samtho

You talk about about as if a human-created neural network is at the same level as quantum physics where there are limits as to our understanding. We know very well how large language models work even if the capabilities of this technology are actively being explored.

You along with others here are far overstating the unknowns we have within the context of AI, whether this is the result of a misinformation campaign targeted at trying to boost the value of this tech or if the pop-sci takes have really gotten too prevalent, it is unclear to me.

This is only a common mistake to the subset of people who labor under the delusion that we have actually stumbled upon Generalized Artificial Intelligence.

We know how LLMs work fundamentally and what their limits are. LLMs are only able to make “correct sounding” statements which have the side effect of being correct a certain percentage of the time. They do not have the ability to reason nor engage in high level thought.

An entire generation was sold the idea that a college degree is the ticket to a decent job, where every adult in the lives of these kids were imploring them to take on tens of thousands of non-dischargeable loans.

This was, intentional or not, a systematic selling of this generation to a 21st century version of indentured servitude, kneecapping a cohort of young adults who got to join the workforce during one of the worst economic downturns in US history and, during what would have been their prime earning years, a global pandemic which flipped industries on their head and displaced workers in a way we have never seen before.

The people who say “I didn’t get loan forgiveness why would you?” are just horrifically out of touch with the rapid rise in cost of education. While they could support a full time credit load with a part time job, the only way to support a college course load after 2004 is literally having cash to pay for the course load up front.

The entire system that led to this is farcical and belongs in a comic book along with the “fuck you I got mine” crowd because of how hilariously evil it is.

This feels a little tone deaf and a bit useless.

OP does not have a job and, especially in a the crumby market that we’re in for tech work, they just need anything they can get. You’re speaking from a place way higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs than where OP is currently.

It’s hard to imagine yourself in a position where you can casually choose who you want to work for if you are not even getting interviews or offers in the first place. This is therefore not a strategy that leads to very motivational results.

Ive done a lot of work with barcodes, barcode scanners, and symbologies. Many of the cheap ones absolutely will. They just don’t utilize the tracking laser to get a reflection as the light from the screen is literally being shone into the sensor. The bars don’t have to be perfectly black, just dark enough from the “quiet” areas to have recognizable contrast.

When a commercial jet schedules a flight plan, they must specify alternate airports, usually two are required especially when weather is predicted to be bad. The closest airport may not be the best one to divert to due to runway restrictions, normal capacity, and it must be far enough away for the possibility of it to not be affected by the same weather conditions that the destination is (which would be a reason to divert). Ft Lauderdale is 225nm away which is not far at all for a aircraft to divert to.

Landings in which the approach is entirely over water is tricky and is done with instruments all of the time, typically ILS. This is normal for commercial flights in general, but should the localizer lose the glideslope, autopilot on the b737 defaults to the last mode it was in, which for the approach, they may have been performing a flight level change (FLC) mode down to the airports elevation which will cause a decent more rapid than the 3% guild slope, which allows the aircraft to descend into and catch the glideslope localizer.[note 1] At some point the gluideslope was lost (or was never caught to begin with) which to the pilots’ surprise, they likely encountered a “terrain, pull up” notice and recovered before the situation got worse.

So why divert? Why not go around? Well they had to make that decision because they may not be able to divert if they made the decision to go around and try again due to fuel burn. They likely did not know why they captured the glideslope and then, all of a sudden, they were getting ready for a water landing. Was it the aircraft’s ILS or guideslope localized receiver? Due to the weather, they certainly could not do a visual approach, and there may not be sufficient RNAV points in the water on that approach to land there, so they diverted to an alternate where they know they could land visually if they absolutely had to.

Making decisions while flying aircraft is a calculated process and may not be immediately obvious. It’s easy to see in hindsight how things could have turned out differently but pilots often have minutes or seconds to make a decision and they will always choose the one that results in a safe landing over a convenient one. Media that doesn’t understand how these decisions are made love to poke fun at these silly pilots and it does a huge public disservice.

Note 1: this was explained to me from a friend who flew b737 for an airline

The 90 day window is an industry standard for zero-days, how the author worded it is neither here nor there. 90 days is ample time for even a half-functioning organization to address the issue in some way. I agree with Red Threat’s decision to not show their hand in the first email. The altruistic take on this is that they do not want the email to fall upon deaf ears (or even a bad actor within a company) and would prefer to have a channel of communication open with the security team before outlining the details.

The biggest problem when faced with a zero-day is that it’s unknown who else knows about it. This helps the the company’s security team justify the work due to the fire lit under the company to take action - especially if their corporate structure does not allow for more “elective” fixes.

I started my professional career writing PHP and the deeper I go in everything else, the more I appreciate the fundamentals that PHP defines as it’s happy path.

Why were you using a web-based content management system for secret management?

I am not.

The size of the organization may only serve to increase the number of potentially bad pieces of code from just plain old tech debt, poorly engineered, or just a hack job implementation. The ability to control quality of code is highly dependent on how staunch the organizational culture is around keeping the repos clean of dead, kludgey, or just bad code, and strict enforcement of agreed upon architecture.

This is the most needlessly complex, mustache-twirling, moderately evil-villain type plot.

The simpler explanation is often the answer here. Either (or both) their internal QA and release process is flawed or specific employees did not follow the process correctly.

These fantastical explanations of some big government conspiracy only serve to make the believers feel better about the fact that nobody is actually in control and shit just happens randomly which is honestly a far more terrifying prospect.

There is a term used in aviation called “hot and high” that describes an air field that is situated at a high altitude as well as having a warm ambient temperature. Hot air is less dense than cold air and higher elevation further reduces the density. It’s two lines on a performance graph that must be checked prior to takeoff.

For fixed wing aircraft, this means that your V2 speed (speed where you generate enough lift to begin climbing) is affected and you have to go faster in these conditions. This is overcome during cruise speeds because less air density is required for lift.

The story changes for helicopters, however. Because they generate lift via the rotary wings (rotors) only, they need to spin faster to get more air to hit the blade and thus produce lift. There is an upper RPM that it cannot pass due to physical limitations of the rotors assembly, engine, or both. If it gets hot enough, it can literally spin up to full speed and not move.

Helicopters freak me out. Fixed wing aircraft degrade to a glider should all power be lost, a helicopter becomes dead weight with deader occupants.

That’s only part of the equation. Grid displays require a lot more memory and often power to drive. By contrast, a seven segment display requires 7 (or 8) LEDs and 8 bits per digit on the output stage, 4 bit in BCD, which can be fed via a shift register.

Chatrooms used to be for idle chit chat, banter, and quick questions, but are now being used for deeper technical discussions. Ironically, you find a lot of this on places like Reddit, including an excess of uninformed and repeat questions.

I am of the opinion that Discord does any niche community a great disservice by first locking content behind an invite link and, once invited, content is locked behind pages and pages of search results if the content is even still available.

I’m sure there is bias on my part because I cut my teeth on forums of the ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, but the siloing and fragmentation of information has ultimately divided up centers of knowledge into smaller and smaller pieces. Those in the know will know and those not will be shut out.

I have a couple of gold pans and prospector shovels in my camping gear, I’ve collected about 8.2 grams of gold flakes/specks/dust and a single picker over the last 15 years.

If you know where (and when) to look, you can pretty reliably pull trivial amounts of gold out of the Sierras and it’s foothills.

Going gold panning is basically an excuse to go up to the mountains super early, hike to a remote part of the river, and enjoy nature for most of the day while also enjoying some beer, ciders, and sandwiches with some friends. We pan for gold but also collect some rocks.

People who do this seriously are certainly a type.

Not OP, but I made one of these for my partner and I’s bonsai garden.

I use standard 3/4” sprinkler valves from the big box stores, connected to a manifold via unions on each side. This enables me to swap if needed, but these are ruggedized and will last a while. They do take 12VAC, so you need a transformer and use relays to turn them on, but they work very well.

Utilizing “Brute Force” as a testing and verification strategy.

The database in question was 80mb, which is very small. It’s also fast and backups are as simple as copying the file.

Not advocating for this particular use case, but we’ve all seen more egregious abuses of SQLite.

Having worked in construction and a bit in building science, there is a single major problem with subterranean construction:

Water.

Diffusion/osmosis means that moisture is going to want to go from high to lower concentrations. Untreated poured concrete is permeable and will allow water to seep through if installed without any sort of vapor barrier. There are building products to help out here, but it’s difficult to identify leaks if you are only leaking a 0.1oz of water per day, it evaporates faster than you can identify it. Once it has some refuge (humid air, damp environment, porous surfaces) it will begin to accumulate and cause problems. I’m not saying it’s not impossible (I think under ground stuff is cool and we should have more of it), but we need to develop standard, cheap methods of reliably sealing off our structures that reach down below.

There are other problems that are site-specific (sandy soils, clays, bedrock), but building below grade happens once so these problems can be overcome with enough money.

“Gluten free” is a little different because gluten is a protein not only found in wheat, but also wheat derivatives like spelt, semolina, graham, and other grains like barley, rye, and malt.

This is different from a wheat allergy, in fact, its also not an “allergen” in the same way that peanuts are (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis), and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose (which is covered by milk but is also an indirect indicator of lactose that can be a false positive because lactose free milk exists).

The score is not a qualitative measure on how serviceable a product is compared to it’s peers, rather, the score reflects how simple it is to service items that are able to be serviced. If the ram is not swappable, it’s simply not counted in the score as it’s integrated with the main board.

This discussion started with a hypothesis based on a second hand anecdote.

For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers in that space more.

> I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work.

*reported

It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature of harassment has changed and is just different from how it was like in-person.

If I’m not mistaken, companies that facilitate or host discussion are given the legal burden of policing speech online but there is obviously no consequence for removing more than necessary. It’s very rational for them to err on the side of caution and remove anything that has the slightest chance of getting them in trouble and being forced to pay a fine. Conversely, bad acting companies can remove content they disagree with under the guise of compliance.

This is just another example of poorly targeted legislation with negative externalities that will far eclipse whatever problem is being solved.

The bigger problem is that we as a society for some godforsaken reason believe it’s best to change social behavior with law. This is the same shit we have been doing for centuries and it has never worked. You cannot stop people from internalizing being a human turd, although social pressures can. But if all you have is a hammer…

I’ve worked a lot in construction both prior to entering tech and as a side hustle while working for tech companies.

Every single one of these construction-tech products fail to address actual problems and bottlenecks in the construction process, ultimately creating just novelties dreamt up by someone who has never set foot on a job site.

The wood frame is one of the fastest parts of structure, I am able to frame 300-900sqft ADUs (accessory dwelling units) in 2-3 days with help or 3-4 days solo, which is 24-48 human hours. The lumber is ordered and delivered by truck, it requires no special equipment, only really needing a battery operated miter saw, nailer, impact driver, measuring tape, speed square, string lines, levels, hammer, and sunscreen.

What takes a long time is everything else:

* Foundation is 85% site prep, 10% coordination of materials/subcontractors/inspection, and 5% of actual work construction. Draining and grading is overlooked or under considered most often leading to settling/cracking or outright failure of the foundation system prematurely.

* Plumbing needs to be involved between every single step, beginning from after the site is graded to after wall coverings are up and fixtures are ready to be installed. DWV (drain waste vent) is critical to get right as shit only travels downhill.

* Electrical is time consuming, has expensive materials, and is getting saddled with even more requirements of diminishing returns. 200A main panels are the norm basically all new construction is 100% electric. You are running 10/3 wire (3 conductors of 10AWG + ground) at $1.30/ft for a clothes dryer, 6/3 at $5.50-6.50/ft for both your electric range hookup and EV charger, 8/3 at $3-4/ft for your HVAC, dedicated 12/2 circuits for each of your microwave, refrigerator, dish washer, garbage disposer, etc. all circuit breakers that service circuits in dwelling area must be arc fault protected (which means your breakers went from $10-20 each to $40-80 each). I won’t even go into solar and how much of everything must be solar ready.

* HVAC is straight forward for new homes, provided the unit/s is/are sized appropriately.

* Wall covering (usually drywall) takes a long time with many passes to affix, tape, and sand wallboard

* Vapor barriers on the outside require basic knowledge to get the install right - which is sadly not always present for the build

* Exterior cladding can take many forms from shiplap siding (cedar or composite), masonry board, a masonry product like stucco, vinyl, or just a tongue and groove primed siding board.

* Roofing is easy and fast but costly

* Final utility hookup is fraught with slowdowns and annoyances, requires certain inspections to be done (but not all) and unless you have someone’s desk phone at the utility to help you out, it’s a crappy process to navigate.

* Landscaping and other finish work takes a while

The elephant in the room, however, is always the going to be related to the red tape. Permitting accounts for a significant chunk of the cost where a new single family home might incur $90-$130K in just permit fees alone (in Sacramento where I’m located, which is on the medium/low end for California). The process is becoming so convoluted and draconian that you need literal consultants to tell you where to burn piles of cash that add comparatively little value to the overall project and just drive costs up unnecessarily. Having safe buildings is important and there is value in getting an third party check work for correctness, but something is wrong when my $85-$200K construction project doubles because it’s literally illegal not to pay this. Because this cost does not scale linearly with the size of the build, most developers build the largest sized home they can for the plot as that’s the best value relative to permitting costs. Affordable housing to-own is never going to be within reach with the way this is setup.

At my first big corporate jobs, I got to work on a codebase that was nothing but premature DRY’d code, but I didn’t know it at the time. As someone who was self taught, and suffered from imposter syndrome as many of us do/did in that situation, I thought I was missing something huge until I was talking to a senior developer and these strange design decisions came up, to which he said something like

> Yeah, that was written by <ex-engineer> and he couldn't abstract his way out of a paper bag

I guess the real lessons were the crappy decisions that someone else made along the way.

The point is that we treat certain things like high blood pressure as a primary issue instead of a secondary one. Instead of addressing something cholesterol, which can often be a lifestyle issue, more emphasis is placed on just taking the statin.

I loathe the respective arguments that each side makes.

On the counsel (municipal) side, you have a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that we need to punctuation to let computers more easily read names, which is ill-informed in the way computers work.

On the other side, you have the classic “it’s just not right” garbage with a tinge of “our great English standards are going to hell in a hand basket” which is ill-informed on how language evolves.

This sounds like an explanation that is found in a future history book where cultural context is absent and the researchers are looking for a simple answer. There are plenty of ostensibly nice places that sport the exact same public infrastructure as SF. It’s just become standard and any deviation to more ornamental pieces is almost always seen as a quaint throwback.

My hypothesis as to why this is relates to how products over time seem to all converge on inoffensive sensibility and mediocre homogeneity.

The more mass-produced something is or generalized use-case something has, the more important it is for the item to meet every single need. Of course, one of those needs is that the physical appearance of the item needs to match or blend in with the aesthetic of its final location. Not all older, crafted pieces match, and to choose one commits you a particular style. Once you’ve decided on that, the cost to change is significant.

So how do you meet all needs? Design something inoffensive, bland, and sensible.