Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

The warmth of AI

Silicon Valley is having an unusually cool summer while the rest of the world bakes. AI datacenters are here to fix that.

At work not working

The best part about being in the office is the lunchroom. Free food, free snacks, socializing, or organizing a group to go out for lunch.

It's a pretty bad place for getting computer work done. Time wasted commuting, people messing with the thermostats, distractions, gossiping, and cheap office equipment. Everyone has headphones on for isolation. If it's a newer office, everyone is hiding somewhere quiet.

It also doesn't solve the problem of people attending unproductive meetings 35 hours a week so they look busy. In or out of the office doesn't matter.

ROI?

Billions over budget and serves half a million homes? The ROI is going to take a while even if it runs for free.

This is a good start but they need to be cheaper.

X sign having trouble too

X is in trouble with San Francisco about a giant illuminated X they put on the top edge of their building without a permit or inspection. I'm betting they put 4 sandbags on it, gave it a firm pat (in the middle of the night when there's no wind), and said, "That's not going anywhere."

Personally, I'd avoid the street below the sign.

Not a morning program

Still waiting for Wayland to survive a sleep/wake cycle without becoming corrupted. Cinnamon/Xorg survives 9/10 times and I have a spot on the screen to click to restart it. I can't ever get Ubuntu/Wayland to work after waking up the computer. Maybe I can't even log in. I first suspected it was the usual NVIDIA bugs but Wayland isn't using it.

Round and round

PCB boards were originally Bakelite and biodegradable. They crack easily, rot in moisture, don't conduct heat, and can't handle the heat needed for durable solders.

If I understand the tech correctly, the really toxic part in any PCB is the halogen flame retardant. Just stop adding it.

There's not much in fiberglass that can burn.

Levitation testing

Superconductivity seems suspect but maybe they discovered a strong new form of diamagnetism?

OK, Russia. Tell us you're committing cyber warfare without saying you're committing cyber warfare.

A treason sentence for researching cyber attacks originating in Russia. Good one!

It's in the mail, but...

The shipping company says there's an ongoing dispute with your address. I don't know the details, but if you can send me another $150 I have can have it resolved so your bundle of cash will be back in your hands.

...engaging an independent consultant...

Most certainly on a private tropical island as a business expenditure.

Magic!

Where did the pits and skins go?

Maybe the wrong target

Hydrogen is a bit tricky to use in vehicles because storage has a bulk/complexity trade-off. Since Bosch is working on both ends of the hydrogen flow, solar storage might make more sense. If you have room for lots of solar panels, you can probably have lots of low pressure hydrogen tanks too.

One thing I can't find in a quick search is hydrogen gas as an atmospheric pollutant. There might be some unforseen impact if boil-off leaks become as common as parked cars and trucks.

Hell no

I do not want any Korean advertising culture in my home. Korea is what motivated me to host my own mail server long ago so I could block hundreds of daily spams coming from LG's cesspit of a network. LG has toned it down slightly for the US but they still don't understand that we don't want pop-up ads flashing on TVs that we purchased. We don't want to opt-in to activating spyware that delivers nothing but more ads.

If you have an LG TV and you want a horrific dose of what LG has in mind, tune to channel "IP0". It's a vivid pop-culture advertising vomit with flickering video glitches. It's worse than the dark corners of Roku where you'll find dozens of channels streaming VHS tape rips mixed with scam ads.

It's a shame LG dropped their cellphone and solar divisions because their hardware is pretty good.

This is fine (room on fire)

Public tech company employees are focused on vesting their stock, selling, and quitting. Leaking private data is fine if it provides an immediate value. Literally nobody cares if you go looking for somebody to fix it.

The bubble bursting COVID-19 made short term focus even worse. Execs are having their $50 million retirement plans ruined so they'd do anything for a quick share price bump. Random layoffs, burn out employees, disband customer support, lie about product progress, SPAC tricks, ... anything goes.

Wish

My wish for filesystems is easier tuning or better self-tuning. You can tune ZFS for anything but figuring out compatible groupings of adjustments can take forever. Many filesystems simply don't have tuning. A few examples:

Performance with large numbers of tiny files.

Dealing efficiently with partial block writes (usually compression related problems).

Force a minimum cache size (cause process swap-out instead).

Handling datasets that start out hot then gradually turn cold.

Ok, then

With that logic, Gsecurity will have to stop yelling at people for using Gbikes. They're just lying around in publicly accessible areas. Fair use, right? Oh, looks like tons of data in Google maps is open to the public too. Somebody could train their own system to generate realistic and accurate maps from that publicly visible data.

Arcade games too

Some old arcade games had their service switches exposed and had the service menu printed on the back for easy maintenance. The risky part was loading the new configuration without the loud diagnostic chimes alerting the staff.

And then there was Tempest. I always got my initials in the top 10 list by hitting the player 1 button during the end-of-game animation. Nice Easter Egg.

No winners

AFRINIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, and the Chinese parts of APNIC have always been a mess. By the time fighting finishes, the value of those netblocks may never be more valuable than plentiful IPv6 addresses. They going to be in various "set and forget" blocklists all over the world because of their long history of misuse and invalid ownership records.

How about review ransom?

I hired a tax preparer for $800 and they were really difficult to work with despite lots of 5-star reviews on Yelp. I wrote a 2-star review after they said everything was done. Nothing angry, just a writeup of the process to get the work done. They actually did not finish my taxes. They were holding the final work for ransom to get a good review. Two of the owners kept phoning me about my disrespect like they were the Mafia. They added a dishonest character attack as a Yelp response.

I have the ability to fight this company but I bet many just write the 5-star review out of fear.

Maybe if I own the VR engine

VR sounds like a lot of fun, but corporation ownership will ruin it. HBO's Westworld is a pretty good list of things that can go wrong, including the part where everything becomes so complicated and expensive that nothing makes any sense and the show has to be cancelled.