michaelt

I'm sure it depends on the size of your readership, but in my experience these kind of offers are a drop in the bucket compared to the salary of an expert programmer - let alone someone who's had their company acquired.

I also felt that, just like you recognise that the blog boosted the reputation of your startup, that if a blog with my name on it started pushing snake-oil product or making sketchy SEO posts, that would have the reverse effect.

I'd leave it exactly as it is. If you want to pick it up again in a few years time, you can.

City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.

The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.

Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.

IDK, haven't Google been putting Gemini front and centre in pretty much all of their products?

I'm seeing Gemini on my slide decks, Gemini on my e-mails, Gemini on my searches, Gemini on my videoconferences, Gemini on my database query console. My impression was they were doing a Google Plus style attempt to marshal all the company's efforts behind one product.

They could just set the minimum ad spend at a level that makes moderation possible.

Let's say it costs $15 to have a human spend 15 minutes checking an ad. If the minimum spend per ad is $100 it'd easily cover the costs of the check. And I imagine most ad campaigns are spending a lot more than $100.

I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.

Of course there have also been crashes where pilots wrongly dismissed sensor data.

In the Kegworth air disaster [1] the pilots had sensor data telling them the left-hand engine was at fault - but a previous model of the plane had a reputation for unreliability in that sensor, and the pilots shut down the right-hand engine on the basis of other evidence.

So we don't want pilots blindly trusting broken sensors - but we also don't want them to dismiss working sensors as broken.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...

But did you know for 'General Aviation' (small planes flown for recreation and suchlike) there are around 300 deaths per year in the US?

An optimist would say:

America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.

As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.

Iran had a series of nationwide protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot... indicating there was widespread popular support for a new, less theocratic government.

Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.

A cynic would say:

Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.

Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.

Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.

Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.

It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.

And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.

Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.

Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.

The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.

To an extent, I guess?

But in the past if one wanted a diagram and didn't care about copyright they'd grab an image like https://i0.wp.com/www.engineeringchoice.org/wp-content/uploa... and reuse it unmodified.

In the age of AI, one can hand it to an LLM and get https://mechaniclove.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/engine-p... in a different style. And with messed up labels and the wrong number of holes in the gaskets.

A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.

Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.

Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.

Take a look at the Google Image Search results for 'Engine Diagram' https://www.google.com/search?q=Engine+Diagram&tbm=isch

In the first row I get two correct-looking diagrams, then a load of AI-generated ones. Three cylinder heads for four cylinders? Two crankshafts? Oil pan labelled Crankshaft? Oil pan labelled Connect in rod? A four-cylinder engine with seven valve springs? Parts labelled up to 39 but a 9-item key? Spark plug wires that loop back on themselves? A crank shaft where the pistons aren't offset in phase? Four-cylinder engines whose exhaust manifolds have three or five openings? Then in the second row, I get "Parts of a V6 engine" showing a four-cylinder engine - with an 'Exhaust malvol', an 'extaust manivol', an 'exsoust manivol' an 'oilolaivt manivol'

Savvy technical audiences have noticed this - and so when a diagram has a whiff of AI about it, they become extremely skeptical and distracted.

Personally I only use AI-generated diagrams very sparingly, and very carefully.

If you're an online service where untrusted users can submit arbitrary YAML, and an out-of-memory exception is a severe problem, then it's severity 10.

If you're an online service that doesn't use yaml in any way, but your web framework bundled the library as a transitive dependency because yaml is one of their five supported configuration options, then it's severity 2.

The problem is figuring out which of those situations you're in takes a load of time - and the flow of CVEs is endless, as CVE numbers are given out like candy at halloween. Often it's quicker to just update to the latest version of the YAML library.

However it doesn't mandate any particular SLA, or the details of how risks are to be evaluated.

Organisations get to write their own policy, and they don't need to commit to patching every CVE within 24 hours or anything like that.

[1] https://www.compliancebase.org/controls/soc-2/cc7-1

I work in a warehouse, and if you type our address into Google Maps, it puts the maker right on our building. But they also label the building as a pub, two buildings down the street.

I've submitted corrections, and had a reply saying they were accepted. You can look on street view and the true location of both pub and warehouse are clearly visible, so there'd be no problem verifying my correction. Their map view includes the outline of the pub, as does their satellite view. The pub's been there 10 years, the warehouse since the 1990s. The Street View car has driven through the pub's car park three times.

And yet, the pub marker stays in the wrong place.

Imagine a house-sized plot of land costs $250,000. That means a builder can offer buyers a $20,000 building for $270,000 or a $150,000 building for $400,000. And in the latter case, the buyer gets 7.5x the building for 1.5x the cost.

For a lot of building projects you need both pictures to send the government to get permission before you break ground; and also evidence of the structural calculations, and that the structural elements were built to design.

You can do these things without an architect, but there's enough demand to support an ecosystem of small businesses (say, 1 architect and 2 support staff). Not every project/architect uses a full 3D model - some architects produce a set of 2D drawings.

Keychron say their mechanical switches last '50 million clicks' so to wear out after a month you'd have to be pressing the key 19 times a second, 24 hours a day.

In Java exceptions can be part of a method's declared type information, so handling is checked at compile time and IDEs can display the info.

Unfortunately certain Java missteps made this design unpopular these days. For example, for many years new String(bytes, "UTF-8"); made it mandatory to catch a UnsupportedEncodingException despite the language spec guaranteeing UTF-8 would be available. A later version of Java addressed it, but still...

So if a seller wants to keep their smart doorbell, or their curtains, or to take all the plants from the garden - they can agree that, as part of contract and price negotiation. At the same time, the buyer gets to send people to check the property and can lower or withdraw their offer depending on what the inspections reveal.

(And yes, this is a very slow way of doing this)

[1] https://www.rlo.law/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/fc.pdf

At least in my country, airports under-provision infrastructure and ask travellers to arrive 2-3 hours before their flights to make up for it. If a person has to queue for 10 minutes for a drop-off bay to become available, that's just the normal airport experience.

> Most airport parking lots have thousands of spots so you’d need a lot

My point is: If you've got space for a lot of parked cars, you've got space for a lot of drop-off bays. If you've got space to build a car park with thousands of spaces, you've got space to give it hundreds of pick-up spots.

Assume your car park is a grid of cars, 20 cars wide and 20 cars long, i.e. 400 parking spaces.

You make the entire first row drop-off/pick up points. With 20 pick up/drop off points you can have a lot of people dropping off or picking up at the same time. And you know pretty well when people will be picking up their cars, as you know their flight arrival details.

Assume your average airport parking customer parks for 5 days, that's 80 arrivals and 80 departures per day. Each of your 20 pick-up/drop-off points only needs to handle 4 pick-ups and 4 drop-offs per day. To me that sounds feasible.

Does the same logic extend all elevated positions? A person in a national portrait gallery, a person with a statue, a person with an olympic medal or a nobel prize, a person with a fancy title like president or queen?

Or is there something specific about bank notes that makes them more problematic?

As a practical matter it would be difficult to prosecute an assault where the victim opposed the prosecution, so most states wouldn’t bother - but for things like speeding and dealing drugs the law has been broken despite the lack of a victim.

Americans don't like having less money in their pocket - who does? - but it's pretty clear that for American car buyers, fuel efficiency is just one concern among many.

After all, a gallon of gas costs the same no matter how rich or poor you are. If government policy keeps fuel affordable for families in the 25th percentile ($41k annual household income) then a family in the 75th percentile ($153k household income) can easily afford the fuel needed to commute to their office job in a crew cab F150, if they so wish.

Of course, that 25th-percentile family's demand for fuel will be inelastic in the short term if their house is a 45 minute drive from their workplace. So when prices rise they'll really feel the crunch - and they'll make plenty of noise about it. But they ain't the ones buying brand new vehicles.