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wiredfoolon Show HN: Marmot – Single-binary data catalog (no Kafka, no Elasticsearch)

How does this get the maps of the data flows and so on? Does it require read credentials to each data silo, or is there a manual mapping process?

wiredfoolon Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions

I love how the brake lever positioning there makes it look like they're grabbing their crotch the whole way down.

wiredfoolon PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

I just got one of the last beelink ser-8s with 64gb for $750. They sold out by the time my order arrived. The newer ones are starting around 830 for a 32gb machine (admittedly with newer everything)

wiredfoolon We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

I think this, like many problems, can be reefactored into the halting problem. Which we know how to solve…. Right?

wiredfoolon Self-hosting a NAT Gateway

For free, and 50% or more of your cloud spend.

wiredfoolon Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs

  There’s an opera out on the Turnpike, 
  there’s a ballet being fought out in the alley…

wiredfoolon Mr TIFF

This is why some people consider TIFF to stand for “Thousands of Incompatible File Formats”.

wiredfoolon Mr TIFF

Kibo greps

wiredfoolon Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

I see a ton of random recent semi reasonable user agents now, and some of them are even sending the sec-ua, reasonable accept headers and the more obscure headers.

wiredfoolon Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update

My parents are moving out of their house of ~50 years.

The garage fridge was in the house (as the kitchen one) when they moved in. The chest freezer in the basement moved with them in '77.

They have had at least three kitchen fridges in the time since the fridge got moved to the garage. I've lost track of the number of dishwashers. The current one was out of service for a few months, partially due to wifi/firmware issues. The super expensive oven clock doesn't work anymore, since it broke after the last time it was fixed for an $800 callout.

wiredfoolon Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout

I've had two first round phone interviews with Google, separated by about 5 years. Both times they contacted me.

Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.

wiredfoolon 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

Having done several rounds with parental control, I'd say -- nfw. We were worried more about timesink than anything else, but over a long period of time, it mainly boils down to knowing your kids, trusting them, with checkups. The tech is just not there to actually control what happens on a device.

White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.

Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.

That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.

There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.

* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.

wiredfoolon Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic plastics

The amount of real stuff in discworld could fill a book.

wiredfoolon Database Linting and Analysis for PostgreSQL

The pg_stat_io tables have a bunch of data that will tell you about index and table usage.

wiredfoolon Orcas are bringing humans gifts

This orca prefers to gift us what appears to be a ships wheel. It’s unclear the cultural significance of this offering.

wiredfoolon Vertical Solar Panels Are Out Standing

Quick look near here -- wood panels are ~50-99eur for .9->1.8m x 1.8m fence panels. I've priced out 550W solar panels (which should be about 1x2M) for about 100£. (Both retail, but different countries (ire/uk))

So, not price parity but also only about a factor of 2 or so. On the other hand, Ali Express panels are about half that UK price at a 10 panel quantity, with unknown shipping.

I'm kind of eyeing the concrete block wall in the back garden currently covered by a hedge.

wiredfoolon Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?

Haven't done a backpack, but I do have a couple of leather laptop sleeves for the M#Airs. One is from scrap napa furniture leather (1mm chrome tanned), so it's soft and colorful, but doesn't protect as well. The other is ~2mm natural + pull up leather, so a bunch stiffer, to the point of being difficult to get the laptop in the first few times it was used.

Both of these sleeves are vertical envelope style, with a tucked tongue closure, and they're generally carried in some other backpack/bag. So these are basically the padding. They replaced _really_ low budget bubble wrap envelope laptop sleeves.

What I'd say from observation of the crafting/development process is that you're going to do one to figure out the issues and one to fix them all. (Or more, having seen a bunch of shoes made in my dining room)

wiredfoolon Wind turbine blade transportation challenges

Jet engines are on the order of 50 MW, and big turbines are on the order of 10MW (at least, onshore ones).

So you’re really only talking small multiples of the flight time, which is minimal compared to the lifetime of a wind turbine.

wiredfoolon MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

There’s a narrow band of math that’s amenable to pocket calculators. When used in that band, they can repeatably return the correct answer.

wiredfoolon Python: The Documentary [video]

So just make it a dict[str, str] and json encode the payload.

wiredfoolon Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

And Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

wiredfoolon Epson MX-80 Fonts

Yes, I’m sure they would be. Especially since the same font would have been used for normal width (10 characters per inch) and compressed (17 cpi).

wiredfoolon Epson MX-80 Fonts

My recollection is that the dots were round on my dot matrix. But it also used a typewriter ribbon, so there was a bit of texture from that.

wiredfoolon Epson MX-80 Fonts

The font on the page is definitely too wide -- it should be taller than wide, and 10 characters per inch.

wiredfoolon Epson MX-80 Fonts

I had a Star SG-10, labeled as "Epson Compatible". (Mostly)

The Near Letter Quality was essentially double struck by making a second pass at a slight offset, with the corresponding increase in noise and print times.

There wasn't support for the printer in AppleWorks, so my first useful program was a BASIC thing that you could set the font in the printer and then reboot into AppleWorks to use either the 10 cpi, 12, 17(condensed) or the NLQ setting.

wiredfoolon Why are there so many rationalist cults?

Objectivisim?

wiredfoolon Why are there so many rationalist cults?

It's really worth reading up on the techniques from Large Group Awareness Training so that you can recognize them when they pop up.

Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal when you run across them IRL.

wiredfoolon I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class

UVA is a heavily Liberal Arts college. (or at least, it was when I was looking a generation ago). That means that there are a lot of distribution requirements and you're going to be doing the soft fuzzy useless sounding things like English rather than going through blindered to things that will be in your major/make you money right out of college. But learning to write means that you need to learn to think critically of what to write.

It's not a Technically oriented college, though it does teach the sciences, but I wouldn't go there (and didn't) for Engineering. That's what VA Tech is for, though the weather is worse, the campus not as nice, and not quite as prestigious.

The generally Liberal Arts system in the US is a strong contrast to the European system, where you often start focusing on a few subjects at the high school level, and then apply to a degree program where you have very few "outside the major" choices. My wife didn't take math or science after she was 12 (but she took languages), Oldest 2 kids are down to 3 or 4 subjects at the high school level (One is doing the Bio/Chem/Physics A levels, one did Phys/Math/Further Math/Geography). The last incidence of anything not STEMish was GCSE/Junior Cert/~15yr old level.

wiredfoolon At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery

You say that like it’s a universal thing. It’s much more of a Liberal Arts thing, which is much more prevalent in the US then in Europe.

wiredfoolon Vibe code is legacy code

Yesterday it was 4 seconds from a LE cert -> scans for .env and other low hanging info leak/vulnerabilities from at least 4 different scanners.

There are groups out there just looking at the certificate transparency logs to get the newly added certs to scan.