Momentum.
3,966 karma · joined July 15, 2021
What does their webpage wrapped in a fairly poor, memory hungry browser get me over just going to their website in my browser?
Just a webpage with a bundled web bowser (electron).
This is like the worst of everything. A terrible noncustomizable browser and a poor email client glued together.
Better ROI: yes!
Better Customer Prices: No!
Better Business Operations: Yes.
Better Customer Experience: No.
Better Profit Margins: Yes.
Better Care: No.
Better Shareholder Returns: Yes.
Better Employee Compensation: No.
Maybe you could argue it cost some electricity, but... In reality, it meant my computer, which runs 24/7 pulling ~185W, was running at ~300W for 56 hours... Thusly.. 300 - 185 = 115W * 56H = 6.44kWh @ $0.13 per kWh = $0.85 + tax.
So... Yes, it was very much worth $0.85 to make my wife happy.
9 years ago, when my now wife and I were dating, we took a long cross-country road trip, and for a lot of it, we listened to NPR's Ask Me Another (a comedy trivia game).
Anyway, on one random episode, there was a joke in the show that just perfectly fit what we were doing at that exact moment. We laughed and laughed and soon forgot about it.
Years later, I wanted to find that again and purposely recreate the same moment.
I downloaded all 300 episodes as MP3s. I used Whisper to generate text transcripts, followed by a little bit of grepping, and I found the one 4-second joke that otherwise would have been lost to time.
Personal anecdote: I work with beginner IT students, and a new, fun (<- sarcasm, not fun) thing for me is the amount of energy they spend arguing with me about basic, easily proven Linux functionality. It's infuriating, the LLM is more believable than the paid professional who's been doing it for 30 years...
I find it highly doubtful that hallucinations, if unsolved, will have any real negative effect on LLM adaptation.
In theory, being ISO27001 means that you're environment follows best practices and has a somewhat sane security posture.
To the business people, a new customer demands that you have ISO27001 certification before they'll sign the $$$$ contract. The salesperson does not care HOW you get the certificate, just that you have it, they need this contract signed!
The department wasn't designed with security in mind, so implementing everything required by ISO will take many months. But sales needs $$$$ now! The CEO, CFO, and CTO are aligned: money now!
So, there's high pressure to pass the audit quickly. You implement what you can, you weasle your way around the things that will take too long. Those things are "out of scope" or "testing databases". You implement MFA while the auditor is auditing, but you know it breaks developers' workflows and there isn't a quick fix, so you turn MFA back off once the audit is complete....
TA-DA! We're ISO27001 certified! But we're no more secure than we were before.
They gave experimental commands full access to their private data. Data deletion is, in fact, the least concerning outcome here.
On the bright side, this is a solid reminder to maintain proper backups.
If this happened to me, I'd just restore from backup and be back up in 20 minutes. That said, I avoid this scenario entirely by running agents in isolated VMs and only mounting the specific directories they need access to.
MOUNT(8)
relatime
Update inode access times relative to modify or change time. Access time is only updated if the previous access time was earlier than or equal to the current
modify or change time. (Similar to noatime, but it doesn’t break mutt(1) or other applications that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it
was modified.)
Since Linux 2.6.30, the kernel defaults to the behavior provided by this option (unless noatime was specified), and the strictatime option is required to
obtain traditional semantics. In addition, since Linux 2.6.30, the file’s last access time is always updated if it is more than 1 day old.Now, I can try the same things, and Claude gets it terribly wrong and works itself into problems it can't find its way out of.
The cynical side of me thinks this is being done on purpose, not to save Anthropic money, but to make more money by burning tokens.
I used to do a lot of consulting work at locations with extremely locked down networks. I could use iodine + wireguard to punch through most firewalls, slow, but effective.
"There will be no longer a NordStream 2, we will bring an end to it"
Shocking, there is no longer a NordStream 2. =D
The Wikipedia on long and short scales[1][2] for the root of the problem.
I'm backing up about 8TiB of data nightly using BorgBackup[0] + InterServer[1] and pay $240/yr.
This gives me differential encrypted rotating backups that are 100% mine and do not lock me into any specific storage vendor.
TL;DR: Make sure Power Nap is turned ON. It allows macOS to consolidate wakeup requests into a bulk queue. So the thing isn't turning on all the time.
That’s an insane amount of both money and stress. You’re at Amazon’s mercy if they will or will not refund it. And while this is in process you’re wondering if your entire financial future is ruined.
Cutting undersea cables is almost a sport for ship captains.
These things get cut all the time by accident or incompetence. &&
&& https://subtelforum.com/category/cable-faults-maintenance/pa...
My main banks, Fidelity and a local credit union, both offer websites that let me do anything I want with my money from a website. No spyware apps needed.
Then anybody can maintain a database of "known fingerprints", and a web-of-trust can be established without depending on a centeral-point-of-censorship.
Fuck CA's. They're not and never have been trustworthy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcitium#Certificate_hacking
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/chrome-boots-2-cert...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-guillotine-falls-on-cer...
1) If the device battery is dead, I can swap it out in seconds and be up and running immediately.
2) Built-in batteries fail, and replacing them ranges from difficult to near-impossible and often involves damaging the device's casing to get the built-in battery out.
When I'm spending $100 on a computer mouse, I'd really like it to last longer than the life of the battery and not have to destroy the casing to get to the battery to replace it.
For decades, management has mostly given in to unions, and union members just "pay their dues" and bitch about it.
Seems like "Management" has finally pondered: "What if we just ignore them?" and currently the unions are just crying in a corner: "They're ignoring us!! I guess the union is over boys :'("
Someday, the union side will remember, they only have power if they wield it.
Don't use a bug zapper. The zapper does kill things, but... the zapper also attracts bugs from far away into your area. If you have a large property, a zapper placed far away at the boundary can pull bugs away from the living area.
You can pay a company to come spray your yard frequently, but it gets expensive over time. I bought a gas-powered fogger (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746S92WW) and the chemicals: Insecticide and Insect Growth Regulator (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RW197XG and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CT9IDO)
Spray everything once a week initially, then you can try dropping down to every other week. Very few mosquitoes remain.
Further, look into repellents: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bug-repellen...
Mosquitoes are weak flyers; if you want to defend a static area, like a picnic table, a large fan can be used to keep a breeze up over the area and keep mosquitoes out.
Today, you'd want something like:
Prometheus + Node Exporter [1]