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pipingdog

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It's important to consider that an online service's poor behavior is amortized over it's user base (or all of the users who subscribe via the service's local copy of a given feed), so it _could_ be worse, if all those users were fetching the feed themselves.

It's also the case that a service wants to ensure they have the freshest copy or impatient users could bail somewhere else, or just do it themselves.

But, there's certainly an opportunity for a service to perform analysis on feeds to see the rate at which they're likely to have more content, as well as take cues from metadata.

At the end of the day, RSS isn't a protocol, and feed providers are just as wild west as consumers.

Tangent: I have an earnest interest in learning about methods for installing software obtained from the internet which would be any more secure than this.

The lack of consensus is on what an SBOM is for. Even the NIST recommendation which came out of Executive Order 14028 had little guidance on how to apply SBOM .

At any sort of scale, it isn't clear how an SBOM shipped with each package can be consumed to any great effect.

A central database of all dependencies, on which queries and analysis can be performed, however, can be very useful, and in a large software shop, I've seen it used to rapidly get a very real sense of the company's exposure to events like the Log4j debacle.

Not Using Zoom 3 years ago

I'll go out on a limb and propose that end-to-end encryption and many-to-many real-time multimedia communication are two things that aren't often combined in a single product.

I use this technique to build a personal dashboard. Rather than try to scrape data, then come up with a nice presentation for it, I just find a nice representation on the web for the data I want on the dashboard, then use Puppeteer[1] to automatically screenshot the specific DOM element that contains the thing I want. Works like a champ.

[1] https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer

A Curious Integral 4 years ago

If you want to get a flavor of the article without being too much of a math person, you can watch the 3Blue1Brown video linked in the article, which captures a similar surprise that for certain values a formula maps exactly to a "round" quantity, then starts to diverge after a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851U557j6HE

I wish people would stop using the "10x" term, as it is meaningless. Nobody can articulate what x is or even what units x should be in. I won't even start--and nor should I need to--on "engineer."

The value of a person engaged in software development is highly context dependent. In the last year as an "engineer" in my previous role, I made a single code commit. A one line configuration change as part of an ops rotation. When I announced I was leaving, my supervisor (and his supervisor) was sad. They threw me a party with a customized cake. How was my contribution being measured? I wasn't managing people. I wasn't coding. But I had "built" multiple products.

Someone once asked me "how do you explain to your parents what it is you do at work?" I replied "I can't even explain it to my boss."

People regarded as 10x in one situation will enter another situation and appear to fail miserably.

From the point of view of the user, I wish this was more true than it is. Cloud users have a specific thing they want to get done, and ideally, the cloud should do that and get out of the way. And yet, there's still room for specialists to "get close" to the cloud and have an expertise in glueing cloud services together to make a product.

From the point of view of cloud providers, standing up a cloud service is enormously complex, filled with interesting distributed computing problems, especially under scale, diverse tenancy (and the predators that attracts), diverse workloads, and creative consumers finding ways to use it that you hadn't considered.

People are amazing at predicting the future, and in some ways we are better at it than remembering the past. That's because we use the same machinery to do both. We partly remember the future, and predict the past. This ability breaks down with complexity and abstractness, as well as with novelty, all of which are involved in software (I can tell you that the sun will come up tomorrow, and where I should move my hand to catch a ball, but I can't predict all of the defects my software will have--though if it involves X.509 certificates, I can tell you exactly when a particular sort of outage will occur)

The Azolla Event 5 years ago

So, Azolla sequesters enough carbon to turn the greenhouse earth into icehouse earth, creating conditions favorable for humanity to evolve and dig it all up again.