cfeduke

I grew up in a small city in upstate NY where a lot of eastern Europeans immigrated in the early 20th century up until the second war. Going to my friends' houses in the 80s - it was normal for the extended family to all live under one roof - there were a few families with grandparents who did not speak any English at all, and only spoke Czech, Hungarian, or Polish. Of course, the people these non-English speakers did business with on a daily basis for most of their lives in the US were speakers of those languages, and they could also rely on their children - my friends' parents - to translate.

For several undergraduate courses, especially the preconditional courses for more advanced courses, there exist CLEP exams. I took a handful of these and got full credit while in the military - at the time they were $99 for each test, and my education command paid for them as a benefit.

There could be a better system here, of course: for example if MIT offered a pay-per-exam for everything they released as open coursework and stood behind the accreditation. It doesn't have to be 1:1 for credits either, as an exam may not be representative of lab work when lab work is present.

> I sat around and played videogames (namely PC) 16 hours a day and became pretty good at computers.

I feel like this was the normal track for my Internet friends and I in the 90s. We've sold two startups pursuing the dream of making video games - which of course that dream came from playing video games all the time as kids. Though I'm doubtful if that particular path will translate well today, or especially over the next decade. Maybe it didn't translate well from the 90s either, but sure feels like it did. (And now in our 40s we still haven't made a single video game!)

I'm also dubious as to whether competitive extracurricular activities will make a difference. This was the _thing_ in high school from guidance counselors - you must must must must be in a bunch of extracurricular activities so you can write them down on your college application or you will never get to attend a good college!

The best is the slide that explains what you should do in said YouTube video:

  Creating Your Own YouTube Video
  • Any Video Will Do
  • PowerPoint Put to Music
  • Picture of Your Building
  • Hire a Professional

Get that picture of your building in that video! That'll show 'em.

I feel this, working on a small team moving things to microservices. My primary problem is observability. It's become a huge chore figuring what, exactly, is going wrong in production when something goes wrong. It's not enough to tail the logs of some distributed application, I need to tail the logs of several distributed applications where there messages are interspersed with one another. I suppose when we get some way to visualize these traces - tooling - it'll be okay. But, small team, limited human bandwidth, and we don't have this tooling in place yet.

The monolith, in contrast, had NewRelic integrated years ago. There were performance problems with this monolith which have been mostly solved through indexes and a couple of materialized views. Trivial to figure out what is going wrong. The code may be old and full of race conditions, but solving problems isn't difficult.

I dread dealing with multiple separate database instances each backing their own microservice when it comes time to upgrade those databases instances. I was hoping for a single database instance with multiple databases, but that particular architecture isn't on the menu. :\

Not exactly what you're looking for, but for anyone interested in Alaska I would recommend checking Peter Santenello's Alaska series on YouTube. It's people and culture focused on everyday life. You'll get a little bit of nature, not much, still very interesting.

As I type a message in Discord, a pop up appears next to my cursor with some disabled Emoticons, prompting me to pony up my credit card and upgrade to Nitro... so I can include these in my message.

This is the forum replacement. Right. :\

> Every time I hear "content creator" I perceive it as Styrofoam. Filler used to convey a product.

This is so good. Perfect. I love it.

After reading this I determined I don't talk about the robot nearly as much as I should or could be.

> What's the incentive for donating your time in such a role? Name on the cover?

Name in the book as the technical reviewer, and a copy of the physical book if it goes to print.

I practice this - DND, no interruptions, etc. - all of the time, with only my wife able to get through via a direct phone call for an emergency. However, when my friends gather for gaming every Friday night at our club - they do not practice this. It is non-stop interruption, chimes from phones, and very long sounds for a text message.

I don't know if its a problem but awareness can't hurt.

You don't, but you are also statistically unlikely to spend money (or, perhaps spend very little) at where ever you're trying to park so everyone concerned would prefer you move along to make room for a paying customer please. :)

My best guess here is promotion material or some sort of internal campaign with an associated bonus for nabbing policy violators.

I used Influx Enterprise at a previous startup. Support was so bad after our first year we switched back to the OSS Influx and added HAProxy with manual replication and round robin load balanced. Was so much smoother, wish we had done that from the start since that was our original plan.

> You can’t be more wrong? Snowflake also stores in s3 or elsewhere

Snowflake stores data in S3 in Snowflake's various AWS accounts. Egress fees are necessary when performing anything outside of Snowflake.

Databricks operates on data stored in your S3 on your AWS account(s). Databricks also runs on your compute contained within your AWS account(s).

Both approaches have valid use cases.

> Databricks are not on-premises either.

Usually, no. But in some cases, yes.

> You can be ordered to take chemicals or medications which have not been FDA approved, and you can be put in jail for refusing.

It's sort of like that and not at the same time. Under the UCMJ, refusing a lawful order can put you in the brig, or a variety of punishments applied (NJP, loss of rank, loss of pay, etc.). Under most circumstances, forcing a service member to ingest an unknown drug is not a lawful order. Under official civilian authority you can be highly encouraged to take an untested vaccine or some such, and refusal, while not disobeying a lawful order, can end up with you receiving unpleasant treatment. (You are there under contract for a set period of time, after all, so a long period of time of unpleasant treatment can be motivation enough to do things you wouldn't normally want to do.)

I was able to avoid the anthrax vaccine around 2000 by refusing to sign a waiver. I ended up getting transferred to a new command shortly thereafter which was scheduled long before this anthrax vaccine situation, but I can't be certain that there were going to be any repercussions regardless of my decision because most of my fellow service members at that time were unwilling to be test subjects as well.

Is this state of the art in terms of fast, incorrect answers? An incorrect answer is often less valuable than no answer at all!

The OpenAI strategy here then seems like a no brainer.

It's this definition of raid: "quickly and illicitly take something from (a place)" (versus the law enforcement version, where illicit is used instead to describe the goods which are taken by the police).

> I would like an example from within the last, say, 75 years. Regardless, you didn't even cite an example.

From Wikipedia[0]:

"In 2020, Matthew Dolloff, an unlicensed security guard contracted through Pinkerton, shot and killed Lee Keltner, a conservative protestor in Denver, Colorado."

Not exactly kicking down doors and assaulting the residents, I know, but hopefully we can agree that its adjacent.

Of course the premise is that "they get away with it all of the time." If such examples existed, citing them would be contrary to the act of getting away with it. I'm not saying that I know for a fact that the Pinkertons or other such similar organizations "get away with it." But I know the United States has produced numerous examples of police officers getting away with it, and in my mind it's very possible that detective agencies do all manner of reprehensible things, especially to people in poverty, and get away with it.

We're hearing about it in the case of a YouTuber because they have a platform.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

A side effect of the credit system in the United States is that it "entrenches and reinforces inequality by dictating a consumer's access to future opportunities."[0] This primarily affects minorities, though anyone in poverty suffers from the credit rating system.

In regards to scoring, its complex, but generally: pay your debts on time and on schedule. Importantly, do not pay off loans early. You'll get positive points for eliminating debt, even early, but more positive points for paying the maximum interest the bank would like to earn from the money they loan you.

0. https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/credit_discrimination/Past_I...

Google has done the same thing to Nest Secure. I removed an ADT system from my office because the monthly monitoring from ADT was $39.99 - the ADT system came with the office. I installed the Nest Secure cameras and system myself, even running USB power outside the office through the masonry. The monitoring was adequate - notifications sent to my phone - and Internet storage pricing was acceptable. But as of April 2024 the service is being shut down and I can opt to have an ADT system installed - a $485 value! - and pay a monthly monitoring fee. (Or I can receive a $200 credit on the Google store, presumably to buy some other technology they are going to sunset.)

Though its a current trend, these high stack running shoes have been around for over a decade. My running group has oscillated between this style of shoe (Hoka), NB, Brooks, and minimalist shoes. I've ran over 1,000 miles in all the major brands, the Hokas are really comfortable. I've also had severe rolled ankles because I primarily run trails. I'd say my last injury in Hokas on trail was on par with a similar injury using Merrell/Vibram sole minimalist shoes. I haven't had an IT band injury recurrence in the Hokas yet and I am approaching over 2K miles between street and trail running so as far as that goes I'm happy with them. (As any runner who is addicted to running knows, IT band injuries are the absolute worst and its important to do everything you can do to avoid them, except of course running.)

Hokas, not sure if there are any copycat competitors in the space, there probably are.

In the late 80s and early 90s the way I got punk was at local stores that sold vinyl - usually punk rock only, or in the 90s both punk and ska. It was inconvenient because as a teen I'd want to listen to my music on cassette with a Walkman but not every band could afford a cassette release - especially local punk bands. So intentional listening became a part of my music culture.

I still have a record player I bought years ago and I listen to vinyl records on it from time to time. I will usually buy a record of an album that's particularly special to me. I've fought enough with jammed CD players to probably never consider the same approach with compact discs.

I came to this thread to say the military bases I was stationed on in the 90s had Hobby Shops where you could get free help from other [probably uncertified DIYers] mechanics and it was the way you did car maintenance if you were enlisted. (Turns out ~$800 a month didn't go very far, even in the 90s!)

But weird coincidence, a few minutes ago I purchased some Park Tools bicycle repair tools to perform some maintenance on my mountain bike after watching a couple of their videos.

Though this is usually how it goes - big successful companies begin to bend towards regulatory capture after having their period of upstart growth and disruption. They make as much money as possible for shareholders on their cash cow and its management culture's primary objective to make sure this is not disturbed.

Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect search, but search wasn't their core competency.

Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.

> There’s no dent

By the time there is a dent, it's too late.

Most likely. I worked at a political company (eww) that used this data up to two years after it was generated. The historical data is more useful for political markets for advertising issues than near real time since campaign targeting usually needs to be performed or at least planned a few weeks in advance. Near real time is great for message tweaking but knowing whether there's a receptive demographic is historical.

It's less about rural population and more about smaller metro populations. Places where there aren't bike lanes - where people on mopeds are really risking their lives trying to go twelve miles. The rural population quote of 17% are legitimately rural counties where population density below a certain point exists. Most smaller metro counties have rural infrastructure supporting a higher population density and simply are not safe for bikes, and a large number of people who are classified as urban are the people making up the population in metro counties. The US Census classifies as rural and urban so it's really hard to know exactly what, but assuming that anyone living in an urban area who is physically capable of doing so could ride a bike is incorrect.