JamesLeonis
A big win with very little effort is systemd starting your docker compose service on boot. You have your systemd config file set `ExecStart` to call your docker-compose command, throw the config file into your systemd folder, and tell systemd to enable it. Docker compose handles the rest.
Windows 11 rolled out with a required minimum TPM 2.0 as a way to force upgrade hardware, including threatening security updates. HN talked about it for weeks. It caused a mass exodus from Windows to SteamOS for many gamers.
While I agree this isn't a conspiracy, it is an open secret that these companies on the Alliance historically make and use standards to their own gain and against their users. It is the same with citizens relationship with governments, which comes with a long history of brutal repressions by the very agencies on the Alliance. This comes especially under the microscope when those tech companies collude with those Agencies against domestic citizens.
The trust is not there.
What's funny is that Passkeys are running into the OIDC problem again where everybody and their dog wants you to use their own implementation. The Costco app keeps bugging me to set up a passkey, and comments on the other HN thread have more examples [0]. It's just a mess. It's ironic the little inter-company territorial spats that keep the big conspiracies at bay.
On the other hand, I'm helping more people around me onboard into password managers. The number of accounts people have to juggle nowadays makes this a security mess too. Having one centralized place where all the accounts are stored (and backed up) is often a bigger boon for people than the secure passwords!
File sharing, BitTorrent, and version control are my mainstay applications I've run on my servers over the years. File servers are out of trauma; I've lost too much data to trust software or hardware, and servers are the easiest way to configure stuff like RAID/ZFS as well as automated backups. BitTorrent on a server lets me be a good citizen and seed consistently. Version control right now is Forgejo, and given the nonsense at Github this is becoming a better decision by the day. There are also a number of support services like PostgreSQL and NGINX, with CRON powered backups to the fileserver.
I also have DDR4 and an ancient 1080 8GB, both perform well at 1440p. I built the box months before cryptotokens went exponential in 2017 and it has carried me ever since.
> The University of Washington today announced that it is part of a multi-pronged grantmaking strategy from Ballmer Group aimed at drawing more people into careers in early childhood education in our state — including by providing more than 1,500 scholarships over the next eight years.
> Ballmer Group is providing a set of gifts totaling more than $43 million to fund scholarships, leadership development and advocacy across multiple organizations, reducing the financial barriers that prevent talent from entering the early childhood workforce. The gifts ensure Washington can successfully implement the Fair Start for Kids Act and build racially diverse leadership in the broader policy field.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/03/16/43-million-set-of...
> The Ballmer Group has quietly emerged as a major player in the world of education venture-philanthropy, committing more than $250 million to K-12 related efforts during 2017 and 2018. As a limited liability corporation, the group is free to make charitable donations and for-profit investments—none of which have to be publicly disclosed.
> The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.
> Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.
> By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.
> Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/ex-microsoft-ceo-no-not-th...
> [Anxiety over the STEM Crisis] has tended to run in cycles that he calls "alarm, boom, and bust." He says the cycle usually starts when "someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians" and as a result the country "is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically." [...]
> The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn't exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their "bust" phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
> Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the "best and the brightest," and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
I've run the latest local models over the last year, including the recent Qwen 3.6 30B A3B, on a 9yo GTX 1080 and 32G RAM I have lying around[0]. If I can do that I don't think hardware will be a problem for you in the near term. The only updates I've needed were to Llama.cpp when a new class of model was released.
[0]: In my case, I want to see how local models perform on limited hardware, sacrificing context size and intelligence compared to SOTA models, so I have to really limit my expectations.
The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?
Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.
From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.
0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...
1: https://www.securityweek.com/facebook-admits-phone-numbers-m...
2: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...
3: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verificatio...
4: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verificat...
First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.
Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.
Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.
The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.
I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.
[Century of Humiliation]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
[Commodore Perry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition
[p-h war]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Phili...
Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)
A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.
When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.
Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.
Even the absence of information is information.
> The Roblox games site, which recently launched a new age-estimate system, is already suffering from users selling child-aged accounts to adult predators seeking entry to age-restricted areas, Wired reports.
I rest my case.
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
[laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20...
[pushed offshore]:
- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...
- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...
[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...
[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...
[collapsed]:
- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...
- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...
- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...
[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...
To keep the encryption modern regular updates are made to the program, and any migration would happen when re-encrypting the database. Checking my earliest entry, I've used it for 15 years without a hiccup.
I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly the public sees the web.
The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.
A major reason we are interested in Europa is because it might have underground oceans. Hypothetically, through tidal forces with Jupiter, the moon's core is hot enough to create oceans under the ice crust. Combined with hydrothermal vents you have the possibility for deep sea life similar to our own deep oceans. The Drake Equation does not predict this possibility.
There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.
I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...
[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
The copyright office itself doesn't recognize any transfer of works-for-hire [0] unless there's (#3) a written document of the transfer, (#4) signed by the recipient, (#5) signed by the copyright holder, and finally (#6) the work was made expressly as work-for-hire. Every employment, contractor, and freelancer contract is written with all of these questions accounted for.
Even wedding photographers keep the copyright of the photos they take of your wedding too for this very reason, unless explicitly contracted to transfer those rights.
[0]: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf, page 5
I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see exactly how much this covers, since some states allow contracts that cover everything you make at any time. California has a specific law that limits these contracts to only works done on company equipment and on company time. Your state might be different.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
[12B]: https://huggingface.co/LatitudeGames/Wayfarer-12B
[70B]: https://huggingface.co/LatitudeGames/Wayfarer-Large-70B-Llam...