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oogali

951 karma · joined March 29, 2010

meet.hn/city/40.3496953,-74.6597376/Princeton
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oogali··on 'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us
You’re right, they don’t care.

People are using LLMs for the things they consider distractions but are “required”, or at least feel that way about: ads, marketing web sites, emails to/from coworkers, and even RFP responses to government agencies.

Wherever someone uses the raw output of an LLM signifies how little they wanted to do the work in the first place yet still [desperately] want to reap the benefits of appearing to care.

Yesterday, I was searching for local HVAC maintenance companies when I came across one with a map showing their service area.

At a quick glance, it seemed fine but that was no longer the case once you zoomed in: it was a collection of hallucinated, non-sensical names. I too said, “how in the world was this reviewed and approved!?”, and then quickly came to the same conclusion that you did: “nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore”.

https://mcairllc.com/images/service-area.png

oogali··on The darker side of being a doctor
While I don’t disagree, this is an article written by an Australian doctor.
oogali··on OpenJev
That’s a scary thought (at least, to me). But all change is scary.

The thought is a new wave of people who only know LLM-generated sites, so those design patterns are what they demand/emulate/etc. across the spectrum of user interfaces.

The only previous trend I can draw a parallel to was when Comic Sans and Microsoft Clip Art dominated every flyer and poster.

oogali··on FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
Total population (341M) is the wrong divisor. It’s so much worse.

Count the number of Americans who would have an ID worth scanning (aka ages 18 or over): 269M [1].

Or the number of Americans with a driver’s license: 212M (2013) [2].

1: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-...

2: https://www.bts.gov/content/licensed-drivers

oogali··on Your AGENTS.md file doesn't do anything
Can you share which model and harness created this situation?
oogali··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I remember this “time” in my US classroom where we were all punished with if one person damaged classroom property (or worse, school property) but no one was willing to speak up and tell on the offender.

I have similar stories from our local neighborhoods where another parent might yell at you but the tales of your exploits made it home before you did. And there consequences waiting for you.

It’s a matter of timeline, not country.

By the late 1990s, I started to see said teachers pushing kids along as to 1) not deal with them again, and 2) pressure from district/state to not have as many failing students a.k.a. optimizing for the metric.

oogali··on Trump to allow use of cyber tools to target transnational criminal organizations
Link to White House memo: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expa...
oogali··on What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not
Thanks for the correction. I guess I had a mis-paste that stripped out the leading part of the hostname... weird.
oogali··on What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not
I use rspamd.

This might be a little heavy if you’re solely looking for DMARC validation, but I use the other parts of rspamd as well for inbound email.

https://rspamd.com/modules/dmarc/

For a library, I mainly write Go and I use https://github.com/emersion/go-msgauth (formerly known as go-dkim).

oogali··on We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447
It's the same incentive that exists in certain corporations and government agencies which have a use-it-or-lose-it budgeting model.

https://www.nber.org/digest/mar14/use-it-or-lose-it-budget-r...

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/12/politics/use-it-or-lose-it-pe...

oogali··on Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
Here's an odd request for you, as a fellow New Jersey-an...

Can I watch/observe one of your review sessions?

Every few weeks, I hear the beginnings of a great approach towards working with LLMs but I rarely see it in practice.

If you're open to this, remote or in person, ping my username at gmail.

oogali··on OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack
It’s like the old firewall meme, reincarnated.

https://securityzap.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/layered-s...

oogali··on PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats
alias less=‘less -X’
oogali··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
Their family meals don’t include drinks.
oogali··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
Looking at the Popeyes menu, the 8pc family meal is $32.99 and feeds 3-4 people (3218-3738 calories)

If that’s not enough, you order the larger portion, not double your quantity.

12pc family meal: $42.99 for 4-6 people (4992-6032 calories)

16pc family meal: $52.99 for 6-8 people (6766-8326 calories)

Have you folks seen a Popeyes family meal? They’re not tiny… eating that many calories in one sitting is not the best idea.

oogali··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
The chicken sandwich large combo at Popeyes consists of the sandwich, 2 sides (fries, slaw), and a fountain drink — $14.99.

The 5pc chicken tenders regular combo (tenders, fries, biscuit, fountain drink) is $15.99.

Where did the other ~$20 USD come from?

oogali··on The AirPods Effect
$550 is a steal.
oogali··on The 2-Year Apartment Rule
It’s not perception as your friend alleges nor is it a conspiracy but rather all dwellings, apartments included, require continuous maintenance. Different levels of effort at different intervals. Skip it, and problems start to compound.

By the default nature of the bathroom being a humid environment (relative to the rest of any house), my wife and I squeegee our shower after each use, and attack the tile weekly in order to keep it free of mildew.

It’s easier for both the current tenants and landlords to defer maintenance by respectively, moving to a new building that matches your expectations and renting your unit to someone whose expectations matches the current state of the unit.

Both approaches don’t require addressing the previous maintenance “debt”. That’s why it feels like it’s all downhill after the first 2 years — either inside your unit, or in the building’s common spaces, or both.

oogali··on Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]
This. All of this.

I strongly dislike SUVs but due to transporting the kids around and their friends, my wife and I have switched vehicles during the week: she drives my sedan, I drive her SUV.

Being able to transport my oldest's friends around has resulted in improved relationships for both the kids, and the parents.

"Last minute sleepover after the game? No problem, I'll take your son and his gear in my car. We'll also pick up a pizza on the way back too. Drop off his toothbrush and pajamas at your convenience, after your other children are fed and bathed."

That's a briefer version of the exchange I had with a family last week, and their response was an audible sigh of relief, many thank yous, and an invite to dinner this weekend.

oogali··on Oracle slashes 30k jobs
Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.

For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].

Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.

EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:

> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.

Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.

Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.

1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...

2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...

3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...

4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...

5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view

oogali··on A DuckDB-based metabase alternative
> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.

Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].

In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.

In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.

Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports

oogali··on Ring owners are returning their cameras
I know sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one concerned about your privacy but there are others who feel the same way.

https://youtu.be/ROFblZ_-9q4

oogali··on Python numbers every programmer should know
It's important to know that these numbers will vary based on what you're measuring, your hardware architecture, and how your particular Python binary was built.

For example, my M4 Max running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (built, not poured) takes 19.73MB of RAM to launch the REPL (running `python3` at a prompt).

The same Python version launched on the same system with a single invocation for `time.sleep()`[1] takes 11.70MB.

My Intel Mac running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (poured) takes 37.22MB of RAM to launch the REPL and 9.48MB for `time.sleep`.

My number for "how much memory it's using" comes from running `ps auxw | grep python`, taking the value of the resident set size (RSS column), and dividing by 1,024.

1: python3 -c 'from time import sleep; sleep(100)'

oogali··on 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
If it really is cargo culting, and the people buying the physical product are not keeping the manufacturers in check because they never play the vinyl, then I can see a potential situation where manufacturers ramp up to meet "demand" but at lower quality (improved profits).

The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.

Hypothetically.

oogali··on How I think about Kubernetes
I sometimes joke that Kubernetes is a mass experiment in teaching people how to write Go via YAML.

The giant nested YAML you come across is the input (pre-deserialization)/output (post-serialization) for the declared types:

https://github.com/kubernetes/api/blob/master/core/v1/types....

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am the only person that finds humor in this.

oogali··on Geedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak
The US has been doing this for a long time (1997), on a targeted basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

oogali··on How I program with LLMs
It’s doable as it’s what I use to experiment.

Ollama + CodeGPT IntelliJ plugin. It allows you to point at a local instance.

oogali··on San Francisco-to-L.A. overnight train inches closer to reality
NYP-BOS

May 7, 7:50pm-12:15am

$20

    [X] Weeks in advance
    [ ] Middle of the night
oogali··on RubyGems is not vulnerable to the xz/liblzma backdoor
The flip side is companies that are not active participants in the open source community (but know they use open source), are pinging all their engineering managers and asking "are we exposed to this!? how do you know!?".

So while it's useless noise to you, it's likely triggered by being on the receiving end of communications like "Hey, my boss is asking if $PROJECT is vulnerable because of a terrible article he read in $MAINSTREAM_MEDIA_PROPERTY?" times however many bosses are harassing their reports.

"I don't want to craft an email reply to every single person, just put up the no-op blog post and be done with it."

oogali··on M 4.7 earthquake 7 km NNE of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey
I felt it in Central NJ, and my wife in NYC felt it as well.

The submitted reports show it stretched from Fairfield County, Connecticut to New Castle County, Delaware.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/at00sbh3yv...

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