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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years

    1. Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
    2. Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
    3. Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade


  • At a guess:

    • People with steam accounts and VPNs in countries that steam doesn’t operate in. Steam will block your “foreign” credit card as a fraud risk, but eBay dgaf cos it’s the sellers problem if they get ripped off
    • This is probably a pretty convenient way to send small amounts of money to people in a way that looks pretty legit. Arrange to buy some drugs off someone over telegram, they get you to buy a “steam card” from them, they send an envelope with a blank bit of cardboard and the drugs





  • I’m pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I’ve even owned - smart or otherwise.

    That said, I don’t think I’m going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren’t around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn’t had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I’m not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I’ll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash


  • This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

    • The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
    • Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
    • If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

    To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

    • A physical device
    • An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

    They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.


  • So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

    The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

    What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

    The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.










    • https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter?tab=readme-ov-file#textfile-collector - which makes node exporter watch a specific directory for files that contain metrics, then re-export them back to the central Prometheus server
    • Some systems have their own metrics endpoints - instead of getting Prometheus to scrape these directly I set up a Cron job to curl these into files for node exporter - this means I don’t need extra config in Prometheus to find the endpoints, and don’t need to mess with firewall rules
    • Other systems don’t directly expose metrics in a format Prometheus can use - in this case I will write/find a script that can do the conversation, then either set it up to write the metrics file directly and run it on a Cron, or run it as a service and another Cron job to do the scrape