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blakesterz

Re:What was a Token Ring network? on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:34AM (#50119705)
The "WAS" in that title just made me feel really old. I remember learning about this in college and it being a thing that I would need to work with and understand how it works why it's different than ethernet. And now it's just a big "WAS".
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
Re:Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:33AM (#49909567)
I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.
Reuters has a non-paywalled (short) report with a bit of detail:

https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...

That's funny, I guess I always just assumed that a truck was a self contained thing were all the work happened, all that other stuff never even occurred to me!

  "The basics: a food truck commissary gives you a licensed commercial space to fill your fresh water tank, dump gray water, handle grease disposal, wash dishes, deep clean your truck, and store food when you’re not operating."
Re:Movie Review: Musk on Thursday September 10, 2026 @10:57AM (#49644859)
This site has numbers and sources: https://www.tesladeaths.com/
Re:I'm Becoming AI-Blind on Friday August 21, 2026 @09:55AM (#49388134)

  "There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "
I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.

And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?

Re:The August 17 outage, and the work ahead on Thursday August 20, 2026 @03:41PM (#49379179)

  "Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "
Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.

  "When I spoke with Cranor, she was floored by just how often I went to McDonald’s: “This guy eats a lot of McDonald's.” My boss, who was also stunned by my processed-food choices, says I now have to stop eating there. Despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes and greasy french fries, I agree." 
I wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits.
Re:Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @10:23AM (#49272844)

  "Accessibility failures are near-universal."
Why does it seem like Accessibility is always an after thought? It is usually so easy to do while a site is built. We just don't think about it until someone complains?
Re:Show HN: KidScreen, a finite YouTube shelf chosen by parents on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @09:53AM (#49272446)
Looks interesting but I would want some public information about how it works and who is doing it, etc... The complete lack of any available details must be stopping many potential users.
Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.
There's a video of the entire session here:

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14ej1ucqu?kalturaStartTim...

(if that link doesn't work, it starts about 12 minutes into the start)

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour.

So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

Are there any defenses I can put in front of my websites that are good for stopping these things? The amount of traffic I see from residential proxies is just killing me. In particular defense against residential proxies.
Re:He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @11:19AM (#48385283)
That link it throwing me:

  "Scan this QR code with your mobile device to verify you are human. reCAPTCHA protects your privacy and does not share your details with this website or app."
Is that a new recaptcha thing? I've never seen that before.
Planet Money just did an episode on this. The answer is, at least according to this, yes, pretty accurate. At least in the past https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308
Re:Your favorite brands got worse on purpose on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @11:33AM (#47850288)
I'm glad they had the "Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff" list, that was my first thought. What other brands are still decent?
Re:Sand from Different Beaches in the World on Friday March 27, 2026 @12:26PM (#47544791)
John McPhee had a great New Yorker article (which I think was also in the collection Irons in the Fire), where he wrote about how U.S. geologists used sand found in the Japanese "Fu-Go" bombs that made it to the NW US to figure out their launch sites from specific beaches near Tokyo.

It starts on the 9th page here

https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1996-mcphee.pdf

Re:Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @04:01PM (#47430717)
You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

  "Most of the private credit loans were floating rate and tied to the federal funds rate, which has persisted at a high level over the past three years. Fitch pointed to this as a catalyst for last year's defaults."
I wanted to dismiss that and say ... but it's not really historically high. I suppose it really is not IF you look WAY back. It actually has persisted at a relatively high level if you look back to 2009, which is more than a short time now.

I guess it is fair to say the federal funds rate has persisted at a high level over the past three years now isn't it?

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...

Also interesting to note, "Fitch recorded NO defaults in the software sector last year. The rating agency noted it categorizes software issuers into their main target market sectors when applicable."

  Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”


https://www.theverge.com/tech/878725/meta-facial-recognition...
I'll just add another vote for OrbStack. I found it way faster on M1 and M5 and never found any compatibility issues.
That's handy! I just started using oh-my-zsh and I feel like I know about 4% of useful things it can do so far.
Alex Stamos talked about this a bit on TWiT late last year:

  "It's getting hard to not be conspiracy minded here. They closed  CSRB, destroyed CISA. CISA has no confirmed director.  This just adds to kind of a complete surrender at least on the cyber side. We are spectacularly poorly prepared right now for a cyber attack."
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1056?autost...
Re:The Anti-Hat Riots of 1973 on Thursday January 29, 2026 @10:37AM (#46811589)
It also reminded me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax

One of those things that seem POSSIBLE, but then again...

Of course, why are the good ones always in mice?

  A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that an injection blocking a protein linked to aging can reverse the natural loss of knee cartilage in older mice.

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