snapetom

Cameras need to connect somewhere, somehow to offload their videos/photos. Whether that's network, USB, SD card, those are all attack vectors. Hell, even the files themselves can act as payloads.

I did a code review for a really, let's just say "challenging", co-worker a few years ago. There was one block of code that was really obtuse and I couldn't figure out why it was there and what it did. So I asked him.

He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow."

I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what we've all done and been through with SO answers.

I worked for the research branch of a children's hospital. At one point, I was brought into vendor evaluations a department wanted to buy. Their tool had something to do with visualizing protein interactions, which was highly networked. It was basically a Neo4j database with a React UI on top of it.

God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down.

Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.

This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?

Last year, I rented a Kia. I was coasting downhill on a curve and approached a group of bikers. Everything was fine. I was a little below the speed limit, they were in the bike lane, I was in my lane, it was a sunny day. The car detected them as a hazard to avoid and STRAIGHTENED AND LOCKED MY STEERING WHEEL in the middle of the curve turn. I ran into a shallow ditch, but holy shit, what if it took control and over corrected onto an oncoming car?

Years ago, like around 2000, I had a personal blog where I mentioned a local TV celebrity talking about something. The post was about 90% the topic, but in referencing the guy himself, I said something like, "this guy's cool." The local celeb had a trademarked moniker "The Car Czar," and I used it in reference to him.

I swear, on a busy week I had about 5 people reading that blog and they were all coworkers. The next day, I had a 6th visitor from Los Angeles and got excited. Who was this mysterious visitor? I found out when I opened my email and saw a C&D from Universal's lawyers saying I was abusing the trademark.

I blogged the next day, "Wtf, Universal?" and a few days later, got an email from the local celeb apologizing for the overzealous legal team. He was indeed totally cool about it.

Yep. Along with your other comment, I also think they're too big to be messed with for now. Last company I was at maybe serves as predictions of what's to come.

It's also blue collar tech, thirty years old, was the first or second player in the market. It fell behind quickly, but served a niche. The market completely changed on them in the last 15 years or so, lots driven by private equity. The company never changed. Customers kept telling them the old "hookers and blow" sales pitches (literally) isn't going to win renewals and new customers, but they never listened, never fixed things. Now the new PE owners don't know what to do with this boondoggle that never made money.

Costco is interesting.

I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.

I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.

As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.

Thanks for doing this. I don't know if this is still the case, but I looked into high end consumer headphones ($700+) about three years ago and concluded almost all of them had a bad sustainability problem.

I looked at cosmetic repairability and battery replacement. All of them were impossible or near impossible to officially get non-electronic parts for. If you dig enough, you might be able to find sources for non-electronic parts.

For batteries, one or two, Focal Batys, I remember is one, had a battery swap program like Apple does. Some like Sony were quasi end-user serviceable. Some gave you like a $100-$150 credit on a new one if you sent the old one in. Bower Wilkins was the worst. If you needed repair or if your battery was dead, their response to me was, "We don't do that."

I found the whole thing hypocritical. All but one or two were based in Europe and touted sustainability commitments on their sites, but their replacement policies did not back it up.

I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.

The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.

We all know Google search has been broken for a long, long time. SEO trash will fill up your first page with results from trash content generation sites that repeat the same thing, usually flat out wrong. Actual meaningful results are buried deep, if Google will even let out of the "In order to show you the most relevant results" hell hole.

My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.

Man, a bygone era where TV theme songs were an art in itself.

Don't care. I'm going to name and shame. I worked at Seattle Children's Hospital in tech for a short time. The insane amount of self congratulatory back patting to mask incompetence and tolerance of mediocrity wasted billions that could have gone to patient care. What I witnessed there was damn near criminal.

Luckily it's not Sunday. Everyone would be out in the country hiking.

That's going to make for some very interesting smoked cheeses. I'd love to try a smoked brie with this wood.

Man you are ultra focused on LGBT

They certainly can do it. Hardcore fans understand what they're doing. Maybe some would hate it, but everyone knows that would be possible. It's sci-fi. Ghostbusters 2016 got decannonized.

For mainstream fans, the whole Star Wars franchise has been diluted with mediocre stories, I don't think they'd care. It's just another SW movie to watch.

That being said, this isn't the first time decannoizing the sequels has been brought up in a rumor. I wouldn't be surprised if this was just more wishful thinking.

Remembering and reading the source articles, divisiveness wasn't the fact Rey's parents weren't royal lineage, it was that fans are going to speculate, and Disney did nothing on or off screen to manage that speculation. In fact, Disney fanned the flames leading up to it.

Rian Johnson: "It's something that is absolutely going to be addressed... The other part of it is there are lots of surprises in this movie and lots of twists and turns, and I really want people to experience those when they see the movie for the first time. "

Ok, so years of oh, ah, and then the big lineage reveal comes and she's just a peasant girl. Screen rant called this "anticlimatic," which is was. The easily could have managed that earlier with a decent plot and decent writing, but the whole trilogy seemed to be written by a bunch of high school students.

Disagree. The people that buy Porches and Macs see that logo as iconic. Sexy as fuck.

One of my COVID projects was to set up a networked Time Machine backup on Raspberry Pi.

Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.

Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.

I was outraged when I first read that article, but taking a step back and catching up on recent progress, I came to the same conclusion you did. Words like "nefarious", "fraud", and "corrupt" were thrown around, but no one was actively was seeking to do harm.

The harm was done by the groupthink and the sucking up of resources to research alternative causes. One of the comments on HN when that statnews article was first linked was by a commenter who worked on Alzheimer's. They agreed and I remember the line, (something to the effect of) "if you wanted funding for alternative investigations, you had to still throw a bone to beta amyloid in your proposal."

Was it all a waste? No. Current thought is beta amyloid is still involved, but Alzheimer's is multicausal. What those other causes are is in its investigation infancy. We could have started investigating those decades ago if the scientific research complex were truly open to new ideas.

It is just obnoxious the gap between thought leaders and everyone else.

I was at a panel last week. The most pro-AI person was an account executive from a big fintech company.

EVERYONE else - a data scientist that works in AI, regulatory compliance, cybersec, and marketing, took the position of "hey this is great and will change things, but let's pump the brakes... a lot."

There was a MoU between the American Farm Bureau and John Deere signed in 2023 that outlined right to repair. This consequently already altered Deere's business model with respect to IP and right to repair, and gave signals that a settlement was coming. In other words, the stock price already accounted for the change. Very few things catches stock prices by surprise in the long term.

I think HN is one of the better ones these days. I have no data to back this up, but the comments aren't like reddit comments. Go into any reddit post on the main subs, and you won't have to scroll very far to get a comment about Trump derailing the whole thing.

Digg's recent shutdown message talked about how bad and aggressive bots were. I'd love to see Kevin and Alex post in depth about lessons learned, Dead Internet, and call out social sites.

Definitely. Besides the performance issues, back then, Teams barely had any features. One example was that it wouldn't show you who was talking. First time we had a call was with 30 people and I remember a manager calling out a director responsible for this decision jokingly saying, "and you don't know who I am because Team doesn't show you who's talking."

The UI is an overengineered mess and I'd rather use literally anything else, but to say it's still unusable is disingenuous.

I worked at a hospital in that timeframe and they rolled out Teams. Up until they, shadow IT teams were running Slack just fine.

Man, what a horrendous pile of crap Teams was back then. The Slack teams were griping that they should just buy Slack, but Teams was the "enterprise solution." The problems were amplified during remote COVID work. Teams is fine now, but how many corporations went through years of frustration just because some IT decision maker said "Teams. Because it's enterprise."

I'd imagine it's not just the research quests, but it's submissions for new stops, too.

My friend did this. He always took pictures of his feet. He was banned from submitting scans and Wayfarer for a few years. He just got access back.

We joke that maybe PoGo didn't get any benefit from his data, but someone did.

They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.