- crmdI’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
- this is exactly how I intuitively approach filters as an applied engineer. Does it give a ground path to DC (low frequencies) and pass the higher frequencies, or vice versa. If we change the capacitance how does the frequency response of the divider change?
- The bring up of seemingly every tube guitar amp i’ve ever built starts with wild oscillation due to negative feedback from the wrong transformer secondary, aka positive feedback. Gets me every time.
- I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:
In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.
In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.
- I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.
- it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.
for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.
- your data belongs to you, just like our data about you belongs to us.
- My undergrad email server at University of Rochester was a two node SGI origin 200 cluster, which is where I learned unix and C, and later in my career, through a series of amazing coincidences, had the honor of working at startups with a few of the UofR sysadmins who used to chase my hacker friends and I around their network.
IRIX has an amazing and indelible place in my heart for being the playground that taught computers to me.
- After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.
- If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.
Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.
I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
- The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.
- Supported by who? Microsoft?
If a file server breaks basic Unix tools it should be unplugged and put in the garbage.
- One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.
If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.
I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.
I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.
- The quote is from Steve Jobs and is absolutely true. As soon as the first bozo infects your team, they will start hiring other bozos, and after a while your org has regressed to the mean. Therefore you should hold a ridiculously high bar for hiring. A temporarily empty seat is preferable to a non-A player.
- I wish to understand the virtue of Amazon culture.
It seems that at L6 and below workers are a Taylorism-style fungible widget driven to convert salary into work product, guided to create the most output for the longest time before mentally breaking down, then being swiftly replaced, with L7 and above being so incredibly political that keeping the snakes and vultures from eating your team is a full time job at every level of senior management.
It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.
I would love to hear positive counter perspectives from Amazonians because the anecdotes from my L6-L10 friends describe what sounds like an inhumane hell on earth.
- How is their revenue traffic-dependent?
- As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad?
I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
- As 432 Park shows, unregulated development here in nyc does not increase the supply of homes for people to live in but rather the supply of abstract assets for wealthy people to launder and store wealth, for which there seems to be a nearly endless international demand.
Housing can either be an affordable resource for people to live in, or an asset that’s likely to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. There are strong arguments for both. As New Yorkers we need to make our vote in November count and decide which is the priority.
- I grew up reading The Economist, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come find the idea that corporations have the right to use their money to form trade associations and directly lobby the government insane. I can understand how business owners may want to spend personal money to make the case of their personal business interests to their legislators, but the idea of Nestle, S.A. and PepsiCo, Inc. being afforded speech rights and allowed to meddle in the “human affairs” of government no longer makes sense to me.
- I once had a board member who was also on the board of Ryan Air, and he casually told me a story about when their CEO gave a presentation on adding a credit card -powered interlock on the cabin lavatories. He told them, “They’re my planes and if you have the nerve to shit in them you should have to pay for the cleanup”.
My colleague thought he was portraying the CEO as a cool guy and decisive manager, but I thought the guy sounds like a sociopath.