wglass

It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.

Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.

After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.

I agree this is a good exploit to write about. But name and employer are hardly your deepest darkest secrets.

Love it how covers all the edge cases.

I object to rule 2.1.4 “Shotgun Dictatorship”. In my car, the driver always has final say.

Huh. I was wondering why my auth expired and I had to resubscribe in one of my channels.

Everything has an expiration date it seems. I assumed I just missed a reminder email or message.

Loudoun county in Virginia, near Washington-Dulles airport. Taxes on data centers built by AWS and other firms provide almost 40% of the county budget.

Hah. I grew up when everyone had their names in the phone book with phone number and home address. It matters more to some people than others.

Can someone help clarify this for me?

Is it correct to say that users would only get the compromised version if they downloaded from the website?

Notepad++ has auto-update feature, is there any indication that updates from the AutoUpdate were compromised?

Related to discussion on Baird vs. Farnsworth, there's a plaque honoring Farnsworth on Green Street in San Francisco. https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp

Fair enough! Guilty of that attitude, no doubt. I note the corrections in the message above re emphasis on Woz/Jobs.

I think mostly I was annoyed at the emphasis on how the computer is untouched and unused, which seemed the antithesis of the spirit of those early days.

Having said all that, I really felt an urge to bid, though no doubt it's 10x what I can afford.

Oh man. Both love and hate this video. It’s so slick, which seems the opposite of the late 70s homebrew backer culture.

The video is designed to appeal to nerd nostalgia. However it has problems right from the start when it emphasizes Jobs not Woz (the true nerd hero), including a stylized ascii art.

According to the video, this item is exceptional because it’s fully operational. However paradoxically that’s because it’s never been used. The video praises the owner who bought it and stuck it in a closet, never turning it on. It implicitly puts down the actual users who actually used the machine (burning the paint) and especially those who tinkered with and modifying the machine.

As someone who grew up in the 80s hacking my Apple II+ doing everything from playing Lemonade Stand to building custom coprocessor boards, I salute those who actually used their Apple machines to the max, destroying the collector value.

Very nice.

I note that in some ways the pictures really contribute to the story. For example, see the story on Eeyore's tail missing. The clue is that the picture shows the tail hanging as a cord to ring the doorbell. The alt text conveys this nicely by saying:

In this drawing, Pooh is back outside Owl's front door, with Owl standing in the doorway. Pooh is looking at the bell-rope, which ends in a tuft of hair.

I'm not sure if this could truly be automated, as the description of the picture needs to fit the context of the story.

Holy moly. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article so angry. Every paragraph has a sensational opinion or put down posing as fact.

There’s some fascinating industry trends here but the analysis in the article is overwhelmed by the cacophony of anecdotes about b movies and bland tv shows all encouraged by the corrupt and evil parent company. Not helpful.

My take on the quality of shows— there’s a huge volume of mediocre stuff but that’s always been the case with TV. (There’s literally hundreds of forgotten sitcoms on broadcast tv from the 70s to 90s). But there have been many gems in the past decade.

A random list of fantastic or innovative shows I saw first on NetFlix. - House of Cards, season 1 and 2 - Russian Doll - Squid Game - Queens Gambit - Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Arcane - Kaos

Only the first was mentioned in the article, and with negative comment.

Overall, a poorly written article and a waste of time to read it.

Looks like the main point of the site is to sell Enron branded merch.

How is this different than a US or European based company hiring someone with a high degree of knowledge from another US or European country?

What makes this more of a ethical violation because a national order was crossed?

Nice moment of nostalgia seeing that. The Chaos book was mind blowing to all of us young math / cs nerds at the end of the 80s.

Spent my Christmas break in college working with an artist coding Mandelbrot drawing routines on a IBM 286 machine. We’d print them out on a dot matrix printer and he’d incorporate them into elaborate collages.

Love too that the author is Rudy Rucker, science fiction writer.

And don’t forget the barbershop 7th!

Seems to me this is just as much a problem with Slack and its configuration as with Zendesk.

Brilliant!

Wow. that brings back memories. My favorite website from the early 90s. I used to rush to check it out after each new episode to see the commentary. Love that it still exists 30 years later. There's a lot to say for a simple style.

Spreckels is where people run the toy boats.

It’s an odd situation when an acquaintance dies. It affects you but it can also feel like you don’t have a right to grieve compared to those who knew them closely.

Some years ago a neighbor of mine was hit by a light rail train after darting across the street, biking during his lunch break at work. I’d talked to him for a couple minutes almost every day for two years in the parking lot while he worked on his car or arrived home from work. Just like that he was gone. I have a vivid memory of a neighbor sharing the news. We went to his funeral. His parents and young wife were devastated of course. It was so unexpected. Thought about him for years afterwards.

My colleagues and I in the SF Bay and Sacramento are using Comcast are unable to access AWS hosted sites.

AWS says:

External Network Connectivity

We are receiving reports of connectivity issues to the AWS network from customers on specific networks in California. Our initial investigations point to an issue with an external network provider outside of the AWS network. Connectivity to instances and services within the Regions and from other networks are not impacted at this time. All AWS Services are operating normally at this time.

“It had bugs”. “Here’s two examples.”

Fairly basic article but more technical than most I’ve seen.

And Atari!

I always thought the insistence on 100% adherence to the sealed airlock was a bit of vanity. When they had to take one of the residents out for surgery, and sent them back in with some food and supplies, the press treated it like a betrayal.

But science isn't an all-or-nothing effort. It was only a big deal because the PR machine insisted there was absolute isolation. Needing to adjust the experiment slightly midway through doesn't invalidate the effort or the insights that came out of it.

When this was being built it was a big tourist attraction. I visited the Biosphere a couple of times that first year and I went to the ceremony for the reopen.

Strange project. There was clearly some valid science and engineering that came out of it, but lots of vanity, hype and backlash. The effort was founded by a billionaire who was either a visionary or a member of a personality-cult, or both, depending on your perspective. The biosphere residents - the biospherians - were lionized in the local press, similar to astronauts.

When they opened it up after the first year, the biospherians strode out in jumpsuits and lined up on stage. Lot of speechs by people in the project and unrelated luminaries.

My favorite memory is a great but somewhat random speech by Jane Goodall. (paraphrasing) "I know this experiment isn't supposed to be about the interpersonal dynamics of a small group in a confined space, but we should use this experience to think about other intelligent animals in confined spaces for long periods of time... like chimpanzees".

very clever little hack -- had to fix the first couple of lines to remove extra newlines and "...."

Yes - same here!

Started around Jan 12. Large pool of IP addresses, hard to block. Occasional brief DOS impacts but mostly just annoying errors in my logs. (if too many crop up we get automatic alerts). What was really puzzling is that many of the URLs are old (e.g. request for details on hosted sites that no longer exist). I loaded up a 6 month old backup database and confirmed those accounts weren't present, so the source list of URLs must be older that. Really bizarre.

After reading this article I looked and confirmed via spot checks they are from Microsoft IPs and Safari 15.1.

I’m surprised the 8 track cassette was still good. I remember finding an old box of 8 tracks in the late 80s and they were disintegrating. Assumed they weren’t built to last for decade plus. But maybe those were just stored poorly.

I found the headline to be misleading. The article is mostly about the migration process (which is interesting), but very little about the details of the cost savings.

What does it cost to run their data center? What are the salaries they are paying for internal IT efforts to administer it? Is it an apples-to-apples comparison, e.g. are they load balancing across multiple datacenters in case of an outage?

It sounds like this was a good move for Prerender but it's hard to generalize the cost claims to other situations without details.