Viewing profile — alexpotato

One of my favorite examples of this kind of thing is requiring a ticket for every change. There is a class of changes that take very little time but have a positive impact. If the …

I've been using Linux as my daily driver on my main personal computers for years. You could say that I love Linux and it has treated me very well. That being said, I consciously ch…

"The rule of thumb was: - buy when home prices are 10x rent - sell when home prices are 20x rent" - The Big Short by Micheal Lewis [0] I remember reading this quote and then checki…

Came here to say the same thing. I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/

In Patriot Games by Tom Clancy, there is a scene early in the book where Jack Ryan is talking about the laptop he is using to write his book. I don't remember the exact specs but a…

My elderly father uses a financial planner/wealth management firm. Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns. My sister an…

I found the below line to get particularly "hard": > When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ …

I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked. That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put res…

There is a great article called "Manual Work is a Bug: Always be Automating" [0] that was written in the pre LLM era for technical operations teams. I would argue that it is just a…

I worked at a place that had a lot of baremetal machines on the open internet. I would occasionally scan the auth.log to see which users the bots were using and it was an interesti…

Wasn't the strategy of Mafia bosses to say something vague like "I sure wish that guy would go away". It was implicit that they wanted someone killed but if brought up in court the…

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased): Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, d…

> So the plugin is split across the ESP32's two cores. The control loop and its sensor event handlers own core 0. The exporter gets its own FreeRTOS task pinned to core 1, where a …

> - People who are on the ground floor generally travel in large groups to the same destination. I also thought that this is one of the biggest reasons destination dispatch was bet…

> “I didn’t think anyone would care” prevented me from writing, though A few years ago I started writing Twitter threads [0]. A few weeks ago I passed 200 total threads. When I sta…

I've spent a lot of time in my career as a SRE/DevOps which includes running MANY outages due to a combination of uncaught bugs and/or crazy infra failures. [0] In my opinion, the …

He's playing the piano in this video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiShsfvbFUA

Wacom tablets come with a stylus that simulates a pencil lead. It actually wears down over time which may sound like a bug/trying to get you to buy more but I have to say that it r…

One of the wildest things to me about this is that the F-16 was specifically designed to be easier for HUMANS to fly air-to-air combat roles at high Gs. For example, the flight sti…

I was reading about Tao's efforts to get more people to use Lean and apparently a big roadblock for people is that Lean uses very specific static typing. e.g. to use a very simple …

I work with several researchers (primarily working on consensus protocols etc). We were discussing research in general and I asked them: "Do you prefer the writing of the papers or…

> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if …

Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security wor…

This reminds me of the stone carvings found in Scotland showing grape vines growing there. In other words, it used to be MUCH warmer in the northern latitudes.