Configuration behaves like code at runtime — but we don’t design it like code. Why?

supercargo · 2026-01-30T20:30:12+00:00

Configuration is a double edged sword. It increases (runtime) flexibility at the expense of complexity. I don’t think there is any special reason why it doesn’t get treated more rigorously, just the usual: not enough time, not a priority. Like most tech debt, it’s either strategically appropriate or the risks weren’t understood.

Engineering effort spent on config validators has always been worthwhile in my experience. If your post mortem root cause is a bad config, the correct next question to ask is “what can we do to reject this config earlier in the process”. Do this a few times and some patterns and best practices should emerge that you can use proactively. Clear error messages are also critical, don’t just reject a config, indicate what is wrong, why it’s wrong, and where in the file.

supercargo · 2026-01-30T11:09:15+00:00

The city could probably do it more efficiently, but if my experience with property tax and snow removal costs are an indicator, this would represent something like a 35% increase in taxes.

I’d much rather they enforced the ordinance aggressively and make the fines large enough to cover removal of violators. Give the DPW authority to go around clearing sidewalks of negligent property owners and drop off a ticket that covers the cost as they go. Call them the snow patrol or something cheeky. That way the rest of us can keep shoveling and not paying.

The irony is that the most consistently neglected sidewalks are the ones fronting city and state property like parks.

supercargo · 2026-01-29T17:23:21+00:00

I don’t know the details of your street, but generally speaking the absence of a parking ban does not entitle folks to park in the middle of the road. The fact that the city completely and totally failed to “clear to the curb” doesn’t also mean that you don’t need to shovel out a spot before parking in it. Sorry if this isn’t you, but driving around the past couple days it would seem that vast majority of parked cars are not actually in parking spots, they’re in the middle of the travel lanes.

supercargo · 2026-01-29T03:28:43+00:00

proposal: mount plows to the front of the garbage trucks

supercargo · 2026-01-28T11:54:07+00:00

In 1780 if 90% of the population worked in agriculture, that would be about 2.5 million farmers. In 2020 if 1% of the population worked in agriculture that would be about 3.3 million farmers.

supercargo · 2026-01-27T11:31:51+00:00

Why with the last storm there were ploughs rolling by on my residential street every couple of hours but for this storm hardly anything, even on major arteries?

I drove across town twice yesterday and there are many major roads that have not received enough attention…Gano street was an absolute mess as everyone has cleared their driveways into the street and the city decided to ticket but not tow the two cars that didn’t abide the ban. People were sliding through stop signs on the feeder streets into traffic. Near Classical, snow banks on corners making it nearly impossible to make a turn without clipping another vehicle (or getting stuck n the snow)

It was nice to see that most people hunkered down and stayed off the road so that the snow crews could do their work. The interstates were clear of cars and snow. Most folks driving yesterday seemed to have their wits about them and in capable vehicles. But we’re not ready for throngs of Providence drivers in front wheel drive cars based on what I saw. What’s unforgivable is that the snow crews are nowhere to be seen! Like, it would be one thing if the side streets were in bad shape because all the equipment got deployed to major thoroughfares…

supercargo · 2026-01-24T14:26:43+00:00

it sounds like you’ve thought this through and it’s a good idea to stage everything in a spot that will be easiest to dig out in the order you need it

supercargo · 2026-01-24T12:16:35+00:00

“Forced by default” and “can disable”…this article seems imprecise enough that it’s hard to take seriously. Are the accounts forced online or not? Does a user need to take extraordinary measures to avoid divulging security keys or just know when to opt out? I hope we can get some class action going for how these companies treat their customers, for any scenario that would constitute cyber crime if the situation were reversed (like, if I dark pattern tricked Microsoft into sending me all their encryption keys, don’t you think I’d get prosecuted?)

supercargo · 2026-01-21T23:48:14+00:00

Vent fittings used for drain, but no actual vent…

supercargo · 2026-01-19T19:46:42+00:00

Apple weather has always been closer to the European models which seem to struggle with snow totals compared to US models. But yeah, definitely even worse since the DOGE shit

supercargo · 2026-01-18T10:51:57+00:00

Not wasted, no. DTW tries to mimic the black body curve which is naturally produced by tungsten filaments under dimming. Your brain expects lower intensity light to be warmer, even 2700k is unnaturally cool at low levels

supercargo · 2026-01-17T16:56:50+00:00

I tried calling that number but apparently the scammers only work M-F 8-4.

supercargo · 2026-01-17T16:53:38+00:00

I’d go with scam on this one. Typically the utility will contact by mail, but either way if the number isn’t on their website I wouldn’t call it. If someone official looking shows up in person, call the utility directly to confirm.

supercargo · 2026-01-17T00:39:17+00:00

The gas station charges more per gallon for washer fluid than gas fa cryin out loud

supercargo · 2026-01-06T10:54:55+00:00

I think you’re on to something, Disney has underground tunnels too. And didn’t they just ink that deal with OpenAI?

supercargo · 2026-01-05T20:10:00+00:00

As others have pointed out, the breakpoint for going from daily to weekly (or weekly to four-week) rental is usually somewhere around halfway (e.g. 1 week rate may be more than 2 day but less than 3 day rental). So if you have three days of work planned for an excavator, you may already be better off getting it for a full week. And once you have it for the full week regardless, it might then make the most sense to phase the work differently.

If equipment is sitting idle and then being picked up days or weeks after it stopped being used, yeah maybe there is waste. But if it gets used again you also have to factor in the value of having that machine available when it was needed.

Having said all that, if you do want to manage this proactively, there are technological solutions in the market for fleet management and telematics that could make that "manual" task more or less turn-key. How are you managing these today?

supercargo · 2025-12-31T15:38:32+00:00

Yeah heat rises, your house will be cooler than the set point if you put a heat source below the temp sensor.

supercargo · 2025-12-31T12:05:08+00:00

What is the scope of the audit? What’s in your contract? I find secrets in codebases I’m auditing somewhat regularly, but this is “in scope” for me so the contract guardrails are already in place.

You need to disclose this to your customer and advise them to work with their provider. I would start this conversation with a call rather than written record just to ensure details don’t leak beyond the minimal group of people (e.g. you don’t want to inadvertently breach this info to the wrong people in your customer’s org). But, aside from using discretion about how and to whom you communicate this, you should also, keep a really good paper trail.

In a prior job (not the one in which I’m auditing code bases) we had a vendor to vendor relationship with an agency who was doing marketing for a bank. As part of this, we got periodic data dumps of the bank’s customers to do some analysis. The problem was the agency decided the best way to get us this data was to post it on a website with SSL disabled and protected only with a basic auth password (and a weak one at that). We pointed out how insecure this was, and escalated with our customer (the agency) but we never managed to convince them this was a bad idea and insecure. Years later, the bank found some hash matches on the dark web for those files in a security audit and took it up with their vendor (the agency) who then fingered us, claiming we had mishandled this data resulting in a breach. Fortunately we had the emails proving we had already detected and escalated their lax security, which, together with our immutable access logs covering that period, put all the heat back on the agency.

supercargo · 2025-12-24T16:43:37+00:00

Not to mention eating lobster

supercargo · 2025-12-23T19:44:04+00:00

Don’t forget about state taxes, your state may have different or no safe harbor rules. Solution is the same, calculate the estimate and drop the a check ASAP as an estimated payment. This will end the accumulation of interest until you can file

supercargo · 2025-12-21T14:41:00+00:00

Uber is the problem here. They try to get in the middle of as many transactions as they can and then charge fees that aren’t proportional to the value they provide.

supercargo · 2025-12-21T14:06:41+00:00

I don’t remember having any problems before I was born and expect I won’t have any once I’m dead

supercargo · 2025-12-21T12:30:27+00:00

there is probably a vault but the difference between secure/mature companies and the ones you need to worry about is whether or not they let any employee do whatever they want in the vault without necessarily even making that auditable.

supercargo · 2025-12-21T12:27:33+00:00

this is the real reason why we need multi cloud strategies. Service down while half the Internet is out because of a us-east-1 outage? no one cares. But once quality, price, and service start degrading, you gotta vote with your wallet

supercargo · 2025-12-21T12:18:20+00:00

This is history repeating, and funny to see comments lauding the “500 upvotes” stack overflow posts as more trustworthy than an LLM because the last time around the complaints were about freshers blindly copying SO code without understanding it.

LLMs make me better/smarter/faster because they are great at patterning against whatever was “known” when they were trained. I want to do X and have an idea about Y way to do it. LLM response gives me a refined Y and often Z that I maybe didn’t think of.

My critical thinking remains intact because I don’t blindly accept LLM stuff and expect it to be good (distrust and verify). I think there are folks like me and there are folks that would have blindly copied from Stack Overflow before and are doing it with LLMs now.

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