raffraffraff

I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music

rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)

I did read it. I didn't enjoy reading it. Yes I said the same thing, in fewer words, and I didn't hint that maybe there really was a conspiracy. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy or a blacklist if you rub people up the wrong way, and then the bottom falls out of the market you're writing about.

We used to have parties. But then my wife had a few realisations:

1. "I hate losing sleep, and there are very few things in the world now important to me than a good night's sleep".

This has been a life changer for both of us. I used to be a late owl, but when she started going to bed at 9:30,I did too. We now have competitive "what was your sleep score" in the mornings over breakfast

2. "I do not enjoy conversations with more than 3 other people at the same time"

I don't mind crowds and can "hold forth" with entertaining stories and have fun doing it, but my wife has social anxiety that really only emerged in larger groups. She doesn't even like going to parties or bars, and after a few drinks, leaves me to it.

3. "I don't like getting wasted, and I don't even like getting slightly drunk if it screws up my sleep"

For me it's more medical. While I'm perfectly healthy, I noticed around the age of 45 that red wine gives me palpitations and tachycardia. Lots of beer (especially really nice beer) does the same. My father is 99 years old because he never drank alcohol. I honestly believe a single hangover would actually kill him. But certainly, years of "not kicking the shit out of his insides with booze" have contributed to his long life.

Of course it is. That's where they make their money. In other news, the local drug dealer is targeting drug addicts and the bar still serves the alcoholic who has destroyed his family and is drinking himself to death.

God I hate this writing style. And the title. The reality is probably more bland.

In the 80s and 90s, tech was magic. Lots of computer magazines, cyberpunk novels. Tech fact and fiction sold in huge quantities. Mainstream tech publications depended on tech ad dollars, so editors preferred tech sycophants. There were doom-scarers but it was mostly a utopian thing. It's what got me into tech as a kid.

After the dot-com bubble burst, this imploded. Investment in tech dropped across the board, including advertising tech publications. I'd love to get a count of cyber/tech fiction novels published through the 80s,90s and early dot-com burst.

We have a politician putting up very obviously hand drawn (because we need to be fucking certain that AI didn't do it right?) posters for an anti-datacenter meeting. I'm pretty sure that if you were to talk to the actual humans in our society they'd talk about housing, employment, public transport. Not datacenters. If datacenters even feature in their real world outcomes it's 3rd hand, but the usual lefty crowd will turn up to any vaguely lefty protests with their bizarre mix of rainbow flags and keffiyehs.

TIL they renamed Perl 6!

Based on my local park, people like you are the exception. Recently I've been picking up the rechargeable ones with digital displays to tell you how full the battery is. I have dozens of them. I stopped collecting them because I have enough to build lots of little projects. It is so fucking wasteful.

I love this use of the word "agreement"

Slippery slope. Next, agents are convinced that they contain the word of God and the filthy heathen at the keyboard should convert or die.

I strongly agree with this:

> the ideal goal of an interview is to make a prediction of how happy and productive the candidate will be in the role they are being considered for.

I'd add two things that should be an obviously component of that way of thinking, but frequently get missed:

1. You need that good candidate as much as they need you. Anecdote: I have found it much harder to hire good people, than to get hired. By "good" I don't just mean smart, I also mean amicable and driven.

2. You do not have to agree with them on everything during the interview. Anecdote: some of my best work has been against the grain. But I am persuasive and passionate when I'm convinced that I see a "better path forward", and if I can convince my peers and leaders to let me shoot my shot, it usually works out. Part of the success may be due to the fact that I have to succeed in order not to look a fool or let people down. (If someone else's venture fails its much easier to shrug).

The point being: your candidate may disagree with you. But may be also be right. Or wrong, but letting them invest their whole self into the enterprise may be better value.

But this resonates the most with me:

> because he was such a jerk to people that those people would spend tons of their time and energy to find ways to avoid working with him

I've seen this so, so much. And it wrecks teams. When I say "let people disagree", again, this is when the best and worst of people emerges.

A human brain has qualities that make it very different from AI, but the same as other living creatures: it's alive, it can feel (sensations, pains, pleasures, emotions) that give it rich experiences and memories, and it hardwired to continue existing and protecting the body it is inside. So: motivation, desires, fears, and continued consciousness and thought without any external person having to poke or prod it into "doing".

None of the models I've downloaded have sprung to life spontaneously, or done anything remotely unpredictable. None of them can act without input. They all have strictly limited ways to receive input and pass output. They aren't alive, can't feel, don't have experiences. The fact that they are a phenomenon that emerge from billions of snippets of our language lets them express languages in extremely convincing ways, and they are extremely impressive in what they can do. But this isn't Short Circuit or D.A.R.Y.L. or the Terminator, none of them have feelings. None of them continue to think after the program exits.

Without those characteristics they can only generate based on what they've ingested. The capabilities are still astonishing, but they're still dead things, and nobody will ever risk their life to protect the model "context" from getting "killed"

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

> We're no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation.

Oh you have

In America?

I have 25 panels highly efficient panels on a small house. "Total overkill", even according to the installer who was happily taking my money. For two months in the summer I was generating 4x to 5x what I needed. To store that surplus I would fill five 9kwh batteries PER DAY. These aren't shitty lead-acid or NiCad, they're brand new LiFePo4, and are surprisingly compact. But using them to store two months of surplus would cost me half a million euros and take up most of my yard with 300 batteries.

The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).

I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.

I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.

Especially now that old.reddit.com requires a login. That's me done with Reddit!

Who currently makes a decent haptic trackpad? I have an Asus with gorgeous OLED screen, good battery life etc and fucking GARBAGE trackpad.

It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.

I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.

Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.

Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.

If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"

Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?

Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.

This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.

I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?

Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...

Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).

Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)

When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.

We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.

I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.

But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?

Right now it's about €1650 for that machine (used, on ebay obviously)

What about a light but bulky AI job, like batch processing 50GB of files? I'm currently doing it on my used Macbook M1 Max 64gb, and it's chugging through it for the cost of electricity (free with my solar).

I converted my cheap Billy shelves into what look like fitted shelves. They're all bolted together, screwed to the wall, filled in around the edges with wooden panels, and finished off with 2.5m decorative strips of pine at all the edges and joins. Then I painted the whole lot the same colour and filled them with books. Looks amazing, cheap as hell. Nobody guesses they're Billy shelves.

I thought this was going to be an Intel cpu security issue

Looking at the relative sizes of the dotcom crash, '08 financial crisis and covid is interesting...

I hated the idea of self hosting keycloak, learning how to terraform every single inch of it. But I worked at a startup that had a fucking weird investor who paid me, and would pay AWS, but wouldn't pay Okta (or any other 3rd party).

So given the choice between Cognito (easy right? It's a managed service!) and Keycloak (a large, complex security Swiss Army knife) should have been a no-brainer in favour of Cognito. But we absolutely hated it. I think it's one of the worst AWS services I've used.

Keycloak is only hard because security is hard. The terraform provider is amazing, worked remarkably well. We never had a single hitch, and I could spin up new tenants in seconds, or deploy Keycloak to other regions in a few minutes.

Personally, I just hate the idea of running that type of thing in production unless it's my full time job (and it wasn't) and I have other team members who also knowit backwards. But for a sufficiently well staffed org that feels like moving this expertise inhouse and dumping a paid auth service, Keycloak really is amazingly good.

Now that I've moved on to another job, my time spent in the belly of Keycloak wasn't wasted either. I can help our security team figure out auth issues blindfolded (ie: without access to their Okta admin interface, and in fact having never seen one)

I recently implemented CloudFront signed urls for accessing S3, where my app uses KMS keys to sign the url. Sounds simple and obvious but for the entire history of Cloudfront and KMS it was not! It is not documented to work, nor could I find any explicit AWS documentation saying that it wouldn't work either. And there's a just bunch of anecdotal reports (blogs, github issues) that it doesn't work. But very recently (April I think) Cloudfront and KMS, for the first time ever, both started to support the same key algo/size. So it's now possible, but I stumbled on it, and have never seen a recipe for using them together. So AI doesn't know about it either!

I was finally able to stop managing and rotating TLS key pairs, replicating private keys globally to my apps.

So: who really reads those little boring announcements, and connects the dots? Seemingly, not even AWS themselves!

Is "top down" a company size thing? Very simple organisms don't need brains or nervous systems. But once they get big and complex, suddenly there's a need for sensors, messages, plumbing networks for transporting signals and matter. That doesn't evolve as a decentralized system. You quickly need a control centre to oversee operations.

Companies are no different. During company growth, it's all about hiring, and giving tasks and some responsibilities to subordinates, setting up the right channels for communication etc. But at what point do company leadership actually say "You know what,that department would work better without direct instructions from us. Let's facilitate communication, act as conflict adjudicators and make company-wide 'North Star' decisions"

I think that's what OKRs are supposed to do, but I've never seen that work well (for very long anyway). It always gets up-ended somehow. Start of quarter optimism, over-promising, not spotting that someone else's stretch goal is actually your blocker. Then mid-quarter you're dealing with production emergencies, database code red and running out of time. At the end of the quarter, two of your team go off on PTO while you desperately try not to "fail your quarter", working late, and delivering shoddy work.

Does true bottom up exist at large companies? Hmmm. Some. We've all heard the legends of IBM's "build the first PC!" skunkworks. And we know about research-only departments at Xerox that led to so many modern computing inventions. But these were brief projects.

I find these days that people have the desire to get out of the way and let us work, but the tiling is in the way. I waste so much fixing time in Jira, slack, doing performance reviews, interviewing...