Viewing profile — ff317

It's not quite that simple though. A lot of these edge cases are necessary for everyone to live their cushy little city lives. It's not a matter of outmoded things. We will still n…

From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network…

I agree with you, for the mass consumer car market (individual/family transport) as a whole. It's coming fast. However, the current EV technology (mostly batteries + charging) is n…

Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the …

> Many workloads don't need something like Galera [etc...] This continues the faulty line of thinking that open source is just for hobby-level projects or early startup throwaway i…

> Computer interfaces had no superfluous subservient text for their entire history prior to LLMs Clippy would like to help you correct this statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

I think this also speaks to the heart of the non-political spectrum between "conservative" and "progressive" societal evolution. It's progressive to enact these kinds of changes in…

When we want to maintain a reliable, stable "product" in traditional software development (a binary executable artifact that ships out to users, or the binary engine of some SaaS t…

Random related data point: for HTTP requests to Wikipedia (and related) for the past 7d, the IP protocol split is roughly 35% IPv6 / 65% IPv4. (this is counting by-request, so heav…

The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on…

It might be interesting for "opportunistic" DoTLS towards authdns servers, which might listen on the DoTLS port with a cert containing a SAN that matches the public IP of the authd…

I like this argument, but it does somewhat apply to software development as well! The only real difference is that the bulk of the "licensed work" the LLMs are consuming to learn t…

https://ziglang.org/ is a solid future C-replacement, IMHO. There's pretty much no downsides and all upsides from a C hacker's perspective. It just hasn't reached 1.0 yet!

The hole in the system, though, is fixed-rate loans over the long term, and the ability to refinance relatively-cheaply. If you buy a house when rates and inflation are low, then o…

Inflation being a years-long painful problem to wrestle with was inevitable with all the stimulus pumped in to keep us afloat through the pandemic. We could have fared far worse, a…

The laws in question are ambiguously worded and untested-yet in courts. They promise severe financial penalties and prison terms for offenders. I don't blame a doctor for being sca…

Why were those "rentiers and parasites" ever involved? Why wasn't the NYT (or any other Thing) just created by the workers without their involvement? The answer in practice is that…

I cook on cast iron multiple times a week. Have for years, using a very antique pan from a dead relative. My rules are fairly straightforward. I don't do any other maintenance or c…

What if they live in a country in which genetic evidence of a disease can deny or significantly increase the cost of health coverage? Even if you're clear of those for now, a new m…

That's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a def…

But it does offer a reasonable hybrid solution: the software in the car doesn't have to solve all possible scenarios, it just has to be good enough to navigate the common, easy sce…

My favorite is American restaurant menus describing a "French Dip" as "with au jus sauce" :)

Yeah but it's not just "water", as in plain H2O. All water has different things dissolved or mixed into it. In pools there's commonly several chemicals added to that water: to corr…

The problem is that software development is less like hiring an airline pilot or a structural engineer, and more like hiring an artist. Try making up a "standard exam" that will te…