First time I ever hoped for a tornado to strike a specific location.

Time to start with one PR per line of code…

Yeah, but that would require raising taxes, which the billionaires have convinced the masses is a terrible thing because socialism, and look where that’s gotten third world socialist countries.

The only solution, according to the billionaires, and the brainwashed masses, is to give even more money to the billionaires so that they can privatize things even more and throw cutting edge technology at the problem instead of proven solutions like light rail, etc.

Public transit in the US simply isn’t good enough in many cases. Years ago I lived in a suburb north of Boston and worked in another suburb west of Boston. It was about a 40 minute drive during rush hour. Trying to do that same commute by public transit likely would have taken me 4+ hours and involved a bus to a subway into Boston followed by a commuter train and another bus. It would have been a nightmare.

Our TV picked up ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and one or two independent TV channels from New York. Our antenna was on a rotator so that you could point it in the optimal location for each.

Born in 1967. I remember as a kid during the summer that pretty much every afternoon 10-20 neighborhood kids would get together to play games like hide and seek or kick the can. We were in a semi-rural neighborhood so kids could live up to a mile away or so. The parents were more than happy for us to be somewhere random with a bunch of other kids.

When parents had to call kids home for dinner they’d use bells, whistles, or other noisemakers. Pretty much every kid recognized the different sounds and knew which kids it applied to.

My grandparents lived in New Hampshire. Their telephone was on a party line shared with 4 or 5 neighbors. We learned to answer it only if it rang twice in quick succession.

I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.

It damn well better remain an exception. I help manage a few hundred Linux systems in AWS for my employer. We patch those systems on a quarterly basis, which in some cases means building up a whole new instance from scratch. I shudder to think what it would mean if we somehow had to prove our age for each one of these systems. And whose age/identity would it be? Our CEO? Me? My boss?

Juries often have one or more alternates. Those are jurors who sit in the jury box for the entire trial, but under normal conditions they aren’t in the jury room during deliberations. If a juror is unable to remain, for whatever reason, then the judge replaces that juror with one of the alternates. I sat on 2 days of a 3 day trial but tested positive for Covid the morning of the third, so I was excused. The judge replaced me with one of her alternates.

If the judge got wind that a juror was disregarding such an order then that juror would likely be kicked out & replaced with an alternate. If the transgression by the juror was severe enough the judge could potentially also refer the juror to the Attorney Generals office for investigation and possible charges.

I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.

I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.

I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.

For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…

For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

What about refrigerators?

Will it block VPNs, proxies, and Bing image search as well?

I’ve seen actors fall down stairs and over a breakaway bannister live in a Broadway show. It’s clearly highly choreographed, and I also spotted the pads one actor was wearing when his shirt accidentally came untucked. Even though it looked very chaotic, in hindsight it was more of a tuck & tumble than a random fall.

Hell, my wife’s entirely manual Jeep (manual door locks, manual window cranks, etc.) still has a sensor that warns you if the tailgate is open…

Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):

There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.

Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.

The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced.

While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

This is a phased array radar system, which is significantly different than the mechanical radars used by boats/ships. A phased array system typically supports near real time tracking of multiple targets since the radar signals are controlled through solid state beam steering.

Mechanical radars like those on boats can only update targets as quickly as the antenna rotates, which can be as slow as 20 RPM for some consumer brands. They are very different beasts. Comparing the two is like comparing a car to a train…

Same here. We also contract with HackerOne, a company of “white hat” hackers that actively attack our site and earn significant bounties if they can do something like remotely execute commands, exfiltrate data, etc. Only after they provide us with a repeatable set of steps and we close the hole do they get paid.

Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Something about the lyrics just makes me smile.