jeffrallen

Make time to listen to Dolly Parton's America podcast:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

The O in "occupy mars" is actually a coconut.

Top comment is a chemist explaining aromatics and seal compatibility. Fourth comment starts with "part time coconut farmer here".

I <3 you HN, never change.

Fine article, though it ended on a low note with the comment about cryptography engineers gatekeeping the technology.

I have worked on high stakes crypto code. Getting it right requires a level of knowledge, care and engineering conservativism that is very hard to come by. I was teaching students. I wasn't gatekeeping. But a vanishingly small percentage of them were able to make secure software, or analyze existing code to know if it was secure.

In as much as AI coding makes testing or code verification cheaper, sure let's use it. But cryptography engineering is hard for reasons that are not "write moar code" and so AI coding should not be used on production crypto work.

Sigh. The error was made by the humans. Full stop.

"Showstopper" is the book that explains this time in Microsoft's history. An excellent read.

So broken. Sorry for you.

MeteoSwiss has an app, which sends geo-specific weather alerts, using the normal handheld notification system. You opt-in by installing it. Simple. No nonsense.

I'm so lucky to have competent bureaucrats.

Indeed. An excellent sailor, an excellent prof, and an excellent woman.

As long as they are owned by a 5-eyes nation, there's no alternative they can offer.

Instead, look to Exoscale, Proton, Infomaniak, or Scaleway.

Disclaimer: I work for one of 'em.

You know, we don't actually have to do this. The people could block the gates and prevent the delivery of the turbines. The local fire department could fail their inspection and prevent the gas from being turned on. The UPS could "mysteriously" go up in smoke during it's commissioning.

None of this is preordained. We, the phyical persons, can choose how we want to live, and what constraints the corporate persons must accept.

...or "the UPS batteries caught on fire", or "the first unit failed and the contractor who was supposed to replace it replaced the second one instead, resulting in an outage".

Or something as stupid as, "vendor requires $50 failed DIMM replaced under warranty to be returned by UPS instead of chucked into the e-waste bucket, but UPS cannot pick up from DC because the driver can't be bothered to ring the bell on the DC gate".

That one alone probably resulted in our longest ever ticket.

The physical world sucks.

pets.com has entered the chat.

Today I added a temporary data source to Prometheus to help me monitor a system closely during a tricky ops task. I would not have done that except that the LLM gave me a small script I could quickly check and immediately use. Without it, I'd have roughly spot checked the service via "tail -f".

Our company's policy on LLM use is: use it, disclose it, and take responsibility for the code you commit.

There's no way that typing that tool back in would have done anything useful for me or my organization.

Companies that use riddles get the employees they deserve.

I know, and worse yet, LISTENING. Ugh. /s

Feels like SF Standard gonna get a copyright strike from The Onion for this headline.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Thank you for this.

Also, I'll never use it.

Because a language feature that needs marketing is against readability, among those in my target audience who have not yet read the marketing.

I need my shell scripts to be long enough to explain to my audience exactly what they are doing.

A colleague gave his first ever lightning talk about this at a work retreat and it was SMASHING.

> Have a strong anti-counterfeit strategy. Don’t overlook this.

Hope we can read more about this.

Practical Engineering already explained the correct solution to this problem:

https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=UUlmnk9sI-leq0SV

But of course, American infrastructure was built on the cheap, and is not maintained correctly. This is why we can't have nice things.

Right, and good luck getting a correct bill from Azure. And when you are finally fed up, it will take months to close your Azure account.

When something surprises and delights me, I tell it. Why not, it lifts my own mood to say something nice.

Yeah, sure totally the same thing, dude.

Yeah, at $WORK, the incident doc has a section for corrective actions. And they mostly get done, but having them struggle for priority with regular work is a problem.

Also, it occurs to me that we leaders should do a better job of saying, "look at that excellent job of attacking that corrective item that team just did!" so that it's clear to people that this is not clean-up work, but in fact the most essential kind of tech debt that's actively being paid down, which identified itself as such by causing an outage.

Cheese warehouse: the feta buckets always leaked onto to wooden pallets, making an unholy stink.

My step dad's worst was shoveling iron shot used to grind cement out of the grinder, lifting them up over his head, next to the kiln on an already boiling hot Californian summer day.

Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.

You might enjoy the book Escher Gödel Bach, the Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, which will open up the world, power, and "danger" of proofs using contradiction to you.

Bonne lecture !

Discrete math and Algorithms were two of my favorite college classes. They were really the only part of computer science that was mind blowing. The rest was software engineering, which was transparently "possible". Like, yes, big programs and OSs and numerical models exist, and yes I will graduate and work with them and add to them, someday, yeah sure.

But decidabilty, Godel's theorm, busy beaver numbers, etc... those were unexpected and worth the price of admission.

Thanks Prof Hadas, you made it fun to have my mind blown.

War is a racket.