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d0ugie

278 karma · joined August 21, 2013

The rent is too damn high!
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d0ugie··on NYC Police Union Reducing Number of “Get Out of Jail Free” Courtesy Cards (2018)
Does it have to be so sinister? Were you a trooper doing speed enforcement, what would you care whether someone give fifty bucks three years ago to your agency's own union, or the FOP? If you are like other union members I've known, you might resent your union for not sticking their neck out for you enough, or for negotiating a weaker contract whatever you had before you unionize, overpromising and underdelivering and so on, the first thing secured during a contract negotiation being automatic dues deductions from your paycheck. Or maybe you like the union, but the "optics" of these stickers is not doing rank and file police any favors, mainly just the often AFL-CIO-affiliated unions themselves.

So Billy BMW clocks in at a brisk but almost reasonable 120mph as he was at least using his turn signals, you chase him down, you "light him up," then you see a union supporter sticker, would that sticker more likely than not work to his advantage with your discretion, because he may have kicked in a few bucks, or by the time you began interacting with this person, wouldn't other things, like his pulling far enough over to minimize your exposure to traffic and so on, matter more? These stickers offer utility not limited to bids for latitude, including political statements, that yes I think the police union, the most vilified institution in the US, is worth defending, and at the risk of getting my car keyed I will stick it on and hope others give money too. Another utility perhaps, maybe it's a signal to cops that, when they pull you over, run your plate and see that you have a CCW permit, that if you concern yourself in any way with police unions, you might be a little more likely not to try to shoot your way out of a ticket as you decide with how much caution you need to approach.

Besides, I routinely see people with these stickers and emblems and thin blue line things driving way too slow. Perhaps they like I do feel that there has been a war on police and it is a thing to push back on, on a flag mast on one's house, in Thanksgiving dinner table arguments, and yes, the bumper of one's car.

d0ugie··on Google Image Search Tools not staying active with new searches
Yandex images preserves filters, and lets you specify dimensions.
d0ugie··on Capitol Police rejected offers of federal help to quell rioting
Reminds me of the reluctance in 2008 of the healthier banks to accept capital injections they didn't need to serve as cover for the banks that did, sort of. On top of concern for appearances of not needing it, one reason that may have been argued was that they would presumably be pressured by the feds along populist lines, like bonuses. Not the best comparison.
d0ugie··on N.Y.P.D. Says It Used Restraint During Protests. Here’s What the Videos Show
Case closed then, F policing as a profession and everyone who sees it as a vital component to a civilized society? NYPD are well aware that they are vulnerable to this virus and in turn to spreading it not just to you but to other cops, but in order to keep a lid on rioting, while growing increasingly shorthanded in number, in tools, maneuvers, plainclothes units, or effecting arrests (regardless of the disinterest in those being prosecuted), they need all the oxygen they can get. I'm not saying that $42,500 is not enough money in NYC, just that this is an exigent need for oxygen, not biological warfare.
d0ugie··on I Built Coronavirus Live Monitor – stats, news, and press releases in one place
https://talksub.com/covid19 is the best I've found for the US, breaking figures down I think to the county level, with sources. For the world, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (if you just want the numbers, not a map), fairly detailed. Though following sites like these gets scary fast...
d0ugie··on Let's Encrypt certificate issuance was down
Is there a detour here or is using letsencrypt reliant on these apis?

https://medium.com/enigma-shards/lets-encrypt-uptime-and-ope...

d0ugie··on Uber makes JFK airport helicopter taxis available to all users
This is a rather imperfect comparison, but to try to answer whether the tech is mature enough yet, the Sikorsky 61N in its Pan Am configuration could ferry 25 passengers plus some luggage (though capable of 39 passengers), with a max range of up to 450NM, requiring about 2 megawatts give or take, fuel weighing up to 4000 lbs.

The Sikorsky Firefly is a one-passenger electric helicopter, one of not that many electric helicopters, with a max takeoff weight of about 2K lbs, a little more than one pilot's worth of weight between MTW and its empty weight (no passengers). Over half its weight, 1150 out of 2050 lbs, is comprised of its two batteries, burning up to 140kW for 15 minutes max (IE, not flying like Airwolf).

So the technology is there to make the electric flight about one way before a long recharge with one very wealthy passenger and no cargo provided the passenger is the pilot, presuming the batteries are replaced regularly and it's not too cold.

Maybe they should use solar paneling for the rotor blades? ;)

https://evtol.news/aircraft/sikorsky-firefly/ http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/acdata_s61n_en.php

d0ugie··on It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
It's all gravy, the javascript WebP decoders, until you convert your 20K high res photo site to WebP, then not realizing for a week, scratching your head about the bounce rate spiking, that you're crashing browsers left and right...
d0ugie··on Google Is Eating Our Mail
But it's not just postfix or sendmail you need to configure correctly and then put apt-get update/upgrade -y in cron to avoid the damage caused by making a mistake or falling asleep at the wheel. Casual self-hosters have other vectors of attack to mitigate, for example making sure sasl or whatever they may be using for imaps auth is solid, that passwords are strong and routinely changed, that php is also tight and so on. The stakes are relatively high, the efforts to compromise systems for this and other purposes are voluminous and incessant. So I'd say "it takes a village" to do this safely enough, not individual enthusiasts who cannot commit to administering a server diligently.
d0ugie··on Julian Assange arrested in London
Whenever the government Al Capones someone, which ought to be a verb, it's a reminder to me that due to a legislative and prosecutorial discretion excesses combined with politics that those of us who aren't 100% squeaky clean are unjustly vulnerable to judicial creativity run amuck. If you've got a Snowden or an Assange you want to lock up with all keys thrown away, stick to charges along the lines of espionage etc; and if you cannot prove those charges, too bad - don't attempt to railroad them for paying a nanny under the table. Not that there's anything forgiveable about nanny tax evasion, but I'm bothered by byproducts of affording too much discretion in the judicial system.
d0ugie··on Blocking high-risk non-secure downloads
You are baffled that they reacted this way, that you became the villain? It's hard sometimes, but I've found it helpful to try to perceive both myself and the digital obstacles from the shoes of users I'm trying to help (calibrating more as I proceed), and adjust myself accordingly.

Affording someone the ability to save face is among the reasons to consider making a private approach. And when irritated, slighted or indignant, when amped up somehow, not disengaging to cool down is the sort of thing I tend to regret.

It's a tall order to expect people to interpret an offer to steal passwords in a coffee shop to assert their need of your acumen as a beneficent act.

d0ugie··on Show HN: What's My Aircraft?
I feed ADSB data I collect with an antenna sticking out the attic window to FlightAware and a handful of others. Not sure why I do that, maybe the attic is an escape from my ol' lady, but I'm glad to learn it's going toward a good cause!

Speaking of grounding the 737 MAX, I should probably ground that antenna...

d0ugie··on Missouri Police Search for Marijuana in a Stage 4 Cancer Patient's Hospital Room
Perhaps the less discretion and selective enforcement we afford police, prosecutors and judges, the more productive we will be in improving the array of laws they are tasked to enforce.

On the other hand, homegrown weed is one of those things the Supreme Court, such as it is, needs to use words like "aggregate" to square federal regulation of it with the Commerce Clause, which is poppycock.

d0ugie··on Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub
> .. trust Microsoft more

ducks in advance - I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP, mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85% of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded.

All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic win-win for everybody.

I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to that.

Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and "keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield.

I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests.

That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers everybody!

edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong and it could help me wake up.

d0ugie··on A Portable Cloud Experiment: SFTP Cloud Storage Sync
I just discovered the joys of sshfs which lets you mount whatever you can ssh/sftp into. What'll they think of next.. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
d0ugie··on Bitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ stress power grids in Central Washington
According to this Q&A from the IRS, yes, miners are on the hook: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf:

A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. (...)

A-9: If a taxpayer’s “mining” of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the “mining” activity is not undertaken by the taxpayer as an employee, the net earnings from self-employment (generally, gross income derived from carrying on a trade or business less allowable deductions) resulting from those activities constitute self-employment income and are subject to the self-employment tax.

d0ugie··on IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
Perhaps fairly inevitable eventual breaches of client data are more forgivable when a given firm can point to efforts such as this as evidence of having tried to keep a lid on leaks, and to elevate confidence that it is less likely to happen.

From what I've seen some firms' internal security practices in general seem more to be about appearances whereas other firms tighten and scrutinize everything as if the company's reputation and survival depended on it.

d0ugie··on Why dumb recruits cost the Army, big-time (2006)
You mean in retrospect? Or was that the prevailing opinion of citizens at the time that had anything to do with trade or total war?
d0ugie··on Gitea: Open source, self-hosted GitHub alternative
I like open source self-hosted alternatives to everything, though some headhunters, for those looking for work, may either ask for your github link or figure it out themselves in order to further size you up, one possible utility specific to github.
d0ugie··on Goldman Sachs to Open a Bitcoin Trading Operation
Goldman is experimenting, not smelling big bucks. Other firms, namely JPMorgan, won't touch bitcoin for the same reasons they train every employee over and over how to stay away from money laundering red flags. Banks have populist targets on their backs, getting involved with Bitcoin elevates the bright redness of those targets. But Goldman is uniquely smart and I'm intrigued. Guess I'll add them as a custom Google News section...
d0ugie··on The War on Waze
No, your first instinct was right, as I have other options, greener options, that include mass transit as well as, I suppose, video conferencing, but opting instead to drive, that makes me part of the problem.

I don't know why but that never occurred to me until now. So surely this isn't the only related area in which I have room for improvement.

d0ugie··on The War on Waze
I was going to cite crosstown traffic on a bus to get from the 125th Park Ave station to the 90s on West End and back but Google Maps is showing that if I took the 4 train to 149th to catch the 2 back down to 96th I'd come out ahead time-wise (and without road rage) versus driving. Nice, thanks buddy!
d0ugie··on The War on Waze
I drive from Connecticut to Manhattan and back during rush hour and have been reliant on Waze's aggressive and inventive routing decisions that often take me through quiet neighborhoods to hop from one highway to another, dodging traffic jams I presume. It almost always gets me there by its eta.

On one hand I'm sympathetic to these people (my wife and I are house-shopping and one of our factors is the house being on a quiet road, also I don't particularly like out-of-state drivers in my town, for example New Yorkers don't realize you can turn on red in Connecticut, drives me nuts), on the other hand I can't be late to my shrink sessions - my guy ain't cheap!

d0ugie··on 'No to sex on roundabouts', Norway tells high school graduates
Roundabout sex ain't what it used to since I got hitched... Nor is her cooking.
d0ugie··on CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant Strides
Hadn't heard of Cockroach but based on the article, this thread and the rest of their site it sounds at least worth installing on a few hobby nodes if only to get familiar with the behavior and configuration should a need arise - like Cassandra was years ago when I had already on my own learned the gist of it, sort of a road not taken relative to my then-firm's usual prescriptions (MySQL and Mongo), it turned out to be perfect for my team's needs (paperwork to get permission to use it notwithstanding). Thanks for posting and good luck!
d0ugie··on Non-Consensual Intimate Image Pilot
That sounds like a solution to me, it satisfies whatever the need is for human involvement while enabling the user to redact the weaponizable elements of the picture.
d0ugie··on How to Interpret Site Performance Tests
Any particular recommendations for doing this?
d0ugie··on How to Interpret Site Performance Tests
Amazing how many e-commerce sites there are out there with time to first byte in excess of 3s, DOM loads over five seconds, as if they have no idea they are throwing away sales and killing their SERP ranks. And the fixes quite often don't require money or that much skill, just a little help from something like Varnish in many cases.

Is the only good way for me to use QUIC with NGINX (or any server that can deliver most of what NGINX does) to use GoQuic and quick-reverse-proxy from github? I realize that, I assume due to the protocol being quite different and using UDP, that it may require a lot of from-scratch retooling by the NGINX devs to light it up (otherwise we'd have had it from them long ago, I imagine), but we need to cut down on round trips baby. Would be nice if Google were to give https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/tools/quic/ an update with a happy .deb to get it running. Kind of a funny page for google not to serve with quic, guess they like a little irony.

Further parenthetically, I am all in favor of Google making the web better both with things like protocol development, pagespeed, image and video things, and also with search signals that give sites with https and speed a ranking boost. Money talks.

d0ugie··on Broadening HSTS to secure more of the Web
I'd wager this sort of aggressive and possibly effective mass nudging toward effective encryption will lead to China further isolating itself from the rest of the Internet.
d0ugie··on Text-only NPR
Google's Pagespeed gods approve! https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
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