simmons

I personally think that I only get worse at programming when I drink even a little, and quickly stop caring.

On an unrelated note, some folks started a distillery in Lakewood, Colorado, and they named it Ballmer Peak after the XKCD. :)

Weird! The decrementing TTLs almost sounds like the sender is trying to perform some strange variation on a traceroute. With the long interval, maybe they are sending such packets to many destinations, and trying to build an evolving picture of Internet routing infrastructure?

I'm curious how much time a solo dev spends on support for a project like this. I can imagine some companies asking for a tremendous amount of support, or even trying to somehow get free consultation on adjacent concerns that aren't totally related to the product. Maybe it's just a matter of setting clear boundaries and limiting time?

A niche mainframe game from 1971, and its successors like BSD Trek, were flying way below the radar of any lawyers back then. Even through the early/mid-80's, developers took great liberties with IP and largely got away with it. (Regard the "Prisoner" game from 1980 [1].)

I remember buying a C64 port of Trek off the shelf at Target in the mid-80s which was clearly not licensed. I don't think anyone could get away with that today. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(video_game)#Diff...

I've self-hosted email for decades, but when I had to migrate recently to a big VPS provider, I started having issues sending to most Outlook customers. (I actually expected more problems, although delivery to GMail seems to work great.) Does anyone here have recommendations for smart hosts supporting outgoing SMTP for very low volume (personal) use?

Any VoIP provider, I suppose. I have a few phone numbers at voip.ms, have a VoIP phone on my desk, and selectively forward the numbers to my cell phone. Outbound calls from a cellphone using such a number is a bit more awkward, requiring either a SIP app or calling into the system before punching in the number to dial. (Maybe there are apps to simplify this by now?) SMS is even more awkward, though there are some APIs.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear this. :(

I've bought many NUCs over the years. I'm literally sitting in my office right now with 8 NUCs set up -- 1 as a workstation, and 7 as servers performing various tasks. I know people have always complained that they are a bit more expensive than the alternatives, but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability.

That said, I've been expecting this for quite some time. I doubt the NUC line made a lot of money for them -- their stated goal with NUC was for these machines to be demonstrations of what can be done with their hardware. In their current situation, I'm not surprised that they decided this was needed to increase their focus.

I guess I'll be shopping around for alternatives at some point.

There are probably many valid answers to this, but my concern would be about bugs or other security failings allowing an attacker to alter one's registration details (e.g. nameservers). This could be catastrophic, since everyone seems to base their security on email (e.g. password resets) these days, in true "pass the hard problem of identity and authentication on to someone else" fashion.

In other words, whoever controls the registration controls the nameservers, and whoever controls the nameservers controls the MX records, and whoever controls the MX records can reset passwords. (Ideally, we'd all be using MFA for every possible thing, but in practice that may not be possible for the hundreds of services one might be using.)

Android doesn't appear to be involved. I sent an SMS to someone's AT&T iPhone yesterday using a VoIP service, and this exact thing happened.

Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, CO USA https://www.mediaarchaeologylab.com/

I hope markets don't panic and I think the chances of an actual default are extremely low. However, I don't think the chances of a default are zero. Everyone I talk to seems to be saying "A devastating default [i.e. not like the brief blip in 1971] has never happened, therefore it cannot happen." Which doesn't seem like sound reasoning to me.

I imagine there's no escaping the fallout of such a default, but I'm thinking it may be time to take a break from treasury ETFs for while.

Great work! I've been playing a little with an older version of this (from ~ March 29th, when it was called `llama-rs`) just to get a taste of the LLM world, and it's super convenient. (I haven't tried llama.cpp to compare.)

Since it's a bit slow on my hardware (being CPU-only at the moment + me not having any fancy graphics cards, anyway), when toying around I sometimes get impatient and fire up jobs on multiple servers via the CLI. I keep toying with the idea of whipping up a webapp that would provide a ChatGPT-like interface and dispatch to any number of connected backend servers.

From the alt text: > 'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.

I sometimes wonder, if all cars were equipped with a radio where drivers could speak to and hear other drivers around them (naturally, not push-to-talk like CB), would driving behavior improve because it would humanize the other drivers? Or would it make drivers want to be at war with each other even more?

While we're plugging computer museums, I'll add the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, on the campus of the University of Colorado. It's no doubt a far smaller operation than most of the others mentioned here, but it has a lot of heart. Visitors are encouraged to hang out, play around with all the old computers and gadgets, peruse the floppy disk collection, and maybe find some games to play.

https://www.mediaarchaeologylab.com/

> I remember accessing the web at a pretty early stage by telnet to info.cern.ch which presented a text client pretty much like an old version of lynx, but double clicking on that would get you nowhere. You had to press Enter, iirc.

I remember using that text client as well. If I recall correctly, it was just called "www" and presented links as footnotes that you could select by number. I remember thinking it was quite clumsy and would never be as elegant and clean as Gopher. ;) I always assumed that was the first web browser, but it makes sense that this NeXT-ish/GUI-ish client was the first, given the circumstances of its development.

In second grade, I and several other kids were given a demo of a TRS-80 computer running a tutorial of how to write a program in BASIC. The tutorial was about developing a program to calculate baseball batting averages, I believe. It asked the user some questions about a baseball game, and performed a few steps. Nothing unusual so far -- just like a calculator, right?

But then it looped back to ask the questions for the next game, and updated the rolling averages, which of course took into account the information from previous iterations. My jaw hit the floor when I realized the immense power of being able to do things like this -- the possibilities are endless! Something changed in my mind in that very moment, and it's never changed back. From that day on, I was obsessed with thinking about what sort of computer programs I could write.

I've been eagerly awaiting this article since your teaser comment a couple of years ago [1], and really look forward to reading it!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094024

My situation is very similar to yours. For annual filings, I just use TurboTax Self-Employed (online). I'm not necessarily endorsing it. I haven't tried other solutions out of a fear that I would miss out on potential reduction of friction from the tool not having the context of previous years' returns.

For quarterly taxes, I use my own spreadsheets, including one that implements the annualized income installment method from Publication 505. (I can't fathom how some freelancers can have income so consistent and/or a crystal ball revealing their total year income that use of simpler methods is possible.)

That's great, and it's not all CS quotes. It reminds me of the quotes from the old UNIX fortune program [1] that many systems or accounts would be configured to use to show a quote on each login.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://github.com/bmc/fortunes/blob/master/fortunes

For Linode Ubuntu 22.04 installations, at least, the default seems to be DHCP, even if the IP address is fixed. And I certainly wouldn't have thought anything about this, since even when using fixed IP addresses, I'm in the habit of using DHCP to provide a central source of IP address truth for my networks, to ease the pain of the inevitable renumbering.

For whatever it's worth, since it was a DHCP problem, I was able to manually configure the static IPs and get the hosts back up. The last incoming connections logged before the outage were around ~ 6:24:00 am MDT (about one hour ago). I guess that's when my server needed to renew the DHCP lease and couldn't.

Arrgh! :( Just this week I needed to do some emergency rearranging of personal infrastructure, and moved one nameserver to Linode Fremont, while the other nameserver is in Linode Dallas. I was fully aware that I needed a more diverse long-term solution, but I figured "What are the chances that both Fremont and Dallas will go down in the next week or two?"

Sorry, folks. I hate that my dangerous flirting with Murphy's Law is hurting other people.

Word Writer 4 and an Okidata Okimate 20 printer, here. Some years ago I wrote a quick-and-dirty program to convert the files to HTML [1]... only to be absolutely horrified at how awful my writing was as a teenager. ;)

[1] https://cafbit.com/post/migrating_legacy_documents_from_word...

I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar capability; I don't know.)

Yes, and don't forget the great schematic diagram in the back! It definitely didn't come in the box with the C64; I had to save up as well. I still have my copy, tattered though it is, sitting here on my office bookshelf. That, and the book _Assembly Language Programming with the Commodore 64_ [1] changed the way I viewed computers.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Assembly_Language_Programming_Wi...

For streaming, I have a few pi's (and cameras) running v4l2rtspserver, and it seems to work pretty well. It appears to be using the Broadcom hardware support for H.264 encoding, so it's pretty light on the CPU. I'm currently using Shinobi on a different host to receive and archive the RTSP streams. (Although I'm interested in checking out Frigate, which was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion.)

I haven't looked at Glassdoor in several years, but if I recall correctly, back then they wanted you to supply information about your employment -- including salary -- in exchange for being able to see information from others. It may be hard to simultaneously provide users with anonymity and collect such personal identifiable information.

Very neat! It's easy to be discouraged seeing how much my investments have fallen in recent months. But this graph makes it seem like the stock market could still be on track, producing slow and steady gains in the long term, when we consider that the crazy bull market of the last couple of years was an aberration. (No guarantees about where the stock market goes from here, of course.)

Now, if only I had a crystal ball, or at least was more in tune with the world of finance so I could have ridden the ups and downs more effectively. ;)

Indeed! I'm familiar with Contiki, and have even done a bit of Contiki programming for fun. :) Sadly, it wasn't around back then, but it's fascinating to see how more value can be squeezed out of old systems.

These particular PS/2 Model 25's probably had an edge on the C64, though. Having proper Ethernet cards and access to Netware servers allowed loading applications a lot faster than, say, a 1541 disk drive. Although my present-day C64 with Ethernet adapter, SD2IEC, etc., might could give it a run for its money. :)

Regarding the PS/2 Model 30 using an 8086, it's important to remember that average consumers didn't quickly adopt the latest microprocessors like they do today, and it was very common for manufacturers to use much older chips in newer products. Hardware was expensive, and the latest hardware was crazy expensive -- the PS/2 Model 30 with its 8086 had a list price of $2,295 ($5,952 in today's dollars), while the contemporary PS/2 Model 80 with its 80386 was $6,995 ($18,142 in today's dollars!). Also, the software commonly in use on IBM compatibles at that time (i.e. DOS) wasn't particularly suited for taking advantage of the newer hardware.

My school had a number of 8086-based PS/2 Model 25's. By the time I used them in 1991, they had been retired to second-tier labs, but they were still perfectly usable for checking email, word processing, telnet to the UNIX server, and some light games. (I remember Star Control ran particularly well on its quasi-VGA "MCGA" graphics.)