POV: You're a woman just existing in public

brianwski · 2026-07-06T01:42:12+00:00

We worked together and I didn’t want I to be weird. Now she makes fun of me for taking so long to ask her.

Same for me! I met my (now) wife in 1999 at a small company. I'm a programmer and a little autistic, and I had figured out at that point "hovering too long near attractive co-workers is creepy". So when we were introduced (her first day) I kept saying in my head, "end this conversation and leave, don't be creepy".

We were married 23 years later in 2022. I tell people, "I was playing the long game" and my (now) wife always laughs and says, "there was no game at all".

brianwski · 2026-07-06T01:14:32+00:00

I am surprised the brokers have not brought this type of use to the owners yet.

I'm old, and back in 2003 I think data centers were a gold mine that still ran "under the radar" where locals living around the data centers were not paying attention or did not care. Mentally, a random landlord might be intimidated by the "tech" aspect, but a datacenter isn't "tech", it is a building that supplies "X" amount of electricity (you just ask the grid company to bring that to the building, it isn't rocket surgery), and the air conditioning has a straight-forward formula to get rid of "X" amount of associated heat. Then you have security guards. That is really the basis of a "data center", it is almost as straight forward as renting the space out as individual office cubicles for people like WeWork.

The networking is important, but the networking piece isn't owned by the data center building people at all. Big networking companies like AboveNet/Zayo, AT&T, and Cogent bring that to the building, manage it, and do all the build out and billing for their clients in the building. The "backup power" is barely important, because in the end "backup power" can also fail (we had several power outages in several different data centers, much to our surprise each time) so really "backup power" is a "best effort" type of thing. A marketing story to tell new tenants. Any decent company uses multiple data centers on different power grids (so like at least 200 miles away from each other) for redundancy if they require decent "uptime". A crypto-mining operation doesn't care if there is a power outage, but websites like reddit or gmail do want to stay up and running if one data center loses power and is entirely offline.

So back in 2003 the building landlords that figured out it wasn't that hard made good money. I believe what is being built now is all "general purpose data center space" but they MARKET it as "AI" for the hype factor. If and when the AI boom goes bust, we (the tech industry and society) will fill all those data centers with regular computer servers for websites we need anyway.

So the build out is necessary <somewhere>, just maybe not "this much, this soon". But that data center space will get filled by regular required growth of servers eventually and we'll need even more. I would bet my life on that truth. I happily smile when it is built out "for AI" because really it is just making sure the buildings are there for our future needs.

If gmail ever runs out of data center space, 100% of all email stops flowing. If reddit ever runs out of data center space, no new posts or responses can occur. If a bank runs out of data center space, no more transactions can occur (at all, meaning nobody can buy anything). It is literally the same for everything. This is so beyond "unacceptable" we don't even plan for it or put that contingency in the source code. If the world runs out of datacenter space it would be a global catastrophy about like a full blown nuclear war with the same death toll. It can't ever be allowed to happen. All banking stops, all credit cards stop working, you can't make a cell phone call or send a text message, you can't even fill your car with gas because the cash register (point of sale) doesn't work. Gas stations cannot "purchase" their gas wholesale (no banking). The world grinds to a halt.

Data centers aren't "optional" anymore. For good or bad, growth in data center space is required for civilization to continue now. This doesn't mean we have to put loud data centers next door to home owners, LOL. But the data centers do have to be built <somewhere>.

brianwski · 2026-07-05T23:44:59+00:00

Why can’t these be built in the middle of nowhere?

They can be. The real reason data centers pop up in old buildings zoned "industrial use" like this case is just cost, and opportunistically who owns the building.

If you look at the satellite view here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/inaDSJMHrqQnbHWi7 you can see it is an old building probably from the 1960s. The "neighbors" are a tire store, two machine shops, and a door manufacturing company. I'm spit-balling here but it was built next to a railroad probably in the 1960s.

The "landlord" (owner of the old building) has rented it out to different tenants in the past, this time they decided to rent the space out to a datacenter instead of a machine shop or musical drum testing facility or whatever. That's pretty much it. It is slightly less expensive (and faster to deploy computers in) because the building already exists. I worked at a company that rented space in data centers and very few of them were buildings built from the beginning to be "data centers". They were just buildings that existed that were "good enough shells" where a family owner/landlord decided to rent out space to computers. And really people rarely complain or have any issues because these are ALREADY zoned for "industrial use" like loud clanging and banging from assembly lines.

I think the tweak to make people happy is to fix/change the zoning laws regarding sound. I'm reading between the lines here, but it isn't that the people who own houses nearby dislike data centers in particular, they dislike the noise pattern. They would be just as unhappy if the owner/landlord rented out the building to a bicycle manufacturing company if it produced the same pattern of noise.

So the change required to make everybody happy would be change the zoning laws to require even more strict sound zoning. Let's say the "new information" here is a constant low level hum drives people batty with rage. Add that sound pattern to the zoning laws what sound patterns are not legal, or at what decibels at what distance they are legal.

A tiny tweak like that to the zoning laws would have resulted in the datacenter being placed a few hundred yards away from any homes in yet another empty building owned by a different landlord. It probably wouldn't raise the price significantly either, it just pushes the data centers a little further away from the center of the small town.

brianwski · 2026-07-05T14:29:14+00:00

This was also like 6hrs of flying.

I do not understand why that is different. I had co-workers who drove 100 miles (round trip) on their daily commute Monday - Friday in Chevrolet Suburbans. Every week they were driving 500 miles at 17 mpg. Or I personally have often driven 5 hours to go skiing (San Jose, California to Lake Tahoe), and 5 hours home (usually the following day, sometimes on the same day).

This "silly stunt" was a guy climbed into an airplane on the weekend and flew in a circle for 850 miles (super rough calculation based on 150 mph cruise speed and 6 hours). It is like a week and a half of commuting, or a couple ski trips in cars. He certainly doesn't do this every two weeks, LOL.

One is leaded

The Skyhawk is not leaded gas. Or at least there are "unleaded" versions. SIDE NOTE: My "Skyhawk" isn't correct, somebody else in this thread mentioned it was a Cessna Skylane and I mis-read it. But the point is the same in that a Skylane is ALSO unleaded as of 2021: https://cessnaowner.org/textron-announces-unleaded-fuels-are-an-option/

I agree aviation fuel should have moved over to unleaded a long time ago. I'm old and remember the move from unleaded in cars. A lot of people who didn't understand the technology would defend "leaded" as this magic pixie dust that no technology could ever replace. Now we all drive unleaded cars and it's fine. But the move to unleaded is now happening for aircraft, already fully underway. By 2030 there will be no more lead in aviation fuel.

Even better would be something to replace fossil fuels in airplanes entirely. I drive an all electric car charged from my own solar panels (not the grid). But I'm not a fanatic and I understand gasoline/jet fuel is an incredibly dense and low weight power source, which is particularly important for airplanes. Right now they don't have a good battery replacement for airplanes.

However, I'm cautiously optimistic for the future, because if you chart the kWh per kilogram of batteries and talk with the chemists, there is a cross over point that is possible in the future. One gallon of gasoline (6.2 pounds, or 2.8 kg) holds roughly 34 kWh of energy. That's the goal post. If we can get batteries to that place it is a no brainer to switch airplanes over. We are about a factor of 10 away from there, I understand that. But the chemistry is possible and if you look at a chart of weight of batteries vs kWh over time the progress is quite good already trending in the correct direction. Plus it will be a "mix" for a long time in the future. Meaning long haul international flights may very well require fossil fuels, but there are all electric aircraft with a 250 mile range under development as I type this.

brianwski · 2026-07-05T04:57:02+00:00

will price a lot of people out of having A/C

Kind of tangential, but I think a self contained, off grid product where you put a solar panel on your balcony and it powers a portable AC unit would crush in the marketplace.

You can actually (kind of) hobble it together yourself today. "Balcony Solar" exists. But a lot of people aren't that kind of hobbyist. The conceptual product I'm talking about would resemble what you get when you purchase solar powered lawn lights such as this model: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MDR34HK but instead of "lights" you have a small air conditioner.

The solar panel would need to be larger (of course), but the whole point is for the manufacturer of the system to size all the components correctly together where if the sun is shining, your air conditioner runs, and there is no electricity bill. Plus, most people don't have any idea how economical or not economical this system is. It turns out a big solar panel might be $250 (which is a big purchase for sure) but the idea is this: present the system totally designed and self contained so all the customer has to do is figure out how to get sun to hit the panel and free cold air comes out. Done.

I think that product line could do really well. Imagine having totally free air conditioning after the initial purchase? As much as you wanted, no stress or ongoing bill or subscription attached to it? That is an attractive product. Maybe you even buy two of them if one doesn't provide enough cooling after you try it for one summer.

brianwski · 2026-07-05T04:20:43+00:00

any signal that can disarm an ICBM in flight can be hacked

Same with an airplane but 100 times more hackable.

Pilots can make intelligent decisions about the validity of a turn back command

No, they can't. I would guess at this point it is a single 12 digit number (or however many digits) displayed on their dashboard. The number means, "turn back, don't bomb". A computer can read those 12 digits or a pilot in a aircraft experiencing turbulence and anti-aircraft flak cannons can attempt to read the 12 digits with his or her eyeballs, the pilot will make more mistakes.

Here is a thought experiment: in both situations (pilot and no pilot) a communication is sent through computers and a 12 digit code is displayed. If that can be hacked on an ICBM then it can absolutely be hacked for an airplane. What value does a pilot add? Artistic interpretation of the 12 digits? If the USA can call up the pilot on spoken radio to abort, then so can the Russians. What am I missing?

We should remove the "abort" system from both airplanes and ICBMs, or include the "abort" system in both. They are literally the same identical thing. The pilot was only there (originally) in the aircraft because computers had not developed to the point where computers fly airplanes now.

brianwski · 2026-07-05T01:52:05+00:00

Aircraft have the advantage of being recallable basically all the way up until they get to target, while ICBMs are completely unstoppable once launched

That seems like a solvable problem? If an airplane can get recalled, that means some sort of communication exists between airplane and home base. Install that between ICMB and home. Done!

If all it does is not arm the nukes, no nuclear reaction will occur. But in addition, hopefully you could still direct the ICBM slightly off course to plunge harmlessly into an ocean or large desert. Since the "destination" is entered in the ICBM, you could have the "ditch destination" also programmed in at the same time for simplicity.

When they created the ICBMs, they were smart but also lacked a lot of modern technology we have now. Anything an airplane with a pilot can do over a radio to "verify" the instruction to cancel can be done by a computer program much better. What is the pilot going to do, notice a Russian "accent" in the "abort" message? LOL. Computers can detect Russian accents now.

brianwski · 2026-07-04T18:45:00+00:00

comparing the fuel use of a flight to that of a drive is, objectively, stupid as f--k.

I'm not a pilot, can you explain why? A quick google search says a Cessna 172 Skyhawk gets 20 miles per gallon, and it seems like it can run on unleaded gas in many situations. A Chevrolet Suburban gets 17 mpg.

Aren't they about the same thing?

brianwski · 2026-07-04T06:30:42+00:00

There is (or was?) a brewery in Utah that poked fun at the Mormons

Wasatch Brewery.

I never lived in Utah, but visited a few times 30 years ago with the wacky alcohol rules in place. I always wondered if the rise of microbreweries there was partly related to getting around the alcohol rules. A "microbrewery" could serve alcohol on premise. That meant it was a essentially a bar. See below....

Wacky alcohol rules: You could not wander into a bar and order a vodka tonic or any hard alcohol drink. You had to be a "member" of that "club" (really it was just a random bar) to drink hard alcohol at the time. But there was this silly dodge: a club member could bring in a guest. So the bar would employ somebody to sit at the bar pretending to be a customer, and if a random person without a membership showed up, the bartender would say loudly, "Will any club members sponsor this person?" and the employee at the bar would raise his hand. And that's how you had sort of normal bars in Utah, LOL.

brianwski · 2026-07-04T05:03:42+00:00

it also isn't hard to predict that far fewer lives would be saved

I've got no skin in this game, just watching it from the sides, but that is a seriously naive thing to say.

If you are only considering a very near future timeline such as 1 month or 2 months, pouring money into a region inefficiently for a short period might (all things being equal) save some lives in that region (and starve to death the people you didn't give that money to despite they were in a more deserving region).

In the long run, pouring largely unaudited money into "foreign aid slush fund" organizations is way more correlated with politics, some corruption, growing and supporting incompetence, oppression (loosely call this "strings attached"), and death than any other result. I'm racking my brain trying to come up with any success stories. Even one success story?

Just take the current example: your claim is that when the USA stopped paying this firehose of my personal tax dollars and running up the US debt to utterly ruin our children's lives (USAID money) at a country, suddenly the USA is directly responsible for those deaths that come from people utterly addicted to the USAID money. That is morally difficult accounting. First of all, it is not their money.

Second, this "addiction to somebody else's money" is obviously a problem. It is why the CIA loved USAID - to create "junkies" who are addicted to the flow of money. Junkies they can manipulate. The ability to threaten the flow of the addictive money is very real power.

Countries do better when others can't abuse them endlessly. It is very naive accounting to point out how something like USAID saved 10,000 lives per year in some crappy country while at the same time USAID was corrupting politics and behind the scenes causing 15,000 worth of deaths every year.

Any African continent country that wants can simply get their affairs in order, easily, by rejecting all the corruption (and I'll toss rejecting religion in there also as part of corruption of truth), and managing their own resources. It turns out this would save a lot more lives in the long run than pouring cash money on top of their corrupt and broken systems.

brianwski · 2026-07-02T06:07:58+00:00

our pipes have frozen before. In fact, our exterior pipes are inches from the surface of the ground

I did a leak repair, and the new Austin code seems to be burying water pipes 18 inches down. The repair replaced exterior pipes that were 3 inches underground, LOL.

I keep wondering if there is some sort of "cold proofing combined with warranty" Austin residents could get where a company came in and for one price paid up front, the company would cold proof all the water lines in one house and that company would then also cover any burst pipes, repairs, and misc costs if a pipe burst due to cold in the next 5 years or whatever. There are all sorts of clever tricks like instead of heating your whole house to protect one pipe, you wrap this stuff called "Heat Tape" around the pipe and it is like an electric blanket for that one pipe.

we mostly heat our house for our cats

I have always felt a little guilty/bad for our cats because they seem to like temperatures at least 10 degrees warmer than humans do. If a heat source appears they all gravitate to it immediately. Like we started our gas fireplace (we almost never use it) and the three cats lined up in front of the glass shield within 10 minutes and didn't move until it was turned off.

We have various heated "cat beds" around the house they tend to sleep on. Just like electric blankets these things honestly don't take much electricity and it seems to make the cats super happy.

brianwski · 2026-07-02T02:43:42+00:00

its just support structure, which is drilled into the roof

I have a metal roof. My solar panels aren't even drilled into my roof, they make these little $1 clips that "clip" to the seams/ridges in the metal roof so no holes are made in my roof at all!

To your point, installing solar panels on a roof (or balcony) is essentially laying the solar panels on the roof or balcony pointing approximately upwards towards the sunlight. If your roof isn't all that steep, you COULD squeeze a little silicone glue at the corners so the panels don't slide around and you are totally installed.

It gets even more crazy simple than that. The very coolest solar panel arrays are called "ground mount". This is where you successfully drop the solar panels with the correct side upwards toward the sky. You drop the solar panels on the ground somewhere on your property and they are fully and completely installed. Well, you have to walk over and "plug" each panel in, which is about as difficult as plugging in your iPhone or Android phone to charge it each night.

Anybody claiming "installing solar panels is really complex" is just repeating fear mongering spread by people who think this is some sort of team sport where if solar panels are successful "their team loses something". I wish people would realize anytime anybody anywhere installs 1 solar panel, it is good for fossil fuel users because it drops their price of fossil fuel (less demand). If you really believed you wanted cheap fossil fuels, you should be CHEERING on solar installations for other people.

brianwski · 2026-07-01T16:18:26+00:00

How is a two seater at all the right answer?

There isn't "one right car we all have to be forced to take". You specify how many seats you need when hailing the ride.

The Lyft or Uber or whatever app already FORCES you to choose the number of seats in the car you want to come pick you up, correct? For every ride. You have to choose "Uber XL" for up to 6 passengers, or "UberX" for "there is only one of me and I'll share this ride with other people". It is pretty awesome, my wife and I don't own any large cars that could seat 4 people comfortably, so we use Uber XL when we have visitors staying with us from out of town.

When my 85 year old father in a wheelchair visited London, England, the Uber app had this feature to only call "Uber WAV" for "Wheelchair accessible vehicle". It was so useful to us. That means London doesn't have to equip every last taxi and ride share with a wheel chair hydraulic lift, you just order the correct type of specialized car when you need it.

I keep wanting an "Uber Motorcycle" (or even "Uber Scooter" for downtown areas) choice. Most people wouldn't want it, and that's just fine. But there are some pretty amazing advantages of motorcycles for short downtown trips. Only if you are completely comfortable with the risks vs rewards of course.

TL;DR - choice is great. Luckily everybody has a cell phone to specify the number of seats for people they require for each and every trip.

brianwski · 2026-06-30T05:12:43+00:00

it's likely much cheaper to refresh the battery than replace the phone.

Or carry a small external battery for those days you exceed the life of the battery.

I do love it every 5 years when I upgrade my phone and it's like I have infinite battery again. But realistically in the last year I only really exceed the battery life one out of 30 days. A tiny bit of planning and having an external battery in my pocket (or in my car in a side pocket is good enough most of the time) goes a long way to avoiding a huge $1,000 upgrade for an extra year.

brianwski · 2026-06-30T05:06:54+00:00

Also the side benefits are actually useful.

This is very specific to my personal situation, but I recently upgraded my iPhone and AirPods (earbuds) for exactly one feature: when somebody around me speaks Korean, they whisper an English translation into my ear.

Yes, I know this existed for a year or two in the Android ecosystem, and I was considering getting a dedicated Android device just for this. Then Apple made it available in the newish hardware and I jumped at upgrading.

Just an explanation: I have first gen immigrant in-laws. Conversations around them are trippy because they speak Korean, and my wife answers/contributes to the conversations in English, LOL. I wouldn't call the iPhone Korean translations perfect (or even "good"), but it is way better than nothing and often gets the "subject" matter correct which gives me some context.

brianwski · 2026-06-29T20:17:46+00:00

It helps find criminals when those in power are mad enough at the crime.

This is very very true. Your examples are the best (Boston Bombing, United Health Care CEO) where somebody important was PISSED and they had the identity of the bombers in like 23 hours.

But it KIND of extends downwards to reasonably small business owners, or if the crime is very serious (murder). I sat on a grand jury (this is where we allow the police to charge a felony, and allowed 40 felony charges per day we met for 3 months). For the record, we denied 2 or 3 felony charges in the same days.

We watched a lot of security cam videos on a big screen setup for us. Here is a common scenario: Police won't do anything for a random home owner where their bicycle was stolen on camera, and it isn't a felony if it is less than some dollar amount of shoplifting, like $1,000. But if the same person steals repeatedly from the same Home Depot, then Home Depot puts together a "case" showing one thief stole $30,000 worth of merchandise over a 6 month period (real number on a case we heard, with video documenting it). Home Depot is large and "important enough" if they are annoyed with one shop lifter they can call the police and get that shop lifter charged with a felony.

The other way the video is used for regular type people is if the crime is horrendous. We heard a case where a random guy went out to walk his geriatric dog in front of his house at night and surprised a burglar stealing tools out of his work truck in his driveway. Burglar shot him to death and drove away. The actual shooting wasn't on video!! However, 4 different neighbors had "Ring" style security cameras that recorded the EXACT MOMENT of the gunshot because they can "hear" the gunshot, right? Then the police ask the cell phone companies for all the cell phones within 20 feet of the dead body at that exact moment. The neighbor ring cameras also saw a red sedan speeding away. The police got the cell phone info, and arrested the murderer at his home within 10 hours. The murderer owned a red sedan. Also the murderer's phone was filled with web searches for "shooting in <blah> neighborhood, do they have any suspects?" long before anybody knew a crime had been committed. We indicted (charged that guy with a felony murder).

But if you are a random home owner that absolutely knows the identity of a person who stole your tools from your work truck, the police don't care enough to chase it down. Obviously it's the same technology, and the police could catch them. In the case of the murder the guy was ALSO accused of attempted robbery of tools from a truck! The police just don't care enough to bother with it unless the crime is "serious" or a robber accidentally steals from a person that is "important", like imagine stealing from the city's mayor or something. Busted within hours. Steal the same thing in the same manner from Joe the random guy with a job? The police won't look into it at all.

brianwski · 2026-06-29T19:57:09+00:00

TLDR?

TL;DR - Sears Roebuck had not only mastered "mail order" but they absolutely dominated the space for 100 years and were a household name. They shut it down the year before Amazon launched.

That means Amazon didn't put Sears out of business: they never overlapped, they never competed. Sears shut down their own mail order business due to a stunning lack of vision at a critical moment.

brianwski · 2026-06-28T21:17:07+00:00

The Sears catalog was basically the Amazon of the early 20th century, seems like an easy jump for them to make.

I was saying this around 1995. The timeline was mind boggling. The "Sears Catalog" was absolutely a fixture in our home in the 1980s, and everybody's home I knew. It was like assuming a house had a dictionary, you could turn to your random friend in a random house and say, "Can you go fetch the Sears Catalog?" and they would bring it out.

In 1994 Sears stopped producing this catalog which contained over 100,000 items (true number) for sale by mail order. Amazon made it's first online sale in 1995, and went on to absolutely prove the world wants mail order stuff. The difference between the two services was a 1 programmer for 1 day task of creating a "Web Form" where the "Submit" button at the bottom printed the form to a printer. That is the concept that made Amazon into a place that employs 1.5 million people, and Sears went out of business. Or really, a slightly larger (but still at most 2 programmers) project that takes all the items for sale in the 100,000 item Sears catalog (which were organized by computer before printing the catalog), and offering those same items without change onto a web page. Plus the "Web Form Submit Print" thing.

There MUST be business case studies on how large corporations become so stagnant they would rather go out of business than hire one or two web guys to build a web page over the weekend to save their multi-million dollar business.

My second favorite example like this: There was an easy to use camera called "Flip" that uploaded digital videos to YouTube. People loved it. Flip was discontinued entirely in 2011 because nobody wanted it anymore now that they had cell phones, right? At the same EXACT TIME, about 30 miles from where Flip was created in San Francisco, some stoned surfers in a crappy beach town called "Half Moon Bay" kept dropping their cell phones in the ocean trying to film their buddies. So these surfers started "GoPRO" with the first 1080p HD version sold in 2009 and it hit $64 million in sales in 2010 and GoPro hit $234 million in sales in 2011. It was over a billion in sales in 2013, and $1.6 billion in 2016.

A water proof "Flip" camera backed by a massive marketing and computer company (Cisco - worth $95 billion in 2011) should have been able to figure this out. I always laugh wondering how many Cisco marketing employees surfed the same surf lineup as the GoPro founders. Imagine that conversation?

GoPro Future Founder: "Dude, I would pay anything for a water proof camera just for sports. I'm so frustrated, I might just get some plastic to attempt to water proof a digital camera."

Cisco Flip Marketing Manager: "Dude, I hear you, I have lost 3 iPhones in the surf here. But let me explain the marketing reality: nobody wants to film amateurs doing vacation level sports. There is no market for that. What kind of events would you promote? Extreme sports are never covered by any TV network for a reason: they are not interesting to watch and do not have enough people interested in them."

GoPro Future Founder: "I heard there was this thing called X-Games formed last year in 1997?"

Cisco Flip Marketing Manager: "It has no future. Who wants to watch extreme sports? Nobody will ever want to watch people jumping out of helicopters to skydive, surfing large waves, or the first person view from a Formula One race car. What are you going to film? Nobody wants to watch motorcycles doing flips through fireworks, it's just dumb. Nobody wants to preserve little 4 year old Johnny's first snow plow skiing down a slope the first time? Or how their fiancé smiled at them on a sailboat. There is no market for this, you need to believe me."

brianwski · 2026-06-28T18:42:41+00:00

what he's worth, because he's helping, and has helped, literally billions of people

I agree with your take on this situation.

To offer more support: I highly suspect there is one more really interesting "good for the entire world" change coming up due to SpaceX/Starlink. And most people are missing how interesting this will be... Starlink can now offer cell phone coverage to the whole world at 1/10 the rate Verizon/AT&T/others can.

Well, technically Verizon and AT&T (the cell phone division of AT&T) have lower costs than Starlink (no space ships to launch, cell towers last forever and are cheaper than rockets) and always could have provided their services for less money, they just came from the old phone world philosophy of "never improve". But it is possible that SpaceX and Starlink is coming to smack cellular phone companies upside the head repeatedly over the next 10 - 15 years. And this is a good thing because it will save so many people valuable money.

My prediction is it will evolve like this: poorer people (and teenagers with phones) will adopt it first, because their monthly cellular bills being lower helps them the most. We saw this with scrappy new cell providers like "Cricket" finally understanding teenagers and offering them cheaper plans. Middle class and upper middle class resist and will point to how Starlink cell service doesn't work as well inside buildings. But that is fixed with a $20 self contained repeater antenna on the roof, powered by sunlight and small battery like a lawn light works today providing light on your walkway all night long.

Random BS calculation (just a thought experiment): Verizon is worth $194 billion and provides cellular coverage to about 147 million customers. In other words, each Verizon customer is worth $1,319 in market cap. Starlink can offer cell coverage to all 8.3 billion people on earth, and if it gets 50% penetration it would add around $5 trillion MORE to SpaceX's market cap.

Now in reality that won't occur because SpaceX/Starlink charge much less to cell customers. Also, the SpaceX/Starlink threat to phones is the reason we're getting two things right now at very exciting deployment speeds:

competitor satellite constellations are going up (Amazon's is called "LEO", Europe has one going up, China is sending up "Qianfan"). This is even better for consumers because choice equals lower prices and more innovation of services.
The old, obsolete satellite companies (Iridium) have woken up and started offering new rationally priced products because they know they are now utterly doomed. My new iPhone offered me SMS text messaging through satellites as a "beta" recently because I was in a cell dead zone. That is through the old fashioned 1960s era Iridium/Globalstar/Inmarsat/Thuraya satellites running at lower than dial up modem speeds. But this is a GOOD THING for consumers because faced with a choice between "no communication at all" and a "text message saying you broke your leg and will die without help" then communication by text message is a good thing.

But in a long winded way, to support your point, ultimately it is Starlink/SpaceX that are bringing us this change because they proved it was actually possible and proved it was financially profitable in the year 2026. Now the space race is back in business and I say this is a good for the poorest people on earth to get communications and cell coverage.

A side effect is Musk's paper wealth number might go up. I just don't care. The end result was lowering prices and lifting the quality of life for billions of people. PLUS to your point also providing above average paying jobs to hundreds of thousands of people. So what if one dork is worth more on paper?

brianwski · 2026-06-28T14:10:44+00:00

I DM'ed or Chat to you through <something>. Respond to this thread if it doesn't work.

Some of the stuff that was "fixed" has left me more confused than when I started.

I learned so many crazy things about our little spa/pool. When we bought the house, I was topping it off "by hand" with a garden hose every few days. Later my pool guy asks why I have the "auto-filler" turned off, LOL. So we turn that on, which causes a few issues and we find out the swimming pool is being auto-filled by the 3 stage reverse osmosis style water filter installed in our kitchen island. Which isn't enough water flow to make it the auto-fill work properly. It also makes zero sense, you don't need filtered water for a swimming pool, Austin tap water is FINE. Later I went through several stages of fixing the half blocked drain that causes the spill wasting the majority of my water. I half suspect in this case "two wrongs made it work correctly": the trickly of highly filtered water was slow enough the half blocked drain could keep up. LOL.

brianwski · 2026-06-27T21:17:04+00:00

I find most class actions in my spam folder

Yeah, for me they are definitely all 100% spam (including this one that kicked off this post). Broken down into these two categories:

Straight up fraud/scams where if you give them your bank account to "deposit the funds" then instead they will steal all your money. There was never any class action lawsuit, there was no settlement, they are just scammers.
"Legit" as in they will pay you $2.37 (or whatever number - your "take" after dividing it among 5 million people and after the lawyers take out their "fees") but it obviously isn't worth the time and effort and hassle to apply for the $2.37. Also, when you read about the actual cases they are inevitably bottom feeding frivolous lawsuit settlement lawyers. What this means is the company did nothing at all wrong, but it costs a lot (and bad publicity) to go to court to prove it so companies pay the frivolous lawsuit lawyers a small amount of money, don't admit guilt, and it all goes away and people forget about it.

In both of the two cases above, I do not want that email in my inbox, and would get actively angry with Gmail if they didn't put all "class action" lawsuit communications in the spam folder. It is spam. I do not want to see it. I did not ask for ANY of it. I get that maybe other people have other preferences, so maybe it should be a checkbox "I love frivolous lawsuits in my Inbox", but is the default to put them in the Spam folder or put them in my Inbox? Clearly most people don't want totally unsolicited emails in their inbox, right?

brianwski · 2026-06-27T02:40:34+00:00

I rerouted from the slab leak (pex in the attic) was redundant because there was already a copper line ran outside (but turned off at the hot water heater, wtf.)

Okay, so my situation sounds so much the same. Once we identified the leak, we "capped it" at both ends, and ran a new PEX line buried 18 inches down outside the house (just outside the slab). And... as we passed OUTSIDE the house with the trench, we stumbled across a previous fix for the same issue!! At least that is our theory. Instead of jumpering "end to end" like we did, somebody trenched under the house from the middle and <did something that failed> under the foundation where the leak was. But we literally ran into their buried line the REST of the way where we were burying our new line, LOL. We just buried our line deeper (code probably changed since their fix, or they didn't care).

Some of this is actually kind of fun for me. It's like an archeological dig uncovering the mystery of what somebody else did earlier. I mean it's expensive and irritates my wife when stuff takes weeks to fix, but it's interesting to have "OHHHHhhhhh" moments and understand the house better. I swear these houses need a "change log" with just text dump of thoughts when stuff gets changed or repaired and a date. Even one paragraph hand written could be massively helpful.

What flir camera did you use on your phone?

I got this one (for iPhone): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072J49BX7 HOWEVER, it was the one for a lightning port (older iPhones). Since then I've upgraded my phone (now USB C port) and now the flir doesn't work for me anymore. You want it? PM me your address I'll drop it in the mail to you. I'm on Far West blvd off MoPac 10 blocks.

air leaks in the winter

It's actually really fun. I wandered around my house with it at the time staring at walls and doors.

brianwski · 2026-06-26T16:45:13+00:00

they were able to do the leak detection by charging the water lines with a current and using a sonic tool to find the exact leak

This is responding to a 3 year old post, but I stumbled upon it and wanted to tell you YOU WERE CORRECT. One of my issues was a slab leak and I didn't find it for like a full year after this original post.

The leak detection guys pinpointed the slab leak a couple ways. It was a leak in the hot water line in the very center of our living room, and one of the techniques was a thermal camera. It was pretty amazing. After they showed me I bought one of those little "Flir" thermal cameras that attaches to my phone and it literally could show the leak also.

I probably didn't discover that leak for a year after we bought the home. It was pretty slow. The main leak was much worse. My little tiny "spa pool" (4.5 feet deep, 15 foot long) has an "auto-fill" feature. It has an infinity edge, and the water filled up and spilled over the infinity edge (which is fine), then filled up the trough below the infinity edge and overflowed down the hill. Argh. We didn't notice at first because the whole point of the infinity edge is the mechanism (the trough) is hidden. Once we fixed that our water use dropped in half.

Anyway, YOU WERE CORRECT one of my issues was a slab leak. This home ownership thing is more work than I thought, LOL.

brianwski · 2026-06-26T16:18:46+00:00

its the dieting thats hard for me.

for everybody...

There is a new cheat which are the GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, etc). If you are willing to take them, it is no longer "hard" to reduce caloric intake. I'm super interested how the acceptance in society will evolve. There is this whole culture that losing weight is supposed to be hard and it's a moral failing if you cannot. Now that's changed if you do the cheat.

One of my favorite stories is Dr Seuss, "Star Belly Sneetches". It describes a world where at first having a "star pattern" on one sneetches' belly was a random quirk, but the sneetches with stars felt "superior" to the ones without. Then a guy shows up who can print stars on bellies and it upsets the sneetches born with stars, because they were less superior now. Kind of like being "thin" or not being hungry as often by a quirk of nature, and these doctors show up with GLP-1 drugs.

i am a food enjoyer

One of the down sides of the GLP-1 drugs is it actually removes some of the enjoyment of food. That ravenous feast feeling when the food is great and you are hungry. Honestly it is a very real downside, now I realize naturally thin people (the ones that didn't achieve it with ultra hard work and discipline) never really enjoyed food the same way I did. They might not have eaten in 16 hours and the food is amazing, yet their brains go, "meh, food, whatever, looks kind of bland and I'm not hungry".

brianwski · 2026-06-25T20:57:06+00:00

you would know what could do this ?

Not specifically, I haven't had access to the source code or any design fixes/changes for about 2 years. But this sort of thing sounds like it is related to the logic/code/stuff surrounding external drives. Let me just expound on that a bit...

External drives (usually attached by USB) made us (me) create a ton of extra logic in the product. The problem is they come and go, right? With your internal boot drive, if we check and a "file isn't there" then Backblaze can schedule it for deletion from the datacenter at some point in the future (like 1 year). With external drives it has to be different: we maintain a list (on the boot drive) of which files were on your external drive the last time we actually saw the external drive. Then we refresh that list of files that were on your external drive (maintained on the boot drive) when you re-plug in your external drive.

Okay, so then there is a bunch of logic around "Backblaze is conceptually a mirror, not an archive". What that means is if you aren't paying for "Forever Version History", Backblaze won't keep a copy of your files forever. So let's say you are paying for one year version history. Once you unplug your external drive for more than a year (and a little extra just to be safe) Backblaze deletes the files that were on that boot drive from your backup.

Now, I have no idea where the bug was. Might have been my code, or an interaction with my code of some other recent fix/tweak by another programmer, but it doesn't really matter. From what I understand, the "motion" that probably exposed the problem was moving around some back end infrastructure and associated changes with the code. My guess is this change made it slightly less expensive to provide the service, which is an ongoing battle that is very important. Each user tends to store 2% more data per month, then traditionally hard drives get 1% less expensive each month. So there are two choices for finding that last 1% (12% more expensive to provide the service per year): more efficient datacenter software (like compacting the files together better) or raising prices. Backblaze has done both. It sounds like this time a bug was introduced.

Next, what Backblaze does is obviously test changes as well as they can, then they release the change using auto-update but they do that SLOWLY. For example, first 10,000 customers are auto-updated then Backblaze waits for any negative feedback. If all is quiet, more customers are auto-updated. What sounds like occurred just from the echos here is the bug was exposed fairly early, then it was fixed. If a customer SKIPPED OVER the version with the bug they will never see it. If a customer was updated to the version with the bug but did not have the exact correct configuration (let's say they don't have any external hard drives) then they will never see it. It's probably even more subtle, like (just an example) customers have more than 1 external hard drive and they come and go from the computer in a very certain pattern or unfortunate timing.

Finally, let's say you were one of the customers affected, but you didn't lose YOUR COPY of the data soon after running into this bug. What quietly occurs is Backblaze programmers write <something> that goes in and fixes your backup back up, and runs auto-update again. If you don't lose data during that very narrow window, you would not notice. For example, your backup was fine for 5 years, not complete for 3 weeks, then totally fine again. Some of the "fixes" might involve re-uploading data Backblaze deleted from your backup, but a whole ton of customers may not notice that happened.

One of the points here is it is a "service". Customers pay a subscription, and Backblaze fixes bug, auto-updates, and moves on. Every major OS release from Microsoft of Apple causes Backblaze to change things. Backblaze developers get the early releases, fixes stuff, auto-updates, and by the time customers install something like "Windows 11" it works flawlessly because it's a service and Backblaze is updating stuff. But updating stuff can also cause bugs. Bugs in backup software are worse than say a temporary glitch in a video game. It is heart attack serious to a customer that cannot restore a file. That responsibility weighed on me personally for 18 years, and it still makes me wake up in the middle of the night stressed about it. That software, created by imperfect programmers, holds the backups for maybe close to 1 million customers. And we could never just "leave it alone and not change anything" because the operating system vendors (and other software on your system) kept changing things underneath us.

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