m3047

I don't disagree. What do you make? I've got contact info and a link to my GitHub account in my profile. Are you having problems with motivating yourself to Make?

I'm coming to the conclusion that this is the wrong attitude about FOSS. The "model" is: make it possible for people to obtain the product with as little friction as possible. That serves the platforms hosting the product, but how does that serve me as the Maker? I want feedback, I want community (they're not the same the former is users the latter is other Makers).

"But the users will suffer frustration and anxiety and leave if there's friction..." Oh yeah? I think they must suffer some friction and anxiety anyway, since they're not participating. What are they doing? Abandoning their search for something which solves a problem or answers a difficult question, to doom scroll on social media? See that doesn't make sense.

As with Stack Overflow, AI is simply revealing the underlying flaw. We still need something to replace it. We need a better mental model.

Why should I have a blog post? I get amazing "performance" out of fail2ban, it does what it's supposed to do and I don't ask it to do more. I've given it "super powers".

Last year I blocked basically all of Brazil. No problems. Who knew?

"Many sysadmins know about fail2ban..." and many will now know about reaction. But why will the result be any different than fail2ban? It won't.

I identify features (which can be expressed as firewall rules) from log data; I write totals to a temporary store (Redis). I have periodic tasks which scan the temp store for patterns which exceed thresholds. When that occurs, fail2ban creates the appropriate rules. This occurs in depth and in concentric rings.

Et tu?

Anything which fills my logs with garbage is unwanted. Your cat could have fallen asleep on the keyboard, I don't care. If you want to use the internet as a giant petri dish, that's on you; but the cat box is elsewhere. I can feed you garbage or block you because your code is shit, or I don't like your style.

CO2, you say? Human activity produces tens of percent of the bioavailable nitrogen.

As a professed "hacker tourist" I've been rewarded with the trust and respect not to set myself or my coworkers on fire, in cultures which didn't see a lot of outsiders. Several times I've threatened to quit within the first month if things didn't change; one time I walked in the door, turned around and walked out. Once I paid for my own plane ticket for the interview, and didn't come home to visit for two months (worked there for six). Pay has been ok, but not stellar. Duration has been three to nine months. (I've been a licensed business since 1984.)

I've been a Forward Deployed Engineer practically speaking, and properly construed the title correlates well with the personal sobriquet "hacker tourist". I've been to Prudhoe Bay, places I won't name here; factories; other things which were basically factories but maybe you wouldn't realize this from the outside. I've done some odd remote contracts, such as hunting medical devices on hospital networks (they're like SCADA, but without the Purdue Model).

I've bridged between the customer's technical team and the vendor / provider's technical staff... when there was vendor technical staff. Other times it's been more like a treasure hunt or something (sometimes there are real bad guys) and I've been there to bridge a gap between broader industry knowledge and the onsite technical team.

I'm getting pings from recruiters based in the Bay Area about "forward deployed engineers" in SF metro. It's not one of the labs, there are no mech or electrical engineers, nothing is going to escape, catch fire, or explode, nor is the inventory heavily guarded. It is bullshit; a con, so you won't notice you're being asked to establish nexus in CA.

I'm tired of flying (although if you need me to literally parachute or rappel in, I'm getting a little old but we can talk), but I'm happy to drive anywhere in the greater Pac NW (no more than two days out from Puget Sound metro).

Schools can develop training and scholarship programs. Maybe we'll find out a degree in Egyptology isn't necessary to teach basic reading and writing? Although walking like an Egyptian sure is fun. /s

Many educators are unionized. These days (it comes and goes, I wish it had been waxing when I was that age) the electricians' and HVAC techs' unions offer apprenticeships to pretty much all comers, not just the niece or nephew of a member.

I'll leave this here, although it 404s now: http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/

Without digressing into spy vs spy, I think deprecation warnings (shared with the customer base) are a good thing. It might not be a good thing for sales, but that's not a concern here either. A / B testing: if I see that, then what tells me WTF is going on? (You lose me here anyway, sales.)

Agree on the language lawyering, too. ;-)

That's good you have the self-awareness. You're kind of on the edge of NLP territory. Is it the act of smoking or is that simply your internal slang for cannabis use? Can you walk and listen to music at the same time? (Fine, maybe you need to walk someplace where you won't get hit by a car or someone on an electric scoot.)

As the other comment says: set and setting. And it works both ways, you can take some memento with you, and when you're being quiet and introspective and you're feeling good fondle some fob: a keychain, a rosary, buddhist prayer beads, some macrame you're working on, it doesn't matter. Point is later when you're in a different situation, you can replay that ritualistic behavior and it will probably reach in and remind your body, which will then remind you mind. This is human nature: it's known that e.g. humans remember / forget things when passing through doorways, and some forms of acting use cues like this especially for emotional resonance.

As someone pointed out in a conversation elsewhere, datacenter water use is a small part of total water use (in WA and CA), which is dominated by agriculture.

Simple, obvious answer to your rhetorical question is: where there's water and power. But city water and city power are not the same as what ag needs / wants / suffers. City water and city power have reliability and purity / quality standards which ag doesn't need (not enough to pay for it).

Do the objectives / needs of datacenters comport with the constraints and drivers which evolved city water / power? How do the constituents who paid for (and probably are still paying for) the buildout feel about the resource _which they own_ being utilized for a purpose which maybe doesn't comport with the _contract_ they thought they were getting?

Recent news is that this isn't shipping on some consumer-grade CPUs from AMD. There, made it explicit enough there's no room for conversation. Here's the link:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-afte...

Yes, for instance a bounty on rats leads to pet rats and tailless rats.

My impression was that it was a reverse buyout. Where did senior management come from after the merger?

Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.

Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/

A decade or so ago I participated in a (data-centric) hackathon having to do with water shortages in California. The acknowledged problem was data, or lack thereof. Most of the groups whistled past the graveyard and presented woulda-coulda "if we had the data / we can get the data by" proposals / findings.

We kept looking for the pony for most of the day. We found some pony exhaust, but we didn't find the pony. The rest of the group presented a plan for future research. I chose to give the minority report: based on the information we were able to obtain, California could solve its water shortage if every household ate 16 less almonds a day; an almond taking roughly one gallon of water to produce.

A couple years later the almond industry ran some ads that the "gallon of water" meme was somehow wrong, because other useful products were produced from almond trees besides almonds... so they said. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.

One of my team members (from Montana) shared a quote from Samuel Clemens: "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over". That hasn't changed with data centers.

From the person who brought us Dark Breakfast!

One of the things which is unaccounted for in both printing and lighting is florescence.

The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years.

In the back of my mind, I find it oddly surprising that we have 3D printers but I haven't seen a printer where you can mix your own pigments and print with them.

Many years ago I knew someone in Seattle who made microprints with burnished copper plates, some of them with a dozen different colors. He designed a couple of commemorative postage stamp-like objects, and that somehow got him hired by an eastern european country as an anti-counterfeiting advisor and then he disappeared.

Reading a little further on this person's site:

    "Reality drifts when systems stop learning from feedback."

A little drier on the dopamine rush.

Some of this isn't new, like the printer example. However I recently bought a Canon inkjet printer because it purportedly had good linux support (spoiler: it's actually ok!).

Even though MacOS drivers and software were available, all of the online instructions were strictly for Windows. So I set the printer up with the Mac software. Knowing what I know now, I could have done all of the printer setup with the printer control panel.

As far as I can tell, all the printer really required on a reasonably modern copy of SuSE Linux was a PPD. I haven't done pcaps, but taking it at "interface value" it looks like it ingests ghostscript-generated PDFs just fine. I haven't tried to get the scanner working on Linux.

So we're shaving yaks here but instability undermines nonrepudiability. Mr. Nobody might welcome deniability in the appropriate circumstances...

Ah, the 1960s.

At least on my systems there's also /dev/udp...

I respect that you recognize that the sample you were given for investigation may not be representative of your community in all respects. Does the Census Bureau publish statistics on the people they have to send interviewers for? Just asking, maybe I'll have to go check their site.

Other comments here about Germany and whatnot falls flat, and short. This is America, and part of it is being ok with your neighbors (unless they're truly insane and release plagues of rabbits or burn themselves out of their homes, but I digress), try to find some common ground even if it's awkward and you have to look the other way about some slights and trespasses.

I don't know how much trouble they went to to "fit" you to the cohort they tasked you with, or how much of a natural fit there was. Did you grow up / do you live in the area? There's an element of "liking" (Cialdini) each other which colors participants' perception of tasks. OTOH nothing like talking to perfect strangers to flex that muscle or find out you really don't have it.

Interesting article, but I don't fully agree that it means what people seem to think it means. Note that the author says "People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts."

I do surprising things with math on occasion, but I'm not a licensed statistician. I don't know what they do in private, but in public statisticians, or people trying to sound like them, seem to fool around with horseshoes and hand grenades a lot.

The Census Bureau doesn't just do the decennial census. For instance due to a convoluted jurisdictional dispute (near as I can tell), I ended up on the agricultural census for several years (until they figured out I wasn't trying to make a profit).

I have concerns about data privacy, but I'm more concerned with private entities trading in it and data integrity. I'm extremely concerned about the misuse of privately produced databases, especially by government functions. I get the impression that for a lot of folks the notion that private databases could be biased in the favor of the provider's interests in order to get favorable treatment from their customers or punish their detractors seems to be an "unknown unknown". We're veering into serious Dunning-Kruger territory attempting to use phone numbers, email addresses, and biometrics for identity / KYC. At this very moment the FCC is getting ready to order telecomms providers collect PII for people buying ALL phones, so they won't have any excuse not to sell that to all comers /s.

Private armies are regulated in the United States, and private data brokers should be similarly regulated for largely congruent reasons.

This is nowhere near household level but is it good enough for horseshoes or hand grenades? I did this almost 20 years ago. I could combine this with aerial and streetview, ALPRs, DMV data, smartphone telemetry...

http://athena.m3047.net/elections/36th-dist-colored.html

http://athena.m3047.net/elections/dist-not-normal/distributi...

Display / imaging as a "big data" problem[0] is turtles all the way down. If we separate "creating something to display" and "displaying something" and call that the "display processor divide" and then ask "what passes across the divide?" in terms of information density then we see that it ebbs and flows.

Suppose I say "print a line". Some program creates a line to my specifications, a driver[1] converts that into something to be shipped across the display processor divide, the display device (printer, monitor, [2]) runs the program.... oops, excuse me "print job". Sometimes the instruction granularity is something like "print a line", other times it's a bitmap, sometimes it's some of both ("print dot at"). Once upon a time "vector displays" expected "dot at" semantics, and "raster displays" did lines and fills; bear in mind, this was mostly done in hardware.

An 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper at 300dpi is 8415000 bits (33,660,000 at 600 dpi); at 30 frames a second it's 252,450,000. That's black and white. If you do 256 color, then 2Gbps. You (still) might need to throw hardware at that problem. Or throw software at the problem (compress it) so you can get by with the existing hardware. One final note: you won't be able to save that 250MB file and later print it out on something which doesn't exactly match the shape and density of the original device[3].

On the other hand an intermediate representation, like scalable vector graphics, or Postscript, allows different devices to be targeted but the ownership of that final conversion and where it should live depends. It depends on the "big data" nature of the problem in terms of what the final device is capable of (is it capable of running a Postscript interpreter), and who wants to pay to license the Postscript interpreter (don't forget about that!); and don't forget about firmware / driver updates. By the way, the intermediate representation is likely smaller; you can always compress that to feel good about yourself.

The opacity is because the shear forces require everybody writing for one of these interfaces to take at interface value that what the other side sends / expects is blessed by the standards gods. Everybody feels like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis.

I think you've got this backwards, you state "...moving the processing from the computer to the printer had a reasonable rationale" as fact, but what I've observed over the past 40 years has been a tendency to favor sending bitmaps across the divide, even when the display device (printer specifically, I'm talking about buying printers at Office Depot here) supports a higher level of abstraction. I am more than pleasantly surprised that my Canon G3270 is supported on reasonably modern SuSE Linux with a PPD (for printing, haven't bothered with the scanner).

Mental exercise: suppose you had enough printers to dedicate one per pixel. Would you decompose the job and send every printer individualized instructions, or would you send the printer a program to allow it to pick its designated pixel out of the broadcast plan?

[0] Big Data: when it gets too expensive to keep scaling what you're doing in a presumably integrated fashion, so you optimize by smacking the problem upside the head with dedicated hardware for one or more aspects and pave over the problems with software. [1] or... a compiler. [2] drone swarm? [3] emulating turtles