pdx6

The first amendment only applies to the oligarchs and their friends in the 3 branches of the United States. TikTok is only the first to be blocked, there will be more, and they will be DC political fodder too.

We need a distributed social platform. Distributed currency system. Distributed personal information privacy. Distributed AI. Where’s the tech YC?

Here's the lesson: We need our social media platforms to be distributed and out of the hands of any government to promote sharing knowledge and creating peace.

When the mass Tiktok exodus tsent Red Book [1] to the top of the App store, it was the first time in history that American citizens started talking directly to Chinese citizens in mass. I've heard all sorts of stories of both sides learning a lot about each other, including the lies and propaganda each others government places in the media, but mostly more positive things like art, fashion, cooking, food, healthcare and -- probably the most important, each other's different humor.

Video, and an AI algorithm to drive the For You page, is probably the most difficult part. We have some good ideas on privacy[2], and I can imagine some sort of crypto ledger system paired with AI learning, but video expensive to store/stream and at such a high volume of streaming, I don't know what kind of end points would really work to keep quality up.

Then there's the problem of policing such a system, and who the police would be. There's some dark places on the internet that I think everyone but a handful of people think should never be allowed on such a network, but more generally there's questions on politeness, stalking, harassment, "facts", memes, and other culture differences that would need to be ironed out.

Who's building this? We need it by Jan 19th, 2025.

[1] Not to be confused with SF's Redbook: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/redbook/

[2] Tim has been making the rounds about his Solid project: https://www.inrupt.com/

I've visited the areas outside of the major metro areas (Athens, Thessaloniki) and found the vast majority of Greeks to be very friendly and family oriented. It really is a break from the American way -- you don't check a website, you ask someone or call someone. The boat is late, maybe call the captain's wife?

There's lots of real estate to rehab in all the smaller towns and even the tourist towns too. Book your flights already!

You could add just about any University to the list. At least in California, many UC IT people left due to poor pay and long hours, however the UTPE CWA 9119 union has grown in numbers and strength and the trend in pay and hours is quickly improving.

There's plenty of gray beards, the UC is starving for seasoned talent, and the HMO plans are inexpensive and cover a lot -- 5 years to vest in the pension that matches nearly 100% and you can take distributions starting at age 50.

It's not the bike lane. The price of going out has gone up and the amount paychecks that have gone up doesn't match it. Each wave of tech layoffs wipes out more customers that can absorb price increases. The city needs to continue lower permit fees and cut red tape for new business to start city-wide to get new money in.

As for the center bike lane design, I dislike it as a cyclist. The entry curbs make it difficult to pull out mid-block without someone behind me hitting me, and if I'm biking in the car lane I can't safely merge back to the bike lane with how the curbs are.

The best design is to make those blocks car free like Market St; deliveries, ADA drop offs, and local garage owners only. Ubers can drop off on the side blocks and back in parking can go in where it fits as well.

Excellent news. I’ve been worried that Sam moving to Microsoft would stall out possible future engineering efforts like GPT-5 in IP court.

As an example of how much faster GPT-4 has made my workflow was the outage this evening — I tried Anthropic, openchat, Bard, and a few others and they were between not useful and worse than just looking at forums and discord it’s 2022.

A built-in cell modem in Macbooks also means additional partnerships with telcos like with the iPhone, iPad, and Watch. Right now there's a clear line between a telco and an Apple laptop. With cell enabled devices, telcos can sell a lucrative "subsidy as a lock in" discount.

I think $5-$10 is a good price point for just the privacy aspect. As far as search, it's about 90% kagi and 10% Google if I don't like the kagi results. Maps could use some work and I'm always jumping back into Google maps.

I don't use any of the other features.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Yes, PST but flexible. On-site/hybrid in SF Bay only.

Willing to relocate: Relocation outside of the US negotiable. Prefer Portugal.

Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, ContanerD, Kafka, etcd, Vault, bare metal, Github Actions, Mysql, deployments at large scale, cloud security

Résumé: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZUxIM86Wih7WARnVp7dPe_Sd...

Email: ballew at sublinear dot net.

About me: Hey team, I'm Mark and I've been doing compute infrastructure for over 20 years. I specialize in deployment automation, computing at large scale, high performance computing, and identity management, and security. I have a strong interest in AI as well!

I'm interested in co-founding and early stage startups, but if you are doing something really cool in corp or gov/mil (Cage Code: 8Q152) drop me a note too! I'm available for W2 or C2C, a US Citizen, and have previously worked with clients in UK, EU, Japan, and Thailand.

I use a Dell R220 with dual ssds and a sata boot key. If you need 10gig, there an expansion slot.

Burying is a good idea and I'm a fan of it for sure. The issues I've seen on my block is the transformer out on the pole fails about every 7 years.

As an aside, it's an interesting failure scenario because there's a loud explosion outside my window, then I get 120v 50hz power from whatever is left of the transformer so half the house lights work at an odd warm glow. :D

It's pretty easy to get to $700/mo. There's a lot of old housing stock without good insulation, leaky windows, etc. Leaving a typical server on is like $70. I can see a 3bd 2ba apartment easily hitting $700/mo with an active family living in it. Add in an EV, that's another $50/mo right there, maybe more!

SFBay doesn't have big freezes like Texas, but I have to wonder the wisdom of eliminating gas heaters entirely. The blower fan on a typical gas heater uses 120v and doesn't consume nearly as much power as a ~20a 240v heat pump. During a typical PG&E power outage a much larger back up battery will be needed to keep a home heated.

Over the last couple of years, I've had 4-5 power outages that lasted over 4 hours and I live in the middle of San Francisco. I do have a wood burning fireplace as a backup, but those have all sorts of restrictions on use and new ones aren't permitted. Imagine what a chilly 20 unit Tenderloin apartment is going to be like!

Unless cheap battery tech, microgrids, and major subsidies are put into place, it's going to be a cold winter when PG&E is out for hours at night in 2032.

I'm still around from wearing a helmet biking in San Francisco. I got my wheel stuck in the old street car tracks on Castro and Market while going 15 mph and went over the handles. My helmet cracked when my head hit the pavement, I was skinned up and shaken, but no serious injuries.

I think there are plenty of low speed urban bicycle accidents a helmet is good for based on this.

This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.

If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.

I bought a PinePhone hoping to have some sort of freedom from iOS and at the time the threat of scanning all iCloud uploads.

I played with the PinePhone for a few days, but it really is still a development phone. It has promise but it'll be sitting in a box until the ecosystem matures. I'm really hoping more serious work gets done in making it a daily driver for someone like me, who is very technical but doesn't have the time to figure out why the screen stays dim or how to load in a game that works.

The phrase over the years is more like “buy now or be priced out forever.”

Recessions are good times to take risks since people are afraid and while capital isn’t cheap this time around, assets are.

With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too.

In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90, but which those are isn't consistent nor wide spread. Home cell coverage at 100/20 is spotty at best, and there is only one flat rate vendor (T-Mobile Home, no Verizon Home yet). For those outside of the Bay Area exurbs, I can only imagine the horrors of Comcast/Xfinity or only DSL people must deal with.

Looking forward, the FCC is assuming that people are just watching Netflix, Tiktok, and making angry Karen posts on Nextdoor. We're not sure where web3 will lead, and how much bandwidth will that take: Distributed file systems/data privacy? Fast crypto transactions? Metaverse/VR/AR glasses/contacts? And what about latency?

1000/500 should be the FCC goal.

BART goes plenty of nice places! If you get out at 16th or 24th, Valencia St one block over has lots of nice shops and bars. Head over to Folsom and 24th for lots of cheap shopping in what is like a little Mexico. Go see a show at New Mission / Alamo and get your lunch delivered to your seat while you watch a movie. Or make a reservation at Foreign Cinema and have a fancy dinner in a former theater.

Get out at Glen Park and and there's a the quaint Glen Park Village.

Get out at Balboa Park and head over a few blocks up Ocean for another neighborhood row of shops.

Or get on Muni Metro and take the KLM to West Portal. Or keep riding to Stonestown and do your shopping at Target, Wholefoods, or TJs, then go see a movie at the Regal.

Hop on the N and ride all the way out to La Playa and get yourself a cup of coffee and a sandwich at Java Beach. Then walk around the Sunset and see just how sleepy the western side is!

I agree, the western side is hardly a hellscape. I guess don't let the tourists know!

San Francisco is really 2 different cities rather than 11 counties. West side (where I live) has some minor problems but otherwise offers the best mix of culture, places to eat, parks, and transit. Downtown is rife with problems and if someday it does get cleaned up, it will wonderful since the right density and transit is there.

This is great! I have a garage full of old gear that I don’t want to put in the landfill but it is still worth a few dollars. Wish I had heard of this earlier this week to make it.

When I worked at Okta, they used EC2 without containers for their primary monolith workload. Scaling would be manual via ElB. The latest hack shows they are using NLB now, but I suspect it is still EC2 only otherwise.

To distribute database load, a cell or “block” of instances would be filled until the largest database was at 80% write capacity or so, then a new account and group was spun up for newer customers.

Okta uses nearly all the us regions, with older (and larger) customers in us-east-1.

I used to work there and know the internals well. These aws outages must be causing massive chaos there.

I think as other people said, you'll want to decide what "IT" is. If you want to fix end user PCs and run ethernet cables, that stuff doesn't pay well and you should stick to ME.

If you want to do SRE or SWE, the easiest way is to sign up for a bootcamp. All walks of life pivot in these programs and already being an engineer will make it a cake walk. The community college might have some programs too, but the boot camps tend to teach more modern skills and do job placement since that's often part of the program price.

I think most importantly is to decide what industry you want to work in. If you want to stay in your previous industry, you'll have a leg up since you already know finance, and crypto is hot now so there's lots of new tech and money to be made.

I think 3D printing is the next wave, and if you are already an ME, you can hit the ground running making robots that can print houses, car parts, rockets, etc.

My M1 Mini crashes about once a week. I look through the crash log before sending it off to Apple, but is always seems to be something different that takes down the system. In comparison, my 2018 Macbook Pro rarely crashes and is running the same version of the OS.

I have the M1 Pro Max on my to-buy list, but I'm going to wait a bit to make the purchase since I really can't have my $4000 workstation crashing on me.

8GB kits run about $120 at Bestbuy for Canakit and Walmart resellers are about $115 for a no name kit. If you are lucky, you can buy 1 at a time from Chicagodist as a single board for $75.

Has someone built a guide to self host on iOS/MacOS so the CSAM issue is moot? Or what are the other platform options, like on Android?

I’m concerned that Apple’s stance on security has been compromised and it is time to dump the platform or find an acceptable modification.

I’m surprised there’s no gist being linked on HN about to get people bootstrapped for secure device backups as an alternative to iCloud (and without a jailbreak).

I have to imagine this will increase global food costs, but there’s opportunity here to make farming high water crops more efficient:

- reclaim runoff

- more efficient growing methods

The capex and research are there. I wonder how the Boise startup scene is handling it?

$2663/mo untaxed is a decent chunk of change. But let’s assume that is the cost to temporary house someone that has no other option. My question is, why is there no standardized process in California to address someone who is unhoused?

I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment.

For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?

Another option is to use AI, like what Standard Cognition does. A customer registers a profile in the mantrap (via app, etc) and then is buzzed into the shop. The cameras just log whatever the customer walks out with — it doesn’t matter if they shove it in their pants or put it in a bag. Clerks in the store exist just for assistance.

It all gets billed to the customer’s account once they leave the store.

Ironically, their demo store is on 6th and Market next door to where Huckleberry bikes was.