jandrese

I advocated for Ubuntu for years because it was easier to install and had excellent hardware support. For 2026 I have switched back to Debian because Ubuntu has been making my life more difficult. Ubuntu 26 basically forces you onto Wayland even though it breaks some of my use cases, particularly with screen recording. It turns everything into Snaps which is a hassle because it means I need to mirror both the regular repo and the snaps to my closed network instead of just the repo.

Ubuntu still has the superior installer by a good margin, but it does sometimes like to crash when run offline. Debian's installer at least has the option to go text only. There is also more work to do after the install is finished on Debian, but since that's a script it's not such a big deal.

The one bit of the Debian installer I dislike the most is how if you aren't online when you do the install you get a completely empty sources.list, and the Debian sources are a lot more complicated than Ubuntu's. Debian's support for third party drivers like nVidia graphics is also more complicated and confusing than Ubuntu's.

The anecdote about Edison setting the electric car business back by overselling a defective battery solution is interesting. I still think the $2,000 electric car is a hard sell against a $850 Model-T unfortunately. I also thought it was amusing to call a steering wheel "un-ladylike" compared to a tiller arrangement. I think that's more just early vehicles not standardizing on controls and in this case the maker guessed wrong, but they were hardly alone. The late 19th/early 20th century vehicles were full of wacky and confusing control systems.

All of the agents struggle with knowing when to stop. They can drive themselves insane inventing problems to solve after they arrive at a satisfactory answer for the current problem.

Keep this in mind when you see articles about how "an AI agent uncovered a thousand issues in our codebase overnight". A great many of those "issues" end up being that some process was not bureaucratic enough.

Or with his battle pug in Dune.

Not to mention Walter Koenig.

I guess you might be able to get around this problem if the vehicle can take off and land on a land based airstrip and then stay at 10m over the water. Otherwise that is a crippling limitation since you not only need the ocean to be relatively calm when taking off, but also when landing.

Do you take a Ku dish backpacking?!?

Doesn't Starlink have a direct to phone very low data thing? Like you can do SMS over it?

I am surprised that Starlink didn't eat their lunch. I think the only thing keeping them alive is inertia and the fact that Starlink still has regional lockouts and doesn't work in the most remote parts of the world.

Au Contraire, that bandwidth is definitely a joke.

My impression is that "home value" is often a dodge that sounds better on paper than "I don't like change". You generally can't sue over hurt feelings, but if you can attach some kind of monetary value to it then the courts may take your case.

As you note home value is an extremely nebulous concept as it is tied to whatever people who currently do not live in the community might pay to buy a house. No matter what someone sells for they can always say "it would have sold for more if every single house was painted exactly the same shade of beige, you miscreants with your off white, ecru, and oatmeal houses have cost me tens of thousands of dollars!"

This is one of the rare use cases where the users should be identifying the servers they are connecting to. If your work is that spooky then a piece of paper with the expected key signature seems like a reasonable precaution.

There used to be that "key art" that was posted to make it more visibly distinct, but I think that feature got discontinued.

Administering your hidden service?

The attack on SSH seems rather poorly conceived. Not only was it detected immediately thanks to SSH printing that huge banner on MITM attacks, but it allowed the admins to easily trace every infected node and respond quickly to shut the whole operation down. Had they stuck to email they would still be running today.

Normally I think LetsEncrypt made self hosting a lot easier, at least if you wanted to support HTTPS.

LetsEncrypt is what finally solved the problem with the previous systems were perfect was the enemy of the good. There used to be a lot of focus on trying to verify that the person getting the cert was who they said they are, but LetsEncrypt came and sad "that part isn't important, protecting the data is what really matters" and basically solved the real problem wholesale. Very few people inspect the certificates on every website they visit, so those protections were mostly useless and created a roadblock to widespread adoption of HTTPS, scoping the problem down to just making sure nobody can inspect or modify the data in transit made automation not only possible but easy.

Yes, give him a Nobel prize but have him share it with Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran.

I found a "BBS on a CD" as a kid in the 90s. It was intended for people setting up a new BBS but it came with a good chunk of content to seed the system with.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of BBSes a lot of the stuff wasn't terribly useful for just one person. Emailing yourself isn't terribly useful. Door games were usually multiplayer, although LoRD was playable solo, and was in retrospect a precursor to games like Farmville.

The part where the BBS admin would call your number to verify your identity was real as well. It was always fun to explain to mom why some totally random guy was calling and asking for me.

Oh, it doesn't require a person to continually monitor it now? I missed that change. Until that happens I don't think it qualifies as "full" self driving.

"It's not flying, it's falling with style!"

I think this is pretty unique demonstration for something that theoretically may be street legal one day.

This thing is covered in cold gas thrusters, I'm betting it can go around a corner faster than almost any other car. The limitation might be G forces on the driver. Maximum performance may only be achievable in self driving mode.

Was anybody disappointed that he didn't mention the price of that cooktop? He had all of that leadup with the price of normal glass ($30/ft^2), but never told us what he paid for the fancy porcelain.

It depends. If it's a basic webpage clicking the resume icon usually works fine. If it's some file hosting thing that wants you to pay a monthly fee for full download speed the resume often fails.

This year is far from typical however. The AI bubble is throwing all of the numbers out of whack.

One word: Volume.

You can make a nice profit off of the enterprise space, but the big winners are the guys who put the work into servicing the consumer market.

I'm guessing they lost their back issues due to neglect and sometimes tragedy. When people are first starting out they often don't think that in 30 years time they will want a physical copy of their joke periodical and warehouse space is always limited. When budgets get tight it is sometimes the storage bill that has to be cut.

There is a button on the top right to turn off the music.

"Hey boss, do you think there is a chance this scheme might introduce radioactive byproducts into the ground water?"

"Shut up"

There should be additional audio logs you can find under some squares that provide snippits of backstory.

I like the part where it doesn't even matter if you hit a mine, you are on this train ride regardless of what you do.

This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.

Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.