mesofile

I like to use Spinitron — https://spinitron.com to find radio stations or shows that I like. The home page is a feed sourced from a large number of community/college/non-commercial radio stations in the US, showing what tracks are being played at any given moment. One can watch tracks spill down the feed and, if you see something you like, click the link through to the station’s page on Spinitron. This lists the stations recent playlist, archived playlists, and schedule, with links to the station itself as well as links to the major music services for each track. It’s a little buggy but I’ve found it great for discovering not only new music but new curators of music (ok DJs) which is even better. And because it seems restricted to non-commercial stations (though no NPR affiliates) there are no ads to speak of.

Down and Out in Paris and London is an all-time favorite of mine, delving as it does into eternal truths about both restaurant work and homelessness. It's also a fantastic slice of life for that particular time period. The experience of sharing a malnourished existence and tiny flea-ridden Parisian tenement room with a voluble White Russian emigré was conveyed so well it nearly feels like one of my own memories.

That would be exactly the kind of thing I dread to know – this is the last item in my cupboard whose ingredients label I studiously avoid reading in order to keep enjoying it. But this is HN, so, let's see:

INGREDIENTS: MADE FROM ROASTED PEANUTS AND SUGAR, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: MOLASSES, FULLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (RAPESEED AND SOYBEAN), MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, SALT.

Oh, maybe molasses (and yes probably the salt) is the flavor note I'm hung up on.

Anyway this is such a pure food-industrial-complex product that I am sure the ingredients list amounts to a sort of cover story. FWIW the parent company scores rates just OK on the 'Palm Oil Scorecard' from your linked page: https://palmoilscorecard.panda.org/check-the-scores/manufact...

As a US native who otherwise mostly abstains from sugary processed foods, big-brand peanut butter is one part of my country's food culture that I absolutely cannot shake. I don't eat fast food or drink soda, but I must have a jar of Jif around at all times. I have tried every type of organic peanut butter and found them all more or less vile, mostly due to the oiliness but there's also usually something flat & colorless about the flavor -- not just missing sweetness but something else. On the other hand the less adulterated alternatives do taste a lot more like actual peanuts, which makes me dread to know what it is that I'm missing.

A Time Of Gifts is a marvelous book, I have a copy by my desk, but I'm not sure how one could read it and come away with a notion that fascination with the ancient world culminates in Fascism. The author is hugely engrossed with classic literature even as a teenager on walkabout -- the passage where he frightens a passerby because he's solo-reenacting scenes from epic poetry rather too enthusiastically, to keep himself entertained while on the trudge, is very memorable -- and it wasn't long after that journey concluded that he volunteered to go fight Fascism in the most literal sense possible.

I had a successful hour-long video call on Signal recently using my aging iPhone SE (1st gen), which has battery-life issues in general but I made it through without needing to plug in. First time I’d used that feature of the app.

This has been a long time in coming, and is significant for the EU as a whole because of Ireland is the designated lead regulator for data privacy issues. This Politico article [0] from last year has a great overview of the history including background on how Ireland wound up taking a lead role on tech regulation in Europe.

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/24/ireland-data-priva...

Sorry for the ambiguity -- but no, I mean getting historical cost data retroactive to the resource creation would be great, but I can understand why that's not possible. What I'm saying is that Cost Allocation Tags specifically won't return any cost data for resources that are older than that CAT's activation date. So not only do I not get past costs but I don't get anything going forward. I went on a tagging spree a while back and then spent a bunch of time later down the road trying to figure out why it was getting info for some things and not others.

For any service -- say EC2:

  - launch instance A  
  - create a new CAT and activate it in the Billing console 
  - apply CAT to instance A 
  - get no cost data back for that instance in Cost Explorer filtering on that CAT 
  - terminate instance A 
  - launch instance B 
  - apply CAT to instance B 
  - get cost data back for that instance in Cost Explorer filtering on that CAT
  

It was explained to me by AWS support that this is in fact how it works, after I opened a case into why I wasn't getting full data back for some legacy stuff. So for any new account I would say that your tagging scheme should get built first, before infrastructure or anything else.

One thing that I wish I'd known when I first started to use Cost Allocation Tags in AWS as described in the article -- they won't apply to any resources created before the tag was created & activated. Well, you can apply them but they won't return data to your cost reports. For some resources this is not a big deal -- any individual EC2 instance I can respawn pretty easily, or I'm not doing my job right. But there's lots of things in the accounts I administrate that would be far less trivial to re-create, due as much to organizational issues as technical ones. Being able to apply CATs to old resources and start getting cost data back would be a huge improvement for my day-to-day work.

There are historical resonances throughout, to an extent that shocks me, given that the author was coming from a milieu that on the face of it -- the industrial computing industry in early-'70s Soviet Union? -- is so alien to my own experience. He seems to have grasped some essential truths that continue to apply even as the world of programming and the world at large have changed in many profound ways.

There are dozens of these shortcuts -- I use the ones for the Applications (cmd + shift + a) and Desktop (cmd + shift + d) most often, but you can find many others listed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

My general experience with crafting IAM policies is very reminiscent of SELinux, in that it's very difficult to work agnostically while adhering to a principle of least privilege. Especially given that this kind of task is often done by admin/ops people, one typically can't know in advance everything that the app might need to be able to access in order to work correctly. The process of discovering this is: try running it -- it fails, you note the permissions error -- look at docs, talk to devs, try to give it the most granular permissions it needs to get around that error -- rinse & repeat, probably many many times. This is onerous and you wind up going all around the mulberry bush trying to understand and satisfy every dependency.

At least, if you're very good and don't mind being perceived as a roadblock, you try to understand things. If you're more typical, you just find the most direct route from logged error to added permission (audit2allow approach). And if you're bad, which is also not uncommon, you just give it the broadest permissions possible and call it a day.

With respect to IAM in particular, I'm finding in the Lambda world that some seemingly straightforward functions wind up needing some sort of access to all kind of other AWS services; these services each have their own funky permissions structures and attendant quirks. Each one is a temptation to the IAM admin to just throw their hands in the air and put a wildcard on it.

Definitely wrongly attributed https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/

You might, as I do, prefer written sources, but I must recommend watching (even just the first part of) this BBC documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDADy9b2IBM

Really I think you're just describing awe, which as traditionally defined [0] always included (or at least, certainly did not preclude) an element of fear. This seems completely natural to me, but I grew up with a sort of old-fashioned understanding of certain English words. The use of the adjective 'awesome' in recent decades has perhaps helped people to forget its negative connotations.

[0] "an emotion variously combining dread, veneration and wonder" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awe

What would be great is if judiciaries only treated video as admissible if it was cryptographically watermarked in tandem with a globally distributed blockchain-style rolling checksum, to resist tampering (deepfakes or just plain old timecode manipulation). Combine that with a licensing scheme, as a condition of using the global checksum service, that guaranteed by law access to video by any party captured on said video — i.e. scenes & events in public areas would be required to be made available to members of the public, on request; or video of private areas would still have to be shared with any subjects that it captured, if it were to be introduced as evidence.

Interesting, I'd always assumed that Erlang was some kind of portmanteau of 'Ericsson' + 'language'.

Link is broken, should have an .html extension, not .htm

I've watched it all now, and I think it's a great dramatic work, well worth seeing. I would also urge anyone who watches it to read some nonfiction around the event; there are a number of recent articles about the series that provide some factual context and corrections. Here is a good one: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...

I am from Washington DC and, while it's true that the President is always accompanied by a security retinue -- for reasons well-founded in history -- it is not uncommon to see members of either legislative body walking around unattended. It used to be more common, that's true, but it's still not unusual. The less of a media profile they have, the more likely it is that you'll run into them at a coffee shop.

In my experience this is true, that money doesn't buy happiness, but it does allow you to focus on your actual problems instead of the boring old money problems that nearly everyone else has. In some cases, newfound wealth will not only not solve one's problems but may throw them into sharp relief, or worsen them by deflecting negative feedback. Many if not most lottery winners seem to be affected by this.

Perhaps it’s like war films, in the sense that it’s very difficult to not glamorize the subject, no matter how gritty the treatment. The worse it gets the better it looks.

What woods were these that had 20mm cannon rounds scattered about?

There is also a dedicated tool, yum-cron.

Also, I thought the --security flag did not have any effect on CentOS?

I thought the quote was pithy, but it didn't quite sound like Orwell to me (who I have read a lot of, though not recently). "What someone else doesn't want printed" is a formulation that doesn't quite mean _truth_; Orwell felt seriously about the journalist's responsibility to be truthful and it seemed like he might have made a finer distinction. Quick search and lo.

Orwell is claimed by partisans of all kinds due to his great reputation as a moral thinker and his willingness to criticize political actors & ideologies across the spectrum. Consequently his writings are often misquoted, misattributed or taken out of context. The "rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf" one is a classic example.

Possibly spurious: see http://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2012/09/25/even-if-it-look...

What’s interesting to me about Minneapolis and other northern cities where there are a lot of cyclists is that they very often have far more people riding to commute or do other practical tasks than any number of other cities with much milder climates. In the American south, where you never see snow, commuter cyclists are practically nonexistent. Obviously there is a climate challenge of a different sort, but not insurmountable ones and not all year round.

Citation needed, I know. There’s a relevant article about this phenomenon out there somewhere, if I can find it I’ll post a link.

Never fear, they’re working on those, too. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a24675/pe...

It's worth noting that Windows Update may also fail to apply the Meltdown/Spectre patch if other conditions aren't met. Some are mentioned on the KB page [1] but they don't mention another common scenario, which is that if your system firmware is not ready to accept the update, Windows Update will not apply it, and _it won't tell you_ that it's not applying it -- it will simply say 'Your device is up to date'.

I had to dig around to find a page [2] that had some useful instructions allowing me to find out what the actual status of my Windows install was. I'm grateful to the author of that page, they provided critical info that neither Microsoft nor my machine's manufacturer did. I wish I could say that it boggles my mind that they could be so hushmouthed on the subject of a vulnerability this severe. Of course, my OEM (Lenovo) has not released an update for my Windows laptop (Yoga 900) since 2016, and as of today their support page [3] on Meltdown/Spectre does not indicate that they plan to do so.

I'm posting this partly in anger/despair, partly in the hope that I'm wrong and that someone will pop up to comment and tell me there's a fix. There is a Linux BIOS for this machine but it's old and I don't know if it will actually address this issue.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4056892/windows-10-... [2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-meltd... [3] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282