agoodthrowaway

I wonder what would happen in an actual battle with the fog of war when people are pushed beyond exhaustion. What happens when senior command is dead or missing?

I have the last voicemail from my Mother. Won’t ever delete it.

I think the news here is that Erskine Bowles was not renominated. Erskine is the only one on Facebook’s board that is on the record as challenging Zuck and who has significant real-world political leadership.

This is false. We actually live in the most peaceful times in human history. The current situation is the result of small scale proxy wars fought between the USSR and the US. These wars were fought instead of a global all out war involving exchanges of nuclear weapons. So if the alternative was global conflict, how can you say these countries are war mongers?

I am on the fence about this. I think it sounds great in theory and it may even work for smaller companies. However, a problem I’ve encountered with this approach to engineering management is that it ignores what the managers need to do to develop and advance. My current company has a very similar role for managers. The problem is that for the managers to advance they have to make an impact to the wider org. So this leads to the craziest, most toxic politics I’ve ever seen. In my opinion, when managers can be judged on their ability to make good technical decisions, it leads to a more objective outcome when judging the performance of a manager.

My take is managers are there to support their engineers but also to make decisions when the team does not have consensus.

I always get excited when I read these things that I might be lucky enough to see a supernova in the sky in my lifetime (provided the gamma ray burst misses us!).

The DVDs were disappointing because they cut out all the videos which were the best parts. I loved their commentary.

Didn’t know there was a new one. Thanks for the tip will check it out.

It’s sad that’s all you got out of it. There’s a quite a bit of subtext in the show, particularly if you’re in SV. I often wonder if people outside the valley pick up on the themes or if it’s jusy slapstick to them.

Beavis and Butthead are hugely underrated. I recall people making fun of me for watching it back in the 90’s. It was almost the only TV I ever watched.

Thee articles are getting ridiculous. I recall the complaints about 3rd party repairs to the fingerprint reader on iPhone. I never understood the spin that Apple is blocking repairs on the device. The fingerprint reader is used to unlock sensitive information and make payments. Locking that prevents all kinds of Backdoor hacks around fingerprint security.

From a PR point of view Google has handled this whole privacy debacle very well. By keeping a very low profile on privacy, they’ve made sure Facebook takes the heat. Facebook’s horrendous management of the issue has also allowed Google to slide under the radar on the topic. Generally I think Page is doing the right thing by keeping a low public profile.

Ugh in part because of the images from Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

I think you are very naive if you think the images of survivors didn’t do anything to prevent nuclear war. Of course there is no “evidence” because how could you prove something like this. Also it’s your own bias and perhaps your politics that leads you to believe that I’m rationalizing.

My view is that the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed people to see the destructive power of these weapons and the horrors of the wounds inflicted. It’s my strong belief that those images that prevented nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. I also strongly believe that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’d have seen nuclear exchanges between nation states.

This is nothing new. Municipalities have been doing this kind of thing for centuries.

My grandfather was an alcoholic who became homeless. He was also a WW2 vet that had shell shock from the Battle of the Bulge (likely cause of his alcoholism). He passed out on a street corner in Chicago and died 48 hours later from cirrhosis of the liver. For 20 years we did not know what happened to him. Cook County said that they buried him in a cemetery. We went to the cemetery on the death certificate and could not find the grave and the cemetery had no record of his burial. We called about two dozen cemeteries trying to find him but also nothing. We later found out that there was a scandal in Cook County at the time where indigent burials were done in a mass grave in Indiana and the burial money was siphoned off and pocketed. We are resigned to the fact now that we will never find him.

Of course there are online video rentals available. We have Apple TV and just rent movies on that. I’m sure other services are available on Android based devices.

Yeah I used to love the city and all the action too. But I tired of the filth, noise, hassle. I just wanted peace and quiet so I moved to the country. Couldn’t believe how much I loved the quiet. Also I love how dark it is at night and being able to see stars. When I get home, the air is noticeably fresher too. I can more or less do what I want to do on my property without anyone telling me what to do. I would have never thought I’d have loved it as much as I do.

Ok flat ground or a descent a recumbent may be faster (my experience is that most recumbents can’t keep 22-25mph on flat ground) but it won’t be faster climbing hills and they have a longer wheelbase and are quite a bit less maneuverable. On hill climbs the weight is the most obvious factor but I’d be surprised if you can generate the same amount of power in the supine position as you could in the standing position.

Since most bicycle racing is dominated by climbing hills, I don’t think anyone would ride a recumbent even if it was legal.

I grew up poor in PA. People who have never been poor are not prepared to hear about it. My wife doesn’t even want to hear about it. She’ll roll her eyes when I talk about it. The fact is that people can’t relate to an empty refrigerator or to not having money to buy a gallon of milk.

Poverty is soul crushing.

I have had a very successful and influential engineering career but I can look back at single decisions I made that could have sent me the other direction. It’s easy for people to say that the decision I made was obvious but it absolutely wasn’t at the time. I took huge risk being the first in my family to go to a prestigious University and double major in physics and mathematics in the early 90s(I was no prodigy); let alone go to graduate school.

One decision different and I’d be driving trucks in West Virginia.

I see any criticism of OSFP is getting downvoted but your points are correct. OSFP is not needed for 400GE.

We aren’t talking about long distance and coherent here but direct detect. Coherent is not cost or power competitive with direct detect for short reaches yet.

When I talk about SERDES I’m talking about the electrical signal interface to the optic. Also it’s worth noting that the majority of coherent DWDM interfaces are some kind of embedded optic already.

100G/wave device will be the norm moving forward and 8 lane devices for 400G won’t be around much except in niche applications.

Sorry but OSFP has at most a life of 2 generations and likely only useful for a single generation. 112G SERDES is not going to scale well and will require repeaters all over the place. Moreover doubling the signaling rate to 224 Gb/s is wholly impractical. The future is embedded devices and not legacy pluggables.

Sorry but it is naive to think people on the Tour were not doping. The tour speeds were simply too high to explain by human physiology. The tour speeds peaked in 2005 and the top riders all within 0.3%.

I’ve done amateur cycling racing in 35+ categories and there’s doping even among Cat2 riders today. That’s how deeply doping is embedded in cycling.

Armstrong wasn’t popular in Europe because he was thumping the Europeans in an area where they had previously dominated. Armstrong was certainly no saint obviously but the European dislike/attacks for/on him really were primarily ugly nationalism.

Yep these facilities require >100MW and require their own substations. Hence one reason why it takes so long to build.

Google has many large facilities that are definitely not shipping containers. You can do this for caching sites but it doesn't really work all that well from a cooling efficiency POV. In 2009 when they were building shipping containers their PUE was as high as 1.22 which is essentially not that much better than traditional raised floor and air conditioners. Their modern DCS are not built like this. Instead they have hot aisle and cold aisles. They call their cold aisles hot huts.

So you essentially trade off time to market for PUE.

In a large compute region the higher PUE of the shipping container approach is going to limit how many servers you can put in that location because power to a particular site is often a limiting factor. Also not everywhere do you have access to water from the Columbia river.

Haven't done anything myself other than smoke weed in the evenings. However at times I've wanted to give Adderal a try to get me through challenging times. When I was in college I used relatively high doses of pseudophedrine during exam times and found it helped me focus. I used it once during finals to stay up for 3 days. I aced those exams.

Currently I am a high level IC at a major web company. The pressure and competition at this level is incredible. I only do this job and put up with the pressure because I need the money (long story) and am trying to put my family ahead. I do like what I do though but would scale myself back if I didn't need the money.

When I get stretched too thin, I have trouble focusing. Adderal would be a way for me to focus when I'm running on fumes. It's not something I'd use daily but something during crunch times for sure. I've not done it because I haven't found a non-risky way to get it. I won't buy this kind of thing on the black market because I don't trust the product or the people. I'm not going to ask my doctor for it. But if I had a reliable way to get it, I'd have it.

It takes about 3 years to build a DataCenter. Also depending on the type of campus you want to build, the availability of power and contiguous land is fairly limited. Additionally most web scale DCs are "passively" cooled and require the local environment to support this.

We are in a construction boom nationally and it's currently difficult to get enough people to construct DCs. The ability to scale out is limited by construction.

Apple is building DCs, they are late to the game, but they probably can't scale their infra fast enough and need to use cloud services as a way to keep scaling without impacting their customers.