I really hope people were paying attention to how this has played out, politically. The FCC under Trump (and of course Pai) tried to go full corporate tyranny, essentially. While the original net neutrality regulations were definitely on shaky ground (it’s not at all clear the FCC has the authority to enforce them), repealing them was only the start of Pai’s crusade. When states tried to go their own way the administration marshaled the DOJ to try to stop them, which when you think about it makes almost zero sense if indeed your concern is just that the FCC was overstepping its authority. In fact at every opportunity the FCC (along with the DOJ, in this suit) acted as advocates for the broadband industry, basically flipping between “supremacy clause” and “states rights” arguments when the situation suited them. They weren’t even especially subtle about it, Pai openly and publicly mocked his critics on the subject in sneering videos he posted online.
Even if you think the federal government has no business regulating the internet or net neutrality (or even if you think they do, but the legislation doesn’t allow it yet) you should be looking at how the FCC behaved under Trump and Pai’s leadership with horror and disgust. That is not how our government should be operating.
I would go even further and say that a stationary bike behaves quite differently than a moving bicycle. There’s side to side/rocking motion, slippage at the wheels, geometry in turns etc. A stationary bike is incredibly constricting, eliminating a lot of different factors in a way that treadmill running just doesn’t (it’s much more similar to running in motion).
I’m old enough to remember when Daft Punk was arguably best known for having a really bizarre and fantastic semi-furry video for “Da Funk”, directed by Spike Jonze.
Tools like this always make me faintly uncomfortable. The idea is nice, but as a systems guy I would liken it to a mechanic’s toolbox that tries to predict what tool you want and puts it in your hand. Seems like it would be nice except you would need to carefully check what tool you were given to make sure the algo didn’t make a wrong decision and you’re using a wrong-sized wrench or something.
I’m not sure I want the fundamental building blocks of my field to be “helpful” like this. I’m much more a fan of naming it easier and faster for computers to do what I want, than I am of computers trying to divine what I want without my explicitly asking for it at this level.
Without commenting on what OP meant I would say memes definitely used to be more quirky and funny and lighthearted in general. Heck, originally calling them memes was because they stuck around and passed between people despite often being nonsensical. They tend to be more opinionated nowadays, and popular ones are usually topical, political, snarky, or all of the above. Not a random mistranslation of an old video game.
It has always mattered how rich the richest people in the world are, for good reason. Now knowing or understanding that isn’t some unique or fresh perspective.
I know it's a luxury that I'm in a position to do this, but anyway: in general I won't continue interviewing with a company that expects me to put in significant effort into just preparing for the interview. Make a full presentation, build a small service or other not-trivial take-home coding challenge, put together a business proposal, etc.: I'm sorry, I don't do any of that for free. My resume and references speak for my abilities, and while I'm happy to have them probed and challenged (heavily!) in an interview context, that doesn't extend to my putting in hours of work just go conduct the interview at all.
This isn't high school, and you're not going to give me homework just for the chance to work for you. And I use the homework analogy intentionally, because just like with school, this doesn't scale. I can't interview at, say, 10+ companies all of whom are expecting me to put in paying-employee-level work just for the interview while also holding down my regular job. And I'm not going to go with a significantly shortened list of candidate companies just because their interview process is so onerous that I literally don't have the time to talk to more.
Again, I know not everyone can do this, but realize that companies try to exploit you during the interview phase, too. You need to also have standards for what you're willing to put up with.
It’s been a disappointing trend that SRE execs have adopted magical ML thinking, believing they’re just a few short years away from ditching all those annoying engineers and replacing them with a model. I am skeptical.
So I have some experience with this. I decided to add BLE beacons to my vehicles and bicycles, and an RPI to listen for the pings and retransmit them over mqtt. The idea was I could setup some Home Assistant alerts for things like "multiple vehicles are absent at once" or "vehicle went from home to away at odd hour" where "odd hour" is something like 12AM-5AM, a time when I wouldn't expect me or my vehicles to be departing.
The way I implemented it was to have each beacon transmit on I think 1s (might have been 5s to save power) intervals, and some python code on an RPI that listens for them, with a timeout for each. If the listener gets a ping it immediately forwards it to mqtt as a "home" ping, using the beacon id to set the topic. If it doesn't get a ping within the timeout then the rpi generates and sends an "away" mqtt message for that beacon. My expectation was to have it alert me within ~2-3 minutes of a vehicle going from "home" to "away". In practice:
- BLE beacons aren't very popular really, most of them are made by small foreign companies who don't sell them in places like Amazon. The ones Amazon does sell are kind of crappy. Setting them up usually involves downloading a vaguely-sketchy app to your phone (I haven't figured out how to configure them from the rpi). They all seem kind of janky honestly.
- Bluetooth and Wifi use the same (some) hardware on an rpi, meaning if you start rapidly scanning for BLE tokens your wifi performance will drop to the point of the rpi being unusable (ssh sessions timing out). I fixed this by buying a separate USB bluetooth dongle, although even that was a pain to get working in the pybluez module - in general bluetooth under linux along with the python bindings are finicky and crap out easily, it seems.
- I have my dmesg and syslog spammed with "Bluetooth: hci0: advertising data len corrected" when using bluetooth scanning, I managed to find a couple bug references to it and other people complaining about it but no fixes over multiple system updates.
- It's just... Not reliable. I don't know why. I've tried really hard to make it reliable, and maybe the problem is the RPI-as-bluetooth (maybe if I used a microcontroller as the receiver it would work better?), but I've tried all variations of scanning windows and such and dug down into the code for Bluez without figuring out either what I'm doing wrong or where the issue is. Beacons will supposedly not ping for minutes at a time despite being on a 5s interval no matter what I do, and this is for beacons maybe 6 feet from the receiver (although ones further away do timeout more).
The last thing is what finally killed the project for me. I had it (still have it) all setup in HA with notifications and schedules and such, but I just turned off all the automation for it until I get a chance to tear it down. Failed experiment.
I'm sorry but the claim is YouTube just randomly deletes channels with no notification? And they do it in order to suppress... Whatever this was? That seems remarkably unlikely.
The whole article is extremely thin on facts and very fat on speculation and breathless rhetoric.
Counter-argument: A positively staggering amount of decisionmaking at a company consists of "look at what other, successful companies are doing and mimic them". It's cargo cult management by the very definition: they see the other people doing the correct incantations and bounty fall upon them. Clearly, we just need to utter those same incantations and we'll have the success they did.
And I'd further counter that: yeah, actually, you and your company ARE special. Every company is. There is no One True Way of running a business, or any individual aspect of that business. Everyone's triangulating around resources, people, industry, corporate vision, etc. If anything I'd say the argument that "you are not special" is the fallacy, as it leads directly to the kind of cargo-culting that you see so many failed companies do.
Finally, when we see successful companies, how often is it because they just mimicked what everyone else was doing? Not very frequently, as it turns out. Well-behaved companies seldom make history.
I guess in 2021, HNers think the NY Post is a legitimate media outlet straining for objectivity, rather than the tabloid rag that they are. And I guess we'll all have a highly partisan discussion over it despite the Post obviously having a huge axe to grind against Twitter, further calling into question their "reporting".
One of the things I find fascinating about lasers is their history is an excellent instructional tool for how science copes with things it doesn't understand.
When lasers were invented, we didn't know how they worked. A lot of laypersons don't even understand this as a concept. We knew how to build lasers, we knew they worked (what they did), but we didn't know the mechanism by which they did it. Their adoption as a part of our world came, for awhile, in tandem with our learning about how they function.
This has all sorts of fascinating implications for people who have never been exposed to it before. I think intuitively a lot of people think discovery and adoption goes understanding -> invention -> application, but sometimes it's invention -> application -> understanding. We, as humans, are capable of making use of things we don't fully understand the inner workings of, and we can even build our knowledge on top of what at first glance appears to be a base of ignorance.
I read a book awhile ago that described this approach thusly: Imagine there are aliens who visit earth who can't see objects with white/black patterns on them. Now imagine them at a soccer game: they can easily tell something organized is going on, that there seems to be some object of focus for the players, etc. You could go so far as to figure out many of the rules of the game, all without ever actually being able to see the ball. (the thought exercise is used in the book to also demonstrate the theoretical physics and the scientific method, and concludes with one of the aliens eventually saying, "Let's presume, for a moment, that there's a ball down there they're all chasing..." and trying to prove that hypothesis).
Why is pooh—poohing the premise of an article without offering anything other than cynicism in vogue on HN these days?
The post makes pretty clear what “the problem with this is”: among other things, most notably Apple has co-opted the use of Boolean flags that previously gave an indication of whether FileVault was enabled or not to instead reflect hardware encryption status which is not the same thing at all.
Why in heavens name is a WSJ opinion piece getting any traction on HN? Why would anyone with half a brain believe anything in such a piece? It’s some of the worst partisan garbage media out there right now and it’s being discussed here as if it’s factual reporting. What is wrong with you?
This is a nightmare in so many respects. I can’t believe my ability to run software on my own machine requires successful network calls. I spent two hours today thinking my hardware was failing catastrophically.
Even if you think the federal government has no business regulating the internet or net neutrality (or even if you think they do, but the legislation doesn’t allow it yet) you should be looking at how the FCC behaved under Trump and Pai’s leadership with horror and disgust. That is not how our government should be operating.