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I live in a remote part of the US and if you go more than three miles from the interstate there is no cell service at all. Likewise you can easily travel sixty miles without cell service, gas stations, or even rest stops. I put a Starlink Mini in my car because it ensures access to both navigation data via the internet and emergency services via WiFi calling. Since it might be many hours until someone can get to me I paired my Starlink Mini with a Jackery power station so even if my engine won’t start I’ve got about thirty hours of power. Because of the 100gb limit I won’t be spending those hours watching YouTube, but I’ll be able to call out and people will be able to call me back.

Or as I’ve explained to other people it’s great that AAA will tow me a hundred miles if I need it, but if I can’t call them then what good is it?

The original startup simulator used cropped images of real people, and I could see in the git history where people had asked to have their photos removed, so for the remake I decided to use AI for the headshots. Each was generated with the grok-imagine-image-quality model. The prompt for each person had sixteen different attributes (gender, age, heritage, hair color, face shape, glasses, etc.), and no two images have the same values. ArcFace is then used to ensure each face has a minimum difference compared to all other faces. Anything too similar was kicked out and a new profile replaced it. The result was ~500 headshots each for the 2015 and 2026 eras. The gender and race of each image are tracked so that when one is selected, an appropriate name can be drawn for it. The list of last names was the largest table in the original generator. It seemed overkill for what it was doing, so for the remake I discarded all the names below a certain probability.

This solution is less LLM and more parrots $h1tt1ng on newspaper. Keep clicking and see what else you find.

I'm sure it's one of those Thomas Edison/Joseph Swan situations. Keep clicking and see what else you find.

Allowing owners to choose when to install updates would address many issues. Most updates are uneventful, but I’d prefer to install them when I’m at home in my driveway rather than while road-tripping in a rural area, 90 miles from the nearest dealer, or rushing to meet a nonrefundable hotel reservation.

Some NCR cash registers used this trick: they shipped with all the hardware included, but jumper blocks determined what percentage of the hardware the customer had paid for. As the customer’s business grew, they could purchase additional capacity, and an NCR service technician would visit to adjust the jumpers, instantly unlocking 25% more capacity. The actual limits were software-based; the jumper block was only read at startup or when a special code was entered on one of the terminals, and the software limits would adjust accordingly.

The motion picture industry’s problem isn’t piracy, it’s just that they keep targeting movies at 0.02% of the population. If they want to sell more movies they ought to target a bigger demographic.

I recently bought a SIG P320, and a week later, I started reading articles about it self discharging. =P It’s not like it happens all the time, but it seems that if the safety lever spring’s thickness is off by a thousandth of an inch, and the height of the post it fits on is also off by a thousandth of an inch, and you drop the pistol at just the right angle with enough force, the FBI reportedly got it to discharge once during testing—though officially, the results are inconclusive. Now, some law enforcement agencies are quietly replacing the P320 with the Glock 19. Personally, I’m keeping mine because it’s a great gun, and I love that 21-round magazine. However, I sent in my warranty card in case there’s a recall or something similar.

Jamie Dimon's "office" is a 2,500 sq. ft. apartment on Park Avenue in New York. It's paid for by the company, and he lives there with his wife during the week. It's so hypocritical that the guy pushing hardest for a return to work is himself working from home every day.

It sounds to me like the university is using the threat of expulsion to steal or coerce you into giving over your site. I think you just got the best IRL education ever.

This is one of those games that would be great to have the source code for. I’ve seen dozens of people try to do rewrites or reverse engineer the code, but this one got further than most. The author of the original Allycat died a couple decades ago, so that little DOS binary is all we’ll ever have.

That is too bad, Teleport is how I learned a lot of the crypto APIs in Golang. It also provided me with a glimpse into part of openssh which was never very well thought out - signed keys.

Since I was working in an environment where development teams tended to obtain root credentials from CI-CD pipelines and use them to change all the permissions on production servers or fill the storage with database dumps, I ditched teleport, ssh, and logins altogether! We followed the serverless model and there are no logins to any compute resource. The only way to bring data in is via unprivileged ci/cd pipelines or the application's API, the only way to get data out is via stderr or writing to a resource like S3. Nothing runs with privileges, there is no ssh, there are no admin-only access methods. Overnight that eliminated almost everything mysterious or unreproducible. No more permissions issues.

When I did low latency everyone was offloading TCP to dedicated hardware.

They would shut down every single process on the server and bind the trading trading app to the CPUs during trading hours to ensure nothing interrupted.

Electrons travel slower than light so they would rent server space at the exchange so they had direct access to the exchange network and didn't have to transverse miles of cables to send their orders.

They would multicast their traffic and there were separate systems to receive the multicast, log packets, and write orders to to databases. There were redundant trading servers that would monitor the multicast traffic so that if they had to take over they would know all of the open positions and orders.

They did all of their testing against simulators - never against live data or even the exchange test systems. They had a petabyte of exchange data they could play back to verify their code worked and to see if tweaks to the algorithm yielding better or worse trading decisions over time.

A solid understanding of the underlying hardware was required, you would make sure network interfaces were arranged in a way they wouldn't cause contention on the PCI bus. You usually had separate interfaces for market data and orders.

All changes were done after exchange hours once trades had been submitted to the back office. The IT department was responsible for reimbursing traders for any losses caused by IT activity - there were shady traders who would look for IT problems and bank them up so they could blame a bad trade on them at some future time.

Private office with doors? I don't need an office at all, I WFH!

I'm hoping that one day ChatGTP will be advanced enough to ignore advertisements for me. Oh what will the world do if they have to go see a doctor to get an effective toenail fungus cure rather than try the four hundred clickbait remedies that don't.

The problem with hashicorp IMO is that all of their pricing is apparently targeted at hedge funds and oil sheiks. I would like to buy support from them but I don’t have $30k/month to do that. I would like to move to a paid tier but that’s another $7k plus change a month. At that pricing level it makes more sense to build rather then buy. Compare that with AWS’s cloudformation. AWS support has a hefty price tag also but it includes every service including cloudformation.

Having your database exposed on the public internet so a third party service like this can read it directly is a very bad idea IMO. I get what your going for but the end here is some mom and pop getting their database compromised.

Deutsche Bank was one of the first places I worked at, closer to its heyday, I absolutely loved it. But it has been in decline for years, and has a lot of management issues, and fiefdoms.

One of my favorite stories to retell is my wife had a job there also and she had a medical issue from a car wreck. Her boss said the bank couldn’t function if she was doing physical therapy two hours a week, basically fired her, all the paperwork was drawn up, sent to a manager in London to sign. The manager in London was “too important” to sign things so he just leaves it for someone else to rubber stamp in his name the next day. Meanwhile my wife goes across the street (literally), gets a doctor to sign her disability paperwork, walks it into HR - and instead of doing physical therapy two hours a week she was on paid medical leave for almost a year. Her termination paperwork did get signed eventually but because she was on a protected leave they had to throw it out.

I think you have that backwards - Elon never wanted Twitter, he just wanted to see his name in some headlines and make people run around pulling their hair for a bit. However he messed up and put himself in a position where he had to buy Twitter for far more then it was worth and he was held to it. All the top people he fired day one were more then happy to parachute away - was the best thing for them. There is no way he will ever make back that 44 billion on Twitter, he’ll be lucky if he can pay the interest payments on it with what Twitter generates. More then likely all the people who went into Twitter with him will get deals on his other ventures and get their money back that way.

The biggest issue I run into is that developers wanting to put some one liner hello world example into production. There is no monitoring or logging, nothing updates the operating system or the application environment that runs in it, the hello world invariably runs as root and fails as any non-privileged user, etc. Any sort of database access reads the entire database on every access and loops through them all performing its own query logic - until the database gets too big to fit into ram. It’s a huge surprise when data gets discarded from memcache or redis. Over and over again I see these same issues.

Don't let Youtube be the golden copy of your video. They can, and often do, kill your account at any time without notice or explanation and you will have no recourse. Keep the golden copy of all your video someplace reliable like S3 and in a format where you can out watermarks and channel names if needed.

Have a separate account for Youtube then your primary e-mail in case they decide to shut down your entire account your not completely cut off.

Try to have a way to communicate with your viewers outside of Youtube. If the algorithm does kill your channel then often times the only way to get it restored is via social media outrage, and you need a way to ask your followers to be outraged. Fund raise via patreon, have a reddit or discord community, release your videos early on a different platform, etc.

Don't be afraid to refresh old content periodically - everything old is new again.

Usenet didn't fail at all, it just went out of fashion after Google killed the usenet archive. Honestly, I think if we applied everything we've learned about http over the past thirty years and applied it to an updated nntp protocol then it would be quite formidable.

The biggest issue that never was never resolved was on one hand you have the people who don't want people controlling what they read and say - and on the other hand you have the jerks that want to abuse that. If you've ever logged into a darknet forum and someone has uploaded hundreds of autopsy photos anywhere they could upload photos except the "autopsy photos" area, then that is exactly what used to happen on Usenet. It's probably the same guy doing it. Though personally I think having to do the occasional bulk delete is worth preserving freedom of expression.

This is a really awesome list - I'm proud to have seen all but two of them.

But I would also note that the 70s gave us both Star Wars ('77) and Alien ('79). Of the two of them I actually think Alien is the most significant because it was the turning point where we lost the rubber suits, army guys, professors making long winded explanations, and hormonal teenagers and started getting the darker and more serious sci-fi.

Disney's The Black Hole also came out in '79 and it is an enjoyable movie if you don't know anything about physics. It is a serious attempt at sci-fi and kept me on the edge of my seat when I first saw it.

My biggest fear about remote work is the trend will reverse and I'll be at a huge disadvantage trying to negotiate a new position. Though everything I've read seems to indicate the trend is here to stay.

I read that Jamie Dimon's office is a fully decked out apartment on Park Ave (NYC) so for all his griping about remote work, he essentially works from home full time.

I had a boss who moved a guy from Russia to the US just so he could fire him. He was gone ten days after he arrived and all the paperwork was done. I guess that worker protections in Russia were really strong at the time, the guy was untouchable while he was there.

Write the stripe CEO, that will get routed to someone who can help. Front line support people are pretty useless except for the most routine functions.

Good luck with that ;) how are all those senators and congressmen going to watch porn with a law like that on the books?

Everybody is hoping they can cash out at pre-pandemic prices before it all comes crashing down. The real estate valuations are mostly wishful thinking at this point. Only question is how long the bluff plays out.

The article says IBM has laid of 5,000 and has hired 7,000 - sounds to me like typical IBM shenanigans to replace expensive employees with cheap ones.

When I was there the gimmick was that you either relocated to a third world country and took a local wage, or you resigned.

Have you priced housing in middle of nowhere lately? I would be more then happy to live an hour off the interstate and have a couple acres of trees for neighbors. No problems with maintaining a well, having a septic system, and a propane tank. Doesn’t bother me that DoorDash doesn’t come there, StarBucks is a trip, and Amazon doesn’t do next day delivery. Houses like that now start around $350k and go straight to the moon. Most of them were purchased in the last 2-3 years and the sellers are trying flip them at 2-6x the price having made no improvements at all. The purchase history is public record and very telling.

At some point the banks should step in and say hey, there is no way this property is worth $300k, $600k, $900k - it will never sell at that price again, none of the local industries pay well enough to have a $7k per month mortgage payment, if the loan defaults we are going to take a bath. However the banks don’t do that, they just say California idiot has money to blow, give him the loan.

And of course the California idiot is going to have problems also when he wants to move in 2-7 years and finds out nobody can afford his house.