shrikant

Google's audio search tells me that it's a stock sound effect: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=2wLKlWPkcOM&si=Sle4B04wAoV...

https://secure.dewolfemusic.com/page/digiffects_sound_effect....

It appears to be used or sampled in a couple of songs (by Anna Maria Jopek and Boozehounds), but these date in the 2000s so can't have come into the camel from then I suppose!

Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown.

https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...

13 hours of (work + commute) -- that's 5 hours of commute + 8 hours of work.

I'm not seeing that colour combination -- are you sure you don't have Dark Reader or some such add-on enabled..?

https://zen-browser.app/ is a browser based on the Firefox engine.

I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...

It's enterprise anti-malware that [in addition to other bits] has a client component installed on all PCs in the corporate network. An update to that client component (called an "endpoint") is causing those Windows machines to BSOD.

It's unlikely you'd have heard of it unless you've worked at a large enterprise that runs primarily Microsoft IT.

Crowdstrike does have Mac/Linux "endpoints" also (IIRC) but I'm unsure if they're affected as well.

Fivetran charges by "monthly active rows", which quickly adds up when you have hundreds of millions to billions of rows that are constantly changing.

https://fivetran.com/docs/usage-based-pricing

I vaguely recall a LiteStep theme for Windows back in the day that did something like this -- hadn't heard of it as a Mac feature before!

They also changed the News Feed on Android phones so that clicking on the story takes you to a search results page instead of the actual link.

...only in an American accent.

When I moved to the UK, I figured this out and used this for a month or so of free internet while waiting for my own internet connection to be set up.

> I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language.

I'm dating myself with this reference, but some of us old data fogeys might be wondering (well, I am, at any rate) when Piet came out compared to Pentaho's OLAP engine called Mondrian (https://mondrian.pentaho.com/documentation/olap.php)...

There's too many "legacy" vehicles still on the road for these to make a noticeable impact. I was in Bangalore recently and in various popular and upcoming parts of the city, it's basically unbreathable toxic sludge at rush hour, and only mildly OK otherwise.

I was still relatively new there -- I'd likely only have thought of this potential downside a couple of years into the job!

I had access to a Windows server VM at a previous job that was commissioned for a piece of work. The actual work was then stopped, but the IT folks never decommissioned the VM so I had a nice little server on the local network to play around with. It didn't have Internet access so I was somewhat limited in what I could do with it.

I ended up building a hacky internal IIS/PHP web app (I guess these days one would call it an SPA) that hooked into the company's Active Directory that showed a nice little page of people in our "business unit", with their names, pictures, employee grade (analyst/consultant/manager etc.) and subteam -- basically any bit of info I could get from a user's Active Directory profile.

It used Datatables (https://datatables.net/) for a simple text-based table view and Isotope (https://isotope.metafizzy.co/) for a card-based grid view that you could quickly toggle between.

I called it the "Book of Faces" and announced it to my team at a team social event, and it took off massively beause it was way more performant, simpler, and just much less painful to use than using the clunky corporate intranet app to check user profiles.

Word spread outside of my team and I started getting requests from various other teams to set up similar pages for them as well, which I was only too happy to oblige. This spurred me on to refactor it to make it as simple as possible to set up new team pages.

This silly thing boosted my profile a ridiculous amount within the company, just because I'd left a small footer "emailto" link that people could use to get in touch with suggestions/bugs.

I maintained it as a side project and surreptitious internal app for about 6 years until I left the org, after which I handed it over to someone else. Last I heard though, internal IT finally caught wind of it, and in what I suppose is a "progressive for its kind" response, spoke to the users of the various pages and built a corporate-ised version of the same thing.

A decade-plus of working in tech and data, and that IIS-PHP-JS monstrosity is still one of the bits of work I'm most proud of!

₹59,954 crore is roughly USD $7.2 billion.

> They are not down. (They just don't work for lots of people!)

Seems about par for the course for big tech these days. There's currently an issue affecting the Google Ads API causing timeouts when sending data to it, but the Google Ads Status Summary page shows nothing [0]. However, there's an incident detail page showing some vague hand-wavy information about incidents [1], which appears to be unreachable from anywhere on the Summary page. Gah.

[0] https://ads.google.com/status/ [1] https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/incidents/gNG1ppoY3y...

p.s.: The actual incident details URLs are available in the "RSS feed" link very transiently and tend to disappear -- the feed, which incidentally for fun reasons, is actually an Atom feed.

> quirky and underwhelming

Describes Stonehenge perfectly. Which I suppose could be some sort of ancient pylons?

Whart's this based on? If anything, this is among the more concise set of interface guidelines I've come across. Design guidelines typically run into hundreds of pages long when PDF'ed -- this page is just about thirty on default "Save as PDF" settings...

You owe me a new keyboard and monitor tyvm

If the government could find a way to make it work for the homosexual activity convictions, I'm sure they can find a way for this miscarriage of justice as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/past-convictio...

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

On a bit of a tangent, something very similar happened to me recently -- splashed out ~£300 for a product and after about 4 weeks of no further contact from the company, turns out it was a scam, and the sender shut down the corporation, website, wiped it from the various archive sites etc.

Fortunately I'd paid using my Amex, and American Express support were incredibly helpful in making me whole pretty much right away. I recall the payment gateway being a Stripe thing, so I really hope the scammer got hit hard somehow.

> Upholding the Original Principles [of AI]

There's a UtopAI / utopia joke in there somewhere, was that intentional on your part?

What a great response.

Often I find it's not even just nonparents, but also parents who have lucked out by having their methods work on their kids, so assume that's all it must take, and why can't other parents just do this list of things that worked for them, so are obviously universally applicable to every child.

/rant, after having spent yet another day exhausted by my weird-sleep-habits 2 y.o.

Nobody else has brought up the elephant in the room, so I will.

OP: Your Substack is called "Thoguhts" and not "Thoughts" -- is this entirely because someone else is squatting on thoughts.substack.com? Or is there some additional "deeper" significance to the obvious mis-spelling?

You can get this information from the "System Information" app in macOS as well. (At least, that's what it's called in Ventura...)

It should be under Hardware -> Power, in the section titled "AC Charger Information".

You should also be able to see connected USB-C cable capacity under Hardware -> USB. For example, mine says the following:

  USB 3.1 Bus:

    Host Controller Driver: AppleT8112USBXHCI

  USB3.0 Hub:

    Product ID: 0x0813
    Vendor ID: 0x2109  (VIA Labs, Inc.)
    Version: 90.11
    Speed: Up to 5 Gb/s
    Manufacturer: VIA Labs, Inc.
    Location ID: 0x01200000 / 2
    Current Available (mA): 900
    Current Required (mA): 0
    Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

  USB2.0 Hub:

    Product ID: 0x2813
    Vendor ID: 0x2109  (VIA Labs, Inc.)
    Version: 90.11
    Speed: Up to 480 Mb/s
    Manufacturer: VIA Labs, Inc.
    Location ID: 0x01100000 / 1
    Current Available (mA): 500
    Current Required (mA): 0
    Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

You still can't watch Sky Sports on a Linux machine, so that annoyance is still there.

> middle-aged dads who care about nothing other than practicality

Damn dude, I didn't ask to catch strays like this :(