talove

It’s all brinkmanship: if you can’t unilaterally control it, the instinct is to destroy it.

I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.

The reason every complex application I've worked on has had a staging environment is because you do need to test production deploys in an environment that mirrors production dataset and infrastructure. Especially with data migrations, distributed databases. That is prohibitively expensive and not feasible to run in n+1 envs.

I drink one cup of pour-over coffee that I make every morning. I like it medium to medium strong. I perceive many physical effects from it. At this point it's my morning ritual. 20 minutes in bed or on the sofa reading or doing a crossword while drinking a coffee.

I am also an hobbyist endurance cyclist. I do cycling 'events' that last as long as 12+ hours. And average somewhere between 6-8. While I've tried for years to add caffeine into my nutrition plan for these events. I have only ever had adverse effects.

I seem to manage 6-8 ounces of coke. But in spite of my morning ritual, if I consume any coffee or caffeine infused energy bars or gels I will be miserable. Every time I get weak, shaky, feel like I am going to pass out, and feel absolutely miserable. After about 30-60 minutes, I'll have to suddenly pee. Once I pee I slowly feel better and in another 30 minutes back to normal.

I've talked to a hundred people about this, nobody seems to have the same effect. But it seems as if my body just rejects the caffeine, pees it out, and carries on.

Ya but we do know the universe exists without any fucking clue how or why. So, it seems fine to let your mind wander a bit.

I'll also add, you might be riding brakes preparing for a turn on a descent. Under many road conditions, especially a steep descent, a road bike is much more likely to break traction than a car which can literally be fatal (sliding out into an opposing lane, barrier, or off an edge). Anybody who has descended, even at reasonably safe speeds on a road bike with a bike computer knows it is the safe thing to do.

In popular road cycling areas, things like 10+ mile descents aren't unusual. Momentarily glances at the map is how you know you need to slow down.

As an example, search YouTube for a video of someone descending a road in the Santa Monica mountains.

I have a 2021 Y with FSD and more or less echo the I've got about the same sentiment. It's nice use it, but does weird stuff. A recent update seems to have resolved many of the FSD issues. It no longer phantom breaks at flashing yellow intersections, and a few stop signs for diagonal merging roads.

And btw, they certainly have the data whether or not you report it.

I am affected by this. I own 4 bikes, all with electronic shifting and 3 hammerhead computers.

This isn't just losing nice-to-have features, many of these features are for safety.

One example, the thumb toggles on the Di2 shifters allow me to change screens on my computer without removing my hands from the hoods / grips. They is now disabled. If you are descending at 40-50mph you have to remove your hand from your hood in order to see your map.

This might seem minor but the point is that cycling is already super dangerous. The tech is there for safety as much as anything else. I find this incredibly anti-cyclist and anti-consumer.

FWIW, the electronic drivetrains are superior in just about every performance metric, aside from needing to be charged every few weeks. You might not want an tablet computer in your refrigerator door but electronic bike shifting is more akin to going from carbureted to fuel injected engines, it is the more reliable and tunable of the two options.

I want to refute this reply since it's up at the very top to say... even with moderate hearing damage your ears are still very capable and amazing.

Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems.

The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems.

Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity.

Do these cables do much? Probably not compared to another pair of cables with gold plated connectors and high-quality copper. That said, the real test in high-end gear is not a blind test of one song, it's doing something like listening to the snare drum ring in 10 different songs, something with a lot of resonance and overtones, and see if you can actually perceive more information across a set of songs.

If all these cables offer is high-quality materials, construction, and quality control and the cost to produce them is 60-80% of that. Then great, I am glad they exist and I hope they make a buck making them.

Preface: Gonna do my best to not add any commentary for or against the social aspect of decentralization / blockchains. Also gonna be high-level.

I can't help but feel distributed computation is a really really fascinating problem and if the socioeconomic wave we're going through now sustains even a fraction of this current moment it'll be a longterm engineering focus.

It's impossible for me to not recognize that the diff blockchains mirror that of different database designs as the web scaled from nineties. First read capacity was needed to support e-commerce. Followed by social platforms where read/write needed to scale and adopt distributed models and eventual consistency.

Now we're scaling distributed computation and all sorts of interesting problems emerge. If things are gonna turn out to be even remotely what an idealist might lead you to believe we're at the cusp of rearchitecting every single layer of computation. Networking. Machine code compilation and execution. File storage.

PS I did a couple of cmd+f for keywords to find someone answering with this context and didn't find any. That seems crazy.

Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is.

The other day I was going through air port security. I had to wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time. I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a huddle for a new shift of employees about to start.

The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements about how to interact with people going through the security lines.

It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing it through various types of taxes.

I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is a good model for a way of creating economies to support people who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.

This. That's why they call them 'attack vectors'.

I disagree with the main thesis for why JWT is a problem. JWT isn't necessarily encouraging you not to hit the DB for user lookup. This is the claim the article makes as a problem with revocation.

It reads like a really long thoughtful article based entirely on false assumptions for how to best use it.

It's ok to carry around some encrypted state in your tokens for some uses cases.