briffle

Kids are smart. My school district has sealed pouches.. Its amazing how many kids throw an old phone in there, and put their actual one away hidden on silent.

Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.

its a blanket rule, which has almost no exceptions. So there are some silly parts. One of my kids is in band and the school uses YONDER pouches. They have had to dig out some really, really old analog tuners to use. They have a fraction of the capability of a $4 IOS app, but the kids are supposed to keep their phones in a special sleeve with no exceptions... (so many kids break that rule, or throw an old dummy phone in the pouch)

A famous case of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile where the man identitified he had a concealed carry, the cop told him not reach for it, he started to say he wasn't, he was getting his license the officer asked for, with the officer cutting him off repeatedly and the officer shot him because he 'feared for his life'.

All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.

Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....

They both showed up in person, because that was NOT the first time that had happened.

I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..

After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.

Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.

While I agree with you, some solutions, such as Oxide Computing could come pretty close to having all the ease of cloud, one whole rack of computers at a time.

the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you add.. Ouch...

I believe both Oregon and Washington have passed bills, but both require CA to also pass so that the whole west coast moves. CA has still not passed a bill.

So what is your proposed solution?

when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.

As do all the other cloud providers, that have had this for years. like GCP and Azure, for 9 years now.

Honestly, I keep an eye on them because we are a core market for their product.. We run a bunch of K8s clusters, and Postgres databases. We currently use cloud, but if someone bought us up, and demanded we stop all cloud, we could move to something like this in a fairly short time, with limited changes. I wouldn't have to deal with Dell, plus VMWare, plus a SAN company plus a networking company, and hope they all work work together nicely.

I could get a spot in a colo, drop 2 fibers assigned to a few subnets, and be up and replicating our databases in a day or two. We have no need for GPU right now, but do need to often switch DB's to add cpu, ram, etc. Honestly, it would pay off in a year to 18 months, depending on the rumored prices, and colo costs.

I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.

Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.

My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot. It is just so weird to see. Forcing decimal on a measurement that does not normally have it just makes me uncomfortable.

https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...

> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.

And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.

The OSU Open Source Lab gives machines to groups in their datacenter: https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/

It has hosted quite a few famous services.

They could just license all the IP, and hire away all the Engineers and executives... :)

no, it wasn't even a real effort. A REAL effort would have been to collect what all is being done, and seeing where things should be removed, processes changed, etc. This was a slash and burn.

LVM snapshots work well. Used it for years with other database tools.. But make sure you allocate enough write space for the COW.. when the write space fills up, LVM just 'drops' the snapshot.

You'd be even more impressed if you saw just how little resources they have to use (ram, storage, cpu), or how old of a C standard they have to work with. I have a few friends that work on this.

Yep, I had a Cyrix processor in mine during that time. Slackware didn't care.

I had to deal with a state Medicaid system that would go down often. If it crashed after 5pm, it was down until the next morning when someone rebooted the SunOS box. (Yes, they just rebooted the box, and no, in 2014 it was still sunos, not Solaris). Meanwhile, it’s messing up pharmacy authorization for thousand of elderly and low income people in the state ….

They have shorter beds, because of the larger cab, but a 1975 Ram one ton could carry 3500 lbs of payload in the bed, and pull a 11,500lb trailer.

A 2025 one can carry 7500 lbs of payload in the bed, and tow 37,090 lbs (some states require extra permits or licenses for that much)

All modern trucks can carry and tow WAY more than they used to.

and the 1/2 ton ones have dramatically impvoved mileage (the modern 3L diesels do about 29Mpg, and the gas ones turn off cylinders when crusing, and can do 20-25mpg when empty. My older small pickup (old ram Dakota) from the early 2000's got 15-16 on the highway.

Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.

you should really look up the profit margins of the largest PBM's, but they are now wholely owned by large insurance companies, or pharmacies. They are the middle men, and get a cut (and often rebates for selling over a certain amount)

https://www.drugchannels.net/2025/03/the-top-pharmacy-benefi...

The tooling should be getting close to manage this on-prem now, with VM's, K8s clusters, networking, storage, etc. I know that oxide computers exists, and they look fantastic, but there has got to be more 'open' ways to run things on your own Dell/HP/Supermicro servers with NVMe drives. Especially since VMware has jacked up their prices since being acquired.

Talos OS looks really interesting. But I also need the storage parts, networking parts, etc.

here's hoping its Oracle's cloud instead....

Equifax: In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The company has agreed to a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories. The settlement includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the data breach.

Apparently, your personal information is worth about $2.90.

A Rivian R1s is about 6800 pounds because of its batteries..