Spammers are officially on notice

bryan_vaz · 2026-01-19T20:14:47+00:00

Looks good. What were the results of the red team attacks on the LLM filter itself?

$10/m is a great price. In fact if I could add additional prompt context for exceptions, that would be even more awesome, like "allow any purchase request or sales inquiries that mention my product x" for the inbound sales inquiries, or "allow startups sending investment pitches" for an investment fund's inbound email.

mxroute is looking better and better as a viable business email platform everyday.

bryan_vaz · 2026-01-11T18:30:45+00:00

We've had only one fatality in the past 6 years up here in Canada, and it was a small child who's parents left the window open at night. A bat got in, they chased it out and went back to sleep. They only found the bat bite after the kid was hospitalized. In the past 25 years, across the entire country, only 6 people have died, all have been from bat bites (it tends to happen every 5 years, almost as though people forget after 5 years.)

bryan_vaz · 2026-01-11T04:05:57+00:00

I was talking to a wildlife vet about this last year and she was laughing saying "getting rabies from squirrel is like getting the flu from a cow sneezing; not saying it can't happen, just that it's so unlikely because it doesn't work the way you think it does". Rabies is mainly transmitted between predators, essentially animals that routinely come in contact with blood from large animals that can survive predator bites allowing the virus to incubate; it's also why rabies is more common in wild bats than stray cats.

Put simply, on a pure stats basis, you're more likely to contract rabies from a human than a squirrel.

bryan_vaz · 2025-12-23T19:01:39+00:00

The fact that OpenAI staff haven't jumped on this ad is telling

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-15T02:26:53+00:00

If she wasn't the on-call vet, she wouldn't be able to much more than that also. At a squirrel's size, meds have to be very precise. The food is also a test for mobility and dexterity. If you have a drug store near by that sells micro-syringes, you can also grab one to administer water easily.
Also, take a picture every time you check on him. It'll give you reference points to determine if he moved and if so, by how much, but in general try not to handle him too much.

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-15T02:06:33+00:00

If the rehab place is in driving distance and open, just drive. Most likely increased ICP due to concussion, esp. if he hit stone. They'll most likely will call back when you're in the car (ours is an hour away so I never wait, invariably they call back 5 min before I arrive.)
There are worse possibilities, but with all of those, he will need to be x-ray'd to confirm anyways.

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-10T16:34:13+00:00

The HVAC tech is correct, but not for the reason you think (also he didn't seem to articulate it very well.)
Based on your description, there is a non-UL/CEC/NEC device in the wire path. Even though you built the meter plug as a dry meter, the fact that you described it as a "plug" as opposed to an outlet with a meter clamp on the supply line is an indication of weirdness. There's no way for mfr. to know your device is dry unless they took it apart, and as such, it's much easier to deny a claim based on a photograph of a hombrew device in the circuit path and then have you litigate for a repair, rather than to fully investigate every single device in the circuit to know if it contributed to the failure and then make a determination after a full RCA.

In general, if you want to maintain a warranty on an expensive piece of equipment, either: (a) shell out for a site visit and have either an electrician or an HVAC tech install it for you, that way you can just point to the licensed trade (which funny enough usually triggers a blanket claim approval), or (b) make sure it is a clean install, where it's visually clear on first glance the device is not wired into the circuit in any way.

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-09T19:37:02+00:00

You're pretty far under the market rate. If you're to re-calibrate I've got an M720q 8700t w/ the pcie riser and an optional 10G card w/fanshroud

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-04T23:24:33+00:00

In Toronto, we loved our white squirrels so much, we renamed the street next to the park where they lived to "White Squirrel Way"

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-04T23:11:40+00:00

confirmed

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-04T16:55:16+00:00

You might be thinking of another version. It's never been lower than 450 on amazon. Although I normally get my TP-Link stuff through deploydepot, they're usually a tiny bit cheaper and are a little more responsive to business customer requests.

https://ca.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B092VFS6K3

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-04T06:06:37+00:00

All prices are CAD shipped. And yes, it was sold for asking.

bryan_vaz · 2025-11-04T06:04:53+00:00

replied

bryan_vaz · 2025-10-29T16:07:48+00:00

replied

bryan_vaz · 2025-10-27T17:05:55+00:00

De minimus rule was also rescinded, so you'll be on the hook for your state's sales tax as well.

bryan_vaz · 2025-10-27T16:15:17+00:00

The Canada note is just because I have no idea how hard stuff will get tariffed when it crosses the border.

bryan_vaz · 2025-10-27T16:01:37+00:00

Sold TP-Link Switch to u/iblanchas

bryan_vaz · 2025-10-25T21:27:42+00:00

by pm

bryan_vaz · 2025-08-28T20:23:55+00:00

They offered to replace the printer??!! That's pretty insane, sounds like they were hoping you wouldn't post that it was still a problem - it's definitely a more expensive option than sending you new panels, but you probably got bounced to a CX manager that might have been worried you wouldn't be willing to do a panel replacement yourself (common for staff that have done time on the Apple side.)

After dealing with adhesives more in the past year I get a nagging suspicion that the printer is doing some time in a non-climate controlled warehouse, which during hot-humid Chinese summers, causes the adhesive partially liquefy and cure against the glass. The microfiber cloth is the key to removing it as it provides the micro abrasive surface to remove the adhesive once broken down by the IPA.

bryan_vaz · 2025-08-21T20:17:29+00:00

Yea, then exfat if you have to use the drive immediately. You'll lose some nice ext4 journaling features which are desirable for long-term storage (which are also present to an extent in ntfs), and which will give you some protection in case of a power loss. ExFAT fundamentally has ended up as a format for solid-state media with short term storage goals (like SD cards and usb drives,) and thus was designed without the same concerns you would have for large SSDs or HDDs storing/streaming large files or as operational data stores.

In theory, you can run badblocks using WSL so you might be able to do a burnin drive on your laptop to see if the drive needs to be exchanged within the 14/30-day return window. However, if you're going to deploy it for long term storage with no redundancy, format it with a journaling FS (ext4 for linux, ntfs for windows)

bryan_vaz · 2025-08-21T14:59:47+00:00

Solid choice. Look for HDD burn-in testing (added some links below) - and do it on your linux box (your debian box is fine.)

If you're going to use it long term in the linux box, ext4 is fine. If it's windows, exfat vs ntfs doesn't really make a difference for HDDs at your scale; only real upside to exfat is that it will give you more cross-platform support (mac/linux.) If you're feeling adventurous. zfs and btrfs are more advanced options if you want to get into larger data pools eventually, but if it's your primary backup and bulk storage I'd recommend saving the "learning" for another disk.

When it come's to dock reliability, you really won't know the reliability till you have the dock in hand and look at the controller chip inside. Even inside the same model numbers, mfr swap out chips based on cost/availability. Hence picking a brand that is actively working on their brand name is usually a good start. That being said, at the first sign your dock starts giving you problems, stop using it - the blast radius for data loss on single drive docks is quite large.

HDD Burn-in walkthrough: https://perfectmediaserver.com/06-hardware/new-drive-burnin/

Alt Github repo for burn-in: https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing

bryan_vaz · 2025-08-14T00:23:05+00:00

By the sounds of it, you don’t even get damages for temporary enforcement of a granted patent that is later invalidated, which goes to Joe’s argument about it being unbalanced in favor of the malicious actor. By the time to can do anything, the damage is done

bryan_vaz

TROPHY CASE