ZephyrP

burningChrome is broadly correct, but the devil is in the details.

There's quite a history of US federal programs encouraging critical federal systems to operate within private infrastructure. This once required very strict scrutiny, joint DoD/DHS/GSA reviews, and was generally a long/expensive process that created the perception that a few providers had a gotten a hold over various agencies through these outsourced operations, which, combined with a fresh "interest" in federal efficiency, influenced a recent national defense budget authorization to formalize a slew of processes with a few minor tweaks as the law of the land, with a tweak or two to allow new cloud operators and service providers to authorize quickly and operate efficiently, particularly for low-risk classes.

Today, this means SASS providers must find an engineer with clearance (not just authorization to work in the USA). This cleared programmer documents and authors a whole host of (typically new) procedures, such as authenticating against a "federal enclave" authorization directory, delivering changes authored upstream to a government-controlled CI/CD system, and working with the SASS provider and the Government Services Agency (GSA) to ensure the backend operates when running within something that could be compared to a special AWS AZ. Things change upstream, and our operator prepares a 'significant change' request, which is, if important, gated by a liaison from the GSA. No one is responsible for scrutinizing implementation details of these 'significant change' requests, nor are their authors required to provide any information about themselves or the code's provenance. Given that hundreds of programmers may have written code included in said change (which is typically already deployed upstream), this is often efficient and generally fine.

Generally.

Unrelated, but does anyone else find the adjacent (4b) definition of 'synthetic' to be unusually unusual, in a way few definitions in a dictionary are?

Without anything redacted, definition 4b is "devised, arranged, or fabricated for special situations to imitate or replace usual realities"?

It is a translation of "dokós", a plank of wood that would serve as a joist or rafter. An ancient palestinian Phineas Gage stuck through with a classical age 2x10, if you will.

Although I'm late to the pile-on and all the good takes have grown old and gotten replies, I cannot let this grave insult against my people go unanswered.

Elixir, if anything, really excels at communicating the intentions of the (occasionally esoteric) architectural demands that the Erlang originally fortified decades ago, often encountered when using OTP. This, alongside that tower of respected Elixir tooling, adhering to Erlang's norms which, once past "mere" interoperability within BEAM, is still supremely important when e.x. minimizing laborious/unusual syntax requirements when using Elixir modules from 'naive' Erlang code. This is part of a more wide-reaching feeling, one of common concerns being important to address in Elixir (and Erlang) for the health of the franchise, not just as grist for the mill of an ancient FP hyperwar, each warring cybergang being willing to die for their preferred juridical interpretation of a bug report.

A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dummy host; I imagine that arpwatch takes a view of network security focused on classifying frames and less on connection behavior.

It's certainly not an "elitist initiation ordeal" to ask a potential crewmate to sketch a library function they've selected, what abstraction or ideas it implicitly contains, and what bearing those have on their overall approach. GP's use of `bisect_left` is instructive here:

  In [2]: Solution().findMin([1, 0, 1, 1])
  Out[2]: 4

However, requesting a bug-free implementation of `bsearch()` (to say nothing of the actual problem being solved) during a timed, in-person interview is less a structured rehearsal of an individual's unique capacities, and more of a jumping-in ritual proving only a willingness to die for their cybergang.

Change keeps coming, even when the wire format of a protocol has ossified. I've spent years in security and router performance at Cisco, wrote a respectable fraction of the flagship's L3 and L2-L3 (tun) firewall. I merged a patch on this tried-and-true firewall just this year; it's now deployed.

As vendors are eager to remind us, custom silicon to accelerate everything between L1 to L7 exists. That said, it is still the case in 2025 that the "fast path" data-plane will end up passing either nothing or everything in a flow to the "slow path" control-plane, where the most significant silicon is less 'ASIC' and more 'aarch64'.

This is all to say that the GP's comments are broadly correct.

In the mid-2000s, I attended evangelical 'kids night'. Held each Friday at the dead-center of an unincorporated community in rural Colorado.

The "cool" youth pastor who was responsible for these events told us "the Gospel's authors are anonymous, their names are totally traditional". I never had the sense that this view was in any way heretical or contentious, even in a strain of Christianity that strongly emphasized the historicity of the Bible.

The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again.

If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.

I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'.

The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.