mdip

I suspect that the Nomad II would not have done as well as the first Dodge Caravan for the same reason that Minivans don't do well, now.

Stigma. It looked too much like a Station Wagon.

When I was a kid, the neighbors had a Caprice Classic Station Wagon with the third row backward facing seat. As a kid, I guess I loved the novelty of looking at the people behind us for some reason. My dad was buying a new car and I told him he should get one of those to which he replied "I'd never buy a station wagon."

To him, the station wagon was the "Soccer Mom" car; a car that -- driving it -- would have made him feel old, I guess[0]. I was surprised to hear the same sentiment about Minivans as I got older. Everyone saw them as a symbol of being tied in suburbia with a litter of kids. So they buy SUVs/crossovers, some of which are classified, ironically, as a Station Wagon.

Incidentally, I've owned a Grand Caravan. It was my favorite non-convertible car. It was like driving my living room, except that my couch doesn't have air conditioned or heated seats.

[0] I have all of zero enthusiasm about the car I drive. My first car was a convertible. Ever since ditching the convertible, I don't really care what I'm behind the wheel of.

LOL, though I didn't take a course in BASIC (AP CS was taught in Pascal), I swore up and down as a teenager that Pascal "would win" and put off learning C/C++ as a result.

It didn't hurt me much since I started writing software, professionally, in C#, which I'd started writing code in shortly after it was released. I'd even offer that my background in Pascal was relatively easily translated into C# once you get past the minor syntactical differences[0].

I think discovering how wrong I had been about Pascal's future is one of the reasons I don't fanboy programming languages. Don't get me wrong, I favor C#/TypeScript over nearly everything, but I recognize that's because those are the languages I understand the most, I understand their use cases and where there are better choices, but the best choice -- for me -- is the one(s) I know and there's plenty of jobs writing code in those languages.

[0] Keywords, braces were fine; I can't think of a difference that fundamentally bothered me other than `=`/`==` and `:=`/`=`. I'd often muscle-memory the `:=`. I can still hit all three required keys in almost one swipe.

   > Barely related.

Me too, but I had to reply to this one. (/shh .. it's got to be fair game with Pascal posts to talk about its history)

   > TP was my language for AP computer science in high school and I felt good about it.

Something tells me we graduated around the same time. ;)

I couldn't agree more. Were it not for Turbo Pascal and AP Computer Science, I can't imagine I'd have found myself writing software for a living. Writing code in Turbo Pascal at 7:10 AM in the morning under The Dzwon[0] was the best part of my childhood.

The language was amazing. For the first time in my life, I could instruct a computer to do something, hit F6 (I think) and get an executable file. It was like magic to my 8th grade eyes[1]. I remember hacking a BBS together and being frustrated at the paint speed, investigating, and discovering that I could just use inline assembly to write characters to the screen. The IDE had syntax highlighting, a compiler, and the standard library all fit on a floppy disk along with the source code we wrote in class. We learned on non-networked, IIRC IBM PS/2 512MB PCs with two internal 3.5" floppy drives and no hard disks.

It amazed me when I began my career at a telecom -- as a member of "IT Support" at the time -- that my first big project was installing Microsoft Visual Studio on 20 developer PCs so they could write code in Visual Basic. I hadn't been writing code professionally at that point but still tinkered in Borland Pascal with a little C++ and I'm thinking ... the professional world picked BASIC? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. In reality, we wrote nothing in VB; it was a one-off. And I also had no idea, at the time, exactly what "Visual Basic" was. I was just picturing that language my buddies with "Commodore 64"s used. In a lot of ways, VB and Pascal shared some things that aren't common in C-like langauges -- they both defaulted to case insensitive string comparisons and code[2].

[0] Over the years I've come to discover that HS Programming teachers tend to be a bit off. Ours was a single man who took off two weeks before the last day of school to spend his summer traveling internationally to places that aren't known for being tourist friendly.

[1] I had an odd childhood. My Dad and I built a PC a few years prior and he started a business for me to do so for others. We'd put in a bid to the district for a tech refresh. The CS teacher saw the name on the bid, realized he had my sister in class, talked to her and found out about me. I was invited to take the AP CS class over at the HS in exchange for an earlier morning, walking over to the JHS afterward as my "1st Hour".

[2] Gosh, it's been so long, I'm second-guessing that statement. I remember keywords and the like were not case sensitive and a few of us took to capitalizing them, making it look like our programs were yelling a lot but I had only passing exposure to VB in the form of VBS and (a lot less) VBA so it escapes me.

It's possible the price pop is happening because of people trying to find spare parts.

I can't speak to these specific devices because I haven't been doing infrastructure work since before 2015, but I recall the price of certain enterprise products would routinely skyrocket a few years after it became hard to find them. I recall having to source a replacement drive for a server at my Dad's company and discovering that finding any drive at least 4.5GB in capacity for this 15 year old server was challenging. I ended up having to buy a much larger drive at about twice the cost of a modern (at the time) enterprise-grade SAS drive.

I doubt my specific example is all that similar to what might be happening. In my case, it was a confluence of the usual suspects: RAID controllers that are very particular about the specific drive models/firmware versions that they work reliably with (which everyone else needs to replace their drives, too!) coupled with the server using a no-longer-common interface (SCA) and a drive tray specific to the vendor which was no longer a popular (and went Bankrupt)[0].

I suspect it's too soon for it to be that simple but I wonder if there are specific circumstances where "My Optane drive failed and replacing this drive at any cost is the only fix that gets me access to my data, again".

[0] Not important, but it was a Gateway brand server if you can believe it. And I ended up kludging the tray situation, anyway.

When I first encountered this phenomenon, it really annoyed me. Now that practically all of my audio connections are digital, it's so common that I don't really notice it.

Nice when something that's bothered me bothered someone else enough to fix it for me. :)

LOL, I did pretty much the same thing, just not for as long. I remember it took about a day after I had it installed that suddenly every house I was looking to buy "had to have @Home service" (there wasn't another provider where I was looking). I can't remember how long it took before it became a mild crisis when internet service was out.

Amazing how far things have come. I work at home, now. Late into the COVID lockdown, the $120/mo Business internet service that hasn't gone down since it was installed (like ten years ago?)[0], was intermittently down for a week, with some periods exceeding 24-hours[1]. I was already at a permanent remote work gig and though I could still write code, there were certain things that were impossible being unable to connect to anything.

I'm a cord cutter and this was COVID lock-down so nothing was open. With no internet/YouTube/TikTok/Snapchat/etc/etc/etc ... you'd think we were living under candle-light boiling water for a bath the way the kids were behaving (insult to injury, it was freezing outside, their mobile service was awful in the house so they were dry).

Seriously, though, there were moments during that week that I was like ... "so what now ... early bedtime?"

[0] Technically it went down once, shortly after install, when the service provider I had left had cut the wrong line while terminating my service. To my new provider's credit, they send someone out an hour after I called -- at 5:30 PM -- and fixed it without charge. They'd charge now, but everything goes downhill ...

[1] The reason I pay for the Business service is this reliability. I was told "when there's maintenance, they send an e-mail and it's late/over the weekend." My neighbors have lost service several times when I've been fine. There's "no guarantee service will always work" but the outage was caused by the provider botching a Gigabit upgrade that was supposed to be short/weekend/evening, customers were never notified about and ended up being a prolonged outage.

I couldn't even get 33.6k to work on my wiring.

The house wasn't that old but was old enough that the wiring was abysmal. You could easily understand conversations happening on one phone line from the other line. When someone was on the other line, I'd get a re-negotiate and sometimes drop to 21.6k (a reliable minimum just before I had broadband installed).

Those things were returned like crazy when I worked at CompUSA. I had never met a customer who had made one connect at 56K[0] and none of the staff -- all serious computer-nerds who spent much of their income at the store -- could get a 56K connection to anything.

I believe, also, that 33.6K is the speed you will get when you are connecting to another modem (ala a typical BBS). I'm foggy on the details, but my understanding is that to negotiate 56K, the other end of the conversation has to be digital[1].

[0] Admittedly, I quit before I had broadband and 56K was relatively new; maybe it got better, but I stopped paying attention.

[1] I did work in telecom, so I am cringing a little because I know that -- at a minimum -- that's a somewhat ridiculous over-simplification of several different things that I had regular, though casual, exposure to way too long ago to speak intelligently about, now.

Not fond memories of the early days of the internet (and to a greater extent, BBSes ... YModem-G FTW).

When I saw the title, I knew the real title was "Should I replace my 56K WinModem with the 28.8k U.S. Robotics modem that I used previously"

I ran a BBS in the early 90s back when my income was "whatever Mom would give me." When it came time to get my first job, I figured "CompUSA has an employee discount, I'm working there." The first serious purchase I made was a USR 16.8k modem to let me move my aging 9600 baud external to a second BBS node[0]. Employee discount was "at cost" which for a hot item like that, which was being sold at MAP price[1], meant it was like $5 less.

However, US Robotics occasionally sent a company rep[2] who informed me that I could get one for like $120 by filling out a form and sending some proof that "I sold four(?) of them" (I think receipt numbers/printed copes was it). There were limits, but I owned two of them, eventually their best 28.8k (I think it was something like $450 retail at the time).

Back then it was "US Robotics", "Sort-of-Hayes", "Zoom or Zoom Knockoff" with the last one meaning nothing but grief. IIRC, the "Zoom Modem" was the first form of what was later just called "WinModems" -- modems with minimal hardware, implemented entirely in drivers, heavily reliant on the CPU for handling the work. It wasn't that the modems broke/failed/were unreliable hardware-wise. The quality of those software drivers was abysmal. The overhead was too high for 90s PCs. They regularly connected well below their advertised rates. They were Plug/Play "jumperless" (sort of plug/play) ISA cards. Meanwhile, you plugged your USR into your serial port. If you had two, you got a serial port card with 16550 UART chip and Bob's your Uncle.

Had this person asked me, at the time, I would have said "I don't know anyone who successfully negotiates a 56K connection to anything" and "Stick with the USR; at least you'll disconnect less."

I never ended up bothering with 56K. Our wiring was pre-modem and there was something related to our actual service (distance to the CO, like DSL?) that meant we couldn't support the speed, anyway. Nothing but the US Robotics modems performed above 16.8k and even the USR stumbled to 24K occasionally.

[0] From memory, and I'm sure I have bits wrong: USR released a 16.8k one at that speed earlier than everyone else before a standard was in place. I bought after they released one that had both standards

[1] Same memory issue as above: I was told this was "the minimum we were allowed to advertise a product at. Basically, the manufacturer pays for advertising space in the retailer's circular, and in return the retailer agrees not to advertise a price beneath what the manufacturer dictates. There were other requirements (such as not selling things before release dates, etc) and we could turn around and sell it at 20% off if all day if we wanted to, but couldn't advertise a lower price (so everyone sold Windows 95 for I think, $45). It's a workaround the typical laws that prohibit a distributor from setting retail prices.

[2] I learned later (at least at the retail stores) these were often people paid by a third-party that supplied swag and a small manual, sometimes "one-time gig" paid cash, usually paid for not by the company but through a staffing company paid for via some marketing company. Or maybe that was just me, the very part-time Fuji rep where I spent most of my time hitting on the Intel girl and scoring Pentium keychains (the ones with the dead Pentiums in them -- still have a few) and those weird dolls that were based on their clean-room staff outfits.

To answer your question, and I'm trying to translate something that happens "automatically" for me, now, but it all hinges on: more throttle makes the bike stand up/go straight in a turn. The first part of the turn involves slowing down.

If you want to make a quick turn, you can keep a higher speed up to the turn, engine brake through the first 1/2 (by angle), ease off and apply throttle by the 3/4 point.

Done correctly, the bike will make a graceful turn with a somewhat rapid "dip" in the middle. On a winding road in minimal traffic, you'll spend most of the time in the same gear, hand/foot off the brake, tweaking your right angle to control speed through the curves.

This excites me but I have a few thoughts about some of the unique constraints that come into play when riding a motorcycle vs driving a car. One big one: transmission.

As an American, I'd had the occasion of driving a manual transmission car a handful of times in my teens. Outside of that, everything has been automatic.

The vast majority of motorcycles are manual[0]. A few things become apparent when you start using a motorcycle for a long commute. The first is that you're going to have a few incidents that you can only conclude "you could easily have died if you'd done something differently". You have to be paying attention to escape paths, especially during rush hour, and you're subconsciously focused deeply on what gear you're in and how the bike will respond to the throttle given those conditions.

I've found most of the time, choosing acceleration over braking is the safest approach. For the most part, while a bike's stopping power can be less than a car, a bike can out accelerate almost any car on the road and has the advantage of size. One commute home a driver completely blew a red light at a point where braking to avoid him would have been impossible; I hadn't thought to brake, though, because I knew I could accelerate across the road before he could hit me and given the gear I was in, I could tweak my speed in both directions very easily with my right (throttle) hand (ready to brake if needed, but it wasn't).

Engine braking to control a turn is kind of how you manage the turn[1]. It becomes muscle memory, including adjusting given the gear/speed. Electric vehicles don't (usually?) have "gears" and I'm guessing those that do wouldn't behave the way that ICE transmissions do owing to the different motor characteristics.

Bikers really care about this stuff. I can't think of anything more controversial in the motorcycle world than "ABS" and "Combined Braking" -- both safety features, but both of which take some control away from the driver and alter "how the bike behaves."

I found it a little funny that they point out the top speed ... it's far more important to know how well it accelerates (and it seems to handle that just fine).

[0] I remember there was one automatic model available (in 2011) "that wasn't a scooter" except it was a scooter. I think it was a BMW bike and I have no idea if it's still made.

[1] If you're not a rider and equating it to riding a bike ... you'll get a surprise your first time. Turning, for new riders, is a challenge (with the general rule being "look at the place you want to go, not the ground, dummy!")

Thanks for sharing, that was a very entertaining read and gave me fond memories of the decade or so I worked in a phone switch.

My office was in a space that was shared by a large legacy phone switch, SONET node, and part of our regional data center but I worked in infrastructure doing software development. My proximity[0] meant I ended up being used to support larger infrastructure efforts at times, but it usually just meant I got a lot of good ... stories.

I wonder if there's a collection of Data Center centric "Daily WTF" stories or something similar.

For me, I think my favorite is when we had multiple unexplained power failures very late at night in our test/management DC[0]. It turned out "the big red kill switch" button behind the plexiglass thing designed to make sure someone doesn't accidentally "lean into it and shut everything off" was mistaken for the "master light switch" by the late night cleaning crew. Nobody thought about "the cleaning crew" because none of the other DCs allowed cleaning crew anywhere near them but this was a test switch (someone forgot about the other little detail). If memory serves, it took a few outages before they figured it out. The facilities manager actually hung around one night trying to witness it only to have the problem not happen (because the cleaning lady didn't turn the lights off when people were there, duh!). I'd like to say that it was almost a "maybe bugs/animals/ghosts are doing it" impulse that caused them to check the cameras but it was probably also the pattern being recognized as "days coinciding with times that the late night cleaning crew does their work."

Outside of that, the guy who made off with something like 4 of these legacy switch cards because some fool put a door stop on the door while moving some equipment in was probably really excited when he found out they were valued at "more than a car" but really disappointed when he put them on eBay for something like $20,000 (which was, I wanna say at least a 50% markdown), was quickly noticed by the supplier[2] was arrested and we were awaiting the return of our hardware.

[0] Among many other things due to a diverse 17-year career, there, but mostly just because I was cooperative/generally A-OK with doing things that "were far from my job" when I could help out my broader organization.

[1] When that went down, we couldn't connect to the management interfaces of any of the devices "in the network". It's bad.

[2] Alarms went off somewhere -- these guys know if you are using their crap, you're stuck with their crap and they really want you stuck paying them for their crap. I'm fairly certain the devices we used wouldn't even function outside of our network but I don't remember the specifics. AFAIK, there's no "pre-owned/liquidation-related market" except for stripping for parts/metals. When these things show up in unofficial channels, they're almost certainly hot.

Thanks for this.

The first thing I'm reading is some statement about how they don't actually want to locate these things on your property, but nearby, which makes me think (a) either "I wouldn't want this thing on my property" or (b) it's "not practical and/or safe to locate this thing on my property" (a being a subset of b).

And then "solid hydrogen" is mentioned and I'm thinking ... huh? Glad I wasn't alone.

So nobody on Earth would ever confuse me with a chemist, but (at least) I think I have some of the basics down.

Hydrogen isn't solid until you drop the temperature a whole hell of a lot or increase the pressure a whole hell of a lot. Now, I guess the upside is that "solid hydrogen" requires temps/pressures that render oxygen similarly frozen which[0] I guess reduces the probability that said "hydrogen battery" doesn't become a "crater surrounded by the fiery wreckage of the neighborhood where said hydrogen battery once was." But, gee, it better be one hell of a power storage source to offset the cost of cooling/pressurizing its storage.

I guess the more logical explanation is "an attempt to dress up what is likely a different use of/material-but-not-flashy-improvement upon an existing technology" which likely hasn't had the slightest bit of practical testing behind it. That sounds a little more cynical than I mean it to -- I mean I really do hope they have something that is as sexy as this thing is trying to sound but the best I could get out of reading that "skeptically" was:

"Put some (top of the line) solar panels on a building (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't using your roof) and store the power in these things just outside your neighborhood (for reasons unmentioned, we aren't small enough/safe enough/it's otherwise impractical to store these on your property/in your home) and they'll go in this sleek-looking 3D rendered thing that we haven't yet worked all the details out of yet[1]."

[0] ... according to the two second Google search that I did.

[1] The cynic in imagines a meeting "Let's see, our technology is something that's solid ... and it's chemical make-up includes something with Hydrogen" ... somewhere along the lines someone was like "F!ck it, let's just call it 'Solid Hydrogen' and see if anyone bites".

You summed up quite well how these things happen.

All of these parts make for an increasingly complex system with a large number of failure points.

Our DC was a very living entity -- servers were being changed out/rack configuration altered very regularly. Large operations were carefully planned. You wouldn't overlook the power requirements of a few racks being added -- there'd -- literally[0] -- be no place to plug them in without an electrician being brought in. However, in a 3-month period every once in a while, two racks would have old devices replaced either due to failure or refresh, one at a time.

Since they weren't plugged directly into rack batteries (we had two battery rooms providing DC-wide battery backup), the overload wouldn't trip. Since we were still below the capacity of the circuit, the breaker(s) wouldn't trip. And maybe we're still under capacity for our backup system, but a few of the batteries are under-performing.

I think the lesson we learned when this happened was: you need to "actually test" the thing. My understanding is that our tests were of the individual components in isolation. We'd load test the batteries and the generator and then the relays between. At the end of the day, though, if you don't cut the power and see what happens you don't truly know. And my understanding is that having that final step in place resulted in a large number of additional tests being devised "of the individual components" that ensured they never had an outage like that, again.

[0] Guessing it's common practice to make "finding a f!cking power outlet" nearly impossible in DC. Every rack had exactly the number of leads it needed for the hardware plugged into a completely full receptacle. They rolled around a cart with a monitor, printer, label printer, keyboard, mouse and a huge UPS on it so staff could do daily maintenance work.

Had something similar happen at a telecom I worked at for years. We had a diesel generator and a couple of (bathroom sized) rooms full of (what looked like) car batteries. My understanding is that the two rooms were for redundancy. The batteries could power the DC for hours but were used only until the generator was ready.

The area our DC was located in was impressively reliable power-wise and -- in fact -- the backup systems had managed through the multi-state power outage in the early 2000s without a hitch (short of nearly running out of fuel due to our fuel supplier being ... just a little overwhelmed).

A few years later a two minute power outage caused the DC to go dark for a full day. Upon the power failing, the batteries kicked in and a few minutes after that the generator fired up and the DC went into holy terror.

About a minute after the generator kicked in, power to the DC blinked and ended. The emergency lights kicked in, the evacuate alarm sounded[0] and panic ensued.

My very pedestrian understanding of the problem was that a few things failed -- when the generator kicked in, something didn't switch power correctly, then something else didn't trip in response to that, a set of 4 batteries caught fire (and destroyed several nearby). They were extinguished by our facilities manager with a nearby fire extinguisher. He, incidentally, was the one who pulled the alarm (which wouldn't, on its own, trigger the Halon system, I think). The remainder of the day was spent dealing with the aftermath.

We were a global multi-national telecom with a mess of procedures in place for this sort of thing. Everything was installed by electricians, to very exacting standards[1] but -- as with most things "backup" -- the way it was tested and the frequency of those tests was inadequate.

From that point forward (going on over a decade) they thoroughly tested the battery/generator backup once a quarter.

[0] We were warned to GTFO if that alarm goes off due to the flooding of chemicals that would follow a few minutes later. That didn't happen.

[1] I remember the DC manager taking over in Cleveland making his staff work weeks of overtime replacing zip ties with wax lace (and it was done NASA style). We're talking thousands and thousands of runs stretching two complete floors of a skyscraper.

I find it ... we'll say, weird ... where they've chosen to trial these vehicles already.

Is there some reason other than "we were able to get permits there more easily[0]" that I'm missing? I wasn't in Phoenix long enough to speak intelligently about that city, but I've done Austin and San Francisco on a few occasions in the distant past.

Both are high-traffic-with-pedestrians, much of it high-density and frequently changing traffic patterns ... except that most of them are varying degrees of "hellish" a whole lot of the time. Meanwhile you (likely) have ongoing maintenance of (likely many) high-traffic roads, detours, squeeze-around-work-crews all competing with emergency services.

Considering GM's HQ, I'm surprised they didn't elect to work these through Metro Detroit. We have all of that craziness at lower (and pretty predictable) traffic levels mixed in with roads that barely qualify as paved and some which are perfectly paved except for the tire-sized 2ft chasm that nearly borders the other tire-sized 2ft chasm. Figure out how to get these things to perfect the "pot-hole video game", understand the "Michigan Left that's also an Intersection[1]" survive more than a few months of trips from Metro Airport to "anywhere in Northern Macomb County" without dings, punctures or busted shocks then move to something more challenging. And we're a bit more tolerant of weirdness around "car sh!t" around here, especially since many in my area have jobs directly supported by the local autos.

I did notice that none of those cities are well known for large amounts of snowfall ... still, I must be missing something because it seems like there'd be much less disruptive places to refine your product. In places like these, I'd be handing the emergency vehicles a computer with a few buttons -- one of those things gets in the way, it's "Disable It" "GTFO" "Force it to Pull Over" maybe with fallback of a Joystick/Computer device to shove it out of the way. It almost sounds like they are providing some way that an emergency vehicle can control these things "on request" the way that reads. At least with a "three button/fallback joystick", mixed with "a little more adequate sensing/driving" work would make them no worse than a driver with the radio too loud who isn't checking their rear-view and would give them more power over the equivalent "machine driven" car than they have over the "d!ckhead driven" car.

Curious if anyone knows why, specifically, those cities were the test-beds?

[0] And one is also our HQ, which might be the only one that I can understand an exception (a desire to be close to your implementation solving the unique problems of that region that you probably understand better than most).

[1] This is a case where "traffic is U-turning to make a left" but the end of the U-Turn meets up with a road where traffic is turning right onto the road. In this case, "the law" is that "left hand turners yield the right of way" just like at any other intersection, but the vast* majority of time, the left-hand turning traffic mistakes their "green light" for a "green arrow" and assumes the usual rules of "go when it's green". It's so bad that they put signs* at many of these intersections reminding left-hand turners to yield on green. Follow the law, likely get hit. Follow the flow, and you'll likely get stuck there when you have the right of way. On a bad day, punch it with a hand on the horn if they move. :o)

Something the author alluded to but didn't call out specifically is the "I'm already a customer" problem.

I can only really speak to Amazon and Facebook (via the web) because my uBlock configuration nips almost everything else, completely[0], and most advertising from those sites, as well.

But when an advertisement does slip through, it is frequently for a service I already subscribe to or a product I already purchased. In the latter case, I've had times where I've purchased something on Amazon and had the same product show up within a few minutes of the purchase as an advertisement on Facebook. So ... that was wasted marketing spend.

On the flip side of that, I'm certain Amazon knows who my girlfriend is and correlates our searches. There have been a handful of times when I was discussing gift ideas and she'll pull up a product and hand me her phone[1]. Sure, they pick it up when she sends me a link from the app or does some other action that can be correlated (i.e. we're both on the same WiFi, our phones are both reporting the same location[2]) but it's happened enough that I've started paying attention. On one occasion, she handed me her phone, we had no other digital back/forth and my phone was charging in the car (off, because I let the battery die). Later that evening, I'm on my laptop and that product was on the home page. There are other explanations, sure, but it'd be pretty easy to see that we frequently share one of two IP addresses when visiting their sites and start tracking those accounts as affiliated in some way for gift-giving purposes.

[0] I see product recommendations on Amazon and for some reason more than a few sponsored posts and the like on Facebook -- I don't use their mobile apps.

[1] I really, really hate using mobile apps.

[2] I don't actually know if the Amazon app tracks location ... I don't have it.

// FWIW: I really did laugh out loud at "Statistical Astrology" and I'm positive I'll be using that statement in the future.

For me it was the mid-90s and my sister the late 80s. She had school cancelled on final exam day due to a bomb threat. The first half of 11th Grade, for me, students were put in "lock down"[0] and then dismissed early due to a bomb threat.

When I went to High School the doors were left unlocked during school hours. It was normal for past students to "pop in" during the school day or in the afternoon for social visits to teachers. We had hall monitors who would question why you were roaming the halls if you looked young enough to be a student but a simple "I graduated last year and stopped in to catch up with my programming teacher" was all that was required all but one time I stopped in (they made me get a pass from the office all of once). I'm not saying "it was safer this way" but I often wonder if the increased security -- sometimes approaching "prison security" -- has the side-effect of some segments of the population "behaving accordingly."

There were school shootings "in my day" but those were limited to rough schools in the inner city. They were reported along-side all of the other crime happening "in the high-crime areas of the city", brushed off by most of us.

Weapon policy was much more lax when I attended school. I routinely carried a 3.5" pocket knife to school because I was irritated with dullness of the various wire cutters/tools in my electronics class. My electronics teacher regularly borrowed my knife without questioning "why in the hell a HS student is bring what looks like a switch-blade to school" (I was always seen as "one of the good kids", though).

We lived about ten miles from a large rural High School, as well. I remember picking up a cousin at his school around hunting season and being surprised, back then, to see pick-up trucks with gun racks proudly displaying scoped rifles in both the staff and student parking lots. This was, of course, "prior to Columbine" and I suspect they put a stop to that shortly thereafter.

With news attention on school shootings and not bombs, it makes sense that hoaxes tend to focus in that direction. School shootings get a lot of coverage with the focus then usually shifting to legislation aimed at restricting gun ownership[1]. The issue is that it's caused people to identify "the problem" as "school shootings" rather than "mass casualty events."

Bearing in mind that the perpetrators of these sorts of things are often of the mindset of "taking out as many people as possible while committing suicide", if it were actually possible to "ban all firearms" in the US, the problem would not be solved. As a High School kid who's parents do not/would never own a gun ... extremely conservative, yet pro-gun control parents[2] ... I had no access to a firearm and no clue how I would acquire one. However, the summer before my senior year in HS, myself and a few friends went off into the woods with a pipe bomb I had made out of things from my Dad's basement and "black powder" salvaged from Independence Day incendiaries. We wanted to make "the mother of all M-80s." The device was smaller than most handguns, easy to conceal and easy to ignite. It would have been devastating if exploded in a hallway.

To this day I have never seen such a powerful explosion in person. "Fingers plugging ears" was not enough to prevent dampening of our hearing by 90% instantly. Despite being an "empty pipe bomb" (lots of "powder" but no screws/bolts/other shrapnel), pieces of it flew -- easily -- twice as far as the distance we were standing from it. Had any of us been positioned at the right angle there would have been no time to react and I have no doubt anyone in the direct path would have been killed/injured in a manner at least as seriously as if they'd taken a large caliber bullet.

About the only solution I have heard that would make a difference is "more high schools with fewer students." The school I attended was designed with about a 750-total-student capacity in mind. My graduating class was 850. We were packed into hallways so tight that you basically squeezed your way to class with the running joke being that if you were too tired, just lift your feet off the ground and let everyone else take you there by force. Putting a high-trained police officer in that situation and asking them to "hit the shooter" would be practically impossible. Even assuming they hit the target, the bullet would travel through several other students before its settled into a wall/other sufficiently dense object capable of ending its journey.

[0] Something we didn't drill for back then except for tornado drills.

[1] Which, despite generally being a supporter of second amendment rights, I find myself supporting some of the more sensible approaches. Incidentally, I am not in support of "arming the teachers" -- the probability that adding another gun to the situation won't just result in more students being caught up in cross-fire isn't an adequate solution.

[2] I live in a blue collar community that fits well into the category of "Reagan Democrats" -- so much so that until my late teens I had no idea Republicans were pro-gun and Democrats were anti-gun. Every Democrat I knew was a card carrying member of a union (usually one specific union) and every one of them had a firearm collection of a small militia. Nobody in my family/extended family -- all conservatives -- owned a firearm.

I have no idea how this hack is done/no insider knowledge but reading between the lines, I suspect that they're altering the pump in a manner that sets the cost per gallon to zero or near-zero.

Welcome to Southeast Michigan.

For whatever reason, everyone within 25 miles of Detroit "lives in Detroit" even though a whole lot of us might visit the city less than once a year.

The media will usually say "Metro Detroit" when referring to someone who doesn't actually live in the city[0] of Detroit and given the location of the gas station, it's probably an actual person who lives in the city.

[0] In which case it could be someone living in one of three different counties.

I used to know a family who ran a gas station in my city. I was surprised to learn they made almost nothing from the sale of fuel. The actual profit -- to them -- was in the convenience store goods they sold.

I'm not sure who eats the cost of the theft, but I'm guessing it's the same people that make almost no money from the sale of the fuel. These were not wealthy people; they were working obscene hours and barely scraping by.

You're mostly right. I think several do give a shit about security but they both lack the knowledge of what it takes to reasonably secure something like this and are somewhat powerless/misled into believing they don't need to care.

The first problem is that companies that add wireless/IoT capabilities to devices have nothing to do with their implementation/security beyond writing a cheque. I used to work for a company that created IoT devices for huge brands[0]. They make a toothbrush, a lightbulb or a vacuum cleaner. They're good at that, but they bring in someone else to either "wholesale create an IoT product" or collaborate on its creation where the "IoT pieces" (and their security) were farmed out to us.

Of course, we didn't have much to do with the creation of the product, either. We (frequently) used a white-label Chinese product -- often, but not always, explicitly chosen by the manufacturer. In fact, the large brands often insist on a specific Chinese provider for long-term maintenance/cost savings[1].

We receive a "dev board" and device that consists of an ESP8266/ESP32 bolted onto whatever it's IoT-ing, and a cloud service (hosted in the country of origin; almost always China). The developers involved write a mobile app and some firmware that interacts with the cloud web service -- which we have no control over/cannot work around or suggest additional security layers -- and we integrate it. It creates an impenetrable SEP field[2].

Companies who care about security care about it up to some industry defined standard that has some form of acronym (the names of which escape me these days) which involve, basically, filling out a form or two attesting (truthfully) to the requirements but that serve only to shield those involved in the process from responsibility beyond whatever the acronym-defining organization thinks to ask. It involved passing a lot of those questions off to the third-party who runs the cloud service, who -- surprise, surprise -- know what boxes to check to receive payment.

[0] I love my former employer so I'm leaving the brands off, but at least one product involved was popular enough that my parents received one as a gift for Christmas ... it was fun explaining that some code I had written was running on their phone.

[1] The pattern (one that we didn't advocate) went "hire us to build the initial, user-friendly, polished version of the app" then pass it onto said OEM to maintain/update it between hardware versions. To the extent that the first version could be secured, it is (until it's not). They don't trust the OEM to write the initial version, but once it's out there, augmenting it costs 1/10th the price and that's about all their willing to pay after the initial product is created.

[2] Someone Else's Problem (Douglas Adams -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

You make several good points here ... if I'm a Coke, a Ford/GM or a candidate for public office, competing for eyeballs with crypto-/weight-loss-/online casino scams is probably not something I want to be associated with.

I know I've seen some legitimate brands (in the past, anyway) on YouTube when I stroll into my family room and see my son watching some guy narrate himself playing video games. Considering, first, that most of the content he's watching isn't great to begin with -- and as a brand I may not want my product being run along side any of that, either -- the other ads I'd be sharing time with make me surprised there's any non-vice/non-scam brands willing to market via those channels.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought "I forgot YouTube has ads!" I have a feeling a lot of Hacker News readership has -- at least -- ad-blocking installed on their computers that hides the problem from them.

Unlike the rest of my family, I generally don't watch YouTube, but when I do, it's almost always from something other than a smart TV[0] and I rarely watch videos on my phone[1] (though on my device, I think I'm ad-free there, too).

In a way, it's a lot more of the same. Internet advertising has been a cesspool ... I'm old enough to remember scantily clad women holding X10 devices[2] (usually cameras) in pop-under ads, along with "cyber cash", online casinos and the like. I used to selectively unblock sites that I didn't want to starve of advertising revenue but that stopped when ads became a popular way to deliver malware. Once that became a thing, the gauntlet went down -- I stopped feeling even the slightest bit of guilt about filtering.

I can't say it's (at all) surprising. The scammers have a system where they can produce a large volume of trash at a low cost and make a profit on a few (often naive/elderly/other) poor souls. There's the usual "policing content is orders of magnitude harder than producing it", "lack of sufficient penalty on those producing the ads" combined with lack of sufficient pressure/penalty on those displaying the ads to police them well enough[3]. It's so bad now that you could do exactly what you said -- Google could, literally, run a script to capture the ads from 10 minutes of incognito play, ban them all and would catch, maybe one?, that isn't a law/terms of service violation. Some of these ads make the offers appearing in my spam folder look about as trustworthy.

Add into that "I'm the problem, too" in that rather than "making a lot of noise about this issue", I simply implement ever-more complex ways of eliminating advertising from my life wherever it exists. Due to filtering, I rarely see advertisements that aren't of the "product placement" or physically unavoidable variety (billboards/physical advertising in public spaces, though I'm sure mixed reality will let me wipe those out one day, too[4]).

My kids, however, watch YouTube and similar services far more than they watch traditional streaming/TV and they do so on devices that I haven't taken the time to censor. Much worse, however, is the advertisements included in "the dumb game of the week" installed to one of their devices. It got so bad that I put a blanket family rule of "do not install anything on your device without asking me, first." As I have teenagers, now, about the only way I've been able to enforce that rule is "your device gets malware, it gets a factory reset and I provide no help getting the thing restored." About twice a year they get that hard reminder. It doesn't help much.

[0] Hell, for that matter, I don't watch TikTok or other social media videos at all

[1] A story worthy of another post but modern smart phones seem to do something to the audio that when anything is played out of the speaker that isn't "a ring-tone", it has an aspect to it that sounds like "fingernails on a chalkboard." It bothers me so much that if I'm dealing with a Migraine headache the sound coming out of the speaker results in my symptoms amplifying about as badly as if I looked directly at a bright light source -- it's caused me to spontaneously run to the bathroom to vomit before.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology

[3] Which, were the penalties big enough would also -- due to "policing content is orders of magnitude harder ..." -- would make it impossible for anyone other than the FAANGs of the world to police.

[4] The idea of walking around with goggles on to avoid advertising is pretty silly ... and the cost of physical advertising is prohibitive enough, today, to make it less attractive to scammers ... however, more than half of the billboards down the interstate are for pot dispensaries extolling the virtues of "the high life", casinos touting the "cool car you can win" and liquor brands "enjoyed by the successful/cool people of the world".

I can think of several ways to "take a password encrypted file and split it up in such a way that you can re-assemble it without all of its parts" but being able to do so without a password is where it's piqued my interest.

This is one of those things that looks interesting to me as someone who enjoys security topics, algorithms and the like. I can see digging into the source code/reading about the techniques involved because I want to know how it was done. But I am struggling to figure out where something like this would be useful -- is there a threat model where this would be useful as a "layer in the onion" of things protecting sensitive data or a way in which this would be superior for a use case that isn't already solved better by something else?

Even the author kind of jokes about an old diary password vs remembering enough hiding places. I think the latter would be a much bigger problem from personal experience and would require having fewer parts and more hiding places, eroding the provided security in the process[0]. :)

Multi-sig comes to mind, but my only exposure to that is "having to participate in it" by "putting a USB key in and running a program along with two of my coworkers" in order to push the one update we ever pushed with that tooling. I remember we all had to provide our keys and "if I was out sick, no update was going out" but I'm not sure if that was a limitation of what we were using or if we just set them up that way because it was "alpha" at the time.

None-the-less, very interesting!

[0] I can imagine, though, that "under the mattress" would be the equivalent security to setting your password to "password".

Good point ...

... I'd imagine there would be similar options with "eighteen-hundred", variants with all numerics, comma separated, without commas, etc.

I have to agree with you. While I do enjoy the OSS projects/physics-/math-related topics (and a lot of the Show HN), these are my absolute favorite things to read.

Curious if you've found other resources that provide more of this sort of content?

I've found the Hackaday blog[0] tends to have a lot of this kind of content (often summarized/linked to the original source) and sometimes it's tagged in a way that makes surfacing others from their archives possible, but I've not found any other sites that are reasonably organized to help surface write-ups of this kind[1].

[0] https://hackaday.com/blog

[1] There are subreddits where this sort of thing can be found, but "deep-dive but accessible technical articles" tend to be placed in a sub-reddit that's dedicated to more narrow topics and a lot are lower quality (there's similar content to this in /r/Optics from 2022, but I'd never have a reason to end up there)

It's possible you've had these customized (by a toolbar or direct setting). I'm fairly certain you can change the built-in ones (I have google mapped to "g" like it was (is?) in Opera).

I honestly can't remember if I've seen this done before or if it was some early morning dream[0].

My pet peeve is user interfaces that provide no "discovery" aspect. I'm not referring to those obnoxious "introduction" tips that occur with a lot of software when you first use them or when a new version comes out. Those tend to be heavy-handed -- stopping the action or preventing you from using the application without clicking "Skip" somewhere. I'm talking about "hints" in a place that is obvious but not overwhelming.

Unfortunately, the "minimalism" of the last few decades has seen a lot of these kinds of hints disappear, entirely, from places they had previously existed. Many applications have eliminated things like "showing what keyboard command would trigger a drop-down/hamburger[2] menu item directly".

Back in the "bad old days", nearly everything that was commonly used (Cut/Paste, etc) would include a "Ctrl-C" or "Shift-Ins" note next to the menu item.

One area that's really common and extremely opaque is the "mouse with keyboard modifier" command. Graphics applications (Photoshop) and especially 3D design tools (Blender comes to mind) can be totally unusable without knowing that "dragging with the middle button while pressing ALT rotates the view around an set fixed/anchor point" where just dragging with the middle button rotates the view treating the "camera"'s location as the fixed point.

The mouse cursor has traditionally served a couple of very simple purposes: to identify where you're clicking and to provide visual feedback on "whether or not clicking on that will do anything[1]"

My "dream" mouse cursor would -- upon initiating a drag, display "what the action of dragging will do" along with the available modifier keys with a single word or very small description of what it does floating by the cursor in as much of a "non-distracting" manner as possible. Upon clicking the modifier, anything "helpful" in using that feature should surface.

I must have used Photoshop through two or three versions before I figured out that you can hold the Spacebar while creating a new selection to have it "lock the shape while allowing you to move the selection around". Things like the "circle selection" tool were always impossible to line up correctly without modifying the initial attempt at placing the thing in the right location.

For a simpler software, the extra context might amount to simply changing the cursor to a more obvious symbol for the action, but considering how many web applications with fancy "replacements for built-in things like select lists" fail to set the cursor correctly, I'm not holding my breath that anything like this will ever happen.

[0] I can't be the only one on this site who regularly dreams about code/software. I'm not saying I don't have a problem, just that I'm in good company. :)

[1] Minor, sometimes confusing, additional context is provided, like the "finger" sometimes indicating that you'll navigate to a new link, but can also mean "select an item in a list" which can also be a simple arrow.

[2] To Firefox's credit, a lot of menu items include the shortcut key.

Taking the immorality of all of this away for a second, you can't help but marvel a little bit at this. I don't know that "fixing sports betting with minimal hassle from the authorities" could get much more optimized than this. Consider ...

(a) It's a sport[0] that, while popular enough, isn't, well,... popular enough for its spectators/gamblers to make up enough of the electorate to draw the necessary attention.

(b) If I'm understanding things correctly, it's not "huge games" they're talking about. There's a "subset" of "a" that care about this.

Taken together, those two minimize the interest in the sport (perhaps the minor leagues ... of hockey ... in Texas?)[1]

(c) From what it appears, the players (the most important part of the equation, I'd imagine) don't get jail time. Therefore, it's a matter of finding a reasonable number of "the right kind of player" -- someone who's aging out of the sport, who's (minimal) success was such that the "cost of their reputation" was affordable to organized crime. Someone who's realistic next step in the career ladder was going to be "teaching tennis to children", soon, anyway.

(d) That person is also, likely disenfranchised with the sport and is likely easy to gain loyalty from. And, of course, their celebrity is such that a player "gaining a conscience" would simultaneously remember their mortality.

On the financial side, it's a matter of decentralizing some of the "people who create accounts on betting sites", "people who place bets", and "people who transfer money" down to minimal assignments per person -- the various "mules" end up making up a large part of the actual crime being committed. It has to make prosecuting something like this incredibly tedious. If "the organization" behind this could recruit enough people, their exposure to "committing an actual crime" might end up being so minimal that there's not incentive enough to get them to give up higher rungs in the organization[2]. It would require a sophisticated investigator, but it because of (a), above, it's difficult to find that investigator.

There's not a lot of incentive for the betting outfits to take simple steps like "disallow betting on matches of minimal significance" or taking really any steps to solving this problem. Besides the fact that many are already operating on the fringes of legality and I wouldn't be shocked if all were run by questionable/criminal outfits/individuals, the article makes it sound like "these low level players/low level games" are optimal to the criminals. I'd imagine there's fear about encouraging the criminals to move up to more important matches.

[0] It hurts to say it as it was one of the few that I played well and the few I enjoyed watching.

[1] I can hear someone saying "in X country, and all countries combined, has more followers than GOD!" or something like that. I'll save you the trouble and both concede that "if you're right, I wouldn't know anyway" and that ... maybe minor league hockey really is popular in Waco ... or something. Neither was my point; only that "the people who do care", for whatever reason, don't represent a loud enough voice (or a voice the authorities care enough about) to be useful.

[2] Especially against the usual "snitches get stitches" tactics.

Frankly, if you're marrying a person who requires you to spend 3 months on a diamond ring, it may be time to remember an important bit of wisdom:

Never enter into a contract where one party benefits by breaking it.

I'm not knocking marriage or (outright) stating that financial motives may be at play, here, but it's a big indicator if "who your with" is more concerned about what's "on their finger" than about what's "around their arm".