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Coding + Mahjong related story:

Back in college, while majoring in CS, I had a rough time dealing with semicolons, typos, missed characters while coding.

I thought to myself "I wonder if playing Mahjong in the Windows games would help me get better at scanning code and finding these types of errors". So I tried it and, lo and behold, it did.

Also, in this day and age of LLMs writing a lot of the code, scanning for missing semicolons in code sounds like "I was great at fixing telegraphs!"


Reminds me of the story about Aeroflot (Soviet National airline) and hijackings

- Aeroflot flights get hijacked and flown to West Berlin

- Soviets decided to put Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) on the planes much like we have Air Marshals today

- Spetsnaz figures "we have guns and are on the plane already" so they start hijacking flights

- So Soviets put TWO Spetsnaz teams on the flight

- Team 1 decides to hijack flight, realize there is a Team 2 who ALSO agrees to hijack the flight


Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:

"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."

But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:

"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978) A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."

Are you an AI?


For all of the "saturated market" talk, I always think of the following examples:

- Restaurant Row in NYC is full of packed restaurants b/c people like variety and the demand is high enough to have multiple market participants

- Clorox is a chemical with a fancy bottle and a lot of marketing. They make $150 million+ profit a QUARTER on this [0]

- As someone once said: if it's visible and people see it as part of their identity, there are many brands e.g. clothes, cars etc. If it's not visible, there are fewer brands e.g. underwear

- The ability to personalize applications has been around for over 20 years but people still want predictable user interfaces so they can share with friends, spouses etc

0 - https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/clorox-posts-lower-pro...


Sometimes you are forced into the ulnar deviation for other reasons.

For example:

- I have long arms (6'3" fingertip to fingertip)

- I have bad vision (20/40 is best I can get even with glasses)

- B/c of the above I like to have the monitor close to me (or I sit closer to the monitor)

- For a long time (5 years) I worked on a trading floor with a desk with very limited depth so my wrists were often turned inward

So I ended up getting a split keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle) so I could spread my hands farther apart so I didn't get the ulnar deviation.


> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel

This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:

- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses

- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid

- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first

As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.


My first laptop was G3 Apple laptop.

It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.

Dell XPS 13 was the 2nd worst.


HDMI in 1997–2003?

Sorry, VGA. And yes the G3 laptop was used to create my first software based solution since it could handle Unix / Linux coding.

By the way the person that down voted my comment highlights the rejection of reality that others lived through.


why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases

There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:

    $ ip address show dev br0 | grep -m 1 valid_lft
           valid_lft 69133sec preferred_lft 69133sec
It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.

I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.


Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)

that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc

I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing


If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.

Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.


Users would assign it to 'just that network is flakey'.. not 'my hardware is not behaving properly' because it works elsewhere.

I do observe this at work sometimes, on Linux I have no issues with wifi/network, but Apple users are complaining.

Many years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house.

My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything.

Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC)

But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi.

So I did the following:

- Plugged in an ethernet cable

- Opened the browser (IE 4!)

- Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary

- scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box

- Success!

It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.


>Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive.

That's not how things work. If you're using a USB adapter then Linux isn't failing to detect the drive, the adapter is failing to detect the drive. Also I'm pretty sure Linux still supports IDE, not that it matters in this case.


If anything my guess here would be the master/slave/cable select jumper.

Like, last I looked the Linux kernel still had MFM/RLL support, although I'm not sure that's going to get included even as a module in a modern distro.


IIRC, the Soundblaster 16 driver received a bug fix recently.

My evening hobby this week is getting my old Rock Band Wii instruments working on Linux. Got inspired by seeing a Linux 7 headline that the CRKD guitar is supported.

There's a whole kernel module that exposes all the Wiimote accessories (inc. plastic instruments) as gamepads. It's still shipping in SteamOS today.


> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things causing competition to push margins to nothing.

This was true before LLMs. For example, anyone can open a restaurant (or a food truck). That doesn't mean that all restaurants are good or consistent or match what people want. Heck, you could do all of those things but if your prices are too low then you go out of business.

A more specific example with regards to coding:

We had books, courses, YouTube videos, coding boot camps etc but it's estimated that even at the PEAK of developer pay less than 5% of the US adult working population could write even a basic "Hello World" program in any language.

In other words, I'm skeptical of "everyone will be making the same thing" (emphasis on the "everyone").


This is cool but doesn't Grafana + Prometheus have a lot of this included already?

My understanding is that they are a more general purpose data collection, and visualization framework. Potentially you could build something like this with that software, but they do not have knock-knock.net’s functionality built in.

Similar thing happened with mask manufacturers during COVID.

They didn't spin up additional mask production b/c they knew the pandemic would eventually pass. They learned this lesson from SARS.

Not maxing out production during spikes (or seasonality) in demand is a key tenet of being a "rational economic actor".


too bad the bicycle industry didn't learn this. They acted like COVID was the new-normal, and it has resulted in many companies disappearing when they learned the hard way that demand for bikes in a pandemic is neither sutainable nor normal.

> Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention

Sidebar:

Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".

- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical

- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?

- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?

These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.


Thats when you reach out to your insurer and ask them their requirements as per the policy and/or if there are any contractual obligations associated with the requirements which might touch indemnity/SLAs. If it does, then it is critical, if not, then its the classic conversation of cost vs risk mitigate/tolerance.

And in the big scheme of things, none of those things are even important, your family, your health and your happiness are :-)

depends, if you don’t clean up the logs and monitor that cleanup will it eventually hit the p&l? eg if you fail compliance audits and lose customers over it? then yes. it still eventually comes back to the p&l.

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