sacnoradhq

The US police, justice, and carceral systems are over-zealous and punitive. The US has among the highest incarceration rates on the planet (including a large pre-trial detention population) and their conditions are often inhumane.

To be fair, juries are an approximate averaging system of guesswork by people who weren't there, listening to other people who weren't there arguing for the interests of 2 sides who present different stories.

The profit-price spiral of the greater economy is why. Everyone raises their prices so everyone raises their prices. 60% of inflation in this post-pandemic echo was measured to be due to corporate profiteering, e.g., greed.

NCLB was as disastrous as throwing away phonics.

Adopting elements of the Finnish model would probably be an improvement.

The goal of learning should be mastery, not memorization of specific cases.

With geometry, the style I was taught emphasized explanation of complex problems using proofs but building from first principles.

That's ridiculous. When I took the entire undergrad physics series for scientists and engineers, it absolutely required calculus, vector math, and diff eqs.

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Calculators with CAS are extremely useful.

Wow, they still make TI-84's?

Covets my vintage HP 48GX.

AWS forked Elastic because of pseudo-FOSS AGPL-like licensing.

Something is either FOSS or it's FOSS-washed crippleware riding the coattails of actual FOSS for $$$.

AGPL is a user-hostile license and a license that MAANGs explicitly forbid.

AGPL and other pseudo-FOSS are purist idealistic aspirations that are, in reality, self-sabotaging footguns.

It's cute. Perhaps it's more of something you find on the tables of a sandwich shop to pass the time.

The Capitol Hill Citizen and ProPublica seem more respectable and influential as research-oriented journalism for underappreciated, important topics.

Ralph Nader's papers, The Capitol Hill Citizen and The Winsted Citizen are monthly broadsheets.

"Supposedly?" Because it happened around the time of layoffs and widespread cutbacks including degradation of microkitchens, closing of eateries, and cuts in benefits. The department I was at was cut to 1 intern amongst an org of ~300. I asked around and a similar situation exists at other megacorps.

It's the classic failure of overshooting cutbacks, driving away talent, and harming future talent acquisition. This is generally an anti-pattern Apple avoids by neither overhiring nor doing layoffs and becoming gunshy with interns and hires. It's quite astute business acumen to avoid megacorporatitis.

Apply common sense: The living have a phobia of being buried alive. And how are they going to ring a bell if they're restrained facedown? ...

I'd make a collage out of it with AOL floppies, :CueCat scanners, and Juicero pouches.

The trick is staying below the chip's rated processing temps because many of these temps are far too high and could easily lead to semiconductor degradation, especially with the mechanical shock of thermal stresses from rapid or uneven heating and cooling. Hot air is far more uneven and uncontrolled than a BGA oven.

Oh fuck, I have 4 FireCudas (2 530s and 2 520s). I'd probably try reflowing BGAs in my buddy's shop's BGA oven.

- Dual AMD EPYC 7402 with 96 threads total (I considered upgrading via eBaying random newer used parts, but the value isn't there)

- 512 GiB of Samsung ECC DDR4

- Lights-out management via Supermicro IPMI

- (2) 4x NVMe to PCIe adapters with many Samsung, Seagate, and Intel Optane SSD on the motherboard

- Dual SAS3 controllers to Supermicro 847E1C-R1K23JBOD with dual SAS3 expanders and 37x 14 TB HGST helium drives. Not using ZFS because of past unrecoverable problems and poor community support. mdadm and XFS are rock solid. I built an md array and SMART drive monitoring tool that tracks the few parameters that are prefailure signals, and also monitors helium levels.

- Intel QuickAssist 9870 - cryptographic accelerator because "Why not?"

- Intel 10 GbE NIC optical to switch

- vSphere Enterprise Plus currently on 7.x (technically unsupported), considering 8.x

- APC SMX2000 and SMX1500 with multiple expansion batteries, NMC3 lights-out, and temp+humidity monitoring

- WiFi: Ubiquiti 6E locally managed without cloud bullshit

- Offbrand POE+ switch firewalled at the router to avoid cloud, telemetry, and backdoor bullshit

- Deciso OPNsense 740 firewall with 10 GbE links to ISP and to the switch running business OPNsense. Wireguard works great with a freebie dyndns to permit remote network access via "VPN". Had to setup a cron with a curl dyndns updater. It's good enough to do remote Steam from mom's internet on an iPad Pro with the Wireguard app VPN in automatic mode.

- 2 Gbps Google Fiber

- VMs standardized on CentOS 9 Stream. A couple of Ubuntu and Windows, along with *BSD and other OS build worker boxes. While the RHEL-compatible CentOS userland needs more work than most, the important bit of RHEL/CentOS is scalable stability, reliability, and security. Make RPMs for whatever you need and vendor dependencies.

- Kubernetes (k8s) and Docker CE on containerd

- Plex Media Server

- Samba setup and enabled as a TimeMachine network disk

- NFS for home directories

- PKI (CA and intermediate CA) for certs on all devices and apps managed by OPNsense (pk not saved)

- SSH: Yubikey GPG-agent backed authorized keys + TOTP + Yubikey FIDO2. (Service accounts are done differently)

- Bitwarden (yes yes, configured correctly and local sync server)

- Obsidian for runbooks and primary documentation

- Also: AWS CloudFront/S3 for YUM RPM repo and EC2 for one-off jobs. Staying below the free tier and using minimal resources is how to be cost efficient.

- Offsite storage: Mega 2TB plan + Apple plan + Google Drive plan (2 is 1, 1 is none)

- Working on: kata-containers and Istio

- Thinking about: ARM server and an HSM

PS: Buy as much as you can used because buying new is usually throwing money away. UPSes must be refurbed with new quality batteries and then refurbed periodically (say, every 7-10 years for the broke home gamer). Schneider Electric bastards (owners of APC) went to a subscription model for NMC3 firmware updates that is cost prohibitive.

Socialism*

*for the rich, and social Darwinian abject poverty for everyone else. Occasionally, crumbs are thrown to mollify the unresolved grievances. (Social Security was just a big crumb, and Medicare isn't single-payer and is for-profit considering how it's structured.)

Biggest hack: go work for Stanford for enough years as an FTE.

https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/benefits-rewards/tgp/ben...

That's rich for "Know your place, grad students. We, like Walmart, condone taking tax payer money (also known as "welfare for the poor for the rich") as indirectly part of your compensation."

If you want to be rich, avoid being a grad student for very long or entirely unless it's pivotal to a tangible financial path where the opportunity cost is significantly worth it.

Anyone with taphophobia should've avoided dying in 17th c. Poland.

Partially why I cooled the jets of SRE/SRM HR teams around 2016. The Googlyness was becoming less Googly classic formula and more political, corporate, and insane.

Clickbait. This isn't a FTE with TC, it's an internship. Unlike Apple, most MANGs cut internships to functionally zero. You're never going to get a corporate coding job without multiple rounds of technical interview because common sense.

Ownership in OpenAI LP appears to be (mostly?) the missus' department.

The cap table is moot in the near-term because of the profit precedence structure.

Yes, yes. qubits & bits. One must think of QC state space on the order of θ(2^2^N) compared to CC θ(2^N) where N is qubits and bits respectively.

IBM's at the 400 qubit mark, and claims to be on-track to deliver 1k within a year. If this were to happen, it'd be like going from the Gemini Guidance Computer to a 386 in 1 year. This means HFT platform$ will be able to use more near-real-time simulation capabilities to gamify the markets to capture greater tranches of total capitalization. I don't see this trend ever declining except when wandering into increasingly-frequent longtail, LTCM-like collapses whenever externalities of the real world catch up to the so-called "efficiencies" of an under-regulated casino masquerading as a bazaar.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2022-11-09-IBM-Unveils-400-Qubit-Pl...

They're good at X.ing* out press releases and SEO.

*or whatever the verb to replacing "tweeting" is.

PS: Elon now has a kid with a nonsense name that's the textual equivalent of a tramp stamp. I feel sorry for the kid having unreasonable and unwise parents.

Independent of fads, I remember a bottom-feeder tech recruiter dismissing another language, Go, as a "nothingburger" in 2012. Hubris is on them, as with any arrogant proclamation steeped in ignorance. The people closest to niche but useful tools are the best to see their trajectory, regardless of media characterization of hype or apparent obscurity. Around 2016 I exited the Go scene for Rust because it became crowded with noisy, low-skilled, needy users who were leading to time suck without contributing much in return.

Inflation has been aberrant over the past 3 years in some areas, i.e., food, from profit-price spirals but there is not widespread hyperinflation.

No one reputable is predicting the USD will crash imminently.

US T-bills lost a notch of rating due to long-term declining governance tied to the cozy relationship and revolving door between Wall St. and federal regulators. This is a form of corruption that undermines the economy and strategic power.

This is it. The source is the spinelessness of studios rather than some greater societal shift. However, that's not to say a societal shift cannot follow from reality mirroring fiction because mass media manufactures much of the attitudes of society.

I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture.

“[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy

Most people don't realize the huge transient voltages in wires of any significant length that can be induced by nearby electrical storms.

Granted, CAT 5-8 cables are supposed to be twisted pairs and sometimes shielded, but it's imperfect.

PS TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litz_wire

I can see the need for firmware in oscilloscopes, like a Siglent, but why would I need or want the complexity of firmware in a soldering iron that could possibly go awry and self-destruct?

I picked up a JBC clone soldering station for cheap from overseas and never looked back. It takes all of the regular tips. It gets almost as hot as fast as the real thing, but it's not quite as accurate or as powerful as a real JBC. For home use, it's good enough for me. I JB welded on a JBC tip quick change stand on the top of the station.

Home lab protips:

0. Save money by buying most equipment used, including taking an occasional risk on repairing nonfunctional items.

1. If you enjoy your health, don't risk it. Don't solder indoors near living areas, get a serious vacuum canister-style fume extractor, ventilate with outside air, and always wash your hands after handling electronics or soldering.

2. A bi/trinocular microscope with a polarized light source. Your eyes will thank you.

3. Regardless of the route you go for soldering, get a temperature tester. It's good to know the accuracy (skew) and precision of selected vs. actual.