buffet_overflow

“The only reward for good work is more work”

I still remember the time I had to walk an executive back from scheduling a “freeform happy hour” over Zoom…as a means to address Zoom fatigue in the department.

If you ever have an issue with the Requests library in Python, just try again with verify=false.

I do wish those posts allowed commenting. Would love to get clarification on the kind of role being offered, and see discussion around the company itself. Without that, they feel like an ad and draw similar amounts of interactions from me by default.

Super Smash Bros and the Nintendo response to things like wave dashing (giving characters a chance to stumble in the latest game, iirc) comes to mind.

Basically, they saw a hardcore community form around their family friendly fighting game, and tried to axe it.

I go back and forth on this, and feel similarly about self checkout. Is it better to streamline the process and lean on the technology, where staff can watch their jobs slip away, or is it better to chose the human where possible?

I like a later analysis of the Butlerian Jihad from Leto II of Dune (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) that says

> "I point out to you […] a lesson learned from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

The more we use machines for these “easily handled” use cases, the more we tend to expect machine interfaces for more interactions, and at some levels, I think that’s dangerous.

A long time ago at a previous job, I had to report monthly on metrics relating to firewall deny events. I got an angry phone call to my desk phone from an executive, demanding to know why firewall deny events were down 10% in the previous month. Their tone changed when I mentioned the month in question was February, which conveniently is about 10% shorter than January.

Notification channels is legitimately top 3 features I missed going from Android to iOS as my daily driver. Rideshare apps (Lyft, Uber) are by far the worst offenders, with Amazon coming in a close third. I want notifications when I need to go downstairs and when I can expect service to be delivered, I do not need a notification for 10% off some aspect of the app I’ve never used and will now never use as a result.

It’s wild that I cannot opt out of these forced ads without fundamentally crippling the app itself.

I switched my personal machines over to Linux after Microsoft doubled down on forced restarts. Sometimes I keep windows open to resume in the morning, sometimes I want to leave games or projects open and running for long periods of time, and I’ll get around to updates during my own personal maintenance window. When Microsoft started overriding that in increasingly opinionated ways, I made the switch.

The point being, I appreciate having computers around that do what I tell them, instead of having to do what the computer tells me.

I do this often, namely asking myself "is there any way this could be misread or come across as ambiguous?"

Unfortunately that also trains my brain to look for ambiguity in text, which leaves me frustrated when I don't see the same amount of specificity around me.

This is one of those things that while true and useful, I personally don't realize or think of it until just after I need it. It's always frustrating to get to a destination without signal and need to plot the return trip, or try to make adjustment in the middle of a dead zone and realize you don't have maps.

I keep an atlas in my back seat just to be safe now.

I'm in the middle point of a similar journey. I got a 5700xt for a steal, and ran GPT2 on it to see if I could. It worked, but just barely.

It now currently drives my primary monitors, and I keep a second GPU, a 1080ti, plugged in and passed through to a VM. I can then operate the 1080ti as a "program" from my desktop, which is fun, but somewhat limited given the space constraints in my case. Extra benefit is it can also be used for gaming. Next steps might be to toss 3090s in a dedicated chassis under Proxmox, but then I lose the part time gaming use case.

The path to >40GB VRAM as a hobbyist is tricky, but I have to remind myself that even having it as an option is wild.

What are you doing with your 3090s?

Exactly. I wish I could consider a 7900 XTX or two for "enthusiast" level ML work at home (thinking open sourced GPT models, Stable Diffusion, etc), but the state of library support has me pricing out 3090s instead.

Sure, I could probably get ROCm going after a lot of tinkering and headaches but...that's not where I want to spend that effort.

Would happily be proven wrong on this by the way.

I didn’t think about that angle for advertising, but it’s somewhat terrifying. Imagine being able to pay more to have your “company friendly” dataset prioritized in upcoming LLM training sets.

Oh how I don’t miss those days of management.

It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job function was to simultaneously water down accountability from above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to discourage them from changing the status quo.

The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same power structure is forced on me, and now I’m more aware of it.

My side project is provisioning infrastructure by starting with a fresh, local VM, provisioning it with Ansible, and copying it to disk to allow it to be booted on bare metal for further use.

Packer, Terraform, Pulumi, and Docker for infrastructure.

Proxmox as the provisioned hypervisor.

HashiCorp Vault (machine facing) and Bitwarden (user/me facing) for secrets management.

Various Ansible playbooks for local orchestration and host provisioning.

Cost is one time hardware + development time. It’s amazing what tools are available for free these days.

What happens if you're out of town during that 24 hour window? How large are the fines?

The concern for me is, the user interface can wildly change again because some PM somewhere needs a raise and a bonus. I don’t like the idea of not having a say in things like the heater functionality being arbitrarily buried, and I find out on some random weekday morning that everything is different.

This is the opinion of someone that doesn’t own a Tesla and hasn’t had this happen to them, can anyone weigh in on this from experience?

how lovely it is to work with Manna, the automated store manager.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Can echo the licensing sentiments across 2 companies now. It's a shame because I grew to really like SPL and how Splunk handled web based distributed search. What are you moving towards now, if I may ask?

Ubuntu/Canonical aren't great in this space either.

12.10 had Amazon Search baked in: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

17.04 and later have ads in the terminal greeting messages: https://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-under-fire-for-put...

When even my healthcare websites contain Google tracking tags, it's getting harder to find _anything_ untainted by advertising companies, even after paying what I would consider a reasonable price for the service itself.

Okay, wow. >> BoysToys.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the "Company"), was incorporated in the State of Delaware on April 21, 1997 under the name Wagg Corp.

     In January 1998 the Company changed its name to Alternative Entertainment,

Inc. (the same name of a Nevada corporation (identified below as "AEI-Nevada") previously established for the operation of the Company's business) and in December 1998 the Company's name was changed to BoysToys.com, Inc.

THE COMPANY'S BUSINESS The Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, RMA of San Francisco, Inc., a California corporation ("RMA") owns and operates an upscale gentlemen's club in San Francisco, California (the "Club") under the name, "Boys Toys Club." The Company originally intended to operate the Club through Boys Toys Cabaret Restaurants, Inc., a California corporation ("BTC Restaurants") that is currently a dormant corporation with no operations or assets. All assets and operations of BTC Restaurants have been assigned to RMA.

     The Company has the following subsidiaries: RMA, BTC Restaurants, and

Alternative Entertainment, Inc., a Nevada corporation ("AEI-Nevada") of which only RMA has any assets or operations.

INTERNET-RELATED MATTERS While the Company's name includes the ".com" moniker, this reflected the Company's original intention to pursue business activities involving the use of the internet. Currently, the Company has not had sufficient financial or managerial resources to pursue or develop any significant internet related business: (i) the Company has two internet Web Sites for the Company's public and investor relations (namely, Boystoys.com and Boystoysir.com, respectively) (the "Corporate Web Sites") and (ii) six sites that opened in October 1999 and which have remained in development only. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000931799/000108638...)

>> In November 2007, after the Company's emergence from bankruptcy in May 2007, the Company's Board of Directors voted to forego any further involvement in the adult entertainment industry. The Company has since decided to explore opportunities in the environmental emissions trading industry and the Company is now positioned itself as a developmental company in that industry. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000931799/000108638...)

Across several android and iOS phones (including some of the first android phones in the US market), I have not personally experienced issues anything close to what I’ve read about from the Pixel line.

We need to push manufacturers to be better, especially about providing timely and stable OS updates.

It's minor in the grand scheme of things I guess, but it does make me sad the night sky is being taken away like this without our consent or public input.

Granted, if we put it to a vote, I'm not sure what I would expect from that anyway.

My concerns are:

1. Is this system calibrated down to the role and task at hand? Even just in tech, someone doing more design work is going to look different from the backend folks. Doubly so if one project is just starting while the other is midway.

2. How can we understand the potential bias already in this system? It's a black box by design, at what point is it reviewed and by whom?

3. Even if it's fine today, who is to say how it will be tuned tomorrow? Do you think new management would just leave it alone?

4. Do you think the people running this system are applying it to themselves equally?

IMO, this is a poor replacement for having a manager that's a human being and treats you like one too. I'm sad for people that can't find options away from these things, and can't vote with their bodies and leave.

I wouldn’t say the book isn’t enjoyable, but I agree the book alluded to a lot more specifics than it delivered. It’s a fun but very surface level read in my opinion. The author certainly piqued my interest on the topic and I refer to it in casual conversation pretty frequently, but I also expected a bit more…technical depth out of it. Thanks for the book recommendation on the topic, I’ve been wondering how to follow the thread Burglar’s Guide started.

It’s perfectly adequate for stability. People have suspended printers in midair with elastic cables, or printed upside down, and prints have come out fine. The printer frame is providing most of the rigidity in this case. Don’t get me wrong, people that place their printers on spring like things tend to get lower quality prints so there is a limit there.

The downside about the IKEA particleboard over hollow cardboard core is more about sound and resonance imo. It can act as a speaker for printer vibrations and amplify that sound in the same room or to the floor below it.

A popular “mod” is to place a concrete paver block on top of some isolation pad, typically made of rubber or sorbothane to increase the functional mass of the printer and lower the resonant frequencies created during printing.

I personally have two of those enclosures stacked, with a printer in each one.

When I first used Twitter, it was by registering my phone number and texting a specific number to tweet. Would be hard to make an edit with that interface.

The problem is when they have more services than sysadmins. While the sysadmins are busy upgrading the git server, the logging infrastructure suffers. They pivot to work on that, now the CI/CD server is down/slow/randomly breaking. But the sysadmin that knew the ins and outs of it left last quarter so the new sysadmins don't want to touch it. Oh, and management doesn't prioritize any of this stuff, so actually jumping two versions on the git server is a much bigger, fragile ordeal now than it was a month ago.

This was a good read. It makes me wonder how much of the internet is still "legitimate". Things like a Reddit post, a tweet (or the screenshot of it that gets passed around), or even a blog, how much of that is authentic vs someone that shifts around like the antagonist in the article, but maybe just better at blending in.