alynn

Unfortunately this article seems to be written in the same casual polymath style it claims to warn of, with people making broad generalizations without any deep knowledge of what they are talking about.

I stopped reading at the point where JFK’s 1947 election was claimed to be purely due to wealth. Although JFK is today remembered much more for other historical events--

He was already a nationally known war hero before 1947. See, for example, this 1944 article in the New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/17/survival

I wasn't aware that CDNs were much cheaper, and am genuinely curious what service you are using at what prices.

When I look at AWS pricing, us-east-1 at < 10TB, I see: EC2 data transfer out to the internet is 9¢/GB, and Cloudfront is 8.5¢/GB for the lowest price class. That's a slight savings, but at 6% I can't justify the effort to switch over on cost alone.

Should I be looking at a different CDN service?

I never would have thought to check the webapp. Grepping for loadProto or .proto" does it. Thanks for sharing.

APFS supports on-disk compression, and the Mac App Store uses that when installing Xcode, so it can be tricky to compare storage amounts.

Xcode 11: 10.3GB on disk / 17.1GB apparent

Xcode 12: 16.9GB on disk / 30.0GB apparent

As someone who’d already been a bit worried about future mass-car hacks, I found the zombie car hacking sequence in 2017's "The Fate of the Furious" particularly terrifying to see in the theater. Rewatching it now, it actually looks somewhat tame compared to what might be since the hacked cars only inflict property damage, not injury.

> Villainess: I want every with chip with a 0-day exploit in a two mile radius around that motorcade now.

> Computer guy: There's over a thousand of 'em

> Villainess: Hack ‘em all. It’s zombie time.

> [zombie cars drive around causing mayhem]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmMnRQu9YQ

Thank you so much for posting this link. I already knew he’d written Mono, the open-source implementation of .Net, but am now in awe at seeing his many other accomplishments, such as starting the GNOME project and making major contributions to initial RAID and Sparc support in Linux.

Thanks Miguel!

> With the US Department of Energy dumping money into SCYL and many in the industry congregating around it, the software front is accelerating rapidly.

Anybody know what SCYL is? Based on the low number of google hits I'm thinking it's a typo

If you want to compare with the manual process for crossing obstacles, here’s a little buggy with a gasoline motor, with the lineman hoisting it past an insulator with the help of a pulley, starting around 6:20:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbtlgAGRaA

Also related, videos of people walking on the cables after being dropped off by a helicopter onto the live lines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA

A youtube search for 'helicopter lineman' turns up a lot of other material in this vein.

I think you’re trying to express skepticism about this claim, but the way that it’s phrased, if the claim were true, directly answering your questions would be to doxx the author of Slate Star Codex here in this thread.

By taking down the blog and writing the open letter, Alexander has made it extremely clear what his current anonymity preferences are.

It must feel incredibly horrible to be asking for privacy, citing safety reasons, only to have people dig up deanonymizing opsec failures from the past and suggesting they somehow indicated you did not really intend or deserve to have privacy today.

macOS: /usr/share/misc/units.lib

ubuntu: /usr/share/units, after `apt-get install -y units`

I coincidentally came across the following article a few hours after being puzzled by nothal’s comment:

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret...

Summarizes the current claims, while providing healthy reminders about exercising skepticism.

Have any other sources corroborated this story? Bloomberg News lost a ton of credibility with me after their “The Big Hack” cover story [1], claiming Apple and Amazon had been hacked by chips secretly added to their servers in the factory. The picture of the chip on the cover was purely a work of imagination. To my knowledge, no supporting evidence was ever produced, nor were any of the widespread criticisms of the story ever addressed [2], [3].

To push another “China secretly hacked the west” story while also invoking Betteridge's Law leaves me highly skeptical.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Businessweek#%22The_... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...

One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O’Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the volume pricing on Safari subscriptions is, so can only say there’s a possibility that ACM article sales subsidize Safari books; I do know that, as an individual who has to learn new things and look old things up constantly, the inclusion of O’Reilly/Safari makes an individual ACM subscription a fantastic deal.

Additionally, having seen someone organize an academic conference once, I do know that IEEE provides a conference with things like bank accounts, insurance, and purchasing departments that can meet the creditworthiness requirements of major hotels. It also ends up covering the shortfall if the conference winds up losing money.

I’m all for improving efficiencies where possible, and there are definitely some problems with these organizations, don’t get me wrong; but I did want to emphasize that both organizations are definitely providing real value to parts of the computing community.

Disclaimer: I haven’t read the link as twitter is (intentionally) inaccessible from my machine.

Yup, this is very common.

Exact numbers are pretty confidential. Ballpark numbers from something a few years ago: tech company sold for $400+ million. CEO got $10 million, head of sales $5 million, CTO $1 million, middle managers $20k, and regular employees $5k. VCs got everything else.

Seemed pretty standard from what I could tell.

Not a new practice at all; first heard of this happening to a friend about 15 years ago, his share class was revalued to zero at the same time as the acquisition of the startup he worked for.

And this goes back even further: https://web.archive.org/web/20050208022306/http://www.suck.c...

> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees

This is by far the best explanation I have heard. Suddenly Joyent makes sense to me after all these years. They have been continuing to do what Sun did.

In a very similar way to how Sun followed the fatal strategy of simultaneously trying to make money selling proprietary Unix hardware, while also making their software open source and porting it to more popular architectures, while simultaneously developing Java as a portable programming language intending to erase all differentiation in underlying architecture/OS differences …

Yes: Joyent is (was) a hosting company trying to compete with AWS, claiming technical superiority in the software stack. Yes they also make an OpenStack competitor. And had their own programming language runtime, node.js, which seemed to be an odd implementation choice for their classic old-school unix tech. All of the above.