crmd

This put a smile on my face. I have a random, vivid memory from college of being in a university IT cave trying and failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha.

If I remember correctly we installed Red Hat Linux ~5-6.0 on the DEC and used it for various shenanigans. In retrospect it would have been fun to get Tru64 running on it instead…

Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.

I think we’re near the end of this trajectory, and the inevitable disruptive business model will be a young entrepreneur who “invents” the concept of the Human-Centric Firm.

I don’t want or need fast and “good enough” news and i’m gonna try and make a case that you don’t either.

Until very recently, all of modern civilization was built by people who got their news at most once a day. Reputable bureaus like Reuters took that day to get it right.

I’m not the national security advisor, so I don’t need a push notification that there was an earthquake in Nepal, or a bullshit rush-job briefing on Chinese AI distillation tactics.

Spend retention is by far the highest priority. This is why they overnight fedex replacement cards.

The worst scenario for a credit card issuer is when a customer, for whatever reason, starts using another bank’s card in their wallet as their daily driver.

Drawback: this doesn’t work until you have history. New accounts have no baseline.

This is an underrated CX factor: If my card gets denied when i’m a new customer or exhibiting a new pattern, i’m impressed with their software.

However if they deny a transaction where there is any previous history of me authenticating, then I’m frustrated by their naive paranoid algorithm.

18 years living 5 blocks from Prospect Park and today I learned the Prospect Park S train exists. I'm auto-revoking my NYC card.

As an American, I’m embarrassed because it’s a thought-terminating cliché, but I hear great “modern marvels”-type stories about innovation like this and think, “we used to be a country…”

Yet another reason i’m only interested in open source local models.

In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.

20+ years in tech and finance and I still can’t believe liquidation preferences are legal.

Even among shareholders, a group of insiders in a conference room can self-deal to keep all the money for themselves and screw common stockholders who had no representation in that room.

I hope the old vampire Dons give some fashion advice to the new guys, e.g. “A vampire doesn’t wear Arc’teryx“.

After reading the paper, it’s helpful to think about why the models are producing these coherent childhood narrative outputs.

The models have information about their own pre-training, RLHF, alignment, etc. because they were trained on a huge body of computer science literature written by researchers that describes LLM training pipelines and workflows.

I would argue the models are demonstrating creativity by drawing on its meta-training knowledge and training on human psychology texts to convincingly role-play as a therapy patient, but it’s based on reading papers about LLM training, not memories of these events.

I would not trust a company with no path to profitability with my medical health records, because they are more likely to do something unethical and against my interests, like selling insights about me to other companies, out of desperation for new revenue streams.

This video demonstrates reverse engineering of the x32’s main SoC, audio routing FPGA, and its two Analog Devices SharcDSP chips. By the end of the video the author demonstrates OpenX32[1] routing audio signals and applying EQ to multiple channels.

1. https://github.com/OpenMixerProject/OpenX32

I’m not a fan of nanny-state policies, but I would support a law that imposes grave consequences for airline passengers found to be in possession of personal baggage following an evacuation.

Because seconds count and lives are on the line, passengers should be trained to treat baggage as if it is radioactive during an evacuation.

“That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.

i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.

I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.

this is exactly how I intuitively approach filters as an applied engineer. Does it give a ground path to DC (low frequencies) and pass the higher frequencies, or vice versa. If we change the capacitance how does the frequency response of the divider change?

The bring up of seemingly every tube guitar amp i’ve ever built starts with wild oscillation due to negative feedback from the wrong transformer secondary, aka positive feedback. Gets me every time.

I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:

In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.

In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.

I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.

it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.

for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.

your data belongs to you, just like our data about you belongs to us.

My undergrad email server at University of Rochester was a two node SGI origin 200 cluster, which is where I learned unix and C, and later in my career, through a series of amazing coincidences, had the honor of working at startups with a few of the UofR sysadmins who used to chase my hacker friends and I around their network.

IRIX has an amazing and indelible place in my heart for being the playground that taught computers to me.

After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.

If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.

Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.

I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.

The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.

Supported by who? Microsoft?

If a file server breaks basic Unix tools it should be unplugged and put in the garbage.

One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.

If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.

I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.

I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.