First time I ever hoped for a tornado to strike a specific location.

Time to start with one PR per line of code…

Yeah, but that would require raising taxes, which the billionaires have convinced the masses is a terrible thing because socialism, and look where that’s gotten third world socialist countries.

The only solution, according to the billionaires, and the brainwashed masses, is to give even more money to the billionaires so that they can privatize things even more and throw cutting edge technology at the problem instead of proven solutions like light rail, etc.

Public transit in the US simply isn’t good enough in many cases. Years ago I lived in a suburb north of Boston and worked in another suburb west of Boston. It was about a 40 minute drive during rush hour. Trying to do that same commute by public transit likely would have taken me 4+ hours and involved a bus to a subway into Boston followed by a commuter train and another bus. It would have been a nightmare.

I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.

It damn well better remain an exception. I help manage a few hundred Linux systems in AWS for my employer. We patch those systems on a quarterly basis, which in some cases means building up a whole new instance from scratch. I shudder to think what it would mean if we somehow had to prove our age for each one of these systems. And whose age/identity would it be? Our CEO? Me? My boss?

Juries often have one or more alternates. Those are jurors who sit in the jury box for the entire trial, but under normal conditions they aren’t in the jury room during deliberations. If a juror is unable to remain, for whatever reason, then the judge replaces that juror with one of the alternates. I sat on 2 days of a 3 day trial but tested positive for Covid the morning of the third, so I was excused. The judge replaced me with one of her alternates.

If the judge got wind that a juror was disregarding such an order then that juror would likely be kicked out & replaced with an alternate. If the transgression by the juror was severe enough the judge could potentially also refer the juror to the Attorney Generals office for investigation and possible charges.

What about refrigerators?

Will it block VPNs, proxies, and Bing image search as well?

I’ve seen actors fall down stairs and over a breakaway bannister live in a Broadway show. It’s clearly highly choreographed, and I also spotted the pads one actor was wearing when his shirt accidentally came untucked. Even though it looked very chaotic, in hindsight it was more of a tuck & tumble than a random fall.

Hell, my wife’s entirely manual Jeep (manual door locks, manual window cranks, etc.) still has a sensor that warns you if the tailgate is open…

Same plan as Iran:

1. Send the US military to bomb a bunch of stuff.
2. Iran Immediately folds and capitulates to all our demands.

It’s the most bestest plan ever that only the brilliant minds of Trump & Hegseth could have come up with.

Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):

There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.

Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.

The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced.

While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

This is a phased array radar system, which is significantly different than the mechanical radars used by boats/ships. A phased array system typically supports near real time tracking of multiple targets since the radar signals are controlled through solid state beam steering.

Mechanical radars like those on boats can only update targets as quickly as the antenna rotates, which can be as slow as 20 RPM for some consumer brands. They are very different beasts. Comparing the two is like comparing a car to a train…

Same here. We also contract with HackerOne, a company of “white hat” hackers that actively attack our site and earn significant bounties if they can do something like remotely execute commands, exfiltrate data, etc. Only after they provide us with a repeatable set of steps and we close the hole do they get paid.

It’s been decades now, but when I was still in school I worked for a temporary employment agency for a couple summers. I had an interview with them so they could get a feel for my qualifications, then they would line me up with random office jobs that could last anywhere from one or two days to a month or more. For most of one summer I worked in the mailroom of a law office.

If you can find an employment agency like that near you it might be a good way to get your foot in the door. Keep your eyes open wherever they send you and see if there might be chances for longer term jobs. The experience of being a temp with a good work ethic can also look good on a resume.

TACO now and forever.

Not just where to put the nails but also how hard to swing the hammer, when to stop swinging it, etc.

I just used Claude yesterday to add some functionality to an existing python script that interacts with AWS. It created an unnecessary loop where 2 of 3 iterations were effectively no-ops. So while it did ultimately provide what I needed, I still had to refactor what it generated in order to remove the useless loop.