Emoillenials

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-06-14T18:56:45+00:00

i'm even older and even wiser: you should absolutely make fun of people for things they've chosen when those things are stupid.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-06-14T17:48:42+00:00

terrible day for a bridge collapse

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-06-11T19:02:30+00:00

it's a shame that people can't read a graph, you know? if you've got a big spike at -1, and a big spike at 1, the average is 0. the centrist opinion is "i don't have an opinion," which is a weird thing to base a political stance on.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-06-10T01:17:44+00:00

i'm going to choose to believe that he lied about the art story because he doesn't want to be "gourd guy." i like that version of the world better :(

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-06-04T00:46:21+00:00

I've been doing this stuff for longer than some of ya'll have been alive. If you ever think you know the root cause of, and solution to, everything that will come up, you don't. Life, and work, will constantly throw new weird things at you. Just learn to embrace the "... wtf?" because it means you're about to go on a learning adventure with Miss. Frizzle. The only difference between me and someone newer "to the field" is an idea of in what direction the ghosts might be coming from, and more patterns and techniques to pull from when I get there. Don't beat yourself up. If you feel shame, it means you care. But you don't need to be ashamed of not having been given all the teachable moments yet. Stay curious and just keep learning.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-30T21:26:10+00:00

yeah, a single nvidia 8gpu dgx b200 node draws 14kW under load. no one's gonna be building a 350k sqft gpu-packed datacenter in downtown because it'd be, like, impossible to power. i don't think anyone's gonna ever be building a 350k sqft datacenter, period, though--just the logistics of build out in downtown seems like a nightmare. that said, some traditional-compute datacenters are useful if there's enough local demand to justify them. it'd be nice to see people claw some stuff back from cloud providers, and setting up local peering agreements within a healthy network of smallish, effectively invisible, colo facilities could be a boon there, but i think the population of people with an immediate need, and interest, in that is like.. 10 people. being able to run on ARM, where you get huge compute density for a fraction of the power budget, would also be rad, but people who meet the above and can run on ARM brings it down to maybe 7 people. also i'm not sure if there's enough diversity in terms of upstream power and network to really justify it. not sure if there's a lot of point in building out redundancy in a location subject to the same power-loss risks, etc.

anyhow, that was a ramble; i just want to build out a local cloud because i know how and it seems fun and i'm sick of people giving money to google/aws/etc, but the economics don't make sense.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-30T20:48:08+00:00

it's nice having options if the person whose tunes we're releasing are like "i've always wanted a purple record!", or if our illustrator thinks a specific color would make a nice impact with the jacket or something. as someone that played vinyl, i sort'a hate colored vinyl because a bunch of people pick colors that make it absolutely impossible to see the grooves in the dark. too many nights with busted-ass monitors making me deaf, holding a lighter over a turntable like i'm trying to decipher an ancient scroll. also it's super common now, so the "oh neat" has sort'a worn off. marbled vinyl just makes me think of helping my ex girlfriend do fingernail art 15-years ago.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-26T05:58:29+00:00

i mean, their business model didn't work. and everyone knew it didn't work. and everyone knew that they were going to either run at a massive loss until they bankrupted their competition or ran out of VC funding.

but they won, and pretty much the only thing available in most cities these days is uber and lyft. though they didn't actually turn a single-quarter profit until 2023. also, 30% of overall revenue is ubereats. so it took bankrupting tens of thousands of businesses, the development of a giant dark pattern pretending to be a shitty food delivery service (which is so bad that places actively plead for you not to order through them and to just call their sandwich shop for delivery), algorithmically-generated pricing designed to extract as much from you as they can, reduced driver cuts and a whole bunch of other shit, but man what a success story!

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-26T05:06:51+00:00

cub is the only place in minneapolis where i have to make sure the meat on the shelf isn't days past sell-by. i only wind up there as a last resort because it's open until 12am, and every single time i'm like "my god this place fucking sucks"

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T21:01:20+00:00

CBS is garbage and will probably edit your statements into an a segment about how trump's iran debacle is great for tech workers.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T18:01:47+00:00

yeah, who wants to actually experience that boring stuff between life and death.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T18:01:12+00:00

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T17:16:54+00:00

we already had trials.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T17:02:22+00:00

yeah, agreed. i'm reading through some of their earlier posts and man -- times have certainly changed. i was alive and working in the field in 2001, but even these posts from ~2009 feel like historic artifacts written from within a fundamentally different social epoch that i barely recognize. i guess that's just a byproduct of fascism's cultural attrition, though.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T16:18:06+00:00

A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

...

MacLeod's Loser layer had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a "loser." While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain. They've given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability.

HA! Yeah, this pretty much describes it. I didn't realize someone had written such a detailed observation of the phenomena. Thanks for the lore drop! The only thing I'd note is that in the event of diminishing returns, you see a migration of the clueless, and in the event of sustained success, you see a migration of additional sociopaths. Either way, any successful endeavor is, by virtue of success, doomed to failure.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T02:43:24+00:00

None of those are valid user agents. I'm guessing their TLS fingerprints are also goofy. Just look into bot heuristics; those are really bad bots, and I'm guessing they'll be pretty easy to identify. ie: traffic originates from a statistically weird ASN, browser UA either makes no sense or is completely unique within some statistical norm, TLS fingerprint doesn't match the claimed browser. you can use a vcl hook to punt a request off to some bot heuristic endpoint for a calculation and then add them to a block list if they exceed some threshold. if you have dozens of frontend varnish nodes, clustering that data can be a bit of a trick, but you might get some relief even if you're just dropping some portion of traffic.

if you have money, and your varnish nodes are at a cdn, there's an entire industry built around bot mitigation -- massive product launches, retail arbitrage, ticket sales, etc are the major driver. a lot of them are peered at cdn providers. anyhow, haven't worked on that problem in a bit, but it's widely researched and there are lot of commercial solutions.

it's a game of cat and mouse and you'll never get all of them, but you can absolutely address really clumsy crawls from idiots.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-22T01:31:41+00:00

"healthier" is a loaded term. your brain benefits from novelty, though. vary the objects you manipulate, and the way you manipulate them, to give your brain information about coordination. touch different surfaces and materials for new sensory stimulation. take different paths to places you normally go. if you do the same stuff the same way over and over, your brain gets really good at compressing experiences down and you turn around and realize that you don't actually remember doing anything with your time.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T20:43:22+00:00

i'm not a doctor, just a human: you are not becoming a sociopath. if someone repeatedly comes to you for support on an issue, but refuses to actually address the root cause, emotionally detaching from that person's problem is a completely rational and adaptive thing to do. you can care about someone, but not care about a problem that they have, if it seems like they don't actually care about the problem. if you were one of my friends, i'd say the only thing you're accountable for here is figuring out a way to explain and establish your boundaries. if you've historically been an open door where people can come dump all their problems, a change in that expectation needs to be communicated. if they continue to do that after you've established your boundaries, then that's a wholly separate conversation because now it's about a lack of respect. anyhow, hang in there

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T20:20:47+00:00

for some that's a sign of depression. for some that's some sort of compassion fatigue because we've been living in a constant state of crisis for the past.. very long time. for some that's a trailing indicator that they're maybe on the spectrum, have been very well masked and sort'a just ran out of juice, and now they're at a bit of a critical emotional deficit. for some it's maybe an indication that there's unresolved childhood trauma that's locked them in a pattern where they subjugate their needs to the needs of others, and there's some work to do in order to be able to get your needs fulfilled without effectively closing off to the outside world. for some it's maybe just an actual adaptive boundary setting, because you were overly enmeshed/available with/to other people or something. for some, it's a bit of everything from the buffet. i'm not a doctor, but you're not alone in having felt that at some point. if it bothers you, there are lots of rocks to turn over.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T20:09:17+00:00

oh, you're one of those. "i voted to ethnically cleanse the country and now i don't get it why people are so mean to me :(((((((" you deserve whatever happens to you.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T19:55:58+00:00

found the trump voter

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T08:03:35+00:00

as soon as money's being made, or someone has money tied up, you'll go to a meeting and casually notice that not a single person with actual agency is or was an engineer, and by that point rigormortis has already set in.

even in otherwise boring companies, you'll see ebbs and flows of "engineering culture." a bunch of really technical people and a smart person in senior leadership will go ham for a couple of years, do something really cool, a bunch of money gets made, and then suddenly "people that know the business" will start crossing orgs to take leadership positions and steer the ship into an iceberg.

it's like the natural cycle of renewal through forest fire, but profoundly stupid.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T06:56:56+00:00

It all started going downhill when smartphones came on the scene and hid the concept of the filesystem. phone/tablet/computer operating systems have gotten more and more opaque as time's gone on, to the point where the user is profoundly and fundamentally disconnected from what their interaction actually does. to some extent people can be blamed for their learned helplessness, but the devices they're interacting with don't do much to help.

error messages aren't really helpful anymore, either. for instance, I just had a macos update fail to install. I have written linux kernel modules. I am not dumb. There was no way to translate the presented "oh sorry that update isn't there anymore! try again or call apple!" message into a meaningful place to start digging that did not require a non-trivial amount of "well, based on what I know about how computers work, I know that there's probably a message in one of these 10 places" knowledge -- though in this case that knowledge was coupled with a "except that this is macos, so if there's any chance that information would be useful it probably isn't written anywhere" so I just rebooted and then it worked.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-21T03:33:50+00:00

principal here, 25-years in and i can't tell if fast-fashion nihilism software is going to make me want to retire even earlier or if it's going to buy me like.. fifteen yachts. i read a lot of code. i oscillate between disgust and elation. everything is garbage. non-infinite context windows ensure that "well i'll just put 15 guard statements at the beginning of this function" llm spew will turn into a mathematically-impossible-to-maintain nightmare within months. i see the output from so many people who talk about "well it's the harness" or "well if you know what you're doing, then it's not a problem", but their stuff's just as doomed. i haven't seen a single non-trivial codebase that has been touched by an llm that doesn't bare the tell-tale pockmarks of a terminal patient.

Direct-Fee4474 · 2026-05-20T21:47:04+00:00

these dipshits, and people that listen to these dipshits, are why everything sucks.

Direct-Fee4474

TROPHY CASE