We've done that at a few places I've been at - it's tricky because if the failure is too short its just annoying toil, but if it's too long there's risk of losing context and having to remember what the heck we were thinking.
Overall it's still net positive for me in certain cases of enforcing things to be temporary, or at least revisited.
We did sailing charters growing up and had one of these on the boat, I was in charge of it and the sound & feel of the CH-CHUNK is seared into my memories like nothing else. We never got any declines, but I always wondered how that reconciliation process actually worked out.
Super neat - I did something similar on a lark to enable useful "web browsing" over 1200 baud packet - I have Starlink back at my camp but might be a few miles away, so as long as I can get line of sight I can Google up stuff, albeit slow. Worked well but I never really productionalized it beyond some weekend tinkering.
This is very accurate - microservices can be great as a forcing function to revisit your architectural boundaries, but if all you do is add a network hop and multiple components to update when you tweak a data model, all you'll get is headcount sprawl and deadlock to the moon.
I'm a huge fan of migrating to microservices as a secondary outcome of revisiting your component boundaries, but just moving to separate repos & artifacts so we can all deploy independently is a recipe for pain.
Same dream here - they work very interesting problems at very interesting scale, but I can see 3-4x the comp while working from anywhere? Not even a chance. I do sometimes fantasize about making a career shift when the cash comp isn't that important to me and the kids are out of the house, but as of now I value afternoon coffee breaks with my kids just too darn much.
I'm also super excited to see more on this, it's been living rent free in my head for a long time. I played around with keypress extraction from sound recordings a couple decades ago in college, and it was remarkably straightforward to extract keypresses based on sound signals, even with zero training - based on the time between keypresses and the unique signature of space/return/backspace you can build a predictor pretty quickly. We never made it to the "bounce a pair of lasers off two window panes a known distance apart and triangulate everyone's keyboard", but it was one of those things that's definitely doable with enough time and brains.
Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?
I've also had my email posted in mailto's in a half dozen places for... a long time. I remember in the early 00's when I'd cargo cult the old "type the whole email out as adrian at adrianpike dot com" thing on forums thinking it would work as some mystical talisman, and it turns out considering emails to be secret isn't worth the time.
Funny story, I wound up finding a bunch of my old Mac-formatted Zip disks a few months ago, and trying to extract data off of them was a wild, tangled mess of external SCSI enclosures, `ddrescue`, and then quick archiving it up onto the NAS before the drive or disk started making the famous clicking noises. Blows my mind we lived like that.
The ones I've seen usually just spam the spectrum with noise, since it's easiest and totally effective, and there's no need for them be sneaky or clever with their emissions since it's very very rare the victim would have a way to notice, and you don't need more than a few watts.
I'd love to find any actual FEMA publications that back up some of the numbers and claims - so far to the best I can tell is it's mostly from interviews with the regional director, which, while valuable, isn't quite at the level of citation I'd like. If anyone's got a PDF I'd love to retract all my critiques though. :)
Thanks for jumping in with your experience - every time the New Yorker article makes the rounds, I do a little light digging to try and find some sources the author based it on. Reading through some of Goldfinger's publications will help unlock a bit more, thank you!
Mil-spec transport containers? Excellent.
Mil-spec rucksacks? Not so excellent.