Overall it’s not a bad idea if devices need network connectivity. Have one central “box” get an Ethernet drop and it acts as a switch for your tv/xbox/playstation/media player/etc. The spec was made back when A/V receivers were more popular than they are now. It would cut down on a cable per device.

If OP means an exploit/hack then that’s a bit different.

Once the humans are removed, there is far less motivated reasoning to keep that process alive if it’s just robots burning tokens passing paper back and forth.

I will likely somehow be proven wrong, but it is one of the main uses I am optimistic for in the AI space.

The word “slop” is tossed around way too much, but these sorts of engagements are a perfect example of replacing low value human slop with computer generated slop.

Probably a net positive to society because a few interns at a consulting company got to spend a Friday night enjoying themselves vs. working on a BS report.

Yes, I might be slightly jaded. But I’m not certain I feel this is hyperbole either.

Doesn’t require and patching at all. These things lurk for years or decades before finally meeting the conditions needed to be exposed. Many times one-off failures that underwrote the issue are written off as hardware failure or whatnot and not actually diagnosed until something like this happens.

It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.

Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.

I’ve seen similar too many times in my career - synchronized clocks are great until someone deploys a cronjob that fires at exactly the same time across the fleet and it breaks a certain OS or firmware revision. Which then exposes another bug that exists globally.

I definitely still subscribe to don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence mindset.

Certainly all speculation though, real root cause will be interesting if it ever becomes public.

Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.

Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.

The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.

Just adding a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to both labels changes things up wildly. And shows me at least a little bit how someone can label themselves conservative and also be totally fine with the surveillance state. Or totally against it.

So long as it is safe, a kid even at 1 years old should be tagging along with the adults doing things. Like building, working out in the yard, helping friends with projects, whatever.

It is very settled science that brain connections happen rapidly in these years. Bubble wrapping your children is not the way to go in my opinion.

Everyone is going to have a different take on this, but for me the choice is immediately obvious. Kids should fit into your life (within reason), not have you change to revolve around theirs.

That said - I highly doubt a 1 year old did much more than watch and have short visits while being cared for by someone not doing the construction work. It’s a great bonding experience even with limited direct involvement.

I remember listening to AM talk radio back in the late 90's and a common trope was you'd get someone calling in ranting about gas prices and how they couldn't afford to take their kid on vacation due to current $president in the white house.

Even back in my early teens I'd pencil out the math and it'd be like a $20 price difference for 6 tanks of gas on their 800 mile round trip with the worst fuel efficiency you could imagine. I thought then - as I do now - that if $20 made a difference in you taking a vacation or not you couldn't afford it to begin with.

For most folks it's just an easy topic for people to rant about.

If a gas station brand advertises Top Tier(tm) gasoline at all, every location must supply it. Diesel is location dependent and warrants more consideration.

All fuel sold at Costco is Top Tier.

[0] https://www.toptiergas.com/

Where they win my Diet Coke business is that they are consistently a "good deal" - never the cheapest, but never the most expensive. And I don't need to wait for a sale to stock up.

I still buy soda from the local grocery stores when I happen by a deal when shopping for other things. But I don't go out of my way. The specials are usually much better than Costco though. By 25% or more per can.

Honestly this goes for most things I buy at Costco. Even in bulk, their per-unit costs beat the standard pricing at competitors - but never the sale prices. It just removes mental overhead. And the bulk prices are always better at a restaurant supply store. Where Costco wins in this area is curation so I can reduce mental load, but then again Costco does the bullshit where they stock something for 6mo out of the year and you spend an extra 20 minutes searching the store for it the next time you need it only realizing they stopped selling it. Then it appears randomly a month later.

They are a decent middle ground for me. I can buy 10lbs of chicken breast of decent quality for $2.99/lb I can toss directly into the freezer pre-packaged into meal-sized portions. Or I can buy 40lb boxes of bulk chicken breast for $1.39/lb from the supply store and spend a couple hours vacuum packaging it myself.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the place! I see Costco as the upper middle class consumerism version of nerd sniping.

There is a reason we know that remote learning is horrible for most people compared to in-classroom. We proved this decisively during COVID.

There is zero reason to believe that most folks magically change overnight from being incapable of remote learning to being highly capable remote workers. It's just not believable.

I hired remote workers in the 90's. It was a small fraction of the total candidate base that could successfully self-motivate and have the discipline to become high performers in such an environment over the long haul. Most of my interviewing and candidate vetting had to do with the remote aspect vs. technical skillset. Luckily around that time is when open source became a huge thing, so those projects presented a pool of pre-vetted candidates to hire out of. The rest of the candidate pool was a total crapshoot.

Remote working has become easier and the tooling and technology much better. But from where I'm standing - many folks do not take it seriously. Simple stuff like having backup Internet is a filtering question for me even today.

This is overselling it. You can come out 2% ahead or so. 4-5% if you are an extremely high spender who enjoys mentally managing 5 or 6 credit cards to max out category bonuses and other benefits and all that.

You come out marginally ahead at the expense of mental overhead. Good tradeoff for some, not for others.

I use a credit card, I dropped from 3-4 different cards trying to max out those 4-5% spending categories and just have a straight 2% cashback on everything card now. Plus one backup on a different payment network in case one goes down. It got to be exhausting trying to remember to manage so many cards plus remember to use the points, make sure to use the right card for the right thing, and all the other BS.

For some of my friends it's a hobby which is great for you if you enjoy such things! For me, it's just adding another chore to my life. Not worth the 1-2% or so marginal gain against my spending.

The super easy stuff is long gone these days too. You get far larger discounts paying via ACH for utility bills/cell phone bills/etc. vs. what credit card rewards give you so all the "autopilot" stuff is largely gone.

I do remember the days where we paid our Equinix bill via the company Amex. That was pretty fun while the party lasted!

The only times I’ve seen it relatively empty were during bad storms.

That said, it’s not an hour wait. Around 20 minutes is average, but I rarely fill up there since I value my time much more than that.

This happens every single day and is effectively never reported. For far more nefarious reasons than a simple scribing error.

Drug seeking behavior enters notes all the time without much evidence and based entirely on a random doctor's (or even a triage nurse) hunch. A significant portion of those notes are outright false and incorrect. Once that is on your file and in a given medical system, you are marked for life.

Have you ever actually read your notes on file?

This is basically living in a fantasy world. Errors are routine.

One of my notes in my current medical file states I injured my shoulder playing for a NFL team. I have never played football, and certainly not at a professional level. Fixing it is sort of like trying to fix your credit report - you supposedly get it done, and then 6mo later the same error pops back up again.

Ironically the reason this note exists is very similar to a way an AI scribe would misinterpret a conversation.

Based on watching the medical software field as a consumer (patient) and friends who are doctors, this is a fantasy. The quality of software in this field is abysmal and there seems to be almost no repercussions to those who develop or sell it.

Which is precisely why this sort of thing can be rolled out without much fear by those pushing it.

I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.

And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.

I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.

My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.

It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.

Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.

Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.

I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.