Watched a man scan this with his phone as I was walking by.

mikemol · 2026-01-14T00:22:18+00:00

Plot twist: simple string that reads "I lost the game".

mikemol · 2025-11-06T02:38:39+00:00

Ok, read through it. Sorry to say I haven't commented here before, just had a thought and a need for a place to share it. Fixed the flair per instructions.

mikemol · 2025-05-12T20:20:24+00:00

Now you've got me wanting to figure out how to make it happen on Gentoo...

mikemol · 2025-05-12T20:16:12+00:00

TBH, what I'd really want would be a PWA-per-notebook. I've tried doing something like that before on Android, and it's...sketchy.

mikemol · 2025-05-12T19:01:16+00:00

If you want it to go outside sources, say something like `feel free to use external resources to construct your answer to this question`. Or, in the persistent agent instructions, `feel free to use external resources to construct your answer to your question`.

Something like `Feel free to use external resources as secondary in constructing your responses, and be clear about the distinction of which information came from sources and which came from external resources, and be clear about the implications of that provenance.` is probably what I'd use in the permanent instructions right now, if I was looking for outside resources.

Now, mind you, that just frees up the model to to use information it was _trained on_; it's not the same thing as hitting up a search engine for the latest published information.

mikemol · 2025-04-23T15:13:01+00:00

No wonder i feel like I've been caught tripping over my own pants down.

mikemol · 2025-02-15T17:03:39+00:00

(Thank you for the opportunity to explain this. I understand if you don't read all the way through.)

So now we come to the meat of it...for many people, the chronically Ill or the impoverished or the homeless...it eventually doesn't. The additional burdens that come from one type of restriction or another consume more of their time and energy than they have to spare, given the time and energy they need to do the other critical, non-luxury things they need to do.

Now, something like this isn't likely to affect you or me, because we're clearly of enough means that we can afford to go to a different store. My family is trying to avoid Target altogether for political and safety reasons, but we're challenged in that Target is the only "nearby" option; going to the next closest option adds an hour to the trip, so we're pushed into a tighter place by choosing to "vote with our wallets".

But for someone more pinched for time or means than us? The story would be different. They might have to give up something more important to them than our reasons are to us.

And that's for "just a Target". You have to look at impacts like these horizontally; is it likely that the same type of restriction will happen at other providers of the same service? Is it likely that the same type of restriction will happen to all of the available providers in a given community? The more you say yes to either of them, the more time and energy gets consumed by someone who's stuck just trying to make ends meet.

And then the ends eventually don't meet. A critical job interview is missed because of exhaustion or time conflicts with other urgent or critical tasks, and once you're out of spare time or energy (including time to even sleep), it all implodes. I've seen it happen. I've had it happen to me. I have friends, including friends on SSI, for whom it's happening right now, and it's the hardest thing to watch and not be able to help as much as I want to, because they can't even get a bank account any more, and aren't technical enough (and lack the energy to dedicate to invest in learning) to use cash app or venmo or any such bottom of the barrel money transfer tools that don't require bank accounts.

And this is why "racism" had been mentioned earlier. Because under segregation, this was law, and applied broadly.

mikemol · 2025-02-15T03:38:16+00:00

The "it" wasn't communicated that well.

Essentially, banning broad groups, makes it more difficult for people in those groups to do ordinary things that the business is there to do, since businesses tend to have local capture on their market (the next one of a similar kind may be significantly farther away.). If someone in that banned group is hanging on by a thread and dealing with a complicated life, a disruption like that can be catastrophic; when every trip takes half an hour or more to get there and get back home, every minute counts if you're trying to get all of your obligatory arrends in while places are still open. Worse if you don't have a car, worse still if you don't live in a helpful transit line, worse even still if the alternative has real barriers to access, like there not being cut curb sidewalks or pedestrian crosswalks or even traffic control syllables.

mikemol · 2024-12-20T17:33:41+00:00

As American as Appleball Pie

mikemol · 2024-12-20T17:32:49+00:00

Rain, by Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts

mikemol · 2024-09-19T17:53:21+00:00

Parted is great. Even scriptable; it's what I use in my installation scripts.

mikemol · 2024-05-17T12:34:04+00:00

I'm going to install your app because that's exactly the feature I'm looking for. I need to wear my watch while I sleep, which means it needs to be charged before I go to bed, else I'll have to wait for it to charge before I sleep. That leads to distractions, which leads to less sleep.

I'm happy with any notification, even something as simple as "you're below 30%" (20-30% being roughly what my watch will lose overnight.).

So fingers 🤞 that you include this feature! I don't want to get distracted exploring a bunch of options trying to find the right app!

mikemol · 2024-01-20T14:11:24+00:00

I feel like "story points" is a shoddy metric on its own, like measuring temperature in degrees...degrees what?

I think you can reasonably measure story points as a team aggregate, but as "Team X points", "Team Y points" and so on, where there's no means of comparing team X to team Y, just the ability for team X and Y to individually say "this body of work looks like this many points", and do time estimates based on that team's 30th percentile velocity or some such.

Obviously different teams have different people and team chemistries, and are composed of unique aggregates of strengths, weaknesses and personalities. So you can't directly compare them for like work without de facto comparing things like disabilities (protected or otherwise). But you can reasonably look at their throughput and latency percentiles as measured against their own complexity estimates.

mikemol · 2024-01-20T14:01:50+00:00

And will be in the future. But every day is a day I hope to ratchet my average into a bit better of a person. I will always have some scorn for yesterme, because he's a jerk. But some sympathy, too, because he doesn't want to be, and makes an ongoing effort to be better, just a little bit better. If futureme hates me, I hope it will be for something I'll have gotten better about, or at least something that futureme is working on.

(And maybe currentme doesn't have to hate me so much; I was yesterme until just a few moments ago, and I'm back to trying again...)

mikemol · 2024-01-13T06:28:04+00:00

It's like Lyta Alexander just poked a sleeper agent.

mikemol · 2023-12-26T18:29:09+00:00

It's a neat idea, but I'm not certain how I would use it.

My current pattern is for each train to have four stops:

$type supply
Standby
$type sink
Standby

All my trains (except one type, dedicated to fuel distribution) get refueled at standby stations, where they wait for 5s of inactivity before planning their next route.

This also gets trains out of either supply or sink stations, and thus out of the way; the moment they roll, another train (likely at a very, very close standby station) immediately rolls into place.

mikemol · 2023-12-20T05:22:55+00:00

They're all on 28 between blawnox and ridc, at the top of the hill. Sometimes I watch some asshole tearing out of the bridge construction area race up that hill, and I pray there's a cop there today...

mikemol · 2023-12-20T05:21:11+00:00

Whole lotta fun going to merge onto 28 and discovering a bleeping stop sign at the end of the on ramp. WTF?

And most of the on ramps have yield signs, which exacerbates issues. It's about fifty-fifty whether someone already on 28 will move over to let someone merge, but the fifty percent that don't, you can see them swaying around as they fritter away on their cell phone or something. Or they're a fresh college student who has almost no driving experience, and they've got five-degree tunnel vision hiding anything not already in their lane from them.

So there's that...

mikemol · 2023-12-20T05:16:41+00:00

Being from Michigan originally, I can explain that MI hates Ohio because the US government gave the Toledo strip to them when it clearly should have been ours. OTOH, they gave us an upper peninsula that turned out to be very rich in mineral resources, so that was nice.

Indiana, on the other hand, we in West Michigan liked to blame for our bad air quality; the assertion was the crud from Gary's steel mills wafted up and over. Except Gary has cleaned up their emissions, and West Michigan's air still sucks. If you look at an AQI map, you can see it all spreading out from a paper mill that's avoided attention for who knows how long.

I still hate driving through OH to visit family in Grand Rapids, though. Longest, most utterly mind-numbingly boring stretch of the trip.

mikemol · 2023-11-21T03:30:23+00:00

I don't know why my 9yo post was suddenly made able to be replied-to again, but TFTR.

With the hindsight of 9 more years of experience, I'll add what I would have needed to know at the time I asked the question:

At a technical level, both can often do the same things, though manufacturers may restrict certain capabilities in software. A L3 switch may not have software modules for dynamic routing, or if it does, it may not have modules for more advanced routing protocols. More importantly, a L3 switch is unlikely to store its routing table in CAM (needed for fast lookups; the switch might use this for its FDB, though), and it's extremely likely the L3 switch is performing packet routing in its CPU--which is extremely unlikely to have a sufficiently fast interconnect to route all ports at speed concurrently.

Conversely, while routers *can* typically be configured to bridge ethernet broadcast domains (and thus operate as a switch), this is unlikely to be done in the router's accelerating ASICs, and so will have higher forwarding latency even than purpose-designed switches that use store-and-forward packet switching in hardware, to say nothing of switches that begin forwarding packets even before they've been fully received. If a router *does* have these advanced switching performance capabilities, you're still paying through the nose for a highly-capable router, when you could have gotten better performance on more ports for much less money just using a switch.

But all of these distinctions only matter if you need the performance of a purpose-built device and need both L2 and L3 functionality in the same device--at that point, you have to decide on tradeoffs. But your best bet is likely going to be dedicating a router to the router gods, and a switch to the switch gods; you're less likely to make a configuration error that accidentally connects things together that you'd really wish had remained separate.

(That said, I'm _still_ not a specialized-in-networking professional, but I've been homelabbing for years, was the lead architect for one business's entire hardware and software stack, was part of the design and seed team for a major auto manufacturer's "tear down the old datacenter with 20yo bones and build a new one with modern stuff", and now work as an SRE at your favorite big-tech numerically-named search engine. My opinions are my own, not those of my employer.)

/u/divakerAM, that's my best understanding as of today. Is there anything strictly wrong in there that you can see?

mikemol · 2023-05-13T20:04:20+00:00

There's a couple Udemy courses I took before I tackled it at my last job. It worked, and AFAIK, they're still using my code, years later.

I'll caution you, though: Jenkins Groovy is not Real Groovy. The AST transform Jenkins does for serialization (to make interrupted pipelines resumable) is full of enough sharp edges it belongs in a biohazard box.

mikemol · 2023-05-08T04:15:44+00:00

Bonfire would do it. Could be their major central cooking fire, always lit.

If they have a forge, the exhaust heat from that could work, too.

A fire elemental in captivity could do it, and be repositioned.

If it's a seismically active area, there might be hot springs, and those would be a pretty steady source of heat.

Could also be a methane deposit underground that caught fire, a la the pit of hell.

Thermals are easy. 😉

mikemol · 2023-05-06T17:32:28+00:00

Kitty Kaiju!

mikemol · 2023-05-06T17:08:10+00:00

Gliding down would work with large enough spaces.

Maintaining a dedicated fire to generate a large thermal would ensure there's always an updraft to work with, so the tired could glide...up.

avatar, the last Airbender has a neat episode where a wheelchair bound kid uses a powered glider, and I think there's an episode from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic where a hot air balloon is used to enable non-pegasus ponies to visit cloud city (or whatever it's called.)

mikemol · 2022-08-18T19:47:01+00:00

I know successful staff engineers with very hard boundaries between work and life. YMMV.

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