makr17

I remember being in Tel Aviv for work, and pulling up maps to plot out a bike route from the hotel to the office. Only to find that the entire route is blurred out online. Turns out our office was a few 100 meters from something important to the IDF, so no map/route data available. Too far to reasonably walk, and didn't want to try a bike without knowing there was a reasonable route...

I still remember being "invited" to a meet-and-greet with the VP of Tech at my college after a fork bomb run amok. 17yo me was sure my academic career was at an end. He let me sweat for a few of minutes and then smiled and offered me a job. <whew>

I'm working on something similar. My biggest annoyance is that the overly-helpful LLM was making every die roll succeed. I ended up building some tooling around rolling dice. Also some tooling around character stats and inventory management, so those don't get lost in context compression.

Presumably stack depth and overflow.

I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.

I remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.

In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."

My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.

Coming up on 20 years ago I was building a system that was going to be deployed at various locations throughout a very large country. All locations had internet access; but the throughput, latency, and quality (e.g. packet drops) were all over the map.

For testing we ended up building a small linux box to proxy for the test environment in the office. We could throttle the throughput to any arbitrary level, introduce latency, and introduce packet drops. It's amazing how poorly a frontend will work when you throttle the network to 128kbps, and introduce a small percentage of dropped packets. But once you get the system to work (for some definition of "work") under those conditions you feel pretty good about deploying it.

California has a low-double-digit percentage of the US population, and mandates organic waste separation/collection.

https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/

Years ago I worked for a company that bought another company. Our QA folks were asked to give their site a once-over. What they found is still the butt of jokes in my circle of friends/former coworkers.

* account ids are numeric, and incrementing

* included in the URL after login, e.g. ?account=123456

* no authentication on requests after login

So anybody moderately curious can just increment to account_id=123457 to access another account. And then try 123458. And then enumerate the space to see if there is anything interesting... :face-palm: :cold-sweat:

My favorite example of this sort of thing has been In My Tribe by 10000 Maniacs. The UPC/Catalog Number remained the same between the 1987 release and the removal of Peace Train (track 7) in 1989. I have this memory of sifting through the stock at a large used CD store in the mid-90s hoping to find the pre-removal version.

> it was a good decade before they even admitted Perl 6 might take longer than expected

I was there at OSCon when Larry announced Perl6, and that it would be "out by Christmas". And I was there the next year, when he was asked about that, and cheekily replied "well, we never specified _which_ Christmas."

I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?

A former manager once told me

> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.

We have the Enhanced Games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games), so we already have an alternative Olympics that definitely includes medical companies.

All of them? It's gotten so bad that I remapped the Netflix button on the Shield remote to mute the receiver. The remote has volume up/down buttons, but no mute, and ads are _so_ loud now.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

--James D. Nicoll

This. "Scam resistance", in my mind, maps to critical thinking and a bit of pattern matching. Could definitely be taught, but critical thinking seems to be out of favor in (American) education at the moment (and has been for a while, honestly).

As with most things, it depends. If you truly do understand something, then you can derive a required result from first principles. _Given sufficient time_. Often in an exam situation you are time-constrained, and having memorized a shortcut cut be beneficial. Not to mention retaining is much easier when you understand the topic, so memorization becomes easier.

Better than one company I was at. Wednesday-evening meeting to announce that there will be layoffs. "If you are affected you will receive an email by 7am EST tomorrow." Which I summarized in slack as

"Sleep well Wesley, I'll likely kill you in the morning."

Nobody is getting good sleep that night, at least until the doom hour has passed without an email.

At the start of Covid lockdown my group at work started having a daily "drinking alone together" afternoon Google Meet.

When that job ended, our household started drinking on our front porch in the afternoons. Soon a few neighbors started doing the same, and we got close enough (15-20 feet) to trade cell numbers. After that we would text back and forth to communicate during "distanced happy hour".

The friendships we made drinking _not_ together have lasted, and we still count those neighbors as friends...

I remember my junior high maths well enough, allowing division by zero is an essential step in proving that 1 == 2, which we _definitely_ don't want.

Interesting, I would have said Boyce-Codd unless you have a good reason to vary in either direction.

I haven't worked with sqlplus in forever, and I'm much happier for it. But back in the day we would wrap sqlplus with socat to add readline behaviors.

Reminds me of one of my Maths professors in college, Ben Freedman. He was a writer and an engineer until his son Michael started asking math questions that dad couldn't answer. So he went back for his PhD in his 40s. Michael ultimately won a Fields Medal.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/9of84w/ne...

Rings true for me. In my younger days I was "privileged" to catch an early morning flight to San Jose with a stack of tapes that I then drove to Palo Alto. All because a RAID array had gone kaput and tapes in a carry-on provided better bandwidth than the upstream from the office where our backups were.

The last three jobs I've held, I've had to state up front in writing that I will continue to act as the paid IT support for my spouse's one-person consulting firm. Hasn't been an issue yet.

Three jobs ago I also had a very small side consulting gig that came along after I'd been hired, so I had to get it cleared. It was at the behest of one of their board members though, so it really wasn't a hassle...

Watching that, I couldn't help but remember my father (who hasn't worked for Boeing since before I was born) saying in the mid-90s:

> McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money, which is a great trick if you can pull it off.

I don't have an automated garage door opener. The only "garage" is as old as our historic house, and is a glorified shed. I would never put a car I cared about in it.

That said, I _do_ have an automated gate controller. The installer wanted some insane amount to connect it to wifi. Politely no. An esp32, a couple of relays, some reading in the installation manual about control circuits and a bit of custom code... And now the gate is on local wifi, easily integrated with HA, and nothing opaque about it.

Do garage door openers have the same sort of control circuits?

92%, 2 perfect.