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packetslave

4,349 karma · joined December 8, 2008

Traffic/Transport infra engineer at Reddit.

My opinions are mine, not my employer's.

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packetslave··on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
As someone once put it: "McDonald's is a real estate company with a hamburger hobby"
packetslave··on [dead]
Nobody cares. Read it, or don't. Complaining about perceived LLM writing adds nothing to the conversation.
packetslave··on An update on Wayback Machine access
This is absolutely something that's happening. There are even paid scraper API's that offer "Wayback Machine fallback" as a feature.
packetslave··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
And you're under the impression that the purpose of a company blog is WHAT, exactly?
packetslave··on TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
> Didn't the DoD at one point build a 1k+ PS3 cluster based on their multi-core chip and had a mini supercomputer CotS?

The Air Force did (Condor) and it hit #33 on the 2010 Top500.

packetslave··on Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction
Nintendo is probably THE most aggressive company in the industry in terms of going after people for using their IP in unauthorized ways. They don't have a blind eye.
packetslave··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
> Waymo driver? The vehicles are autonomous

the "Waymo Driver" is how they refer to the self-driving platform (hardware and software). They've been pretty consistent with that branding, so it's not surprising that they used it here.

> Importantly, Waymo takes full ownership for something they write positively [...] But Waymo weasels out of taking responsibility for something they write about negatively

Pretty standard for corporate Public Relations writing, unfortunately.

packetslave··on Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models
right-click, search Google: "MSK most commonly refers to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a world-renowned institution for cancer treatment and research"
packetslave··on What an unprocessed photo looks like
Right-click, "Search Google for 'ADC'", takes much less time than making this useless comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog-to-digital_converter

packetslave··on Cloudflare outage should not have happened
yep, and it was this exact requirement that also caused the exact same outage back in 2013 or so. DDoS rules were pushed to the GFE (edge proxy) every 15 seconds, and a bad release got out. Every single GFE worldwide crashed within 15 seconds. That outage is in the SRE book.
packetslave··on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
I have a bit of a different take on browser fingerprinting: I don't want to uniquely identify you as a person so I can serve you ads, or whatever. I want to identify your traffic when you're scraping my content from 2,000 different IP's and 1,000 different user accounts, I can block you or rate limit you without hurting anyone else.

Given the scale of scrapers these days (AI companies with VC money have no problem spinning up thousands of VMs running Chrome), fingerprinting at the browser level is the only realistic option.

(obligatory: my personal opinion, not necessarily my employer's)

packetslave··on A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System (1977)
TCP/IP Illustrated is still in copyright. Please don't post pirated material here.
packetslave··on This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
and his dad was head of computer security at the NSA for a while
packetslave··on Jujutsu at Google [video]
Google had 86TB of sourcecode data in Piper way back in 2016.
packetslave··on New coding models and integrations
Also the just-released DGX Spark from Nvidia (although it "only" has 128gb of unified memory)
packetslave··on AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference
in AWS's defense, it's pretty easy to see the rationale for this. The amount of abuse they must deal with is staggering -- "spin up account, do evil stuff until they notice and nuke the account, repeat"
packetslave··on You Are in a Box
It's a less... dramatic... version of what happens when HN links to JWZ's blog.
packetslave··on You Are in a Box
Someone who is writing on their personal blog and doesn't give a damn what is "acceptable" to some rando on the Internet?
packetslave··on How the Sun Enterprise 10000 was born (2007)
Those look like E5500 or E6500 cabinets (hard to tell from the angle).
packetslave··on Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
Netflix is a weird case, in that they let new hires pick the mix of stock vs. cash in their total compensation. Since the CA law requires posting the cash salary in the job offer, it really can be that wide of a range.
packetslave··on Sparks – A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code
Sparklines have been around (in modern usage) for nearly 20 years (coined by Edward Tufte in 2006.

Also, Google is a thing.

packetslave··on Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
what an intrusive, nosy question!
packetslave··on The Evolution of SRE at Google
Not everything needs to be spelled out for people who are too lazy to Google
packetslave··on Noisy neighbor detection with eBPF
that's a related tool for monitoring the utilization of BPF programs within the kernel, but NOT the focus of the article -- detecting noisy neighbors in non-EBPF workloads.
packetslave··on We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi
Hack is not PHP (any longer)
packetslave··on James Earl Jones has died
If we're purely talking voice actors, there are SO many incredible talents to choose from: Mark Hamill as The Joker for sure, Kevin Conroy as Batman, Tara Strong as dozens of characters, etc.
packetslave··on Google Closure Library has been archived
It's a 15-year-old project. Try harder.
packetslave··on The journey of an internet packet: Exploring networks with traceroute
I mean, KIND OF, if you squint. From the trace, Akamai and Google have a direct peering link (hop 6 looks like an Akamai edge/peering router -- Akamai owns Linode so that makes sense -- and hop 7 is a Google peering router).

For it to be hitting "the Internet" you'd expect to see hops on a Tier 1 carrier like AT&T, Lumen, etc. and/or an ISP like Comcast, Spectrum, etc.

packetslave··on The journey of an internet packet: Exploring networks with traceroute
To be fair, that entire traceroute never touches "the Internet". Everything after hop 6 is inside Google's backbone network, and everything before hop 7 is inside Linode/Akamai.
packetslave··on Crafting Interpreters
codecrafters (YC S22, http://codecrafters.io) has a new module called "Building Your Own Interpreter" that works its way through this book. It's great because you work in small chunks, each of which has unit tests to tell you if you got, e.g. scanning string literals correct.

Currently free while the module is in beta. I spent today working through all of the lexer exercises in Rust (I'm currently learning it), and had a lot of fun.

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