quesera · HackerLangs

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

> The situation is tragically optimal--we've achieved some kind of multiobjective local maximum on a rock in the sewer at the bottom of a picturesque alpine valley and declared victory. We should do better.

But it's a very comfortable rock. pointy in all the right places.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Well, in the early days of infrastructure growth, when designing bespoke monitoring systems and protocols would be relatively low-cost, it's still nowhere near the highest-ROI way to spend your tech team's time and energy.

And to do it right (i.e. low-risk of of having it blow up with negative effects on the larger business goals), you need someone fairly experienced or maybe even specialized in that area. If you have that person, they are on the team because of their other skills, which you need more urgently.

SaaS, COTS, and open source monitoring tools have to cater to the existing customers. The sales pitch is "easy to integrate". So even they are not incentivized to build something new.

It boils down to the fact that stream-of-bytes is extremely well-understood, and almost always good enough. Infinitely flexible, low-ceremony, no patents, and comes preinstalled on everything (emitters and consumers). It's like HTTP in that way.

And the evolution is similar too. It'll always be stream-of-bytes, but you can emit in JSON or protobuf etc, if it's worth the cognitive overhead to do so. All the hyperscalers do this, even when the original emitter (web servers, etc) is just blindly spewing atrocious CLF/quirky-SSV text.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

I struggle to see the difference between "bringing an extra battery" and "bringing a power bank".

Except that the latter has more functionality than the former, and should be prefereable.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Grand solutions require broad coordination, and they often devolve back into a modified-but-equivalent version of the previous problem. :(

Stream-of-bytes is classically difficult model to escape. Many have tried.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

This reads like satire, but I've been feeling that a lot lately.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

All China has to do here is stay in the game and wait patiently while the US and EU press pause on data centers. See also: solar panels.

We're making this way too easy. The rationale and logic are reasonable, but ultimately irrelevant.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

If benefitting the victims is a goal, then clearly sending them money now is more valuable than sending them interest-borne money later.

If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

I think you're wrong, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't operate on the fringes of fraudulent behaviour, so I might be miscalibrated.

But my premise is that there is benefit derived from the lie, either financial or otherwise. I believe this is clearly fraud and risks civil penalties if pursued by the party who used the information to extend the benefit.

An interesting case is if you lie about previous salary to a prospective employer who does not have the ability to confirm the data. In that context, with no formal pre-employment agreements or contracts, the lie is probably just negotiation strategy with no civil liabilities. I repeat that I am not a lawyer. :)

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Similar situation here.

My take on it is that frequent users perceive apps as desktop launchers/shortcuts.

They don't care about the difference between app and web, per se, but the bookmarking situation in mobile browsers is awful (desktop too, honestly), and an app presents a convenient launcher for the service/site/data they want.

Adding a springboard launcher for a PWA is easy but still apparently more frictional than installing an app.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Android and iOS both require user permission for apps to access contacts or location.

Are there other platforms that can't even manage this basic level of user protection?

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

In the time it took you to write this comment, you've thought more about the abstraction than most of the people who are confused by it -- and it will never succeed to coax them out of their confusion with such logic. :)

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Credit agencies do not report income to the IRS, so there's no tax relevance. Credit agencies are not party to your obligations to the IRS at all. You can lie to credit agencies all day long if you like.

However, if you do so for the purpose of some kind of benefit, financial or otherwise, it's clearly fraud.

It's hard to remember that that's still illegal these days -- but it is, for you and for me, at least.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

In the US, I regularly see bathrooms and kitchens without GFCI.

I looked up the history:

  1961 GFCI invented by a professor at UC Berkeley
  1971 Added to NEC code for outdoor outlets
  1981 … bathrooms
  1987 … kitchens
  2005 … laundry rooms and unfinished basements
  2014 … crawlspaces, around pools and hot tubs

Lots of bathrooms haven't been renovated (or at least not with permits) in the last 45 years, apparently!

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

A great deal of pop music, performed by teens-20yos, is written and produced by seasoned professionals who are in their 30s-40s-50s.

The exceptions to that pattern are remarkable.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

If an app can make an HTTP request, the app can know the user's public IP address and the geolocation derived from that.

This data has well-known limitations, but I think it is the fallback people are talking about here.

quesera

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

No one is trying to go that far down the path.

https (specifically the CA chain of trust) is imperfect, and can be compromised by well-placed parties.

quesera

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.

I watch kids squeezing the polybags trying to find an identifying bump or edge, hoping to either get the one they want, or at least not get one they already have.

And yeah, baseball cards are/were no different, going back decades.

But at least the financial loss here is constrained to a few dollars. I don't think these are the gateway drugs to gambling problems, but they are definitely exploitative.

quesera

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

3. A Memorial Wall for those who have mistaken ChatGPT for a therapist

quesera

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

In the US states that I know well, a residential tenant may perform necessary repairs to bring the space up to health and safety codes, and may deduct the cost from their rent. They have an obligation to notify the property manager, in advance in the case of non-emergency repairs, or after the fact otherwise. There are additional details to consider as well.

I don't know if this would apply to a commercial tenant.

But it would definitely not apply to non-violating conditions like the OP's case.

quesera

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

When we've had "too many" hens, we've had multiple large salad bowls full of eggs on the countertops. And that's after overwhelming our friends and neighbors.

They will easily last 4-6 weeks with no major degradation (i.e. still good for omelets, but use the freshest ones for poaching).

The forest predators eventually help moderate our egg surplus. Free range comes with risks, alas.

Interesting point about ridge-cracking. I'd never thought about it, but it makes sense and I will mend my ways! :)

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