nucleardog

Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?

So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!

Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.

Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".

If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.

In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.

In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.

(Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)

So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.

Your options are:

* Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)

* Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.

* Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.

As a kid I have memories of driving a bit out the edge of town to a big steel plant for almost exactly this reason, it's not totally insane.

There's plenty of free parking, free admission, giant pool with some small waterslides and stuff, a bunch of picnic tables and public barbecues, generally some nice greenery and trees for shade, ponds and fountains and stuff, a bandstand, etc.

It's not somewhere you'd pop over to for a "quick swim", but especially for lower income people it's a great place to have around as a "grab a pack of hotdogs and your swim trunks and make a day of it" sort of thing. As a kid we couldn't afford to, say, go to the actual waterslide park or anything so I have a lot of fond memories of visiting the steel plant.

I'm sure the construction and upkeep was less than a rounding error in terms of construction and upkeep costs for the plant itself.

In the first case, I've connected to someone else's server and actively done the damage of deleting their data.

In the second case, I've provided instructions on how to destroy the data, said "don't do this", and then someone has done it anyway. _They_ have destroyed their data, and it's now up to them to justify why that's my fault.

If we want to get into legal territory about it, which I'm sure we're both woefully underqualified to comment on... the CFAA is all worded around "intentionally accesses a protected computer...". How exactly do you show intent to access a protected computer here? The developer never took any sort of positive step to access _any_ specific computer. The best I could see would be negligence where a reasonable person would have to have known someone would run this on a protected computer, but that still feels like something a good lawyer would find a way out of.

I think unit tests are documentation in the same way that a Dockerfile is... it's not. The tests don't paint the bigger picture, explain why, etc.

That said, if you pitched me something like a Jupyter notebook style doc where tests validating the claims of the documentation were inline, I'd totally buy into that.

Yeah, that's a reason to do it too! And one I'd hope would land with most people, but "respect and decency" aren't universal unfortunately.

Yeah, after the dozenth time with the same person where the "help" is "playing 20 questions to finally get the stack trace out of them which they should have sent in the first place and then then error explains exactly what is wrong and what they need to look at next" you might feel a little different about it. Or not.

End of the day, though, there's a huge, obvious difference between "asking for help" and "asking for someone to do all my thinking for me".

As a _person_, I'm very sympathetic to why that might be happening. I will do everything I can to help. And sometimes it does feel like I'm bordering on practicing psychology without a license.

As someone responsible for making sure _everyone_ is getting paid this month so they can keep a roof over their head and their kids fed, I do need to be mindful of and address issues that are dragging the entire team down. Regardless of why it's happening, if we're in a situation where you are doing the more company more good by _not showing up to work_ (you're contributing negatively), we have a problem and it needs to be addressed. We can work together on addressing it, but we can't ignore it.

For whatever it's worth, every single person on the team I manage says one of the things they love most about working here is how helpful and cooperative everyone is. Everybody's always happy to hop on a call and work through stuff together and really has a mindset of a rising tide lifting all boats--people are always volunteering to pitch in and help others before being asked. I like to think I've had some part in creating that environment. I am _more_ than happy to _help_. I had to starting making a distinction between "helping" and "doing someone's work for them" because I was getting burned out from overwork. I made it "formal" because I work with the kind of people who really appreciate clear rules and guidelines for things, including communication

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.

It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.

You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.

It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.

The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.

I'm thinking Apple might just be better at figuring out what specs actually matter, and which specs just make nerds happy but don't actually sell. (except liquid glass, they failed on that.)

Or maybe this is just a totally different product?

I'd also call out, anecdotally, of the people in my life the non-technical people are interested in touch screens, don't care about speed as long as it runs a few Chrome tabs without feeling slow, and have literally never mentioned noise except to complain about some absolutely absurd "gaming" laptops. I've only ever heard the "nerds" talking about this stuff you're saying actually matters to the non-nerds. Maybe you're one of the nerds?

Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...

For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.

I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.

So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)

As a daily GitLab user, I'd say that would be the main criticism I could levy at it as well. It does feel like there are a number of "and the kitchen sink" type features that are just there to check a box in a RFP or something.

That said, are the majority of people actually even _using_ those features? For us we're essentially just using GitLab for git, merge requests, and CI pipelines. A couple places we use the static page hosting. (First thing I do whenever I create a new repository is go into the settings and just uncheck _all_ the boxes.)

All of that core functionality works really well and is more than polished enough from my point of view.

Yeah it's just a semantic pet peeve. Let me ask you this: What is a "Language Model", if this is a "Large Language Model"? Inversely, if a 1.5B model is "Large" then what is the recent 1T param models? "Superlarge"?

Sure, we could do it like we did radio frequencies! Most of what we use are "High Frequency" and above... Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency, Super High Frequency, Extremely High Frequency.

In my own very humble opinion, it becomes "Large" when it's out of non-specialized hardware. So currently, a model which requires more than 32GB vram is large (as that's roughly where the high-end gaming GPUs cut off).

So the definition shifts over time based on the market availability of RAM? And can also go backwards? I can't really see anyone bothering to look up the state of the GPU market in order to determine correct terminology whenever they want to talk about this stuff (or interpret old comments, or...).

That also decouples the terminology from the actual capabilities which is what people are generally more interested in. GPT-3 was a "large" language model at this present time. However the the seemingly much more capable Gemma 4 was a large language model at the time GPT-3 was in use, but isn't a large language model right now.

I kinda question the arbitrary line drawn here too--32GB VRAM? Where I am that's a ~$5-6k problem. I'm not sure I'd call that a "consumer" product any more than the $20k data center cards regardless of the OEM intent, but we could argue semantics on that one too.

Fundamentally, defining it this way just seems kind of... useless? It's borderline a meaningless modifier already. This just defines it in a way that's so complex to use or interpret that it's just meaningless in a different way.

For what it's worth, I'd vote to use "large" to mean "big enough to be general purpose", more differentiating from the small, specialized models that came before.

And btw, there is no way you can train a language model on a CPU, even with ddr5, lest you wait a whole week for a single training cycle. Give it a go! I know I did, it's a magnitude away from being feasible.

Yeah, was mostly being silly--tried to allude to that with the "intergenerational project" comment toward the end there.

Though I _did_ try doing some inference on CPU, which is how I found out that these Xeons I have don't implement AVX512. Surprisingly Gemma 4 (2B) was able to spit out a solid 13-14 tok/s! Was expecting more like... 0.13.

Hey now! I've got a half terabyte of RAM at my disposal! I mean, it's DDR4 but... it's RAM!

And it's paired with 48 processor cores! I mean, they don't even support AVX512 but they can do math!

I could totally train a LLM! Or at least my family could... might need my kid to pick up and carry on the project.

But in all seriousness... you either missed the point, are being needlessly pedantic, or are... wrong?

This is about learning concepts, and the rest of this is mostly moot.

On the pedantic or wrong notes--What is the documented cut-off for a "large" language model? Because GPT-2 was and is described as a "large" language model. It had 1.5B parameters. You can just about get a consumer GPU capable of training that for about $400 these days.

I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway.

I don't get _only_ this from Mailchimp, but I definitely get quite a bit of this from Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and others. I've marked it spam, reported it to them (no response), and continued to receive the emails.

I can be kind of scatter brained and generally give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it's pretty clear that, e.g., I most definitely did not sign up with some accountant in a different country, in a place I've never been to, to receive reminders of tax deadlines that don't apply to me and offers of accounting services I can't use. Or if I somehow did, the signup was deceptive enough that they never received meaningful consent and I'd call it spam anyway.

(And the email they're sending this to is not some easily confused gmail address or a fat finger--it's my own name at my own domain.)

Having valid contact details or an opt out on their sign up form isn't relevant given I never signed up. It's _unsolicited_, _bulk_ email. It's spam.

Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.

Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.

Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).

They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.

When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"

We live in a society, etc, etc. I think it's worthwhile, or even _more_ important, to look at how these impact other people.

In some hypothetical deregulated world, I can choose to buy a car without seatbelts, air bags, ABS/TCS, reverse camera, etc and take that risk on.

My neighbour doesn't get to choose whether or not they want to take on the risk of me backing over their child. The other people on the road don't get to choose whether they take on the risk of me losing control of my vehicle and slamming into them.

The value question isn't purely economic. Regulations that force a general societal care and consideration over selfish individual choices have value in _allowing us to have a society_.

All modern browsers require certificates to be published in the certificate transparency logs in order to be considered valid.

These are monitored, things do get noticed[0], and things like this can and have lead to CAs being distrusted.

It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive... but in general, this is unlikely to be happening on major sites or at any significant scale.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend people taking some time and reading through the CA Compliance issues on Bugzilla. The entire CA program there, in my opinion, does a fantastic and largely thankless job of keeping this whole thing on the rails. It's one of the few things I can say I had _more_ trust in the more I looked into it.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

But what if the wolves become unstoppable?

Why would you think Canada is fine when the government can freeze your accounts at will?

Can we stop with this nonsense at any point?

The government can declare an emergency. Certain actions can be taken during an emergency which are outside what is typically allowed or bypass normal processes. The actions are subject to a mandatory judicial review within 60 days. The judicial review happened. The government was found to have acted out of line. It's current working its way through appeal courts.

The way you phrase this is, imo, intentionally implying "the government is ALLOWED to freeze your accounts at will". The reality is more in line with "I can murder someone at will.". Yes, yes I can. Because we don't have precogs and a pre-crime division. That doesn't mean it's allowed or accepted.

Direct your energy at this law. This is _actually_ a huge fucking problem.

I tried to find any of the original text so I could try in my editor, but couldn't so I can't say for sure but... At least copying and pasting a bunch of unicode private use characters and stuff, they're not only rendered (box with an X through it) but highlighted in bright red.

Presumably opening this file I'd see some suspicious looking code and a giant bright red block in the middle of it.

I have the benefit that I'm only working in English so "flag anything that's not basic ASCII" is workable. I could see how this could get a bit messy when you _are_ working with other languages and need to differentiate the compound characters and invisible characters and things that _are_ part of your normal use versus these that aren't.

SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

For me they were.

I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD.

I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop.

Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds.

(Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.)

For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.

I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand!

If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo

(Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)

That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance.

Depending what precisely you mean by the second one, you may not even need an AM/support for that.

They won't help me use the platform, but they will still address issues with the platform. If you run into bugs, things not behaving how they're documented, or something that simply isn't exposed/available to customers they seem to be pretty good about getting it resolved regardless of your spend or support level.

(On my personal account with minimal spend, no AM, and no support... I've had engineers from the relevant teams email me directly after submitting a ticket for issues.)

So yeah, "if you know what you're doing" you probably don't even need the paid-for support.

Not to mention the incoherence that one day its a tool to bring jobs back, the next day its just a negotiation tactic so they get reduced/dropped on a country by country basis over and over.

I thought it was retaliation for Canada not doing enough to stop their 20-odd kilogram contribution to the 4 tons of fentanyl smuggled in every year? [0]

(Which is to say I agree with you. Just trying to support your point that the reasoning has been so completely all over the map that anybody trying to assign any real meaning seems delusional. At this point I think most people have entirely forgotten half the reasons that have been made up along the way.)

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...

I... Well, I had started explaining point by point how wrong this is but frankly the answer is just "all of it, very".

I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)

None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.

Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.

I just fired up a container on my laptop... running on kubernetes... running in a linux VM. It's lightly dynamic (no database or filesystem I/O).

While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.

I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.

Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.

If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.

So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.

When I look back, seems to me the default was sort of "anything can copy and modify anything" because without additional measures or rules... what's stopping them? We added copyright as a time-limited exclusivity available to the creator to encourage people to create things (knowing they would have time to recoup some of their effort commercially).

With anything else (books or stories, pictures or movies, etc) the ability to modify or extend the work was the default. Copyright was a carve-out in this.

With software it's actually the reverse--the ability to modify or extend the work is _not_ the default. It takes explicit action by the creator to make that reasonable without substantial effort in most cases. We're actually dealing with an entirely different situation here, and providing that exclusivity on top really does seem like a bad deal for society in a lot of ways.

Is there anything else that's covered by copyright that's in a similar sort of situation as software? Where the thing that's covered by copyright _isn't_ really modifiable to begin with?

Which is a lot of words to say--on the surface, yeah, I agree with you. Besides shorter terms, I think if you want that exclusivity from society you should be required to give something back in return... like the source code so everyone can benefit from and build off of your work after your period of exclusivity expires.

Maybe you just have a shit vacuum.

Our cordless, on the highest suction setting, is bordering on unusable. The effort to move it across carpet becomes quite high. Trying to roll it on an area rug tends to cause it to drag the rug around, and if you pick it up while on it will pull the rug up off the floor.

I have done some _very_ scientific testing here, vacuuming a section of carpet on the lowest section (doing lines where each pass half-overlapped the previous so each part of the carpet got touched once in each direction), emptying the vacuum, then going back over doing the same on high. Didn't see anything else come up. Shop vac didn't pull anything else out either that I could see.

I used to be in a similar boat of "these are a stupid class of product", but end of the day even if it takes eight passes my wife was going to use it anyway. The effort for her to set the time aside to drag around the heavier corded vacuum which is a substantial effort for her, etc, would be more than doing eight passes with a cordless. So got a good one and I'm sold on it now--it is quite convenient, and it does work.

Only thing I will say is the battery definitely can't do an entire carpeted house on a charge. We don't have that much carpet, so don't have any problem cleaning all the floors and a couple area and entry-way rugs on a charge.

I don't know who this is for.

I think I could build a pretty clean and stylish looking office out of it.

No laptop banging around, no PC to hide away, etc. Could throw this on a minimalist or partially glass desk with an (unfortunate) single cable up to a monitor on an arm for video and power, use wi-fi, and essentially have a fully functional workstation for most people seemingly out of nothing. No bulky AIO, no PC strapped to the back of the monitor, etc.

So I guess that's my guess.

Though my impression from the linked page is more "HP doesn't know who this is for either". There's not much in the way of clear messaging, lifestyle photos, or anything else.

When your immune system activity increases, generally so does your heart rate. It's fairly common to get sick and have an increased heart rate. A quick search for "heart rate when sick" will turn up a number of results explaining this, the mechanisms behind it, and more.

Sorry you missed out on simple, effective preventative health measures because of this misunderstanding.

So the question to ask yourself is -- if this was a deliberate interaction that cloudfare was required to participate in via a warrant, would they legally even be allowed to publish a blog post that contradicted this?

So you're proposing they could be in a situation where they can either:

1. Publish an untruthful blog post, relying on public data available from multiple parties, trying to somehow explain it all while avoiding talking about their involvement in a way that would get them in PR, legal or political hot water; or

2. Publish nothing.

And they chose #1?

The only way #1 makes any sense at all is if some greater consequence to not publishing was put in place. But that would be more something like "the US gov essentially forced Cloudflare to write this" than "Cloudflare was part of this".

Unless they were part of this, _and_ the government forced them to write a post saying they're _not_ part of it and...

For my money: this is something in the news making it a good marketing opportunity which is ultimately what the blog is--trying to market Cloudflare and the brand to technical crowds.