iFred

Nothing short of a gut punch.

Yes, nearly every working day.

The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.

With these guys you get into a weird world of "is it them, us, or upstream of both of us" all the time. I had been using Twilio's telco partner maintenance notifications as a way of figuring out if someone like Orange was responsible for a bunch of French end points independent of Twilio had network degradation.

I mean, their viz is free and straight forward, not hidden behind a paywall or a demo page. I also appreciate not putting any comment based signal indicators as that is often noise.

High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.

What kind of image set is used here? A quick scan over the site and I don't know if I can provided my own aerial or satellite imagery or if you provide it.

Looking forward to an CNN breaking chyron titled "Oops!"

The German “ICON” model uses a spheroid shape that escapes me right now, but each grid cell is effectively a triangle. Most others are gridded squares.

I keep hoping for a Microcenter in either Portland or Seattle but alas, I get the "we're always looking for new locations" email from their team and a "why not just order it from Amazon" from nearly everyone else.

I can't be the only one let down that there wasn't some new slot design. Something with pizzazz and flare.

SLA contracts, clawbacks, and performance obligations make these pages a bit of a minefield for CSPs. When I was at a top-tier CSP, we had the status page that was public, one that was for a trusted tier of customers, one built for a customer-by-customer basis, and one for internal engineering.

Down Detector can have a poor signal to noise ratio given from what I am assuming is users submitting "this is broken" for any particular app. Probably compounded by many hearing of a GCP issue, checking their own cloud service, and reporting the problem at the same time.

I feel like a kindred soul of sorts with this author.

I’m on my fourth iteration of a smart home setup with HA. Depression, neglect, a feeling that I need to burn it all down and restart, and depression again were all extinction level events for my setup. At one point I had meticulous Grafana dashboards worthy of a Golden Grot that could tell you the concentration of CO2, the pressure waves from the Tonga eruption, a map of Puget Sound gas prices, and other bits and bobs. I had dozens of Airthings sensors, plant sensors, ZWave temp sensors, three weather stations, countless LIFX bulbs, all working in unison to give me a pulse on my house.

Then I had a bout of the existential sads and just stopped looking at the slack notifications when HA connected the dots between a spike in radon and a nearby earthquake. I stopped caring that the CO2 concentration in my office was over 750ppm, or that watering my plants in my office in the winter was contributing to increased particulate in the air. Because I wasn’t listening to the interesting stuff, I stopped listening to the important stuff- alerts about failed drives, dying batteries, and broken updates.

Not caring felt so freeing. I didn’t start things up again until a few months later when I realized I wanted something cool to show in an interview. The cycle started anew.

Are you folks working directly with utility companies or pulling the data yourselves?

Complete aside, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen Apple’s internal DNS outside of Apple.

Learned about this last night and needless to say it was a gut punch. There is a whole generation of us that have Gordon to thank for our monthly pilgrimage to the magazine section looking for the latest edition of Maximum PC. Once a year we were treated to a buffet of hardware with amazingly high specs and prices to match with these Dream Machines later serving as mental checkpoints of the eras fastest personal compute. The. There was the effort that Gordon put into consumer advocacy in his columns, bad parts, badder corporate practices, and he was there fighting for us on the printed page.

Rest in peace Gordon.

Bought it at launch and use it a couple dozen times a week.

For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.

Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like

I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.

Transall Saga by Gary Paulson. One of those young adult survival stories he was known for writing but with a sci-fi element. The book has been living rent free in my head since an elementary school book fair 26 years ago.

Oh man, xray is just a nightmare waiting to happen.

also partially on https://openinframap.org/

The past seven months of Twitter as observed through HTTP response latency of various endpoints exposed to the client.

Interesting to see the drop of latency in May inline with BlueSky and the rise in the latency of backend services which looks like a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” situation with compute.

https://bsky.app/profile/ifred.bsky.social/post/3jzi7qzjzzd2...

The Grafana - https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/0ybkyhO4k/twitter-death-wat...

Things started to get pretty bad on 2/24 where a lot of the backend stuff used to serve media started to get slower.

https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857

Twitter services that are publicly exposed have seen a global latency average has racked on 150ms with regular spikes of several seconds or more. [1]

Core services for Twitter have been throwing 500s a dozen times every few hours. [2]

Twitter performance for users in Australia has fallen apart twice due to what was found out to be someone losing access to a root certificate and mitigation delayed because the team that could fix it is no longer employed. [3]

This is far more than a few stability glitches.

[1] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

[2] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

[3] https://deadbird.singlepane.io/d/hI9vrUO4k/home?orgId=4&refr...

Evokes the same "staring at a lava lamp" feeling as Weather Sandbox [0]. I yearn for a Sim Earth replacement and seeing folks work on simulation sandboxes like this give me hope.

Now give me something planet scale with basic climate, biosphere, evolutionary models, and a Simpsons "Genesis Tub" approach to Civilization and I might not leave the keyboard days on end.

[0] https://niels747.github.io/2D-Weather-Sandbox/

https://deadbird.singlepane.io shows the API up but a trace of iOS Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Birdie shows an EoF response when api.twitter.com is called.

I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.

Oh hey, that’s me!

A Sim Earth remake.

I want a sandbox where I can take a planet from its bombardment era all the way to a point where its start has started to encroach on the planet's orbit. I want to see live evolve from the soupy amino acid mixes that were brewed from shallow waters and watch it grow to a multitude of competing civilizations. I want my screen to feel alive in a "ants crawling over a petri dish" sort of way.

I want to do this with a very deep simulation, everything from geophysics, climate, and even solar insolation modeled. I want to see ice ages come and go with glaciers carving up the landscape and leaving behind lakes and fertile soil. I want to see oceans acidify and recover, cycling through colors. I want my screen to feel lush like a moss carpet.

I want my sandbox planet to have a moon.

I want to have a time scale that requires planning, where a few months of game play on the same planet feels rewarding. I want this planet to be persistent and to be shared where friends can just load up and watch or maybe even hop in. I want my friends space faring civilizations to come and visit.

I don't want a manual for anything more than interface. I want to be surprised by what happens on digital ball of dirt.

I want something that will have the fun spirit of Sim Earth, the seriousness of Universe Sandbox, open endedness of Powder Toy, and trigger that "into the unknown" feeling some of us got back in the early days of Minecraft.

You’ll get there one day. I’ve kind of enjoyed the idea that downvoting is limited to a few, meaning someone that is greyed out must have said something very wrong or worthless. I’m guessing that gate keeping polls also means that they’re more of an event than low rent submission spam.

Probably the only server experience that really felt like you had an entire world and society to explore and consequences to deal with.

I spent way too much time trying to figure out a way to scrounge up Ghasts and TNT to level Orion.

I disagree with broad brush statements about "uniquely-European" ideas when it comes to indigenous peoples of the Americas. The concept of land ownership, stewardship and ultimately domain of rule, were present with cultures across the Americas. This can be inferred though hunting grounds passed through clans, to land surrounding structures, like the tribe I am from. What seems to be interesting is the uniquely-American idea of the native monoculture or some kind of tribal harmony with land, resources, and people. It is a shame that our history is fragmented and understudied because it wasn't a Disney-esque utopia before the Vikings and Spaniards.

For what it's worth, I'm indigenous and maintain close ties to my family's pueblo in New Mexico.

[edit for spelling]