Johnny555

Does anyone know what the server is? I don't see it on their site.

I'm curious why supply chain issues got in the way and why they couldn't just configure a Dell Poweredge and get delivery in a couple weeks.

I'm assuming they have some special requirements that weren't met by an off-the-shelf server, so I'm just curious what those requirements are.

Yeah, so many places ask for phone number that don't really need it that I assume the phone number is a unique identifier used to combine individual's data across websites.

Most of the time I use a made-up 555 number or if it needs to send an SMS to verify, I'll use a free SMS numbers.

>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?

People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic.

I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk.

When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work.

My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office.

The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.

I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.

A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.

>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though

But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.

>For me, that means topping up with a supplement. The UK government advises everyone in the country to take a 10-microgram vitamin D supplement over autumn and winter

My last blood test showed I was slightly deficient in vitamin D - my doctor recommended a 50 microgram (2000 IU) supplement. My next test to see how well it' working isn't for a few more months.

Oh I remember those days. In our case, it was because we had so much website data that we couldn't keep it all in cache, so when the site became busy enough, performance fell off a cliff as we became disk I/O bound. We had maxed out our main server with 512MB of RAM.

We couldn't afford the new Sun Ultra 2's that would have given us a spacious 2GB of RAM, so we ended up coding a front-end to shard requests across the 2 web servers and used a Sparcstation 5 to run that front-end.

Eventually we rearchitected the entire site to move the static HTML websites into an Oracle database. (by then we had upgraded to a Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000, which could handle up to 6GB of memory, more than we could ever use)

>On route, train operators punch the code into a control panel at the back of the display, and the LCD blocks light on specific segments of the grid to build each letter

I always thought those were mechanical displays with little mechanical shutters that moved to display the segments... like these:

https://youtu.be/Gj_mTp6Ypzk

Never knew they were LCD.

Even in a desert, people still use umbrellas for protection from the rain:

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/jan/19/fast-moving-storm-b...

And the rain still causes problems, even (or maybe especially in) a desert:

https://nypost.com/2022/07/29/las-vegas-braces-for-more-rain...

That continues the analogy -- it doesn't rain often in the desert, but almost all deserts receive rain. And since it rains so rarely, you're certainly not going to find an umbrella during the rainstorm.

So again, if staying dry in the rain is important to you, buy an umbrella before the rain, if you don't care about getting wet from time to time, then no need for the umbrella.

While the personal blog owner may not care about DDoS related downtime, he may face extra usage charges due to higher bandwidth, CPU usage, etc that he'd like to avoid.

I thought that's why it's a good analogy - DDoS protection doesn't apply retroactively to prior attacks (or even current attacks, it's hard to apply DDoS protection while your site is down due to DDoS). If you want protection from DDoS, you need it before the DDoS. If you want to insure your car in case of accident, you need to insure it before the accident.

That's a good analogy since the corner shop is going to be sold out of their small stock of umbrellas during the rain storm so you won't be able to buy one until the rainstorm is over but at least you'll have protection for the next storm. If staying dry is important to you, you should buy the umbrella before the rain.

>The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed.

A treaty is only as good as its enforcement, and if the USA declines to uphold their obligations, who is going to force them?

How is Trump using digital ID's on iPhones to complete a coup?

The article is in response to a very one-sided government ban (well, reported ban) on TP-Link products. The company is being targeted for what appears to be political reasons, the article even said so in the first paragraph:

Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any specific technical threats

>Setting aside the environmental impact of flying private, you'd think all those brilliant minds could come up with some kind of solution beyond flying further away and driving into Portugal. Maybe a jet that hundreds of people can charter at once?

Seems like there's a business model here -- create a company that owns large aircraft and have some kind of booking engine that lets people book seats on those airplanes. Maybe have those planes travel on a fixed schedule to let people plan travel in advance.

There's so little cost to store the contents of a single 9 track tape that there doesn't need to be any reason at all to do it.

I don't know what native apps they needed Windows for (I wasn't doing IT work by then), but I was still setting up PC's when they said they needed Windows Excel (not Excel on Mac, not Office365) for some forecasting spreadsheet product they purchased - it only ran on native Excel. We gave them Windows in a VM on their Mac at first, but eventually they had more and more apps that ran on Windows and moved from Mac to Windows laptops.

The same reason most organizations use it -- inertia and because it's been the standard for so long, it's the best at what it does.

The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.

>Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on

I had a seismic shutoff installed at my gas meter and the plumber who installed it had no problem turning off the gas and turning it back on when he was done. (and then turning it off again to demonstrate to me how it worked).

He re-lit the water heater pilot light before he left. The gas company was not involved at all.

>Just a waste of copper and a beaker really.

But also helps avoid the case where your coffee maker trips the breaker shared with your refrigerator and you don't notice until the food in the refrigerator is warm. (which was a risk in my previous apartment - the counter circuits were shared with the refrigerator). I think it makes sense to have it as a separate circuit.

The owners manual for my Bosch 500 says prewash detergent is not necessary. But it does have a prewash cycle as I can hear it draining before the main wash.

Note: This dishwasher provides the optimum cleaning performance without the use of a prewash detergent and further enhances our standards of sustainability and efficiency.

>It sounds like you should never trust any medical advice you receive from ChatGPT and should seek proper medical help instead. That makes sense. The OpenAI company doesn't want to be held responsible for any medical advice that goes wrong.

While what you're saying is good advice, that's not what they are saying. They want people to be able to ask ChatGPT for medical advice, give answers that sound authoritative and well grounded medical science, but then disavow any liability if someone follows their advice because "Hey, we told you not to act on our medical advice!"

If ChatGPT is so smart, why can't it stop itself from giving out advice that should not be trusted?

IANAL either, but I read it as using the service to provision medical advice since they only mentioned the service and not anyone else.

I asked the "expert" itself (ChatGPT), and apparently you can ask for medical advice, you just can't use the medical advice without consulting a medical professional:

Here are relevant excerpts from OpenAI’s terms and policies regarding medical advice and similar high-stakes usage:

From the Usage Policies (effective October 29 2025):

“You may not use our services for … provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional.”

Also: “You must not use any Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or material impact on that person, such as making … medical … decisions about them.”

From the Service Terms:

“Our Services are not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition. You are responsible for complying with applicable laws for any use of our Services in a medical or healthcare context.”

In plain terms, yes—the Terms of Use permit you to ask questions about medical topics, but they clearly state that the service cannot be used for personalized, licensed medical advice or treatment decisions without a qualified professional involved.

While they aren't stopping users from getting medical advice, the new terms (which they say are pretty much the same as the old terms), seem to prohibit users from seeking medical advice even for themselves if that advice would otherwise come from a licensed health professional:

https://openai.com/en-GB/policies/usage-policies/

  Your use of OpenAI services must follow these Usage Policies:

    Protect people. Everyone has a right to safety and security. So you cannot use our services for:

      provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional

The Las Vegas Airport is very close to the strip, surrounded by residential neighborhoods and hotels about 1/4 - 1/2 mile from the airport, and UNLV university is about 1000 feet in a straight line from one of the runways.

This article is in response to Trump's declaration that the USA is starting nuclear weapons testing, the the energy secretary clarified that these are "non-critical" tests, i.e. they are testing the non-nuclear parts of the weapon but will not be causing any nuclear explosions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd26yxxx3lo

"These are not nuclear explosions," Wright told Fox News on Sunday. "These are what we call non-critical explosions."

"Americans near historic test sites such as the Nevada National Security Site have no cause for concern," Wright said. "So you're testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry, and they set up the nuclear explosion."

I wanna know how they keep it cool, even if it's 95% efficient, that's 15,000 watts of power to dissipate.

For those not well versed in Haskell, GHC is apparently this:

https://www.haskell.org/ghc/

What is GHC?

GHC is a state-of-the-art, open source compiler and interactive environment for the functional language Haskell.

I've made about a dozen payments with them, and have had only one real problem - not long after I made the account but after I'd used them successfully for a few payments, I was paying for a purchase in 2 payments (one for each item).

After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".