Grandma was always a broken record with that stuff. The family would sit around that table, apparently, gabbing about nothing, and everything, just staring into a raw pizza, pulling and stretching it, starting over, living with their hunger, for a flawed process to bake slowly.

These days, fresh pizza is 10 seconds away, it's always identical and we never have to share. It's hydrated, eaten, and in the trash by the time I am onto my next attention, always perfect, always on time, always identical. I don't think about this much, but I sometimes really feel pity for what the old timers suffered through, all those ridiculous, pointless wasted interactions and delays, sitting there for what felt like ages, for a random pizza shaped thing.

I dont get it.

or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?

again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line

In 2003, Network Address Translation (NAT) was becoming the default LAN IP management scheme, for two reasons: (1) IPv4 space was at the beginnings of its inevitable resource restrictions, and (2) the perceived security of the NAT had effectively become what people believed a firewall performed.

In those old days of the middle Internet and early web, it was still fairly common to visit an IP address (IPv4 - IPv6 was ratified but still being interoperability tested, barely a toy yet), you could visit an IP address directly without using the DNS.

Peer distribution was often a derivative of the sneakernet (carrying media around on your person), emailing long lists of popular but undiscoverable media content.

The concept of the home gateway device was young but functional. You could go to Best Buy and get a router to pair with your CPE; integration of CPEs and routers had already happened but it was still common to see them as separate devices.

Back then, traffic was a sliver of what it is now; a systems operator might have personally seen anomalous traffic, ingress and maybe even more unlikely, egress, and had the notion "that ain't right". These days we rely on incredible solutions that have existed for a long, long time to alert us, and self manage, these types of events.

While experimenting with codex this past week (old guy trying to participate but I gotta stretch out first, old), I tossed a pair of 8.8x3 inch monitors on a pi4 and told codex to 'go wild' making me a poor man's ATC kit, with a pile of html real-time gauges of everything I could think of - outer space, space station, planes, weather, home assistant temperatures, all of it.

And then at the outset I asked codex, hey, how often are you hitting these endpoints? How often do you ask the web what time sunrise is? Ah, every 900 seconds.

And so my Abe Simpson clincher, is, it's very easy for me to see how the ballast of the data on the internet is just bots, talking to bots, and how a 10 second NTP selection 2 decades ago was just the same move, before the immense scaling and false resource abundance we have today, allowed it to continue unchallenged.

But I also am glad teachers try to teach kids about slippery slope as a logical fallacy. To convince others, we must use fact; when beliefs are chained as facts, well, you form a slippery slope.

And I'm just saying, plainly: I'm glad teachers are still teaching that stuff. Nothing against your win.

but over the next few years i learned so many hobby art projects: insulation, electrical, sheetrock. a few inspections, a few consults. a few surprises that people in this state can just go buy the stuff at a box store!

and then eventually, my 12x6 foot office appeared, the same width as a 1960s metal tanker desk. finally!

and ... i instantly hated working out there. i didnt make it 6 weeks. it's just an office for storing crap, now: i work out of the house, where the kitchen, dogs, bathroom, are. but the journey was worth it, even if the destination was not.

kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.

but i always guessed that maybe half of us seeing how many tokens we can spend for a year straight maybe stressed tested their platform for a year straight

I do know that when I'm in that thing, I feel like I'm on a vacation. My corporate ego can't fit through the door and I'm just some happy dude in there breathing fresh air with fresh oxygen. If I can figure out how to live off the food and sell some of it (or at least give it away) then that's 8% of my way to transitioning out of tech.

We're all largely in the same boat. Every company's trying to save cash, run lean, reign in the R&D, scale the automation, use the AI to drop the headcount. Humans are cost centers. We don't feel good, we're all looking to get onto the same single elevator out of here and the logs they're a' jamming. Everyone goes home after work, looks for meaning on amazon, waits for someone else to say 'lets hang out, lets connect, lets be', and we dont, we just have this fantasy about feeling control, feeling together, feeling alive. Unreal engine 6 better make me remember what high school friends felt like.

We're all there with you. Alone.

we could just not use the old cliches, French people are just as hard working as the rest of us