It will be like the dot com bubble in many ways. Back in the late 1990’s every other TV commercial was for Pets.com, Ask Jeeves regularly had a balloon in the Macys Thanksgiving parade, and Lycos was pushing to be the home page for everybody. They never recovered after the bubble burst, and companies like Google quickly took over.

In a similar vein I think a lot of the AI big hitters will vanish once this bubble bursts, leaving one or two lucky/cautious ones still around to scavenge the pieces. But I don’t think companies will be so hung ho about using AI for everything once that happens.

First time I ever hoped for a tornado to strike a specific location.

Time to start with one PR per line of code…

Didn’t he brag about solving something like a dozen wars, and thus deserved the Nobel peace prize? This isn’t even a full fledged war, so why can’t he solve this?

Yeah, but that would require raising taxes, which the billionaires have convinced the masses is a terrible thing because socialism, and look where that’s gotten third world socialist countries.

The only solution, according to the billionaires, and the brainwashed masses, is to give even more money to the billionaires so that they can privatize things even more and throw cutting edge technology at the problem instead of proven solutions like light rail, etc.

Public transit in the US simply isn’t good enough in many cases. Years ago I lived in a suburb north of Boston and worked in another suburb west of Boston. It was about a 40 minute drive during rush hour. Trying to do that same commute by public transit likely would have taken me 4+ hours and involved a bus to a subway into Boston followed by a commuter train and another bus. It would have been a nightmare.

Our TV picked up ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and one or two independent TV channels from New York. Our antenna was on a rotator so that you could point it in the optimal location for each.

Born in 1967. I remember as a kid during the summer that pretty much every afternoon 10-20 neighborhood kids would get together to play games like hide and seek or kick the can. We were in a semi-rural neighborhood so kids could live up to a mile away or so. The parents were more than happy for us to be somewhere random with a bunch of other kids.

When parents had to call kids home for dinner they’d use bells, whistles, or other noisemakers. Pretty much every kid recognized the different sounds and knew which kids it applied to.

My grandparents lived in New Hampshire. Their telephone was on a party line shared with 4 or 5 neighbors. We learned to answer it only if it rang twice in quick succession.

I’m a DevOps engineer and my employer runs a lot of Linux instances in AWS. I’d love for these politicians to explain to me how age verification of Linux web servers should work for auto-scaling environments where instances are spun up and terminated automatically based on traffic volume. I’d also like to know if I should be using the age of our CEO, the age of our company (thanks to Citizens United), or something else.

Haven’t you heard the price of memory is skyrocketing?

It damn well better remain an exception. I help manage a few hundred Linux systems in AWS for my employer. We patch those systems on a quarterly basis, which in some cases means building up a whole new instance from scratch. I shudder to think what it would mean if we somehow had to prove our age for each one of these systems. And whose age/identity would it be? Our CEO? Me? My boss?

Senators that are unable or unwilling to do their jobs should be fired. From a cannon.

Juries often have one or more alternates. Those are jurors who sit in the jury box for the entire trial, but under normal conditions they aren’t in the jury room during deliberations. If a juror is unable to remain, for whatever reason, then the judge replaces that juror with one of the alternates. I sat on 2 days of a 3 day trial but tested positive for Covid the morning of the third, so I was excused. The judge replaced me with one of her alternates.

If the judge got wind that a juror was disregarding such an order then that juror would likely be kicked out & replaced with an alternate. If the transgression by the juror was severe enough the judge could potentially also refer the juror to the Attorney Generals office for investigation and possible charges.

I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.

I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.

I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.

For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…

For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.

My “scam” has caused my electric bill to effectively drop below zero when averaged over the whole year. And that includes charging our EV, which means the “scam” is saving me a boatload of cash given gas prices these days.

The article says the local utility already gets 25% of its electricity from solar panels it owns, but 75% from the provider that’s shutting them off next year…

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

What about refrigerators?

Will it block VPNs, proxies, and Bing image search as well?

I’ve seen actors fall down stairs and over a breakaway bannister live in a Broadway show. It’s clearly highly choreographed, and I also spotted the pads one actor was wearing when his shirt accidentally came untucked. Even though it looked very chaotic, in hindsight it was more of a tuck & tumble than a random fall.