I blog at http://swelljoe.com
I toot at https://mas.to/@swelljoe
- SwellJoe parentAsk your AI system to help you make a website that can handle a few requests per second.
- This is a remarkably ignorant take. Literally every detail is wrong.
They aren't major chords, they're mostly power chords, which are neither major nor minor (no third and the third provides the major/minor tonality). They often function as minor chords because of the melody or other parts, or just because of how the progression fits together. They aren't unique or new with Cobain, he was part of a long history of punk and rock and roll.
Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition. He was not particularly innovative or doing something technically unheard of, and he wouldn't have claimed to be. He wanted to be a good songwriter, and he succeeded. That's it, don't make up bullshit about it.
- "The old doctrine was that CO2 was a proxy for air quality"
That's not accurate, though. CO2 is, on its own, an air quality concern.
It has also been known, or at least part of the conversation, since Florence Nightingale's time, that fresh air reduces infections (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9300299/). This research makes a small tweak to our understanding, but it's also something that's been suspected/suggested by others for decades.
This research isn't "challenging" anything, it's merely expanding our understanding of causation about previously observed correlations. It's good to know what's happening. It's silly to make it out to be something it's not.
- How is that new information "challenging old ventilation doctrine"? It confirms old ventilation doctrine: monitoring CO2 remains a good proxy for general air quality, including viral and bacterial threats, and reducing CO2 via ventilation reduces other threats. That's doctrine, and now it has stronger evidence to support it, and another possible explanation for why and how well CO2 is correlated with other air quality issues.
Ventilation good. CO2 bad. No challenge to old ventilation doctrine detected. (The article and the research seems much more nuanced than the silly title.)
- What would motivate its existence if not government?
Google has Project Zero, but it's quite limited in scope, mostly focusing on things in Google's supply chain. What other evidence is there corporations will fund the scale and scope needed to secure the whole ecosystem (that everyone depends on at this point, Open Source won)?
Lots of the security-related organizations that currently exist merely find and report exploits, often even asking for compensation from the maintainer of the software for reporting it (even if it's a bullshit report: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...). Putting more work on volunteers isn't a reasonable ask.
- I always liked the reddits (Steve and Alexis), but I'm not overly fond of what reddit has become.
And, I fear the beatings will continue until morale improves. I just don't think the incentives are aligned with building a good community, anymore, so there's nothing pushing reddit toward becoming good again and many things pushing toward exploitation of the near two decades of conversation found there.
- I work on Virtualmin, and have for nearly two decades; most of that time as both a commercial product and Open Source project. It is an extremely competitive market, and it is a shrinking market. We've had about 150,000 active servers running Virtualmin GPL+Pro (give or take a few thousand) for the past several years, despite some new users fleeing from the cPanel price increases, and despite a major UI overhaul and lots of improvements in that time. The reason cPanel has raised their prices is that the specific market niche is dying and it is a very expensive product to support.
If you haven't found the dozens of direct competitors to cPanel (at least a half-dozen of which are credible substitutes for most users), you haven't done your market research effectively. According to the market data I have seen, Plesk is now the leader in the market, due to pretty effective deals with some of the largest providers. Nearly all of the competitors to cPanel are cheaper, and some are free, including Virtualmin GPL. And, the real problem for cPanel and all the other control panels isn't even the other control panels, it's all the other ways people are building sites and apps. We aren't losing customers to other control panels, generally speaking; we lose them to completely different ways of doing things.
The traditional control panel market is shrinking as more and more people and companies move to cloud native deployments or to services like Squarespace/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify/etc. Developers have been moving to the cloud, small business has been moving to easier to use site builder type services. Shared and VPS hosting is feeling the squeeze on both sides.
There are opportunities there in both directions, even in easing the transition for people currently on shared or VPS hosting, and it may even be that some of the control panel makers will make that leap, but it's a whole new paradigm. There's not a lot of shared code between what cPanel (or any of the dozens of competitors) does and what a cloud native deployment looks like or the services on the low-end (the SquareSpace/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify niche) look like. We've been moving in the cloud native direction in Virtualmin for a while, but it's a major undertaking and there is very little immediate benefit to existing customers (and, Cloudmin, despite it's name, is not very cloud native, either). Our customers are not broadly asking for the ability to operate Kubernetes deployments or for the ability to deploy containers to the cloud, for instance. It's a classic innovator's dilemma. Our customers want a faster horse (or, in your case, a cheaper horse), but in five to ten years, most won't want a horse at all.
Also, I think you're (wildly) underestimating the time it will take to build a credible commercial alternative, when there is already so much competition, including several free products in the space. The minimum viable product to compete with cPanel is hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I would not start a commercial product in this space today, or even ten years ago, despite my now decades of experience in it.
- And, it emulates two SID chips and has multiple modes (6581 and 8580), so it seems like a pretty darned good deal, honestly.
Real SIDs are pretty pricey these days, and they aren't making any more of them, so they will keep climbing in price for as long as people find them interesting. So, it's good to have an alternative.
- For what it's worth I'm sure he's aware of music made with his later inventions at Ensoniq (which made the first low-cost sampler, as well as some of the most popular synths of the digital era of electronic music...huge swaths of the late 80s through mid 90s owe their sound to Ensoniq synths and samplers). The SID was a breakthrough for microcomputers, but it wasn't widely appreciated in the music industry, but his later work certainly was.
- I don't think I mind this change. I mostly use my own mail servers, but when I setup a Discourse forum a couple months ago, it was so easy to turn it on with Mailgun that I gave it a try (the forum was migrated from an existing forum that sends about 9,000 email notifications per month, so I was going to be pushing the limit a little bit on the free tier right away). I definitely wasn't, and am not, willing to pay $35 a month for sending email for a forum I'm paying $20/month to host, and for a service I could setup in an afternoon on a $5/month VM, but if they want to charge me $8/month to send 10,0000 messages, I'm absolutely fine with that...the API, bounce processing, reporting, etc. are definitely worth a few bucks.
Mailgun was the obvious choice when I set it up, since it would be completely free for the volume I send, and I'll probably stick with it for that forum that's already using it, but now maybe I'll look around at the other options again for my next project.
- I thought I was clear, but perhaps I can explain better: Blockchain is very often suggested as a solution to a social or ethical problem, absent any evidence that it can solve those problems (or can solve them better than existing law/contract/trust-based solutions). Kinda like religion.
Blockchain is real, in the same way any other algorithm or technology is. Saying it will solve people being jerks is superstition.
- I've gotten to the point where I automatically and instantly discount any theory that proposes blockchain as a solution. I'm not saying blockchain technology will never be a good solution to a real world problem, but I have noticed that it is very often an ignorant assertion of faith rather than an argument based in fact. It walks like a religion and quacks like a religion, so I'm not sure why I should think it's something other than a religion.
- Cantrill is probably the most well-known. Long-time Solaris advocate, worked on Joyent for a long time, etc. You'll find his fingerprints on a lot of stuff. It'd be hard to find someone more capable of building on-prem cloud infrastructure at a systems level, I think.
Frazell is pretty well known for Docker and container-oriented stuff. I think she was at Google for a while, but maybe Microsoft? Somewhere big doing cloud things, for sure, though.
I don't know the other person. But, I would guess they have to be reasonably impressive to be on this team.
- I think there's a battle between nerds and non-nerds, and maybe in between is the worst place to land. I know some of my projects' users complain a lot about the lack of a WYSIWYG editor in our forums and issue tracker (we use Markdown, displayed plain until previewed or saved). Some people hate it. But I would hate a standard WYSIWYG editor, so we just accept the hate. Every Markdown-ish WYSIWYG editor I've tried has sucked...so I don't know that it actually is easy to get right (if it is even possible, where is the good example?).
Slack serves a mix of nerds and non-nerds, with non-nerds becoming a bigger and bigger portion of their user base over time. I can only assume it will become less and less enjoyable for nerds in service to the goal of serving their growing non-nerd users. For my own projects, I don't foresee myself ever using Slack (I use it for work). It feels like a decent product getting worse with time as it tries to be all things to all people.
- All code sucks now, not just blocks. Inline code screws up at least half the time I use it; it tries to guess what I want, and sometimes doesn't end when I close it with another backtick. And, when going back and editing it sometimes carries the formatting outside of where I put the backticks.
So frustrating. I hate having to think every time I insert code and re-do it about half the time; I'd rather have no formatting (just show me the markdown as-is) than this mess.
- Most of these are trash.
I like old buildings, a lot, and I also understand that growth requires new construction sometimes replace old buildings, but this is kind of the worst possible outcome. It still destroys the old building, and puts an incoherent one in its place. Some mergers of old and new are interesting and cohesive, but it seems like there isn't even an attempt to make them work together in a lot of cases.
- Printing books directly from the browser isn't a solved problem, so it seems like a good project, to me.
I don't see any evidence on their website this is intended for reading in the browser, and tons of clues that it's intended for printing books from the browser. I mean, there are tools for physical page sizes, blank pages, front/back matter, page counters, etc. Things that make zero sense in the browser and are necessary for a nice book printing.
So, what makes you think this is intended for reading in web browsers? As you note, it's horribly unpleasant in a browser...seems like they would have noticed that if they were testing in the browser, rather than using it to print books.
- A vehicle that has a towing capacity in the tens of thousands of pounds can have a big battery bank, and so it could have longer range than a small sedan. Of course the weight of the battery itself reduces range, and carrying a load will reduce range, and bigger batteries increase cost, but I suspect the reason Ford is introducing an electric truck in 2021 (and Tesla has one coming, too) is because they've done the math and it's finally starting work out right for some category of their customer base.
The truck market is downright scientific, and Ford is the leader in that market. They serve a lot of fleet customers and have huge amounts of data about how those fleets are used. They must have found a segment that will find electric vehicles cost-effective, otherwise they'd put it off another year or two or three. It's not the average truck buyer that's pushing them toward electric (there's a deep vein of stupid in that market that loves big, noisy, smelly, engines), but I'm confident they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. I believe Ford making an electric truck means there's a market for electric trucks, whatever their limitations, at the price they can deliver them.