jmbwell

On behalf of my late mother, these look impossible to clean

Okay, well, that’s clever for now. The real arbitrage base is pulling is getting in while there’s capital to be raised for it and money to be extracted from the market, before competitors emerge and the incumbents respond and everyone realizes the play all along was to build an enormous battery plant without the expenses of land and compliance and negotiating with producers and carriers. They’re in the buying low phase now.

They’ll sell high when PE buys the company and pulls a Broadcom on all the existing customers, who will abandon the equipment after ten years go back to installing Tri-fuel generators while Centerpoint deals B2B with serious battery plant operators instead of B2C with annoying consumers

Customers running batteries they don’t own to store energy they can’t use for a company that won’t share profits is not the future.

Vermont’s project might be more viable, they’re a little better able to see beyond a spreadsheet up there. California will regulate it into unsustainable price territory. In the meantime finbros in Texas will make a killing having Claude build badass dashboards to show how much they make off bored suburbanites stuck on a grid built and operated as cheaply as possible to take as much money as they can before the useless state government is run out on a rail or finally eats the last bite of its own ass

Since you ask

Base power is doing something similar in Texas. AFAICT, they take a loss on the equipment, charge the batteries when electricity prices are cheap, then sell power out of the batteries when prices are high and keep the difference. The homeowner enjoys only most likely having backup power.

I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.

AI apps are flooding everything. No doubt they are using or planning to use AI to help manage the load.

And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.

I was once in a position to relay the sleeping-in-conference rooms situation to such a leader. The tone of surprise, confusion, frustration, and more than faint contempt in his voice as he said “everyone got paid didn’t they?” stays with me

Money solves all their problems, if it doesn’t solve everyone else’s then fuggem

Truly a concrete jungle where dreams are made of

AIUI a “markup” language is for applying structured enhancement to a document containing effectively arbitrary contents. An unstructured source, but we need to add some structured components. Obviously today it has all reverted to a structured document object model, but one of the insights of HTML was, at least in the era of gopher and ftp, the system shouldn’t interfere with the data more than it needs to. If I write up a nicely formatted RFC text file, and I want to put it on the World Wide Web, I shouldn’t have to translate the whole thing to some other language. With HTML, I could, in a structured way that remains independent of the structure of my document, add enough bits to make it work with the World Wide Web. I could, in other words, take my already formatted and structured document, and mark it up with metadata.

At the time this “markup” concept got everyone all excited. But it ended up not being the way to solve problems like what you seem to describe, which don’t have the arbitrary document aspect at all.

Which is exactly my point. Markup and structured data are different. Even at the time of XML’s reign, there were plenty of established ways to serialize and exchange structured data.

Trying to solve a structured data problem with a markup language is how the markup language as a concept got contorted into a data structure system that was simultaneously both too flexible and arbitrary and too maddeningly rigid.

JSON solves it by being a data structure first and last.

It’s such a product of “Ooh! Markup languages! What can we use a markup language to solve!” When authentication is just not a document or data stream that needs marked-up.

The article rightly connects this to XML, which was indeed the hammer to everything’s nail at the time

I think we aren’t done with this problem yet, though. OIDC makes a lot of assumptions in service to Google and others. And tailscale as mentioned, despite “holding the line,” already reveals the cracks when things like GitHub accounts have to be treated differently from others.

What we are missing is a provider-independent way to do this. I should be able to create an account and log in just about anywhere using a backend I control. It can be done, but not with what we have today

I love it. My PDP-11 has some fault that keeps it blowing fuses. Emulators don’t feel the same. Real hardware doing the work, well done

I just watched through this over the summer. It’s a fascinating specimen of a show. I am highly confident much of the Austin Powers aesthetic is borrowed from this, from the featureless suit coats to the everyone-is-mad-sexy to the swinging soundtrack.

It’s a Gerry Anderson production, so lots of great Thunderbirds-style miniatures too. And wild cars. All the action sequences have the delightful feel of an eight year old playing with toys. In fact a lot of it seems to have a fun child’s-idea aspect. “And it’s part submarine and part fighter jet! And they slide down chutes into the cockpit! And his office is a secret elevator! And all the grownups are doing computer things! And to get a whiskey you push a whiskey button! And the whole thing is under a movie studio!”

But god yes, Stryker’s family story is harsh. Way overbearing the trope that he’s such a powerful dedicated man keeping the world safe that his utterly neglected family has to suffer so badly. Particularly when much of the time, he’s standing around the office smoking and drinking and asking the nearest woman to go fetch him some coffee. You thought you were getting a show about high tech futuristic alien defense. Well, you have to watch a lot of office banter too, that’s the deal.

Still, super stylish. And its cousin “Space: 1999” might be more interesting/bonkers sci-fi, but UFO (pronounced YOOFO) is just relentless with the looks and swagger. Each episode is worth watching for the intro alone.

This burden is on the site using passkeys. There should be some equivalent of “My Account > Security > Passkeys > Add Passkey.” There often isn’t, which is an incomplete implementation. And yes it’s frustrating.

I tell people a website is like a payment terminal. Your device is like your debit card. A password is like a PIN on the card. A Passkey is like a chip on the card.

Logging into a site with your device is like putting your card into the terminal. The site can ask for a password the way the terminal asks for a PIN, but if your device supports Passkeys, that’s like your card having a chip, and it’ll use that instead.

So think of Passkeys like using a chip card.

I dunno how well this analogy works down to the last detail but it has gotten it across to all the parents I’ve used it with

So use the recovery codes. Or scan the QR code and auth from another device

I’d buy that there are too many different confusing ways to recover from this situation, but not that it’s impossible

Another one of the underdogs I seem to like to pick. I find it so much more elegant than homebrew.

Fight the hegemony!

Thanks for this.

I’ll explain later

I forget where I read it but I have not forgotten that sometimes, a task reads as a threat. like, physiologically. Stack of unhandled tickets: menacing workload, guilt for being behind, internal judgment, fear of external judgment … fight or flight. Or difficult task: all the same things.

Or, and this was my own ah-ha moment: losing valuable context on where you are currently. Exiting one activity to start another, in the fear of losing progress and momentum on something you -did- manage to activate on. Not wanting to give up the -previous- victory over inertia.

So one of the many things I can try now (none of which ALWAYS work) is naming the physiological aspect. My body is recoiling as if I’m about to fight a bear. But do I actually see a bear? No. So shake it off

(And move on to the next procrastination complex…)

I was confused for half a sec also, as someone who often finds I will do anything other than what I need to be doing

I think it’s meant to be an example of a more, “see problem → fix problem” kind of approach

The number of times when something minor has been suboptimal, like a TV being on a dumb channel or an appliance beeping or something on the floor being in the way, and just … nobody wants to do anything about it when it would take mere seconds to deal with it…

I think activation energy is real for most people. It’s certainly very real for me

Procrastinators HATE this one weird trick!

Hear hear. Although being great at something and being a great parent do not have to be mutually exclusive.

You can work yourself to death with or without kids. You can also have a successful career and a great relationship with your family.

This whole premise that one must come at the expense of the other seems like rationalizing, or excuse-making, or maybe just another caustic result of capitalism.

And even if the drive to compete is so real, why stop at competing for either/or? Why not compete at being a whole person according to your own values?

To hell with anyone who says you can’t have the life you want. Win at being yourself.

Solaris family kernels move this problem to run/allocation time, instead of waiting for the system to become unusable before trying to do something about it. Kinda nice

Okay. Well so if the model will tend to converge on the median of a user’s interests as measured by engagement… the user would have to depart from the recommendations to increase the odds of being recommended something surprising, no?

It’s interesting to see how Netflix evaluates RecSys internally, inferring from how they are comparing GenRec to it. In both cases the premise seems to be that users mainly want to engage with more of the same.

I would be even more interested in some kind of comparison to Netflix’s much earlier system for exchanging reviews and recommendations among a user’s human social group. Seems like there could be some insights around the input of fresh signals from aligned but not strictly conforming participants.

I wrestle with this also. A colleague pointed out that LLMs reduce language choice to an implementation detail… don’t have to know assembly to write python, and now you don’t have to know python to write a functional app. So why stick with python when rust might be better? Leave that to the LLM and let your engineering effort go toward designing the app instead of operating a programming language.

In which case yeah, projects are likely to converge on whatever pattern LLMs broadly fall into. But maybe that part doesn’t really matter. Not every project needs the engineer to care about that. If I’m not writing hardware level code, I don’t care what instructions my python compiles to, either.

Meanwhile nothing prevents someone from caring about these details if wanted or needed. Someone who knows and cares might absolutely do a better job than an LLM. Those people won’t necessarily go away.

But there -will- be a whole new category of software contributors who have ideas they don’t know how to express in a software language. Those ideas might well be very tasteful. So it could be argued that software development as a field will gain access to a whole new range of tastes.

I don’t know the answers but it all seems plausible

Someone with questions about this excerpt of Sontag on taste would do well to read the rest of the work, which does a fuller job of drawing distinctions between sensibilities like taste, and systematic ideas like good/bad, morality, relativism, mathematics, proofs, and wrong/right.

One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the ideas were rooted in stability and permanence. The space was designed for its uses and its inhabitants.

More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.

Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters

Yeah this is all very regional too. Row houses in London and brownstones in New York or whatever won’t have front lawns as a function of density, but may have back yards or gardens, which may or may not be a function of producing your own food, which is all tied up in different experiences of war, while certainly countryside estates are for form more than function, while post war housing in the midwestern US was in part a build-on-your-lot market with houses literally ordered from a Sears catalog…

There’s definitely more to the story and there are myriad factors.

I guess I mean treat it as a clear first class feature. Right now most browsers treat it as an arcane error. I’m thinking more “This is the first time you’re connecting to this site. Do you trust it?”

And later if something changes, then they can do the whole DOING SOMETHING NASTY! thing, which is effectively the experience today

I don’t know much in this space, but I find myself wishing there was a dead simple self hosted CA solution and also that trust on first use (à la ssh) was A Thing for self-managed root certs in client implementations. TOFU is such an elegant, good-enough solution for these use cases. Fixed deployment is always still an option, but in this day and age it feels so much like we are unnecessarily still dealing with solved problems

I’m so almost here. The thing holding me back is projects that don’t do their own migrations reliably. Through no fault of their own, perhaps, though at this point I would argue LLMs should eliminate any good reason not to have alembic integrated or something. And even Home Assistant is bizarrely averse to fully automated system wide updates. Updating system and core and addons all independently is bonkers. But yes, the simplest implementation is often the best

I just caught myself thinking Pantos shouldn’t have answered the phone. Not in a blame the victim way, more in that never answering the phone is just good opsec at this point. The phone, the door, just don’t talk to a cop without a lawyer. They don’t come to you to be helpful to -you-.

Except in this case in a broader sense, we know about something we wouldn’t have otherwise