bananamogul

Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.

Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?

Another side effect of deleting 10 million rows in some databases (e.g., Oracle) is that the database writes out 10 million rows' worth of undo, which can swamp the disk space set aside for archive logs if you can't back it up and clear it off fast enough. Committing more frequently help, but if you have large databases and regularly need to purge, the best way in my experience is to use partitioning. Dropping the oldest (or whatever) partition is nearly instant and painless.

I wasn't clear exactly what the author was doing. "The worker crashes because it couldn’t write to the database and the VM shuts down" - why would the VM shut down? I assume VM here means the Virtual Machine (OS).

This article states multiple times that spinning up a process is expensive/very expensive. Is that really true? I ask out of ignorance.

“Compared to other ways of doing parallelism, processes are very expensive, both in terms of taking CPU resources but also the amount of time it takes to spin up a new process.”

“Because it’s expensive to spin up new processes, Postgres will only do this for long-running queries.”

Also:

“There’s been years of people talking about switching Postgres from a process model to a threading model, but nothing concrete has come out of that.”

I’ve read several times that on Linux, the cost between a process and a thread is relatively small.

Or Perl. Or Python. How many environments have only bash and not awk, perl, or python?

"The year 2024 is closer in time to Cleopatra than the Egyptian queen’s life was to the construction of the pyramids."

It's truly astonishing how old Egypt is. The sphinx is 4500 years old! I listened to Bob Brier's course on ancient Egypt (from TGC) and it was mind-blowing.

Solving the safety problem by making it loud does not seem like a great solution.

Fast forward and everyone is driving nearly silent electric vehicles. I wouldn’t want loud Vespas then. Cutting city noise pollution is one of the benefits of electric vehicles.

Hold up...why isn't .self listed here:

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

Is this just an idea at this point, or some kind of "you have to use our DNS to resolve .self domains" scheme - ?

That quote from Heat (1995) is so deployable in so many different contexts.

I remember in the 70s and 80s people on buses and subways reading magazines and newspapers. The idea that electronic devices have ushered in some age where humans want to interact with each other less is a myth I think.

I have an unusual name, and have published a book with some minor fame (which is the first google result for my name). Querying ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. gives a reasonably accurate summary of my public info.

OTOH, this tool describes me as a "security researcher known for talks and writing on JavaScript, Node.js, and web security."

I am not a security researcher and have never given any such talk and know precious little about Node.js or web security.

"If emacs is not installed on a system, I use sed."

Bill Joy (creator of vi) once said that if he sits down on a foreign system, he reaches for ed [1].

To be fair, both emacs and vi have "magic exit incantations", though if you have emacs perhaps you have a menu in GUI mode. If not, C-x C-c is really not any more memorable than :wq! The vi one at least has an obvious mnemonic ("write quit") but either way, you need to know an arbitrary sequence of keystrokes.

[1] http://xahlee.info/comp/interview_with_bill_joy.html

I reported a repo containing obvious nulled software to GitHub in February 2024.

The title is "nulled WHMCS" and it's a full copy of that software with copy protection removed. It couldn't be more cut and dried.

The repo is still there 2+ years later and GitHub has taken no action.

If GitHub can't respond to tickets pointing out obvious pirated software, I don't think they care about anything anyone puts up.

These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2].

Next viral doom post in September-ish?

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...

“To be continued.”

This was published in 2021 but apparently never continued.

Do you ever abbreviate the project name as A. Burr and how many Hamilton jokes[1] result from this?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel

Wow, Steam Frame has only B&W passthrough...[1]

The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.

I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...

LGR did a nice video on the history of Eagle: https://youtu.be/0wdunM5XZwo?si=eDINPvrYZl6QQsEo

Because we have 4 other sports that originated in the Americas: basketball, gridiron football, hockey, and baseball.

If you like soccer, perhaps you'd like to try our faster, more kinetic version, called hockey. It's the same sport (goals and such), and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or if you still like the "players are fragile" model of soccer but want more goals, we also have basketball. It's the same sport, and you get to watch it in air-conditioned comfort.

Or we have two other sports that are totally different.

Football and hockey require a serious gear/facility commitment, but baseball and basketball don't, so there's something for everyone.

I'm intensely skeptical about anything Anthropic says, because they are so incented to make their products seem dangerous (i.e., "capable", "science fiction", "ahead of everyone") ahead of their IPO.

And they've done it before.

Remember the whole "when threatened, the model would use an engineer's email to blackmail him about his affair" nonsense? That was just fan fiction. They simply created a scenario with some facts and asked their model to continue the story. Go ask Claude about ways to steal the British crown jewels and it'll give you some ideas. This does not mean their models are so dangerous that the Tower of London needs additional security.

I assume all their other scare tactics are more of the same.

I regret I have but one upvote to give you.

This sounds more like 1970s TV drama than reality.

Cutting someone’s brake line has to be one of the least reliable ways to injure or kill them. If you cut my brake line, you might bust up my garage door or my neighbor’s yard, but they’re not going to fail on cue as I go around a mountain curve…(dramatic music)

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In which state is that a class A misdemeanor? In some states it's a crime to record phone calls or other private conversations without all-party consent, but I wasn't aware that it was a crime to record a conversation in public anywhere.

I hike in Oregon and I've seen bodycams becoming increasingly common. I don't think that's a bad thing.

To be fair, when he was stopped by the police, he was very polite and compliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-8UqcSJDY

"In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment,"

That is a near textbook case of abusing statistics. Those things are completely independent variables. Perhaps "civilians" (as opposed to what, military?) killed by police increased because crime increased. Or population increased. Or laws changed. Or bullets changed.

Why would we expect widespread adoption of bodycams to decrease the number of criminals shot and killed by police? That starts with the spurious assumption that the police are randomly shooting and killing citizens in droves without cause and bodycams would put a stop to it. As it turns out, this isn't happening, so bodycams have no influence on the variable.

There's no need to read the rest of that article if the authors are trying to secretly sell such a pejorative opinion.

I invite you to go watch a couple hundred bodycam vids on YouTube. It may change your perspective on what police deal with. What I see consistently, regardless of department, is police bending over backwards and using all kinds of non-lethal force, to the point of risking their own lives, before using lethal force. There are well-publicized exceptions but in the vast majority of cases, the officers are facing someone using lethal force against them.

Would looking at the device's MAC address (which you can get from arp) help? That would give you at least the manufacturer of the network interface.

This is assuming you're on the same subnet.

You didn't include Perl's CPAN, which I think is older (1995) than all of these. And it allows scripts as well.

Github's anti-piracy enforcement is a joke and always has been.

Example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/will-github-ever-remove-this-null...

I'm not a BitLocker user or expert, but I thought I'd read that if you used a BitLocker PIN, the exploit didn't work. If the gov't asked MSFT to deploy an exploit, wouldn't they make it work PINlessly?