3dbrows

I’m currently evaluating Auth0 and other similar services with a view to migrating from Cognito. May I ask what you don’t like about it?

I imagine it means one with a higher coefficient of greybeard admins.

Yep. Rotten luck with the malaria and blockades, eh.

I’m not sure it was mainly rich folks who suffered. Many small scale investors also lost money. So severe were the losses that something like 25% of private wealth in Scotland was destroyed.

Some argue we are still feeling the effects of this today. It certainly didn’t help with social attitudes towards being miserly with money (which we very much are).

Does Resend use AWS SES under the hood?

It seems to be true that they are either doing very well or very badly.

St Andrews? Elie? Lovely. Methil? Granton? Pass.

Are there examples of “it’s alright” seaside towns above some threshold size?

I’m sure you managed to get the MIDI background music working easily though.

I hate how accurate this is. Imagine you are a UK resident, born and raised, who went to the UK’s top school for CS (4-year degree). You made American friends at university who later moved back home.

15 YOE down the road and you are making $80k as a good senior SWE. You are absolutely bewildered that your American friends who you studied with make comfortably double that.

Make it make sense.

Could this claim the title of “oldest host on the public internet serving traffic”?

At first I thought “~100 days, so what?” - but that was before I knew this was an 8088 managing to hold up to even just the background noise of the modern net (portscans, etc). It’s surviving being slashdotted by HN. Very impressive.

I wrote about something along these lines a couple of years ago [0] and thought the idea was dead due to rate limiting. But does LE now regard each subdomain as having its own limit, rather than taking that of the parent domain?

[0] https://3dbrows.dev/

Yes. Also, one could quite trivially turn the driver’s seat and steering column 180 degrees in the UK model, yielding the benefits you mention, as well as that of facing the direction of travel in reverse gear.

Like I said, views are changing in light of events, but let’s not pretend this was the settled majority view since 1945 or 1990. That’s the point: there has been a presumption by America that their view is the only view over the long term, leading to European perceptions that the US takes an arrogant view of their defence spending.

I would agree that the worldview of Europe is changing, given the sharp reality of its defences being tested.

Europe is of course (to state the extremely obvious) no stranger to its own imperial adventures. We might do well to stop that if we don’t want to trigger refugee flows and other outcomes we don’t want.

Quite, and the reality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly trumps armchair rhetoric on this topic. I would only add that (until recently) many Europeans would have questioned whether their aggression exists in a vacuum (“are we provoking them?”). But that sort of navel gazing vanishes when artillery is fired in your direction.

There was a deep-seated aversion to rearmament owing to the memory of the Second World War, which is fading away, cajoled by events in Ukraine.

> Another point I’d like to make is that modern European lifestyles exist partly due to American military hegemony, which has allowed European nations to redirect their defense spending to social programs.

I see Americans make this comment a lot. Putting aside whether or not it is true that it enables higher domestic social spending, the comment never seems to come with the realisation that many Europeans deride the “need” for higher defence spending. This is due to Europeans’ perception that American military adventurism is what creates the instability from which Europe requires American protection in the first place.

Many Europeans will say: “America, please stop bombing the mideast or continuously expanding NATO; this will stop creating problems that result in you demanding we spend more.”

In other words, many Americans presuppose the validity of their military adventurism and assume Europeans agree with it, and thus think they should want to participate in funding the defence of blowback from it.

By contrast, many Europeans would rather America did not try to play global policeman, or if it’s going to do so, then happily accept paying for European defence as the price of Pax Americana / US hegemony.

I’m no expert, but I wonder what the long-term socioeconomic effects are of Sweden not having been involved in major wars or colonial empires for hundreds of years.

Sitting atop the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, accumulated over decades of judicious management of national oil wealth, perhaps insulates Norway from realities that apply elsewhere.

We also have a lot of infuriatingly tautological explanations, for example:

“We apologise that this train has only 2 carriages today. This is because the additional carriages failed to enter service.”

Well, yes.

Thanks for your comments - my goal with the writeup was to attempt to sound out why the idea of ".nonpublic" would or would not work, and I think it's clear that it's not really viable. That's a pity, as the current state of affairs isn't great. It was interesting to explore though.

Right, so it would be necessary to force the NS records to point to registrar-owned nameservers which would be the point of enforcement. This is of course bad for a variety of reasons, not least how convention-violating it is.

Don’t let your degree get in the way of your education.

The ability to socialise with others and form connections with people is of maximal importance when it comes to convincing someone to employ you. There is no textbook for this. Interact with different groups of people and you will soon become a very good communicator, as you will be able to talk confidently and amicably with anyone.

Beyond that, a couple of projects that you can demo in an interview is a nice idea.

As someone who worked on timetabling databases and pricing services at Skyscanner, I appreciate just what a phenomenal achievement ITA is. Very well done sir.

There is still so, so much innovation that the flights travel industry is ripe for.

In the Royal Navy, written letters to the captain [1] have to be signed off with "I am honoured to be, Sir, your obedient servant". I remember (in 2010) people thought this was stupid and instead used something like "Yours sincerely". But this ran contrary to regulations, and it was announced that letters would be rejected if not signed properly. Time moves very slowly in the RN.

[1] There are codified degrees of formality for written communications. Formal, demi-formal, and others used more operationally. I am talking about first-tier formal letters to senior officers in this case.

Astonishing. Not only the modern conservatism in this regard, but also that lesbianism was legal in the UK even in early C20, so the SG position was even more strict. A morbid but interesting area of study perhaps is the long tail of repressive laws left by the Empire around the world still in force today, particularly in African countries.

One wonders why a country (SG) which professes extreme economic liberalism (well, until it doesn’t…) cares so much about social illiberaism like this. It’s not like the PAP needs to appeal to tubthumping angry populism for votes, is it? (Genuinely asking. I assume that people vote for them on the basis of administrative competence. Wrong?)

Perhaps it’s more a case of “rocking the boat on this topic can only harm us, and gain us nothing”.

The laws of many former British colonies are, unsurprisingly, copypasta of British law from the ~19-20th centuries. The homosexuality law is a case in point. The UK itself has moved on in some areas.

Delighted someone remembers it! Thanks.

When I was about 12 or 13 I ran a website called freelin.org. This was around 2001. Its goal was to provide Linux on CD to anyone who asked, globally, without cost. My hope was that donations would cover costs. They didn’t. I tried my best to supply everyone based on pocket money (allowance) at the time. To my shame, a few people who donated £1 didn’t get a CD. If this was you, please let me know and I will make it up to you. I apologise.

My enthusiasm was powered by the ability to do good by using my cable internet connection to download ISOs in trivial time.

I cut a strange figure at the post office every Saturday sending packages to places like Macedonia.

Strongly agree. Local newspapers contain “common myths” that underpin society: a local shared understanding of the world, where the technical veracity of that understanding is secondary to its promulgation. That is being lost by hyperpersonalisation at the cost of community bonding. If you think that’s a good thing, consider whether you trust (or even know) your neighbours.

The tragedy of the commons is that nobody cares about the maintenance of the common good: I posit that the common good ought to include shared myths. Historically, this meant shared worldview and religion. Today, we are challenged to find other bases for trust in one another.

Let’s hope the peak just gone is the last big spike. In the final analysis I imagine the British public’s _willingness_ to get the jab will be seen as an enormous success factor, on top of the vaccine itself’s efficacy. This willingness merits study. High social trust of the NHS, historic common understanding of vaccines and everyone knowing someone affected by the virus all play their part. As an aside, I believe this to have been the NHS’ finest hour, and in future “the pandemic” will replace “the war” as the lynchpin reference point in time, as it were.

The staggered school return times you mention could be one factor (as could better weather resulting in outdoor socialising instead of indoor). The effect when schools return (~2 weeks from now in Scotland) might be muted however as hundreds of thousands more vaccinations will have been done in the parent-age population. In Scotland, for example, over 90% of adults have received the first dose, and 72% the second (implying that ~18% are in the waiting period for the 2nd). Perhaps we should expect to see a spike in cases in children, but not so much among their parents.