skylanh

Some details I don't understand, and I may be misremembering, but the gist was:

- they were (under?)-employed within their field, at an okay job

- they had health benefits

- they had had a major health condition which caused them to now have a pre-existing condition (cancer? I don't recall.)

- they were now in a situation where-in if they lost their job, or COBRA coverage for 2+ months, they lapsed out of their existing policy

- they would then have to apply for health insurance coverage with a "pre-existing condition" which would not be covered (by the normal policies?)

So now they were very clearly and palpably tied to their health insurance and by extension to the company that employed them, and felt very uneasy about going through the hiring / probation period somewhere else.

I may have the major details wrong there, feel free to correct me if I do.

- panic attacks

- waking up into a panic attack; imagine sleeping, then waking hyperventilating, shivering, and for lack of a better word "freaking out"

- sleep disturbances

- periodic severe emotional disturbance

- inability to remove the stressors, and critically, I had to increase the stressors involved as it was time critical

I was able to take two weeks off from work, and I took escitalopram.

I didn't find escitalopram to be ... a game changer, but it did allow me to "decide" how I was going to feel, and if I felt I was going to have a panic attack, I could head that off through feedback and self aware thinking.

Past threads: https://www.reddit.com/user/bad0seed/submitted/

Completely spit balling, but I suspect that front lens element is worth about as much as a house.

So, no, this doesn't have anything to do with smart phones.

In ye' olde times, induced background blur would have been a gaussian blur in software. I'm not sure what special magic they do today. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05698 suggests things have moved on.

These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon.

My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon.

The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition:

> [as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request]

I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews.

So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do.

I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job.

Examples:

Mike Tomlin fined for blocking an on-field player, the team may have been penalized by forfeiting draft picks: https://www.nfl.com/news/mike-tomlin-fined-100-000-for-actio... They weren't: https://www.nfl.com/news/steelers-won-t-lose-draft-pick-for-...

Coaches fined $100k for not wearing face masks, teams fined $250k: https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-fines-broncos-49ers-seahawks-fo...

Saints fined $500k and stripped of draft pick: https://www.nfl.com/news/saints-fined-500k-draft-pick-patrio...

Controversial team fines: https://www.nfl.com/news/draft-picks-that-have-been-stripped...

- Falcons for fake crowd noise

- Patriots for "deflategate"

Saints were fined as a team, head coach suspended, players suspended for "bounty gate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Saints_bounty_scan...

Team sports can be lost by a player, but must be won as a team. E.g. Kyle Williams of SF 49ers muffing two punts in the 2012-Feb-22 game against the Giants (off his knee, and the strip).

However, I do know that minutes of mutual settlement can be filled with a court, and the court will, based on the affidavit of filing, enforce it as if that court had ruled.

And for instance, this is in a Arbitration submission agreement I found: "The parties agree to abide by and perform any award(s) rendered pursuant to this Submission Agreement. The parties further agree that a judgment and any interest due thereon, may be entered upon such award(s) and, for these purposes, the parties hereby voluntarily consent to submit to the jurisdiction of any court of competent jurisdiction which may properly enter such judgment."

i.e. "act as if a court ordered it, 'cause they have in effect"

So you are right that a binding arbitration agreement probably isn't enough, but filed with a court, and filed with either bank or employer, it should be enough.

I have used Backblaze, and was storing 16TB there, and that was $50/month.

I did a simple envelope calculation, decided I could either hand-roll a offsite system with 2x consumer harddrives, or look for other options.

I have 28TB backed up with another provider now.

Why haven't I tried either AWS or Azure cold-tier storage?

I have maybe 2 hours a month where I can spend looking into solutions to my offsite backup situation, and I am somewhat concerned that I could mess up the AWS solution and cost myself thousands of dollars. This coupled with a lack of time, significant competing concerns (keeping a job during a global pandemic job market; work-load; personal life), and "eh, I'll get to it"-laziness, means I have to put this on the back burner.

If you handed me a simple solution using rclone, zfs send, btrfs-send, or a pre-canned "this is what it would cost" Bacula approach, I would move to it.

I haven't tried it, but I believe part of the reason that AWS is recommended is due to the build time.

The book "The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11" appears to deal with this fairly well: https://www.nap.edu/read/10569/chapter/4

This was the era where a major computer consultant (IBM) failed to provision for the Olympics: https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...

- https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/cold-supply-hot-demand

I don't have much more on that front, but it's worth a look to see what well developed agencies are aiming at.

> A federal appeals court last week issued a “hugely important” decision with potentially major implications for data journalists when it held that using computer programs to collect publicly available information from the internet — or “scraping” — likely does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal computer crime statute.

Links are in the quoted text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

> In 2019, Evan Ratliff—who wrote a series of articles about Le Roux for The Atavist Magazine—published The Mastermind, a 446-page account of Le Roux's ventures.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549566/the-mastermi...

Find a list of:

- consumer and commercial insurance companies

- healthcare insurance companies

- retail banks

- any industry that has been doing high thoroughput, large value, and large volume sales in a very constrained environment for more than 30 years: oil and gas, ocean and rail cargo shipping, commodity sales brokers

- every major government with a digital infrastructure older than 30 years (this brings us back to pre-1990, mainframe was the only real option back then)

I would posit that in each of these areas you will find very well paying jobs, very demanding and interesting work that's critical, and some extremely smart coworkers.

I would go further to say that if you showed up unannounced with a security clearance, history, resume, and credible reference checks, that you could have a letter of offer (as quickly as the wheels of bureaucracy spin) and salary you could negotiate on.

Yes, there are frames that go on top of COBOL. But a lot of the reasons to actually use COBOL come down to:

- there are 300+ applications on your mainframe, and each has an interface, associated queues, code table, and calling conventions which are specified in COBOL

- correctness of solution, and proving it correct

- the field twiddling decisions based on data are low level, "inspect field A, do X, else do Y, afterwards save A2 and send message B", that doesn't appear to leverage well into a higher language

- tooling on the mainframe supports COBOL quite well, there is a lot of infrastructure which very very smart people have put in place over the last several decades

So there's a lot reasons why COBOL "fits" in the current space. It's not cool though. And that inertia is worth multiples of billions of dollars in invested time, and replacement costs for like-with-somewhat-better can easily hit trillions of dollars. I don't really want to do the envelope math, because some applications are ~1 million, and some are 100-250 million to replace.

The HR issue is clearly something that organizations know about, and have been trying to address for literally decades. COBOL was passe in 1995, and 2000, and still is, but as an industry we're still addressing this issue in 2020.

The other aspect of your question that I'd like to address is: why not program in COBOL? What does a code generator give you? what are you gaining? I'm trying to ask a question about mentality towards COBOL. COBOL can be compiled just like any other language down to efficient byte code. If we had a supposed "10x DevOps program engineer", what makes COBOL something that they couldn't master and leverage in a month? The experiences gained wouldn't simple be "COBOL programming", it would be an entire development and run environment, release and CI approaches, etc.

All that said, I had the opportunity to work in COBOL, and I passed on it, so I can understand as an average programmer why not to work in it.

If you bring in someone who is smart, pragmatic, and interested in a nice indoor job with good pay, they're more interested in the specialized job training and position that comes with it.

Someone I knew made the tongue in cheek retirement joke that "where else could I learn COBOL and mainframe in university, and never learn anything else until I retired?"

- it caused $15 million in damage, and $100 million in updated security -> contractor needing work

- it was a "domestic terrorism" event -> what legislation or policies were on the table at this time?

Those would be my starting points.

- speed

- overall saturation of tower (# users per tower)

- population density (full coverage of an area may be difficult)

- technology; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_sta... which could affect federal regulatory licensing costs, technology licensing and acquisition costs and competitiveness of market to provide technology, tower density, total user capacity

This is my laymen's interpretation. For instance, to blanket the US (9.834 million km² and 36 people per Km2) in LTE would be a significantly harder challenge then blanketing Myanmar (676,575 km² and 83 people per Km2) or even Norway (385,203 km² and 15 people per Km2).

Just look at the stats for Myanmar, 86 people per Km2, and I might be able to get most of them within 300-500k km2. My subscriber base is excellent!

vs

Cost of negative image (deferred via simple returns) + cost of inventory loss duo to fraud + cost of inventory loss due to employees

It's simpler to simply eat the cost of abuse.

Someone, somewhere said "huh...", and placed another filter into the pipeline to handle these types of images.

While looking for something to sound smart wrt the tank-training myth, I found this interesting page: https://www.gwern.net/Tanks "The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend"

And interestingly, looking at the link for "superresolution needing learned downscalers" found this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12904 "Learned Image Downscaling for Upscaling using Content Adaptive Resampler", code available at https://github.com/sunwj/CAR

So, IDK, seems like this Fawkes approach will be an interesting paper.

There's an interesting 2012 Ted Talks presentation by Peter van Uhm the then chief of defense for the Netherlands. He discusses the state monopoly on violence as a central point of how and why the military exists.

"Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun"

Ted: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun?la...

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjAsM1vAhW0

Other interesting results were:

Canada forced to honour Bayer's patent on ciprofloxacin (BMJ. 2001 Oct 27; 323(7319): 956. PMCID: PMC1172996)

> In an embarrassing mix-up, Canada's federal government will pay twice for a supply of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (marketed as Cipro) that it ordered to protect Canadians in case they are faced with an outbreak of anthrax, as has happened in the United States.

...

> After a meeting of officials from the health department and both companies on Monday, the government announced it will still pay the generic firm the amount of its contract— $C1.3m (£580 000; $824 000)—and will buy another 900 000 tablets from Bayer. Bayer's price is said to be $C2.50 a tablet, compared with Apotex's $C1.50. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1172996/

Canadian government almost swamped by ciprofloxacin (BMJ. 2001 Nov 3; 323(7320): 1026. PMCID: PMC1173010)

> Canada's federal government has narrowly avoided having to pay for twice as much of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro) as it thinks it needs to protect its citizens in the case of an outbreak of anthrax.

> The federal health department circumvented its own drug patent rules when it ordered about 900 000 tablets of the medication from a generic drug manufacturer, Apotex. The patent, held by Bayer AG, does not expire until 2004. Bayer reportedly threatened to sue. But after an announcement by the government that it would both pay the generic firm the amount of its contract—$C1.3m (£574 000; $825 000)—and buy another 900 000 tablets from Bayer, both drug companies let the health minister, Allan Rock, off the hook.

...

> Under the patent act, the government could have obtained authorisation to have a non-patented version of ciprofloxacin on a non-commercial basis, but it failed to ask for this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1173010/

> 432 healthy men and 344 healthy women (age, 20.7±1.8years)

> We demonstrated that morningness (less eveningness) was associated with (a) lower regional gray matter density (rGMD) in the precuneus and adjacent areas, (b) lower rGMD in the left posterior parietal cortex and adjacent areas, and (c) higher rGMD in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex. Further, our exploratory analyses revealed that (d) higher rGMD in hypothalamic areas around the bilateral suprachiasmatic nuclei were associated with morningness.

Browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Edge

Perhaps you're referring to the link on the website which says "Click here to generate Cartridge!"?

Which follows the somewhat expected path for the picture context.

> Added their own package repository (MRAN), replacing CRAN.

How is any of this different than the many incompatible Linux packaging solutions?

How would you address insecurity and trust relations if you weren't a first-class contributor of CRAN? (consider the recent Python package exploit; although amateur, it's still an indication of such issues; I'm sure I remember this was an issue with the Perl packages as well; wasn't there an exploit pushed to the Linux kernel tree at some point years ago?)

The narrative changes from "MS is EEE'ing CRAN" to "MS allowed a package with exploits to be deployed from CRAN".

I am not familiar with any of the issues within the R ecospace, but I am very familiar with corporate culture, security, and liability awareness.