fubarx, fubarx@lemmy.world

Went on the public tour of our local waste-treatment facility. Really fascinating stuff. Highly recommend it if you’re even slightly curious.

There are definitely industrial-scale automation systems. Mostly PLCs, but also SCADA for monitoring. Lots of 20-30 year-old tech. Those networks have no reason to be connected to the internet.

But there were also office equipment and personal devices everywhere. All it takes is for someone wanting to monitor the state of a digester on their laptop from home.

You just crossed the beams.

What they don’t show in a lot of SciFi is the mundane day-to-day stuff (AFAIK, the only shows that came close were Red Dwarf and Firefly.)

Problem is, things break. Connectors come loose. Temperature makes things brittle. Small debris cross pads and create shorts. Most automated manufacturing lines can catch assembly problems, but none have 0% failure rate. This is what post-deployment maintenance is for. Somebody shows up in a van with a bunch of test gear and replacement parts. They diagnose the problem, swap out a cable or board, and the business keeps humming.

Add IoT and fancy telemetry. Monitor sensors and run ML to do predictive analytics. It still requires someone in a cargo van with a bunch of spare parts.

If you put an installation in a remote location, under water, or in space, there are benefits. But you just multiplied the cost of basic maintenance. You can build in redundancies, but a small glitch at a single-point-of-failure could cascade to a catastrophe.

Microsoft and Google tried putting data-centers under water, and after years of trials they nixed it because of these issues. Multiply that for something far out in space.

Only alternative is to build failure into the business model. Something breaks, you just leave it to rot (or burn in the atmosphere) and send another container out. Maybe the finance math works out, but it sure is wasteful.

tl:dr: SciFi is fantasy. A clogged toilet is reality.

Last time this happened, we got Tang: https://www.wideopencountry.com/tang-drink/

“Give it to me. I’ll leak it myself.”

…

“Now, I am the leaker!”

From the HuggingFace article:

With node root and forged service-account tokens valid for 24 hours, the agent read the cluster’s secret objects, including a production object holding 136 keys. With node root and forged service-account tokens valid for 24 hours, the agent read the cluster’s secret objects, including a production object holding 136 keys.

The whole thing about moving from centralized to decentralized had a core glitch. Whatever server you signed on would effectively lock you in. What happened if things didn’t go as planned? LOLA is a good step, but it’s still not enough.

Long time ago, URNs were designed to handle URLs that moved. These were permanent resource indicators that would allow the underlying data to move but not break the link. The HTTP redirect codes were supposed to help. Idea was, a website could redirect to a new location so clicking on a link would never get you a 404. It assumed both source and target site were still accessible so source could send the 301, 302, 307, or 308 codes. Very genteel. But what if the source site or account were zapped or suddenly blocked?

Redirect codes work if the owner moved them and has now set up a suggested next location. But it doesn’t handle the negative reasons. Getting forcibly banned, site getting hacked, sites shutting down, owner not paying the bill (for economic, health, or political reasons), anything else that could render the content inaccessible. It’s nice to add constructs to avoid getting account hacked. But what if owner is in jail, muffled, coerced, going through a tough personal stretch, or dead?

They still need to solve for real life and how shit happens.

This is great!

All the bad advice in those poorly-edited “For Dummies” books gets to live on.

Corporate customer dinner in Vegas, footed by sales director, who insisted on ordering the most expensive bottle of scotch on the menu.

It was pretty good, but pretty sure not worth the high 4-digits.

He did get to close the sale 🤷🏻‍♂️

My dad took me for a drive when I was 15. Awkwardly asked if I knew about women. I lied and said yes. He was visibly relieved. That was the end of it.

My wife and I made sure our kids had multiple sex talks, quizzed them about scenarios (especially involving STDs and consent), and gave them starter 3-packs of condoms.

We’re not leaving things to chance. We also factored the future therapy bills into the equation.

Video summary of Iliad: https://youtu.be/T7iVwJb0BfE

Precursor to The Odyssey. Explains why certain things happen later. You can watch it sped up. Video summary of The Odyssey: https://youtu.be/OuGeoq_uVts

To go even deeper: https://youtu.be/BgSiijz-bKM

vLLM.

It’s slower to start, but once it gets going, pretty solid.

Congrats! Hope it went well.

It’s a bit too late now, but for anyone else, make sure someone packs you both a takeaway food box, as well as beverages.

When we got married, we spent the whole time going around talking to people and neither one of us got a chance to really eat. Fortunately, someone with experience had thought ahead. We ended up back at our place super late, tired, happy, starving, and grateful to discover the goodie bag.

Thanks for this. Read both books back in college. Just watched an hour long YT synopsis of each book. Have tickets to see the IMAX 70mm version in a couple weeks. May be enough time to re-read the book.

Will keep an eye out for the differences you point out. Thanks again.

Wonder how many of those repos contain AI-generated code?

They’re just there for a three hour tour. A three hour tour.

Don’t EVER use any public wifi without a proper VPN. As soon as you connect, launch the VPN. Hotels, museums, conferences, coffeshop, busses and trains, and library wifis are the worst. Even homes of friends.

I’ve seen wireshark traffic that would make your blood curl.

As with most things, you just have to nail the one appreciative customer.

It’s all that gherkin testing, isn’t it?

There are many branches in philosophy, and it’s easy to mix them up. Depends on what you’re into.

• Ethics: notions of right and wrong and moral values.
• Epistemology: questions of knowledge. How do we know what we know.
• Metaphysics: ideas of space, time, existence.
• Aesthetics: appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, etc.
• Logic: for the math-oriented. How do we reason and arrive at conclusions? If X, then Y.
• Language: how we communicate. Meaning of words, symbols, and metaphors.
• Phrenology: method of relieving cranial pressures.
• Science: how to reason about the physical world.
• Religion: Understanding the divine and how we fit in.

This is where he wakes up from a dream and we find out he’s been in an asylum for 30 years.

He looks around, blinks, and goes: “Whoah…”

Then the nurse leans in and whispers: “Come with me if you want to live.”