing it play out in a plastic period of our own construction. The Earth will win, but whether we will see that happen depends on all of us.
itsbenweeks··on Self Studying the MIT Applied Math Curriculum
A lot of these earlier courses are available on edX, too. The platform won't grade you unless you pay, though.
itsbenweeks··on UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access
Finally! I've been hearing librarians gripe about the prohibitive cost of academic subscriptions for over a decade. It's no surprised that the first administrative body to take a $tand is from a state school system. It's surprising that their budgets didn't bring them there sooner, though. Lets hope that UC faculty will stop publishing with Elesevier in the future, so the journals rankings begin to drop.
itsbenweeks··on Street-Fighting Math: Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (2010) [pdf]
And a self-paced course through edX:

https://www.edx.org/course/street-fighting-math-mitx-6-sfmx

itsbenweeks··on This Tech Bubble Is Bursting
I think this is pretty close to the truth. Investment capital getting out tech should cause people to be more discriminating in their business proposals, and the market will adjust accordingly. If anything, this will help prevent a crash.
itsbenweeks··on 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor
The third part on the Tor project's blog at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/facebook-hidden-services-an... describes this well.

Check out mapgrep's comment on another thread below for a more in depth answer, too.

itsbenweeks··on 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor
I thought Onion addresses were a hash of the public key, not the private key.