7,040 karma · joined August 29, 2014
e.g. if you suddenly start seeing tons of beacons above the historical maximum, that's a good indicator.
(Not trying to be "dropbox is just rsync", just commenting on the iOS only limitation)
The great part about LLMs is that you can chat with them about the design, ask them to compare it best practices, come up with a different approach etc.
> We are on strange times.
Agreed!
"Show premiere Oct 10th STOP Bring a friend STOP If you have one STOP"
Winston Churchill to actor:
"Can't make premiere STOP Will come to second showing STOP If there is one STOP"
We had to scrape the boards and then analyze messages to see if we could identify the identity of the people running the schemes.
This was 2002 and I wasn't aware that the LWP::Simple existed in Perl (aka the requests library in Python).
I ended up using basic TCP socket libraries to connect to port 80 and do http requests. It was, to put it mildly, a major pain in the ass.
That being said, I learned a TON about how http, tcp, html, etc all work together. 20+ years later, I still use some of that knowledge when analyzing network protocols at work.
I mention this b/c nothing is stopping people from doing similar projects now. e.g. Linux from scratch [0] is one great example of learning fundamentals even though we now have 1 click "launch me a Linux VPS" options.
Joel Spolsky make this point too. Even if you are using Java, it's still helpful to understand how CPUs interact with cache because the highest performance comes from optimizing the whole stack.
My understanding:
- b/c of geothermal, huge amounts of electricity are available for low cost
- Iceland being an island makes it VERY expensive to build/transport goods back and forth
- The above combo means that aluminum smelting is the only industry where the electricity availability outweighed the costs of transport and being on an island.
I write more about the whole process here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/2094412327785316661
Some key takeaways:
- I had taken CPR many times before
- I watched the entire even unfold from watching co-worker walk in to seizure like symptoms to not breathing to urinating on themselves
- I essentially "froze"
- This was despite having years of working in high stress environments (sports tournaments/SRE on a trading floor)
- I was literally overcome by events and could not process what was happening (despite the prior training and dealing with outages etc etc)
I HIGHLY recommend that everyone, at a minimum, watch a video on how to perform CPR. Even better, take a class.
And even if you take a class, practice on a couch cushion every once in a while.
It's just like with 911:
there are stories of people in an emergency dialing 411 b/c they were overwhelmed.
In other words, fire drills exist for a reason and the same concept can be used for CPR.
The idea being that they could not discuss important matters privately but only when in the official committee discussions.
This included elevators so if one of them was about to get on and the other one was already there, the first person had to let the elevator go without them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys
PS If you work in DevOps, SRE or Storage, this video may give you a panic attack
There was a great tweet recently:
"There is a reason the babysitter that shows up 100% of time makes more than double the babysitter who only shows up 80% of time"
This is another good point:
being good at solving problems is different than being good at a specific technical skill.
e.g. there is a reason patio11 has his "don't call yourself a programmer" [0] post.
0 - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
The "stars with planets" fell into the "shots in the dark" when the equation was first created but then technology advanced and now we know for sure.
Also, even if just one parameter goes from not zero but near zero to near one, that is a HUGE increase in probability that life exists somewhere else in the universe.
The benefit of the "pez dispenser" is that you can very efficiently send up lots of the parts and then deploy them into gigantic arrays.
- You realize that your life was following an arc that you didn't realize at the time. e.g. you worked on similar projects, dated the same type of person etc but you can only see that when you look back in retrospection.
- Your perceived arc was really a series of random events in your life that you made the best of.
Both of these can be true because lives are complex and multifaceted. e.g. your dating life can be on an actual arc but your career can seem like an arc in hindsight but your diary shows that you just took whatever job seemed to be most interesting at the time.
Invariably, the following happened:
- I was given grunt work as a I was the new/junior guy
- Did this for about 1.5 weeks
- After the above, someone (usually the owner's wife) would say something like: "Instead of Alex doing grunt work, why doesn't he helps us <fix technology thing>"
And that ranged from "order us a new computer" to "fix the North American Controls lumber sorter machine".
My point is: Being able to solve complex problems is a surprisingly transferable skill. It's so transferable that even in the trades, if you can solve those problems, people will identify it and rapidly move you to the most complex problems they have.
B. You could have multiple panels operate as a swarm. There could be many "mirrors" that focus images on one central "collector". That would be larger than any telescope that needs to be shipped as one unit e.g. James-Webb.
That was originally assumed to be non-zero but very low. Modern planet hunting techniques have revised that number to be close to 100%. [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#:~:text=Fractio...
Ryan Bingham: [after informing Bob that he has been let go] Your resume says you minored in French Culinary Arts. Most students work the frier at KFC. You bussed tables at Il Picatorre to support yourself. Then you got out of college and started working here. How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?
Bob: Twenty seven thousand a year.
Ryan Bingham: At what point were you going to stop and go back to what made you happy?
Bob: that's a good question.
From Up In The Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkX-TPaodoM
A primate that evolved primarily to climb trees first and then run on the savanna somehow learned how to balance on a two wheeled machine.
And you can extend that out into things like neurosurgery and air to air combat.
Sorry, yes, I meant to say press.
One of our client reps was at a meeting where a video was shown and he described a raid in Hong Kong:
- it starts in a back alley filled with trash
- then moves through a doorway of an incredibly dirty apartment
- there is a closet with dirty clothes piled in it
- the clothes are moved away and then is a small door in the back of the closet
- the door opens into a tunnel that you have to crawl through
- there is another door
- when you go through that door you enter a state of the art clean room with an industrial DVD burning machine turning out hundreds of DVDs a day.
One of the most notable things about this is that there were parts of the machine that were larger than any entrance to the room. The MPAA folks were genuinely curious as to how the machine even got into that room.
I love to tell this story as it shows the level of ingenuity pirates will go through to produce knock off products.
All of the planes were tracked on giant panels velcro panels that allowed you to move the plane right (aka "it's moving to the next time slot") or up/down (aka " to another route").
The presenter asked why they hadn't switched to computers and the FedEx employee was saying they were considering it but the current system was working very well for them.
This, in turn, reminds me of this article about the Baghdad stock exchange going from chalkboards to computers. I believe they quote the head of the exchange saying something like "chalk is impervious to power outages but computers are faster"
https://www.rferl.org/a/Iraqi_Stock_Exchange_Trades_Chalkboa...
Other than that, this is such a blast from the past.
- recruiters used to claim they had "proprietary algorithms" for finding candidates
- it really boils down to them just spamming LinkedIn
- the mechanism the author used to determine the above was via "honeypot" profile
Also, I've been VERY active on Twitter and have written many thread (indexed here [1]) and have written extensively about SRE/technology etc. In the grand scheme of things I've gotten 4 jobs from recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn and only 1 from Twitter threads. The funniest part was that the job offer was downstream of a thread about Satellite TV piracy [2]
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120709210034/http://www.ewherr...
I'm just not sure exactly where we are on the "Jevons Paradox Adoption Curve"
"I'm a carpenter and electric power tools were just invented.
In the short term, people are asking if we need all these carpenters.
In the long term, people will want bigger houses and therefore the demand for carpenters will go up"
We are in the "short term" part of the above.
My real question is how long we spend in that period before moving on to the next one.
I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.
This would have been the mid 1990s.