qurren

I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users, from the logs it seemed mostly schools' math classes in Latin America. It was running on a single AWS EC2 Classic.

Ironically, when I started working for AWS, I always felt threatened with sticks and never had space to maintain my own projects. When they deprecated EC2 Classic, my site went down. I didn't get time or mental space to migrate it.

Cest la vie I guess.

Mostly:

1. Hardware generally just works

2. Videos that use patented formats just play without fiddling

3. Proprietary closed-source software, if they even support Linux, usually releases Ubuntu binaries before anything else

Just get a big monitor or projector and whatever TV box you want.

If you really want privacy there's always the NUC running youtube.com in a browser

Fully agree. Medicare should pay for:

- Gym memberships

- National park passes

- Exercise equipment and sports equipment

- Subsidies for heart-healthy foods

Medicare should also:

- Fine employers if their employees are working more than 40 hours a week, pay the fines out to affected employees tax-free

> They don’t have problems keeping their high speed trains safe

Their trains are safe, but they also have 2X the national suicide rate as Spain, which amounts to about 17000 more deaths per year. I'd attribute a big chunk of that to their work culture treating people like machines, whereas Spain's work culture tends to lean towards treating people like humans.

That isn't an excuse for railway mishaps, of course, but I'm just trying to de-romanticize Japan as some kind of magical perfect place. It's not. They might have gotten their railways right, but they have massive safety issues around mental health.

I'd also be interested to know what the speed of cognitive decline is OUTSDE the times that you are <birdwatching/hiking/whatever is claimed to cognitive decline>.

Like, if you have a baseline cognitive decline of 25% in 10 years, and you instead spend 2 of those 10 years (total time spent) watching birds to go from 25% to 20% reduction in cognitive decline, you haven't really slowed your cognitive decline, you've just effectively paused it during the time you were watching birds.

I like to think of nuances as nuisances. Sometimes I wonder if we can just merge these two words because they're pretty much the same thing most of the time.

Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.

Until some website of some service you're using embeds an Indian-sourced JavaScript required for its support chat and you're unable to get a refund on a defective product you purchased.

Or worse, you were billed incorrectly by some US-based service, their support chat loads Indian assets, and they threaten to hit your credit score and send debt collectors after you if you don't pay up.

The useful thing I actually want to do with this: Zero-latency ssh.

1. Train a smaller (<10M-50M) model. Lower accuracy is fine; I want latency <10ms.

2. Then create a "reactive" version of `ssh` that gives you the perception of zero latency over shitty networks and high latency ssh connections across the world. Basically, the local screen should respond instantly to my keystrokes (including how arrow, tab, etc. esc keys respond in various TUI apps), and then correct itself when the server actually responds.

I'm also wondering who the hell would use a registrar called "eMudhra" with Arial font in the subtext in their logo. It's so incredibly 90s.

I'm actually being serious, I do judge companies by their logo and website design taste, and more modern-looking companies also tend to pay more attention to doing things properly.

It seems everyone has gone to Substack and Medium now because those are the only things people actually read. :(

The real problem is generating leads that are more likely to yield positive results than throwing darts at hypotheses.

That's what top-tier scientists are good at.

Okay so one of the reasons I post on Meta platforms less nowadays is that they often don't show my content to my own followers and friends. I'm tired of talking to walls. I'm tired of having communication between friends gatekept by a stupid algorithm. I'm fine with recommendation systems being used for things I DON'T subscribe to, but if it's between friends I want to see ALL of it.

So now it's "pay $50 to post 2 links" but does that guarantee them showing it to your followers and friends? If NOT -- is that sufficient reason for a fraud lawsuit?

> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning

I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.

The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.

But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.

I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?

> If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.

That sounds awful. Someone's family's well-being at the mercy of some corporate internal market. Companies can have ways to decide on what to work on and iterate on that decision process, but they should accept their historic decisions and treat their hard workers as proper team members, not survivor contestants.

Yeah all the 3rd party printer cartridges do this. Their reviews are for other random products. Drives me nuts. They sell paperclips for a while, accumulate hundreds of 5-star reviews because it's hard to screw up paperclips, and then swap the paperclip listing out for a shitty, leaky printer cartridge.

Where the hell are the good 3rd party cartridges? They're almost impossible to find.

> you've had too many people use it to mean "people whose future is on the line based on the outcome of the product."

This is pretty much the only way I've ever heard it used in the companies I've been at.

To clarify, I don't want people holding any stakes other than the equity of the company itself.

I don't want people holding stakes because they want a promotion, because their direct manager wants to launch a corporate political battle into another team, or because some salesperson wants to get a commision for an otherwise worthless customer. I don't want roadblocks in the name of security so that the IT guy has a sense of self-worth. I don't want someone trying to protect their egos around something they worked on for 3 years, when there's new tech that supersedes it.

The real culprit is a combination of too many levels of hierarchy and performance reviews IMO. Especially when multiple levels along a management chain disagree on what a report must work on.

This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.

Yeah I fucking hate them.

I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.

But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.

About 80% of my software engineering job is fighting disagreements between "stakeholders".

Meanwhile these degenerate folk play these things irresponsibly, become public charges, and I have to pay the brunt of it as a taxpayer who isn't going to get any of my money back in the form of things that benefit me. Social Security will be insolvent, I still don't have universal healthcare or functional public transportation, and the cost of everything is going up while I'm getting taxed to death.

The only actual solution I've found is to participate in the "system" itself and actually get my money back from the "system". I have better math skills than 99.9% of people on the platforms, so I'm able to profit significantly by quant trading on it.

I wish I didn't have to do this. I'd love to be rich just by working and getting to actually keep the money I make from working. Inflation and taxes could be less if everyone was smart with their money. But my money is stolen, used to support this system, so I just fish it back by playing the house :/

> #3 - If you haven't reviewed the product on Amazon, you should warn other users with a review

I've warned users of many such instances of false claims, and safety issues with products. As a consequence, I've been banned from reviewing, and all my past reviews have been removed.

"Community standards", I guess.

This gives me Microsoft Bob vibes

Sneaky pricing. Offers you plans when you sign up, if you decline them, it offers you a discount.

Just offer the discounted price up front. If your business cannot survive without sneaky pricing, it's not a good business.

I detest this kind of pricing. It seems that for every subscription I need to threaten to leave to get a discount, and now need an AI to automate that process.

Just get a second phone number for all these websites

> it won’t compete with a doctor’s judgement or knowledge of their practice and institutional knowledge.

I vehemently disagree, based on the number of times doctors have misdiagnosed me, and AI or other internet searches have yielded a correct diagnosis and treatment.

It won't compete with the top 5% of doctors, but most of the time you are not going to get to see a top-5% doctor.

> Well the AI can’t order any diagnostics

Oh, it absolutely can. If it's bloodwork I can absolutely get that done through Function Health or similar platform without a doctor's order. If it's imaging I can fly to another country and get it done faster and cheaper (including flights and accommodation) than the insured price in the US.

I also give the AI access to all my medical records at 6 institutions in 2 countries over the past 15 years, and it draws upon that context. Doctors don't usually have time for that.

It's often still cheaper to buy from Amazon than buying from vendors, unless you scour the internet for the 30% off coupon and sign up for the newsletter for the 10% welcome bonus and then promptly report the newsletter as spam.

There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.

Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)