coldbrewed

Won't anyone think of the leopards? They can't subsist on faces alone and yet people keep feeding themselves to the leopards?

I have a time of use electric plan and adjust load (grow lights, dehumidifier, AC, battery backups) at certain times to save money. Smart home can be pure tinkering but it can control some pretty practical things.

You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.

There are much better ways of device enrollment; at a minimum they could require device activation that doesn't blindly use a token with no further checks.

Move fast and break things*

* Privacy, civic trust, society if you get a chance!

This is the end product of tech leadership taking fat rips of disruption cocaine for the last 15 years. Flock Safety got VC money so that they could build a panopticon. There is nothing surprising about the fact that they did a hack job with terrible security; the fact that their service names are various types of alcohol is beyond parody.

Oh well, at least Flock Safety's IPO will be a critical cash infusion in the pursuit of building the torture nexus so that's cool.

Your bank's mainframe would like to know your location.

In this metaphor the police are corrupt, running a protection racket, and might get drunk and shoot you while your dealer is in the mafia. The mafia link might be a problem at some point but the person with the badge and the gun is a problem right now.

The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).

In practice this requires duplicating the upstream build and release pipelines, so now you need yet another agent running in the background (+ periodically going off the rails + eating tokens) which incurs more up front cost and cognitive overhead.

In my experience "throw another agent at it/fork it" consistently creates unsupervised trainwrecks.

Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!

Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.

I'm still on opus 4.6 for a healthy chunk on work; the technical competence has lagged behind but the slop-comment generation and misdirected self-initiated actions on newer models ultimately burn more time than a little more babysitting, but I'm optimizing for minimized slop generation over sheer generation speed.

Show me a fully LLM-generated database with an implement that's clear, documented, and adequately bug free.

Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments.

LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.

Virginia has more power infrastructure in place but said infrastructure is already seeing significant DC build out; I know little about power distribution in Louisiana but would be surprised if there was extensive spare capacity in the transmission lines and generation facilities. I'm surprised that the rust belt hasn't seen more uptake since they had all that manufacturing capacity but the backing power generation/distribution may have atrophied in the intervening years.

With the amount of cash OpenAI is splashing around they could easily write it into the contracts, but the current incentive structure prioritizes time between ground breaking and powered GPUs in racks. OpenAI has shown complete disinterest in the impact of AI writ large and will only reduce their community/infra impact to optimize that time to racked GPU along the Pareto frontier.

This is a collection of "OpenAI will boldly act in the abstract to provide air coverage for Texas leadership." With data centers under construction one would think they would have examples of successes or projects in progress available for reference. They'd claim credit if they had it so the silence is telling.

Big tech has consistently valued profit and growth above good stewardship; the onus is entirely on OpenAI to demonstrate that any of these claims aren't fluff with the projects that are already greenlit. When OpenAI presents plans to the communities prior to/alongside city counsels and drops the NDAs then there will be merit to this but our expectations should be somewhere between "super deep kola borehole" and "upper mantle".

For a standalone Pi power via USB is fine. As soon as these devices get embedded or you're running more than two in proximity the USB spaghetti gets pretty miserable.

There are so many quirks with the Raspberry Pi that make it a pain to work with, from the lack of mainline Linux support on the Pi 5 to the awkward by default power arrangement to the fact that the architecture is a GPU with a CPU glued onto the side. The Raspberry foundation made SBCs much more ergonomic and kudos to them but working with them still feels like walking through a field of tiny rakes.

Send an email to the Digitalocean abuse email with the time ranges and origin IPs.

We see constant abuse from the Tencent ASN/associated ACE ASN, and I've memorized the china169 backbone asn as AS4837 because of thr nonstop crawlers splattered across their network ranges. It's not possible to ID the operator running the crawlers running from these networks but there's a clear signal of the origin of some of these entities.

I do not like anime but holy crap do people with anime pfps make excellent software engineers and terrifying red teamers.

The Internet was fully functional and full of competent people when it was a much weirder place. Converting all spaces into the equivalent of dress shirts and blazers doesn't reduce anyone's competence but does make the experience so much more drab. Let people like things.

The problem in both of these cases is to how prioritize the complexity of the domain vs. the cognitive overhead of the implementation vs. the computational complexity. If the domain is complex and best represented by modeling the domain, model the domain. If the domain is simple and the the complexity is low, make it simple. If the computational complexity is high and the domain is complex, then all solutions will be bad so minimize the suck in the best way that you know how.

Occam's razor applies to all domains. Don't use confusing implementations until there are no good options left.

We shouldn't tolerate slop in any form, especially not in commit comments. What we should care about is communicating design decisions, intent, and especially we should explain concerns that can't be intuited from reading the code. A longer, more detailed comment that explains some significant detail can be especially valuable but it should earn the weight that it carries.

I think we're all in agreement that a one word "runs" commit and a 6 paragraph slop commit both fail to communicate effectively.

Duckdb has a server mode[1] which might alleviate some of those pain points. SQLite is a bit more precise in that only a single connection can write to the DB which provides more concurrency but still has pain points. For a single file DB either choice seems justifiable to manage complexity.

[1]: https://duckdb.org/2026/05/12/quack-remote-protocol

SQLite is _the_ tool of choice for local SQL databases with minimal overhead. If you needed a single file DB for an OLAP workload, SQLite was still the best option even if the technology wasn't an ideal fit. Duckdb is exciting specifically because SQLite/duckdb aren't comparable; we can stop shoehorning OLAP into an OLTP database.

I ran into this myself; I tried using SQLite to store the results of whole-internet rDNS scan and a count() over the entire DB could take 8 minutes. I used the wrong DB for the job and the narrative around SQLite/duckdb is around reckoning with perfectly reasonable limitations and tradeoffs that SQLite made.

IANA chemist but my guess is that it's of particular interest because PTFE surfaces are especially non-stick, and non-PTFE surfaces have good options that require less exotic chemistry.

The question I have is how long will it be till the report comes out indicating that DuPont has been dumping this product and intermediate compounds into local waterways. I give it 15 years?

The water was likely redirected for agricultural purposes and the farmers won't/can't surrender it on top of drought, if it's anything like the US. Would be real cool if we could make investments like this though.

Wait a minute, weren't these the same people using layoffs and RTO to take down their employees down a couple of notches? And the people who were telling the world that AI would destroy white collar work? Could these possibly be the same people that indicated that AI might wipe out humanity?

At least they're not using their money to swing politics to their favor or being the US administration.

Or were the same people A/B testing their apps to "maximize user engagement" to the detriment of society.

Anywho, we should all unionize. No relation to the above, just seems like a neat idea.

Can I buy a 40mm grenade launcher without a FFL? No, I can't. Can I legally manufacture and install an auto sear on my AR? Also no. Would it be sick if I could? Hell yes. Do I own a delightful selection of firearms, including AR pattern rifles? Yes, and the cardinality of that set is only going up.

Does society benefit from mass ownership and unlimited access to fully automatic rifles and grenade launchers? If it does, what country allows it?

Are the above constraints explicitly decided as constitutional though years of legal decisions at all levels of the courts? Yes? Then we can observe that we can reasonably constrain constitutional rights through law and legal opinions. The line may be hard to draw and may shift, see the AR ban, but it is accepted that constitutional guaranteed rights have bounds that can be articulated and clarified through the legal and political system.

We put upper bounds on the rights and freedoms of individuals and corporations because we all must live within proximity to each other. These bounds may be authoritarian at times, and of course that's bad. But we collectively can limit freedoms because the alternative is actively and disproportionally harmful to society.

When it comes to the rights and the freedoms of the largest and wealthiest corporations, we already live in an era where these entities are shaping major aspects of our lives. Infinite scroll is one small mechanism by which they're hacking our biology; this is more than just pixels on a screen but a component in a system that was A/B tested to maximize behavior modification.

Help me understand - do you believe that it is possible to regulate these entities in any form? Or do we need to say that the folks that yeeted tea into a harbor were fine with infinite corporate power and regulatory capture?

Isn't it fascinating that the people making the most extensive use of infinite feeds and A/B testing for maximum user engagement are also the massive platforms with dominating network effects and captive audiences? It's like _specifically regulating large social media conglomerates with outsized impact, capacity for harm, and demonstrated propensity to maximize user addiction might provide an ideal balance of societal improvement without harming smaller actors_.

Re, source code: you can print out an implementation of your infinite feed and put it on GitHub. Go nuts. That's your freedom of speech. Likewise, I can write DDoS control software and clients. However I can't run said software as a service because that specific act is illegal. Same thing applies to the application feeds we're discussing; hosting content and offering software as a service has different semantics.

If you think that UX is a matter of free speech then I have an illuminated freeway sign running at 3000 nits to sell you.

We can have nice things. We can push corporations to act in pro-social manners. We can put individuals at a better footing with respect to large corporations while ensuring the liberty of individuals and small businesses. This libertarian idea that we cannot constrain obviously harmful behavior from massive corporations without immediately turning into an authoritarian both flies in the face of historical precedent and basic reason.

Exactly this. Residential proxies are _the_ tool that makes stealth browsers and massive scraping work, and it's overwhelmingly done without informed consent.

Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?

Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?