bradknowles

It’s easy enough to just configure TouchID so that it doesn’t work to log into your computer. It’s only used for authorization to do certain operations (like ApplePay), once you have logged on with a password.

I do this on all my devices. And I don’t use FaceID for anything at all. Which makes modern iPhones a bit of a pain, but I do it anyway.

I don’t think these methods are possible anymore in this modern economy of “fire everyone because of AI and then rehire them a few months later at half the salary”.

If you’re not one of the senior managers, I don’t think these kinds of long term investments are feasible anymore.

You know, if this was software, I would agree with you.

Let’s just say that hardware and I are not a good fit.

I regret to inform you that I am not competent to make electrical systems design changes on a device like this.

You should ask Daniel Stenberg of CURL fame. He might appreciate some help in this area.

Trump: Yes, let’s kill all the children. Surely that will improve things.

This design appears to be 220VAC only. And I’m assuming all metric threads and other measurements, too.

I think I could live with all the other components being metric, if they just had a way to work with standard U.S./Imperial containers as well.

Oh, and they need a 120VAC design for the motor and all the electronics inside.

Or, a design that can handle both 120VAC and 240VAC, as well as both 50hz and 60hz.

Only until OpenAI or one of the other hyper-scalars makes sure to adequately pay him off.

So, use a good VPN. IMO, the main thing they’re actually useful for is protecting you against abuse from your own ISP.

For the time I worked at AWS, pretty much everyone inside the company used s5cmd for its speed.

I think that speaks pretty highly of it.

Yeah, that jumped out at me, too.

If they can’t re-run the benchmarks on the same hardware, it’s hard to compare the numbers.

You can send power without wires, over short distances. Induction charging on devices like iPhones and Apple Watches are common examples of that.

But it gets exponentially more difficult to transmit power wirelessly, the greater the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, especially if you want to send large amounts of power that way. Certain bands of radio waves can be transmitted long distances, and could b turned back into electrical power on the remote end.

But by then you will have successfully converted a multi-kilowatt power source into the source antenna into a few microwatts at the receiver. Not very efficient.

Is it supercavitation or is it riding in a bubble of steam that it creates ahead of itself?

Either way, it’s effectively flying through the air bubble underwater, which was the concept I was thinking of.

This is not a new concept. You can see a discussion of this technique being used (to a degree) on battleships in WWII, by watching some of the videos on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel.

There’s also a Russian torpedo that uses a similar concept to “fly” at supersonic speeds underwater.

So, Kiri Engine?

No, but there is still common use of the related form “wary”.

One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density. You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment. Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.

Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.

You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.

With regards to cerebral palsy, my mind always goes back to Chuck, a guy I knew in high school in 1983-1984. His case was pretty severe, most people couldn’t understand him when he talked. He was able to drive his motorized wheelchair pretty well, but unless you looked closely, it wasn’t obvious how he did it.

Chuck was a bit older than most of the high school kids, due to his challenges. I think he was something like 27 at the time. But he was also the best programmer I have ever known.

We had Apple ][+ and Apple //e hardware in our computer lab, and one was set aside for his personal use. It had a special hardware adapter over the keyboard so that you couldn’t accidentally press two keys at once.

Watching Chuck write a program was wild. His hands would wave around in the air for a minute or so, and then somewhere in there you would hear a “chunk” sound. That sound was him hitting a key on the keyboard. He had a 100% success rate of hitting the key he wanted, every time. Because editing a file would have been too painful for him.

Chuck’s programs were also perfect. They did exactly what needed to be done, no more and no less. And you couldn’t shorten them by a single character, because otherwise the functionality would have been lost.

Chuck spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about his programs before he ever sat down in front of the keyboard. By the time he got there, the program was already completely written in his mind. And it was completely debugged. I think he was the only person to get a perfect score on every test and every program in the computer science class that year.

Over the time I knew him, it became easier for me to understand what he was saying. Towards the end of that time, if Chuck and I were in the room at the same time, his assistant was able to even take breaks to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, she had to be with him 24x7. That wasn’t something that I intentionally enabled, it just kind of developed that way, but I did find out later that she appreciated the time that we were together.

I think a lot of people looked down on Chuck due to his difficulties, but I thought he was amazing. And over forty years later, I still think that he is the best programmer I have ever known.

Salt water is a nasty substance and difficult to handle properly. That salt interacts with metal and other substances in the pipeline, etc….

You might not have to go to fully potable (drinkable) status to get something that will work for cooling, but there’s a lot of processing that needs to happen.

Datacenters need four things: power, water, cooling, and access to the WAN.

A dry desert environment is not very conducive to datacenter operations with regards to those first three items.

If you’re located close to the sea or an ocean, at least there’s a possibility of getting water, albeit perhaps through expensive reverse osmosis. But then you’re operating in a more humid environment where certain types of cooling systems won’t work well, because they depend on water evaporation to function.

If you’re building a multigigawatt AI datacenter, those are two types of environments that you want to avoid.

So, whether it’s Houston Texas or the UAE, I think that’s a very poor location for a datacenter.

For years, my dad and I had pun fights. Sadly, my mom was caught in the middle. Literally. Her chair was between my dad’s chair on one end of the living room, and mine on the other end.

That stopped after a while. I guess it was all the strokes and over work that got him.

VCs and PE will fund anything, especially if someone like Peter Thiel tells them that Palantir will make trillions of dollars selling this information to their bestest buddies in all the governments that they own.

Many years ago, I did a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering, to deliver a Jenkins CI/CD system for the code that was used to communicate with the employees in the stores, to allow those employees to communicate with each other, to deliver training to them, etc….

There were multiple major components. There was the back-end server system that ran on Linux. There was the content creation system that ran on MacOS. There was the end-user clients that ran on iOS and iPadOS. And there was an extensive array of QA processes that they ran.

I ended up making minor changes to the code base for each of those components, so that they could build on the Jenkins server that was running underneath my desk (on an old Mac Pro server that had been lying around).

And I can tell you that they had extensive regression tests — as of the time I was there, over five thousand of them. Those took a really long time to run, which is why they needed the Jenkins server instead of doing this stuff on their laptops.

Now, I can’t speak for developers anywhere else at Apple, but I believe that they are well acquainted with the concept of regression testing.

Even with solar panels, you have to have the right equipment at your meter and in the first box connected to the meter, in order to backfeed power to the grid. You can’t just slap random gear inside your house and have it start feeding current back. That would violate the National Electric Code (NEC) and could get someone hurt or killed if they thought the power was out but your equipment was providing current back onto the lines.

The description was very poor. They could only feed power back into the one circuit that hardware is on, and the would also be a violation of multiple safety standards, as well as the National Electrical Code. That’s a good way to get someone hurt or killed, and to have your ass thrown in jail for sporting such a stupid device.

This is why you have lockout devices on breaker boxes, if you’re going to have an emergency generator that plugs into the same box.

Or you have automatic transfer switches that handle cutting off your feed back to the power company, before turning on any battery or power generation equipment at your site.

Take a step back and look at how it’s constructed, and what the inputs and outputs actually are. It is clear that it’s just a pretty UPS with a weird proprietary wireless communications system, and should be compared against the likes of APC and CyberPower.

It's a UPS. Compare it against APC SmartUPS and CyberPower.

I've already got multiple APC SmartUPSes in the house. They don't need to be networked together. And they've got multiple output sockets, not just two.

At 2.4kW max output, and 1.6kWh storage, you can't even run this thing at full power for an hour. I can do better with both APC and CyberPower.

And APC has slimline models that use lithium technology to come in around the same physical size, albeit at a higher price point.

It's pretty. It's networked, albeit via a proprietary wireless protocol. But I've never needed either of those things for any of my "point defense" UPSes.

I really don't think there's anything here that is worth spending any time or effort on.

It's a UPS. It doesn't do any back feeding. Compare it against APC SmartUPS and CyberPower.

Last time I looked at `mtr`, I believe that geolocation was already available.

Well, it was down when I looked at it. It does seem to be back up now.

Which leads me to the next question — how is this any different/better than `mtr`? I’m not seeing any benefit here, but maybe I’m missing something?

For me, the most important thing is to think about what data you’re sharing with third parties, and how that data might be abused.

Or maybe that third party doesn’t abuse it themselves, but they’re vulnerable to someone else stealing it, and landing you back into HaveIBeenPwned yet once again (I think I’m up to 17 times on HIBP so far).

I think about this any time I use a service like DeleteMe, or Optery, or 1Password, or any other third party service where I might be sharing potentially sensitive information. And I very carefully select the third party services that I use which might have sensitive data shared with them.

Then I like to try to ensure that I minimize what data that I share with these third parties, especially data that is shared automatically — like a log of every single URL that I visit.

I’m a lot more willing to use tools that work 100% locally and don’t share any data with any remote service, even if those tools do not provide all the same levels of service that can be provided by the remote service. For example, I would never voluntarily enable something like Microsoft Recall, but I might be willing to use a local-only program that recorded periodic snapshots of every URL that I visit and make that information locally searchable, so that I can roll the clock back and see what I may have been doing at some time in the past.

The problem here is not that the data is collected, or that it is collected locally, but how that data might be able to be abused by others once it is shared with a third party.