saltminer

This is incredible. I've also struggled to comprehend the scale of distance and time in space due to the sheer magnitudes involved, but this really puts it into perspective.

Some suggestions:

- Better documentation/help menu. (What is ∆t relative to? Some internal clock tick? Also, you should link the source code in the menu.)

- Arbitrary time adjustments so I could click on the date and set a custom date to view any point in the past or future

- The ability to see more than just the solar system

But for now, you can presume the Netflix button on your TV remote can't be configured to point to an alternative API if Netflix goes away. :)

At least for Android TV devices, Button Mapper works for some.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flar2.homebutt...

You can't use a NEMA 14-30 to power a PC because 14-30 outlets are split-phase (that's why they have 4 prongs - 2 hot legs, shared neutral, shared ground). To my knowledge, the closest you'll get to split-phase in computing is connecting the redundant PSU in a server to a separate phase or a DC distribution system connected to a multi-phase rectifier, but those are both relegated to the datacenter.

You could get an electrician to install a different outlet like a NEMA 6-20 (I actually know someone who did this) or a European outlet, but it's not as simple as installing more appliance circuits, and you'll be paying extra for power cables either way.

If you have a spare 14-30 and don't want to pay an electrician, you could DIY a single-phase 240v circuit with another center tap transformer, though I wouldn't be brave enough to even attempt this, much less connect a $2k GPU to it.

That's hardly a SoCal phenomenon, sadly. In all the places I've lived, "protect and serve" seems to be abbreviated - "protect and serve our desk jobs and pensions" would be more accurate. If the TSA is security theater, the police are a circus, and the occasional show of force is them coming to town.

It's like those pictures of Luigi Mangione being perp walked in Manhattan with 20 cops and FBI agents behind him. Imagine if those officers were on the beat or enforcing traffic laws instead. That would make more of a difference in our communities than a photo op ever will.

During rush hour, cars block the box

There's an easy solution to this: have ticket writers waiting at intersections to paper all the cars who do it. It's not like they can drive away. NYC used to be really good about enforcement, and it worked extremely well.

It doesn't solve traffic, but it does help stave off gridlock and keep intersections free for bus lanes to operate normally.

Too late to edit, but I scrolled right past the "Morningstar Pre-Sale Report, September 2024 [Pg. 14]" table. They've been primarily lending to deep subprime borrowers since at least 2021.

Considering other subprime lenders have reduced extensions while Carvana has doubled them, I'm guessing their lending standards have cratered even by subprime standards and Ally isn't happy.

The real problem is the SEC has largely abdicated its role to meaningfully prosecute fraud. Short sellers shouldn't be our only real defense against fraud, but that's the reality we (Americans) live in.

Grant Thornton seems to take on the worst clients. They've been featured by Hindenburg at three other companies [0][1][2], two of whom switched to them from E&Y [1][2], like Carvana.

Around 2019, Wells Fargo was considering becoming Carvana’s second financing partner, according to a Senior Manager at Wells Fargo we spoke with:

“Their underwriting practices were not something that we were particularly comfortable with. [...] In one anecdotal example, when we had someone look at a proof of employment or a pay stub, it did not look to be legitimate. So we had significant concerns about some of those controls. To say you work for a large company, your pay stub shouldn’t look like someone built it in Microsoft Word. It should have a little bit more substance to it and look more official.”

With standards this low, they should hit up Block/Square [3], it's a match made in heaven.

I have to wonder if the reason Ally has been buying fewer loans is purely market-based (the risk-reward for subprime is worse in a high interest rate environment, unhappy with rising delinquency rates, etc.) or if Carvana's standards have taken a dive.

[0] https://hindenburgresearch.com/eros-international-on-the-gro...

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/crius-energy-trust-an-unsusta...

[2] https://hindenburgresearch.com/lpp/

[3] https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

I've seen this same problem with many so-called low-code/no-code application creation tools (e.g. Betty Blocks). In their quest to cover every use case, they cover none of them well, forcing compromises and creating more real-code work for the actual application developers whose systems have to be accessed by these tools.

It would have been quicker and cheaper if the company just hired more actual developers to integrate properly with existing systems (and resulted in more featureful, less buggy applications), but the prospect of paying lower salaries for less qualified people to do the same end result (as promised by the slopware vendors) seems to be a siren song of sorts to management.

It's wild the tales [certain] media outlets tell. When I moved to Chicago, I got no end of suggestions to buy a gun, get bulletproof glass for my car, increase my life insurance policy...

Sure, the deep south and west sides might be not be too nice (particularly at night), but that's mostly gangs shooting at each other. My neighborhood is actually quite nice, but even if you take the city as a whole, the violent crime rate is 639.7 per 100,000 people [0] or 5.38 per 1,000 [1], depending on what source you go by (but I'll just use the 639.7 figure since that actually makes the city look worse). Compare this to Houston, TX: 11.35 per 1,000 people [2], Dallas, TX: 7.71 per 1,000 [3], or Nashville, TN: 10.95 per 1,000 [4].

So, 0.006397 (Chicago) vs 0.01135 (Houston) vs 0.00771 (Dallas) vs 0.01095 (Nashville). Hmmm...seems like Chicago is slightly more peaceful than Dallas, I'm 1.77x more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Houston, and 1.71x more likely in Nashville. One has to wonder, if Chicago is apparently a warzone, why [certain] media outlets aren't equating Houston and Nashville to Fallujah.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago

[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/chicago/crime

[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime

[3] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/dallas/crime

[4] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tn/nashville/crime

The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-trivial functionality.

I wish there were publicly available data on this stuff, as we can only discuss anecdotes. In any case, in the neighborhoods I've lived in, it's not uncommon for UPS and Fedex to have zero deliveries at least one day of the week.

If Fedex is rolling around twice in one day, it's never the same line (that is, Fedex Express vs Ground/Home; Express incurs a special surcharge for residential deliveries and thus is usually only used by companies that primarily deliver to commercial addresses or who don't care about cost).

UPS is similar; usually, they only roll around in the evening, and when they roll around in the morning it's for one package with a specific delivery window obligation.

During December, of course, this goes by the wayside. Even USPS will roll around twice a day on the weekends leading up to Christmas.

One key difference between USPS and UPS/Fedex is that USPS does not do freight, and they do a lot more lightweight items (i.e. letters), so cargo capacity is much less of a concern. The fact that junk mail is so common actually reduces the need for cargo capacity since their routes tend to be made long not because of physical volume/distance so much as dwell time (that is, if someone is using EDDM[0] to target a neighborhood, you have to stop at every mailbox in that neighborhood, even if it's just to deliver that one piece of junk mail which will immediately get thrown away, and this takes far more time than delivering a bundle of packages to a handful of houses).

I remember reading about the NGDV, and one of the reasons it looks so weird is because USPS wanted a vehicle that was low to the ground (to make it easier to climb in and out of) and easy to see over the hood, even for very short drivers[1]. Given that they are in residential areas (and thus, in proximity of kids playing outside) far more often than UPS/Fedex, I can't say I disagree with that requirement. (Also, if you have a tall truck like UPS and Fedex typically roll, good luck delivering to the average mailbox while staying in your seat.)

USPS has certainly evaluated more traditional designs; in fact, they are actively using ~20k Ram ProMasters (a rebadged Fiat Ducato), which are quite similar to the Mercedes Sprinter, alongside ~9k mini vans[2].

[0] https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm

[1] https://x.com/Nir_Kahn/status/1364465483911675905

[2] https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-01/... (PDF page 6)

It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.

To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.

If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).

Roblox is one of the main online destinations for kids these days, above even minecraft servers it seems.

It really is. I don't play many video games these days, much less block-like games, so I always saw Roblox as a successful long-running title and not much more...up until I saw their public peering arrangements [0] and had my mind blown. Even if they massively inflate their playerbase, they're still huge - you don't just build out a multi-terabit network on a whim, and network operations aren't exactly the strong suit of most investors, so it's unlikely they would fake network capacity or build it out for show.

I wish we could properly compare Minecraft vs Roblox traffic, but the distributed nature of Minecraft multiplayer makes this quite difficult. A quick search on Google Scholar isn't showing much in the way of network volume, so it seems to be an unexplored/unexamined area.

[0] https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/22697

Mountain towns and roads flood when it rains a lot.

Chimney Rock, it floods with 3" to 5" inches of rain.

This was no ordinary flood - Chimney Rock was basically wiped off the map. This isn't a "dry it out and replace the sheetrock" situation, most of the town is gone.

That's not to say building several feet above a mountain river is a smart idea (or any river, for that matter), but this level of destruction hasn't been seen since the 1916 flood.

This is not to make excuses for Intel ME, which is entirely unauditable by third parties and has harbored significant security vulnerabilities in the past. But, remember, we all use one processor architecture from one of two vendors, so Intel doesn't have a whole lot of motivation to do better. Lest you respond that ARM is the way, remember that modern ARM SOCs used in consumer devices have pretty much identical capabilities.

I actually took advantage of one such security vulnerability to unlock my old Moto X's bootloader! The details of the exploit are quite interesting:

https://bits-please.blogspot.com/2015/03/getting-arbitrary-c...

https://bits-please.blogspot.com/2015/08/exploring-qualcomms...

https://bits-please.blogspot.com/2015/08/full-trustzone-expl...

https://bits-please.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlocking-motorola-...

Alternatively, if Oracle hikes the price on an industry-specific product by 75%, how much of that industry goes under?

This created a minor emergency for me, because it was an other-than-minor emergency for some contractors I was working with.

Many contractors are small businesses. Many small businesses are very thinly capitalized. Many employees of small businesses are extremely dependent on receiving compensation exactly on payday and not after it. And so, while many people in Chicago were basically unaffected on that Friday because their money kept working (on mobile apps, via Venmo/Cash App, via credit cards, etc), cash-dependent people got an enormous wrench thrown into their plans.

I never really thought about not having to worry about cashflow problems as a privilege before, but it makes sense, considering having access to the banking system to begin with is a privilege. I remember my bank's website and app were offline, but card processing was unaffected - you could still swipe your cards at retailers. For me, the disruption was a minor annoyance since I couldn't check my balance, but I imagine many people were probably panicking about making rent and buying groceries while everything was playing out.

Still amazing that it is two generations.

The 14th gen is so similar to the 13th gen, Intel took a lot of heat for it in the initial reviews. It's no surprise that they both suffer the same ails.

LPT: Recipe Filter is shockingly good at cutting out all the filler and presenting it in an easy-to-read format

https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

I remember seeing a quote for 500/500 metro E from Comcast several years ago. $12k to install, $1.2k/mo. And that only involved laying a few miles of fiber, no redundancy. Dedicated lines are no joke. If you're AWS or GCP, you can be your own ISP and mitigate this to some extent, but that's just the physical connection they save on.

You can always save by going on-prem, assuming you have no uptime requirements. But the moment you sign an SLA, those savings go out the window.

I was thinking the same thing. Lots of corporations rely on UPNP for printers and the like, so if you were to embed a UPNP spammer in a malicious invoice...

That's a bit surprising, I'd expect them to be factory-calibrated since marketing departments love their Pantones.

If you do this, keep in mind that ARC (audio return channel) is an alternate configuration for the HEC pins. If the cable is going to a sound system, you cannot cover those pins (unless you have another audio-out cable, like TOSLINK, in which case you wouldn't connect to the sound system via HDMI to begin with).

Yes. If you built a UPNP spammer, it could effectively create a persistent DOS. Considering how many corporate networks rely on UPNP for printers and the like, you could really make life hell for IT departments if you were to embed this in a malicious invoice.

Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.

Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.

You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.

Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.

I finished it a couple hours ago and I've also never played the games. Given Hollywood's track record for video game adaptations, it was much better than I was expecting. Hopefully this will set a new bar in that regard.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/Kbcrl

My department pays out any leftover budget as a bonus at the end of the fiscal year. I got an email recently that, due to retention, there probably won't be much of a bonus come June.

Churn is indeed down.