mherdeg

It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.

Was this the premise of the pilot episode of 30 Rock? The trivection oven?

Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after.

(I have the same feelings as mhh__ in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38967529. Just a remarkable and extremely slow miscarriage of justice.)

Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.

I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.

In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)

Would you accept weaponized trademark infringement as a sibling to patent law? The behavior described here seems odd -- I wouldn't call it "good" or "bad" in a moral sense just technically impressive: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2023/10/26/apples-trademark-ex... and https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436760/us-customs-state....

Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.

The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".

It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.

nothing about computers is magic

In this vein I think about nelhage's "Computers Can Be Understood" from time to time - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/ .

I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take it step by step."

Boston definitely makes it hard to love.

Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.

Huh. What happened with the lot of 2000 seized OnePlus Buds? ( https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436760/us-customs-state... )

Did the company just write off that shipment and keep selling them?

Gosh. I just emailed myself a .png of the barcode containing my library card number and open it in, like, the Photos or Gmail app when I'm at the kiosk.

I *swear* that a year or two into this whole thing there were a wave of articles about how individual state marketplaces were having insurers exit the state marketplace. The story which I am *sure* I read more than once said that an insurer found they were losing money on a small number of patients with very expensive treatment needs which drove up their costs so much that no one else wanted to buy their product at its new price.

I went looking for articles about this recently and couldn't find them any more. Did I imagine this happening?

Wow, the last time I read about this, I had not seen

* the 2019 update that someone re-evaluated the risks and thinks the retrofit might not have been necessary after all ( https://www.nist.gov/publications/wind-effects-tall-building... )

* the identification of the person who called LeMessurier in 1978 and whose questions made him redo the math (whose name is not listed in the New Yorker article) as Lee DeCarolis ( https://onlineethics.org/node/41606 )

In the version of the story I read, Diane Hartley flagged the risk to the engineer by writing a whole thesis about the building (see e.g. writeup at https://www.lemessurier.com/sites/default/files/publications... and https://onlineethics.org/cases/engineers-and-scientists-beha... ).

It's interesting how, the closer you look, reality grows more complex than the stories we tell about it.

Reading this writeup, the procedure takes up to two minutes:

* each person in the room pulls up the stem when their individual second hand is pointing at 0, and also sets the time to the prearranged hour/minute,

* then everyone waits a bit longer until this is done;

* after another minute, everyone pushes down the stem simultaneously

Is there an alternative where you could have some way to force your second hand to the 0 position rather than waiting up to a minute for it to get there on its own then freeze it?

I do see why hacking is nice for time zone changes.

(I realize that there are a few details that you can use to tell these apart, but,) Who gets to register the copyright on the image?

So the house pays $10,000 to everyone who hasn't folded yet?

Thanks for this link -- really interesting.

I like the suggestion to rethink whether you actually need to be doing asynchronous computing with a message broker/queue/stream or whether you can represent your work another way.

A little over ten years ago I worked in the Excel Services team that makes the consumer-visible Excel Web App and also the SharePoint-integrated Excel Services product (server side processing accessible via API or web UI).

I loved seeing the genuine joy our PMs had whenever they found an honest to goodness calc bug and could get it reproduced and fixed in The State Machine. It was also a delight to see the web app approach parity with the desktop client experience -- we got to listen to a wide swath of users and build out the stuff we thought would be most useful to the most folks. And I loved our group PM's insight about what the heck Excel could be good for versus purpose built BI tools, other web sheet apps, pure SQL, etc.

This is a very fun kind of product to create and it's awesome that you were able to ship it in a way people could use!

If the Earth's rotation speeds up or slows down, would you like the "6pm local time" to be 6pm plus the leap seconds that come in between now and 2030? (We don't know how many there will be yet.)

Whenever I want to think about "what does it mean to prove something?" I dig into my copy of Imre Lakatos's "Proofs and Refutations", a Socratic dialogue-style story where a bunch of aspiring theorem-provers try to prove a particular theorem about the Euler characteristic of polyhedra and discuss what they are actually doing and why it works or doesn't.

I originally picked up the book because I was trying to understand Euler's polyhedral formula better -- which in retrospect is kind of like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because you wanted to fix a motorcycle.

I'm not wired for pure math -- I loved real analysis then quit while I was ahead. Still it's fun to pretend sometimes, and Lakatos does a great job of making you feel like you're learning inside knowledge about what mathematicians do. He introduces fun concepts like "monster-barring" (the way people sometimes carve out special cases in a proof when they encounter counterexamples).

I've never made it the whole way through, but I like to go back every few months and absorb a little more.

edit to add: I just now skimmed the author's Wikipedia entry and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's story about the author's interaction with someone named Éva Izsák and I have a ton of questions.

I hate to dunk on this type of art while it's down but

Impact Theory agreed to destroy all Founder’s Keys in its possession or control

What does this mean practically -- like they delete the files that would allow them to transfer control of the NFT? What even are these things, are they just text files in a distributed file system that list the owner's name or what?

Knowyourmeme is very late to the meme game. Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed on 4chan, fark, Slashdot, YTMND, and the bare metal internet long ago.

Bonsai Kitten is lost to the ravages of time.

One of the special treats of operating a large distributed system is getting to watch the graph of requests-versus-time as you do stuff, like enabling http flow-control headers or tweaking load-balancing algorithms or whatever else.

(1) You learn a ton about which production clients actually respect your instructions, and which ones creatively misinterpret them. You learn a lot faster than you would by stepping through the code.

(2) You learn how other systems behave with flow control in place. If you can, you make it so the default behavior is safe for users. This makes it safe for people to practice pushing the button, even when things aren't overloaded, so they remember how to do it and don't feel uncomfortable doing it during a high-load event.

(3) You get to see some really cool shapes -- sinusoids, cliffs, plateaus -- that show you how traffic goes away and how much of it comes back. (You probably learn, early on, to tell different clients to retry after different time windows, and how this shapes the curve.)

Also really satisfying has been observing how a system behaves under load and making a tens-of-lines-of-code change that hugely affects the safety of request handling. We stabilized a large system that was showing bad behavior under load just by teaching it a few things like

(1) Put health checks in a different thread pool than other request handling, so you can always satisfy them quickly

(2) If you're going to return fast failures to certain categories of request when overloaded, insert some debouncing. Evaluate "I am overloaded" over a time window -- like "I have been continuously overloaded for the past 300ms" -- and a lot of signals smooth out in a way that ends up feeling better to users.

This has always been a fun space to work in.

This version of the story implies that the outcome is a bad thing people have been tricked into doing.

As far as I can tell from TikTok people want to be part of a brand experience, they want to show their friends they live a luxury lifestyle, and they want to earn promotional goods by being influencers.

There may be some sinister manipulation by marketing experts, but maybe also people just love Texas Roadhouse rolls and love being a part of a bigger movement when they get their pint of butter.

Is there anything wrong with that? It's fun to do your version of the thing that everyone's doing!

I think the separate trend towards hiding your authentic self in a small group direct message or a Discord or Slack instance isn't so bad ... It's not too far off from where we were on IRC in the before times.

Nicely spotted.

Did the domain lapse and was it re-registered and rehosted for promotional purposes?

Has Ajit Pai commented on this?

This is really special - glad to hear it went well.

Best of luck to the author on their tiered monolith journey! Some things to think about:

(1) How many distinct total binary versions of your monolith will you permit to run in production? Some options might include

At most two globally ("current" and "new" canary/blue-green deployment, no special code on particular tiers)

At most two globally, but sometimes you're willing to deploy a special build to a single tier to mitigate an emergency, with eventual convergence

At most two per tier, but with no attempt to keep each tier running the same binary code (maybe you don't want to redeploy your async consumers as frequently as you redeploy your http handlers)

An unlimited number (maybe you deploy customer-specific binary code to specific instances within a tier)

Would you like an alert when there are too many distinct versions running in production? Who should get that alert and what should they do when it fires?

(2) Does this thing deploy simultaneously everywhere?

If so, is any specific person or team responsible for making sure the deployment worked ok on every tier, declaring an incident if not, and rolling back and finding an owner to resolve the issue? Will every team who owns a part of the monolith contribute someone to a shared rotation for release monitoring?

(3) Suppose there is a blocking problem in one part of the monolith, for example async message processing stops working reliably. Should this block deployment or development for other teams whose changes are outside this blast radius?

(4) Suppose some low-level intermittent compilation error prevents the binary from starting up 10% of the time after a certain build revision for every tier. What team will work to resolve this kind of problem? Is there a team writing telemetry and common logging for your monolith everywhere? Is there a team who will implement common operational concerns like feature flags to gate binary changes?

(5) Does your monolith run in any non-production environments? Is every tier running in each environment? Does somebody publish an SLO for those environment? Is one team allowed to break everyone else in pre-prod by deploying experimental code to the monolith in some environment? Who deploys to the pre-production environment and how?

(6) Suppose you discover you need to split up your workload (one kind of http request is much slower than all others and you want to separate failure domains). How much work does it take to create an additional tier -- updating deployment jobs, quality gates, and CI/CD pipelines throughout various environments, provisioning resources, setting up graphs and alerts, creating new tests? Who does this work?

(7) How will you manage configuration for your monolith? Will configuration directives be delivered to every tier simultaneously? Can someone accidentally break the behavior of another team's tier with a typo or logic error in a configuration change?

(8) When it comes time to split this thing into microservices or macroservices for a few years before a successor team looks at the mess and decides to reimplement a monolith, how do you set up your architecture to successfully allow a split?

(9) Are you absolutely sure your tiers do what you think they do? Can API customers bypass rate limiting by pointing to the hostname of your async-worker tier? If a security vulnerability in a particular http route affects your monolith, will you remember to block the route on every tier (even the ones you think don't normally serve web traffic)?

Used to take family vacations to a little cottage where the only entertainment was the Mad Magazine Board Game. Great material, loved the tone, just really fine work.

Every few months I check out the library's audiobook copy of Gravity's Rainbow and listen to the first chapter or so while running errands, then give up. I've heard a lot of the banana breakfast :)

I read the first few chapters of the book then skimmed and read some more. Pretty grim stuff in there...

This book is my white whale. I read "V" straight to the end in a few sittings and love it and think about it a lot when I'm in NYC or the eastern seaboard or Malta or Florence. I read "The Crying of Lot 49" straight through in one go and loved its paranoid charm.

But despite having lived in London and thought a lot about what it was like for people there during the war I just can't finish Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.