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This sounds like it is a good first step and I appreciate someone is trying to tackle a problem that bilks people out of billions a year. Another thing that would help is hitting at the sources of revenue for these criminals. My mother was bilked of Amazon gift cards after she was told she had her identity stolen by Indian scammers and had to provide restitution. She was panicked that her identity was stolen and called me. The first thing I said was did they request gift cards? And of course that answer was yes. This was after she sent them $1500 and they wanted more.

Perhaps there should be some warning that is required before a gift card purchase that warns the purchaser of scams. I know some stores are doing this now when they see someone buying a bunch of gift cards, and sometimes preventing victimization. But perhaps legislation is needed here due to the scale of loss. I am not in favor of a nanny state, but sometimes people need to be told things.

That is noble they did that and shows that they still have that element in them. I do not support Trump, and it shows objectivity to defend someone like him when his rights are infringed as they seem to be in that case.

The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus away. [1]

1.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

They have changed their direction considerably since 2016. The cases they take on now tend not to align with an absolutist stance on freedom of speech and due process.

When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.

This is their plea for donations: "Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide."

Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be defending deeply unpopular people anymore

You don't get charge for transit if you are sending stuff IN from the internet or to any other AWS resource in that region. So there is no QOS constraint inside except for perhaps paying for the S3 GET/SELECT/LIST costs.

It is pretty much exclusively to lock you into their services. It heavily impacts multi-cloud and outside of AWS service decisions when your data lives in AWS and is taxed at 5-9 cents a GB to come out. We have settled for inferior AWS solutions at times because the cost of moving things out is prohibitive (IE AWS Backup vs other providers)

There might be pricing pressure, and a lot of people entering the space, but it is more than a nice to have. If you do not have some sort of SIEM solution, you will pay more for or not be insurable for cybersecurity/ransomware insurance.

Implementing observability/SIEM yourself has also become a lot more complicated because the domain of things that have to be observed is increasing. There are many organizations now that have things that need to be monitored in several clouds, infrastructures like k8s, and stuff on prem. So you need a vendor that has the tools to collect this data easily and aggregate it.

The startup world and startup whales might be dying now. But there is a giant iceberg of companies that are becoming more hybrid and their systems that used to do things like funnel syslogs and firewall flow logs to a collector are no longer adequate.

Yarn made the same mistake going from 1 to 2 as Angular did. The newer version was so different. Both should have been named something else. At a certain point of incompatibility and divergence it is a different product, and the benefit you get from using a well known name is outweighed but the cost of confusion.

Yarn 2 brought a lot of great improvements but since it was named "Yarn" people were expecting it to behave somewhat like the first one.

This is also true in Orange County, Florida. I was surprised when I found out via a friend that was a deputy there that the uniformed police working at bars were being paid by the bar, and it was required that they had a certain number of them on duty. They too were getting paid $50-60 an hour.

The problem is that your profits are made on the fresher items. The marked down items are being sold at cost or at a loss. That conditions customers to shop for marked down items and cannibalizes the fresh sales. I myself used to buy the "Manager Meat Special" leg of lamb when it came up. But the stores near me stopped doing it. They find it more profitable to dispose of it at a 100% loss than discount.

There are multiple things that are done here. Suppose you had great, immutable backups. They still have many things that can ruin your business

1. Restoring networks, servers, third party services with knowledge that anything you restore could be compromised as well. Keys

2. The attackers will then threaten to dump all of your private information.

It is more than just restoring data, it is restoring and resetting your entire infrastructure. And most places have backups, but they don't practice entire restores

Well one thing an OTS solution accomplishes is it makes costs and capabilities very clear to product and marketing. When you have an internal team doing something bespoke to your organization it is viewed as much more malleable.

If the third party solution cannot support the billing system devised, or will support it for a large cost, companies are more likely to choose things that are more in the box.

Great accuracy as tested to a continually changing black box. GPT hits are also expensive and often have unpredictable latency. This would have to be integration tested to detect changes to GPT answers.

I was thinking of this when a friend passed away from pancreatic cancer a couple of weeks ago. One of the reasons pancreatic cancer is so deadly is that it is deeply internal and symptoms of it are not present. This is true with all of the deadliest cancers. We already recommend colonoscopy to older adults which is a fairly invasive procedure to screen for colon cancer with no other history. If we could scan people with low or no ionizing radiation that would be a great tool.

There are plenty of items that have been replaced with a different one but maintain the previous product's high review volume. Also there are those with a huge number of fake reviews. I look at the 1-2 star reviews. If they are dumb ones like box was damaged or shipping slow, that is good. If there are 4000 reviews saying "Great product" and 30 saying it went up in smoke with pictures, I am not buying it.

I have shopped online almost exclusively for over 20 years and have started doing the same thing. If I buy a fan at Home Depot, I can be reasonably assured it won't go on fire. They have product buyers that assess the quality and prices of products. Amazon purposely does not have this as it would open them to liability. So "Independent reseller" GOODAIR fan is not at all assessed, and they only provide a platform for users to judge the quality of items and post reviews.

[1] Reminds me of this video where a guy humorously simulates someone coming in to steal his military "Deuce and a half" 6x6. These things have no locks on them because the military doesn't want people to be locked out. But getting one moving is not easy...

1 https://youtu.be/57gBrGfboMM?t=208

Russia could touch anyone in the US that they really wanted to, and vice versa. There is just this understanding that whatever you do, they are going to know it was you most likely, and something is coming back. So Russia turning a blind eye to cybercriminals extorting the USA and others is their way at annoying the USA just as the USA does to them in various ways. But when that annoyance turns into something more than annoying, and verges on an act of war, there will be a response. That is why you don't really see foreign acts of assassination. Because other parties can do the same thing.

They do when it leaves the law enforcement world and goes to shadowy government agencies as in Colonial pipeline that have a lot more resources and don't have to play by many rules when dealing with hostile foreign based attacks. If LockBit suddenly crippled the US electric grid or stock market it would be the end of them. So these groups try to extract as much money as they can without getting that heat.

If you are bowling with a house bowling ball, and not hooking it extensively you would have done just as well on any lane. The lane did not do it for you. The balls used by league bowlers are highly reactive and they generate spin in the oil. Once they hit that dry part on the outside they fly into the pocket for strikes.

If you came off the street, picked up a ball of the rack, and bowled a great game it was all you.

This is absolutely real, and I am impressed they included that. It is called a "walled shot" I used to work as a bowling mechanic when going through college. The lanes in PBA bowling have to have a minimum amount of oil. There should be more oil in the middle and less on the boards towards the gutters.

However every single house has no oil at all on the boards towards the gutter. This allows the balls when thrown with a hook to boomerang back and smash the pins.

I always wanted to make it a PBA shot, but the managers said no absolutely not! Bowlers equate how good a place is with how good they bowl! They get angry and superstitious about everything. Like they would think the head mechanic oiled the lanes better than 19 year old me but it was really done entirely by the machine. So if you gave them a regulation shot, and they started bowling worse, they would go to an easier house.

Edit: It is not just the high end recreational bowling centers serving sushi, it is all of them. They change the pattern if hosting a PBA event.

I never knew the scale either. But the book says gasoline has a specific gravity of 0.7. So 100 tons will make roughly 30 tons of buoyancy. The negatively buoyant craft is 50 tons so combined with the air inside that is probably the displacement required to make it positive

Was the pandemic a fad? Yes certain segments did grow wildly during the pandemic due to in person restrictions. That growth is certainly unsustainable. If it weren't for the corresponding stock price explosion and then costs explosion to attempt to grow even more, they would have a very profitable company. As far as fitness trends they do manage to hold on to a lot of subscribers.

Startup layoffs are very much related to the funding environment. I work for a startup that laid off half our staff. There have been very few series C and later this year. So if you are a startup you need to decrease burn now and get to having good MRR. You can't aggressively grow at a loss and expect to get more funding for that with few exceptions. When VC money was much more plentiful people hired a lot without the pressure to become more sustainable. For further funding rounds they had to show that they were growing in some way. SVB collapse was huge in the startup world not just due to the people who had deposits there.

With larger companies like Meta, their multiples are also based on growth. So even though large tech shows no signs of being financially insolvent, they will have to still deliver growth in profit with flat to declining revenue. So the focus then is to decrease expenditures in lieu of revenue. There was a ton of hiring the last few year along with the tail wind of tons of money out there. Now it needs to rebalance.

The lockdowns went on far longer than the "flatten the curve" phase. I think the lessons learned here were:

1. Once something like this escapes its confines and starts spreading as COVID did, it is here to stay and any lockdowns that are not to avoid hospital capacity problems just prolong the inevitable

2. Compromised people due to health conditions and age should definitely lay low when there is an outbreak. But locking down a populace at great financial and other costs does not help them. In fact it probably causes more harm as the cycle is prolonged. The more healthy people that recover the better.

Trump did his things based on stubbornness and stupidity. Persisting lockdowns and draconian restrictions past the hospital situation being resolved was also not wise either. I live in NY and in April 2020 locking down was essential. It was very bad with the hospitals and nursing homes being ravaged.

Unfortunately that is the internet now. The results and pages you are getting are poor because people stopped publishing websites. Now most of the internet forums and self curated pages are gone and information is in those silos

Someone isn't going to design one of these system or has designed some of these systems themselves or during an interview. However for something like YouTube one could say Ok to start simply I would have a frontend form to submit videos, which sends it to a video conversion API queue that calls back when it is completed or could be polled for progress. Now obviously what YouTube really does is much more complicated. But the follow up questions could be like OK your form works and now your video site becomes enormously successful and your video transcoder is overloaded, what would you do? Well I could parallelize the consumers of the queue to some large number, and scale based on load...

So isn't going to be something like I would architect my own massively parallel converter database and binaries written from scratch to process all the various formats which is probably closer to what is done in reality. But senior and lead engineers should indeed understand tradeoffs, parallelization, queues, data storage concerns. They are given as questions because people know from a use case view how they generally work.

There is competitive demand with food supply but that is the point. If we did not have surplus corn produced, the USA would be very vulnerable to food disruptions. Because as we saw during COVID, business supply chains are only optimized to current demand without disaster. So if there is another channel to purchase corn it creates more demand and keeps excess production going at a price that is still possible to produce at.

If the USA suddenly had a food crisis, the ethanol production could be stopped.

I really liked the take home. It is just that if you have someone doing this, you are having that person commit hours of their time to interviewing without the same investment on your end. So if you do not have the means or time to process these submissions then it is not fair to have someone spend their time on it.

I think your hiring process is great otherwise. And yes if someone isn't very familiar with every intersection of stacks there it will take them more time. That is fine too. It shows the person can learn on the spot.

I completed that exercise along with a Nomad one w ELK stack. And submitted it. And never got a response ever besides we will look at it ASAP. (3 months ago.). It was billed as a "2 hour" exercise, but to even get close to that you would need to be completely fluent with Fly, Nomad, ELK, Wireguard, Linux networking stack. I thought it was a great take home but you would at least expect a response for completing it successfully.

One use case is to make a decentralized form of micropayments. The "Open web" is at huge risk right now (and is declining in usefulness) due to the incentives given to content providers. You can either make money in a walled garden like YouTube or provide affiliate links. Now this is more at threat with things like ChatGPT using your provided content as training data with zero attribution. This will continue to get worse.

So as someone with knowledge about a particular area, and with people that need such knowledge (such as those that need training data or someone looking for something) you can be incentivized to provide it.

Of course in reality this is super hard to accomplish with bad actors abound but it would be nice.

It could be to gradually increase reaction expectations so it would not be surprising if China shot down one of the USA's drones. Or perhaps escalate by using their previously demonstrated ability to blow up satellites. The balloon was a very public microaggression that forced the USA to respond in a very public way. China tried the public "oops it was a weather balloon" to give the USA a chance to back off the public response (but know that China was still provoking them). But it was too brazen to accept.

The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.