faster

Doesn't the Flint 3 require a binary blob to run the broadcom chip? If so you'll always have a locked down black box inside your "open" system.

I got the Flint 2 to avoid that, and I'm really happy with it for the reasons you mentioned.

I worked on the shuttle for a summer a long time ago, and my group's admin was obsessed with the toilet plumbing so she had engineers stopping by with specs and diagrams a few times per week. True story: there was a component in the liquid waste system called the "last drop pinch tube". She laughed about that for weeks.

I love my 7506s. And I have a recurring event on my calendar to remind me to buy new pads every 2 years. That's almost exactly how long they last. I've tried 3 brands and they've all lasted almost exactly 2 years. The original Sony pads also lasted 2 years.

Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, we kept a can or Renuzit solvent in the garage to wipe tar spots off our feet after coming home from the beach. I'm sure that stuff was toxic. The tar was everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for a while.

Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.

The best business writing advice I ever got was "always answer more questions than you raise". It's usually clear when something is going to raise questions. I'm with you wrt guessing what questions readers will have, but reading critically can identify where you have unsupported claims, incomplete explanations, and confusing or conflicting statements.

Sounds like you were expecting fuckedcompany.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.

We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.

I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional.

She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.

When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.

My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.

When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.

You can self-host ntfy.sh but then you need to find a place outside of your infra to host it.

I bought Levi's 501s at a farm supply store in the 80s, $12 on sale. About 10 years ago I gave away my two remaining pairs. They were a little thinner but still intact, no holes anywhere. Modern 501s are made of much thinner fabric; I'd be surprised if they would last 5 years. Looks like the sale price is $45 now, which seems comparable.

The US has trade sanctions on Iran too, and Iran is on the tariff list. I don't think that's it. Some transparency would be helpful.

Here's a dashboard. https://www.project2025.observer/

Not a substitute for reading the doc but good for a quick overview.

The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics

Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.

So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.

I recently started reading a great book called "Democracy for Realists". Voters may believe that they are electing someone who will represent their principles, but that is not how it works.

This is a good summary of the book: https://sppe.lse.ac.uk/articles/52

Why `source .venv/bin/activate` with direnv? I use `layout python` in my .envrc and direnv activates the venv on entry to the directory.

A long time ago I worked for a company that had a "cost plus" contract to build and operate a thing. I took a management class while I was there and one of the people in the class was a consultant who had been hired to map the division's revenue flow. Almost everyone there was a manager and all of them were on the edge of their seats while he explained.

Basically, you mark up the little stuff that everything is built on ($1/page for copies, for example) so the margins look smaller when you get to anything substantial. So 3.3% is a meaningless number until it has been audited all the way down to the smallest purchases.

When I saw the headline I thought it was from the author of "Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight".

I struggle with this. I work with devs who think that a function with 3 side effects is fine, and suggestions that it would be more maintainable if it did one thing (and even more offensive, that the function name should be a clue to what the function does) are often met with hostility. In the end they're angry and resistant and I'm frustrated. Sometimes I just approve it, write a technical debt ticket, and move on.

One data point, but it was only 2 days ago. I needed a place to quarantine while I was the only one in my family who caught covid on a trip, so I went to the hotel a few blocks away and asked about their rates. They told me that the lowest they could go was $183. I asked why Google showed 6 third-party sites advertising their rooms at $135 and they said those sites reserve rooms in bulk and they aren't normally refundable. So I booked the room with credit card rewards points for about $120/night and everyone was happy.

I always thought that booking direct got the best rates also, but that seems to be incorrect, at least in this case.

A friend of mine who worked as a very high level consultant for years once said that consultants are often wrong, but never in doubt. Having just graduated doesn't really change that dynamic, as long as you have the confidence to pull it off.

I bought one of the KSGER stations a few years ago fully intending to apply all of the safety fixes. When I opened it up, they had all been applied from the factory.

Still worth checking, but maybe not an issue for new stations?

If your print dialog was set for color then it requires working color cartridges. Even if the document is only black and white. I've been buying Brother printers for over 20 years and I've run into that a few times.

In a certain range of company sizes, this works. I have been contracting since 1998 and have had a C corp since 2000. I'm currently doing work for a Fortune 100 company and they were quite unwilling to hire my company; I have to work through an agency as an individual.

My experience is that when a company is big enough to have a legal department, they invent a bunch of terrible scenarios and then create policies to protect the company from the things they imagined. Yes, there can be real problems hiring contractors directly (but I think it's fairly rare), and it's a lot easier to have one or two agencies that you pay instead of dozens (up to thousands like the company I'm working for now) of separate contractors.

Billing the big corps (when it's possible to contract corp-to-corp) has been a pretty awful experience too. Adobe wanted to see my company's client list, tax returns, and marketing materials AFTER the work had been done, for an invoice under $20k. I said no, and it took over 2 months to get them to pay. That was a while back though, so maybe things have changed.

Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? The noisy people and PACs who donate to campaigns are against it and that's all that matters.

Mostly the same here. Physical servers in a colo since 2000, same IPs the whole time. I host a few domains for friends, too. It's really not difficult to keep email running smoothly. I look at a summary report every day (less than a minute, normally), and I have a daily cron job that builds a black list based on whatever list looks good to me when I decide that the one I'm using isn't catching enough.

I have a spreadsheet where I compare what it would cost me to do this in a cloud or on VPSs, and though there are some squishy factors (I enjoy messing with servers occasionally, when I have to visit the colo I also visit old friends in that area, etc.) it's still cheaper for me to keep my physical servers in my colo.

I think standards in general are confusing to the average person. The average person doesn't care about standards, they care about completing a task: can I use this cable to connect my Mac to a 4k Monitor? Can it pass all the power that my device needs from my charger? Will this cable be a bottleneck if I connect it to my external SSD storage?

None of my computers support USB4 today, but I'm buying USB4 cables so I don't have to waste so much time looking for a cable that will do a particular job.

I want to say that I will only buy cables that are labeled clearly with capabilities and bandwidth but I'm not sure that is a promise I can keep.

My daughter was a little younger than that when we bought a pile of dead DVD drives and disassembled them. Then we build a little driver circuit and hooked a laser diode to it. She was so excited to come home and take those drives apart after school. She learned about how things come apart, the importance of eye protection, how to use basic hand tools, and a little bit about electronics (I am self-taught and my knowledge is super uneven so I'm not the best teacher for that).

I get 5-7 hours on battery from my X1C7 FHD running Ubuntu. I carry a power bank in my bag that gives me that much again.

I've had servers in FMT1 since 2000. They had a series of power issues. Generators didn't start and everything died. Next time the power went out the generator started and the switch from the grid to the generator blew out the switching system (and killed one of my hard drives and who knows what else) IIRC. I'm pretty sure Linode moved to FMT2 because of this. There have been other problems but around 10 years ago they reached a point where the whole power backup system was new and they have only had one outage that I can remember since then.