foobarian

Wow seeing that hit me surprisingly hard. Such good times

I like to say, AI is the duck programming duck I always wanted

The most interesting honey I had was "forest honey," which bees don't make from flowers at all.

Heh I thought like you until we had kids. The 6th graders now are all "bro this," "bro that." And it's not even the usual English "bro," it's a slightly Aussified "broah" like it has a weird umlaut. I resigned to just roll with it. "Begging the question," though, that's a hill I will die on.

Wow that is a good way to describe it. For me it's constant coffee, or chocolate, or chips.

> nodes running VMs,

huh, but how would bursting work then? Do VMs support it nowadays?

It's like unit tests and integration tests!

Not to detract from your point but the Bialettis also let you make a great cafecito

Yes, on the surface the religion is the textbook antithesis of free thought. And yet I think my friend was getting at something deeper I can't quite pin down easily. Maybe it was just a lucky combination of aristocrat philosophers justifying their pursuits? Then there was the Enlightenment thing...

Wait a minute, if this is on AWS then what are we talking about? On-prem k8s sounds fine to me but you don't have the ECS option.

That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."

What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It's a shame the incentives don't seem to be there for it.

Not JS but I like having explicit return var assignments because it's easier to break on and inspect. I don't know why tools don't make this easier.

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank

I wonder who would prosecute them. What about an AG who, when confronted about doing a bad job, deflects by pointing out that Nasdaq is "smashing records?"

It's worth noting that the common complaint about systems like this, which is that they could cause dangerous conditions during power outages when people expect the power lines to be unpowered, is addressed by electronics that only feed power when they detect an active mains.

You have to just close your eyes and hum a requiem for the glory days. Like I do when questions are begged

Dams are just too good a source to ban them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station 60 GW planned capacity!

And who gets paged when the Claude integration fails?

At least this site managed to not get shut down because it appears to foster timely communication to cybercriminals :D

The build quality and least-nonsense OS is why I like it. Huge caveat though, I keep it plugged into a KVM setup so I don't actually use it directly, but I do keep it open on the side of my desk for meetings.

Not sure how Hetzner works, but do they have IDRAC type access to their servers and/or remote hands available to fix stuff? Guess you'd be on the hook for that sort of thing here, making the Hetzner price more appealing if they do include that kind of functionality.

I got into software because being an introvert, I always had trouble dealing with people and here were computers that always unquestioningly and faithfully obeyed all commands and that level of control always appealed to me.

Yet I like planting stuff and gardening as well - why? I think it's a side effect of growing up with parents and grandparents who did that sort of thing as a hobby and I feel it's a bit of a comfort zone for me.

It's worth mentioning that in many cases there is also the incentive to get away from Google's stranglehold on incoming traffic. Every app install is a path to your product that does not go through Google's SEO or SEM funnel.

My cynical take is that the 20th century exhausted the major scientific discoveries that move various global needles, and now doing well at fostering science matters less.

In the past, if you neglected your institutes and academia, what happened? A rival state got electricity/cars/nuclear weapons first and you would be SOL.

These days, what happens? They invent faster phones? Higher res video?

This take may be a bit hyperbolic but I find it's a good thought exercise prompt.

> Batteries have gotten so cheap

Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.

If they manage to bag a platinum asteroid all bets are off

You jest, but I ended up getting a lot of use out of being able to do this in software for a dimmable LED lamp. Dimming the LED required PWM, and the potentiometer resistance -> PWM frequency map ended up fairly intricate to make the knob "feel right."

Now what I would have loved to have done is come up with some crazy analog circuit to implement an arbitrary transfer function from potentiometer input to LED voltage, but I didn't know how to do this at the time and the dev cycle would be a lot more painful than with software.

I picture a scene with Richard Crenna knocking on our old fogey's cabin door to ask us to come out of retirement and help hand-optimize software in this new environment

> sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

How so? The narrowest point is still 20 miles wide. Is there a deepwater lane that's narrower than that, but still impacted with a wreck?