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runlevel1

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Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my current or former employers.

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www.youtube.com 1y ago

The Only Famous Motherboard [video]

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2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 1y ago

User Operation Prohibition

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www.sigidwiki.com 2y ago

All Identified Signals – Signal Identification Wiki

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en.wikipedia.org 2y ago

Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System

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en.wikipedia.org 3y ago

Hewlett-Packard spying scandal (2006)

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en.wikipedia.org 3y ago

XML Appliance

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www.youtube.com 3y ago

Exploring the Largest Overland Vehicle – LeTourneau TC-497 [video]

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wiki.openstreetmap.org 3y ago

Copyright Easter Eggs

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www.youtube.com 3y ago

How Do Computers Work? Exploring Computer Main Memory –| DRAM DDR5 [video]

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www.youtube.com 4y ago

Economics of a Nuclear Reactor [video]

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www.youtube.com 4y ago

Demonstration of a prototype 'palm muter pedal' for piano

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bgr.com 4y ago

Open letter to BlackBerry bosses from senior exec as company crumbles (2011)

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10pts0
en.wikipedia.org 7y ago

Maslach Burnout Inventory

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www.youtube.com 10y ago

Flight Data recorder teardown

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hackaday.com 10y ago

This is what a real bomb looks like

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www.foia.cia.gov 11y ago

Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960-1975

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www.nytimes.com 11y ago

Mapping Migration in the United States

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www.crh.noaa.gov 12y ago

NOAA Massive Mayfly Emergence Tracking

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www.jacook.name 12y ago

Discovery's Teardrop

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www.check-six.com 12y ago

In 1956 an F-11 shot itself down running into its own cannon shells, 2 mi. later

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www.smashingmagazine.com 12y ago

Stop Wasting Users’ Time

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bl.ocks.org 12y ago

Solving a Maze with D3.js

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www.theregister.co.uk 12y ago

MySQL 5.7 released, doubles performance over 5.6 in benchmarks

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andre.arko.net 13y ago

Rubygems, OpenSSL, and you

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pragprog.com 13y ago

Pragmatic Programmer updates Programming Ruby (The Pickaxe Book) for Ruby 2.0

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3pts1
rt.com 14y ago

F-35C unable to land on carriers

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The price might be more commoditized if OpenAI kept true to the original mission that lives on, albeit vestigially, in their name.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. That all but ensures Google will face antitrust action in the US if the administration sours on them.

The world is so not ready for the impact of LLMs on security issues.

I agree, but it's the people I'm worried about.

I'm hearing anecdotes from all over about devs pushing LLM-generated code changes into production without retaining any knowledge of what it is they're pushing. The changes compound, their understanding of the codebase diminishes, and so the actions become risker.

What's worse is a lot of this behavior is being driven by leaders, whether directly (e.g. unrealistic velocity goals, promoting people based on hand-wavy "use AI" initiatives, etc) or indirectly (e.g. layoffs overloading remaining devs, putting inexperienced devs in senior rolls, etc).

The world's gone mad and large swaths of the industry seem hellbent on rediscovering the security basics the hard way.

I still use AFP on my NAS for a few reasons:

1. When I benchmarked it, AFP was significantly faster than SMB. Both with SMB2 and SMB3. Even when transport encryption was turned off.

2. On SMB2+, symlinks created by the client are not real symlinks. They're "Minshall+French" links which only look like symlinks to other SMB2+ clients. To the server and NFS mounts they look like flat files with the target path encoded in them.

3. It exposes a different precision for certain timestamps. Software that uses this metadata to decide whether a file needs to be updated will see almost every file as needing a resync.

It's been a year or two since I checked the status of these. The situation may have improved since last I looked.

YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections

That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.

How disappointing it is to see how easily some leaders in our industry abandon their principles, and how cheaply they sell out their fellow man.

The tech industry was never perfect. It was never a charity. But there was a time, several years ago now, when people were more driven to build things that delighted others.

Just last week, two NYPD cops were indicted for evidence tampering for doing exactly that.

The indicted cops responded to an off-duty cop's DUI crash. They texted each other on their personal phones so as not to create a record. They positioned their bodycams so as not to capture the incident. At one point, one of the cops held the other's to make it look as if he was still standing there while he secretly called their supervisor. They then let the drunk cop drive away. Hours later, another officer found the car parked on the sidewalk. That officer did finally arrest him.

"These police officers did their job. We should not be here today," said union president Patrick Hendry, who accused the DA of targeting the officers. "He needs to support officers instead of going after them. Enough is enough."

To their credit, these charges came based on a referral from NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, though it was 4 years later.

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/nyregion/nypd-dui-coverup...

Global Entry and PreCheck are not going to be the only consequences. The people in these databases are considered to be domestic terrorists.

Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 includes "civil disorder" in its list of acts of "domestic terrorism." Its indicia of "terroristic activities" includes extremely vague language like "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism" and "extremism on migration, race, and gender" and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality".[^1]

I sincerely hope that the engineers responsible for these technologies have fully grasped where things seem headed. This country is teetering on a knife's edge. Maybe more precariously than we know. Nobody can know for sure if we've tipped too far until it's too late.

The economy cannot thrive in a vacuum of normalcy and stability. If things escalate into something akin to The Troubles... I hope that's factored into their cost-benefit analysis.

[^1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...

Starcloud 9 months ago

Their numbers strike me as very optimistic:

    *Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.*

    | Cost Item                     | Terrestrial                     | Space
    |:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:----------------
    | Energy (10 years)             | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh           | $2m cost of solar array
    | Launch                        | None                            | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)
    | Cooling (chiller energy cost) | $7m @ 5% of overall power usage | More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space
    | Water usage                   | 1.7m tons @ 0.5L/kWh            | Not required
    | Enclosure (Sat. Bus/Building) | Approximately equivalent cost   | Approximately equivalent cost
    | Backup power supply           | $20m                            | Not required
    | All other DC hardware         | Approximately equivalent cost   | Approximately equivalent cost
    | Radiation shielding           | Not required                    | $1.2m @ 1 kg of shielding per kW of compute and $30/kg launch cost
    | Cost Balance                  | $167m                           | $8.2m
Source: Page 4 of their whitepaper https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
AI coding 10 months ago

There's the rub: AI coding is like super tab complete. It's a useful tool. Full stop.

AI coding 10 months ago

Before he deleted his Twitter account, he claimed AI was already being better than humans and that singularity was only a few years away.

He's confidently wrong a lot. (Even if I happen to agree with his new, more sober take on AI coding here.)

In theory, when there's viable competition, a competitor will take advantage of their competitor's overly-cautious interpretation.*

But if the regulation is indeed oppressive or byzantine, everybody hurts and only the biggest survive.

*Social contagion effects on risk perception can be a confounding factor here, though.

Grok 4 1 year ago

Those comments... Wild what some people are willing to post under their real name -- and their employer's name.

Looks like they quietly took the message down. For posterity, it said:

ⓘ Restricted-Access Federal Facility, Effective July 7, 2025

Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the general public. Security officers will enforce these restrictions, and your cooperation is appreciated.