After literally about 10 years of lusting after these, I finally pulled the trigger. I don’t know when they’ll get made and arrive, but I feel that they will have been worth the wait. But… ouch.
SA Retro Keycaps, Ordered
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED
According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.
I mean, I keep saying that they’re doing all of this, in the open, despite the clear intent and letter of the Constitution, but, here we are, and here we will continue to be, unless someone like Vivek Ramaswamy can get elected, and shut it down. Unfortunately, we’ve already witnessed our “deep state” kill three prominent national leaders to prevent them from changing their agenda, and watched in slow motion as no one was ever held accountable for these conspiracies, so it’s not like they’ll let him — or anyone like him — anywhere near the presidency.
Why do people use VBA?
Why do people use VBA? In order to answer this question, we must first look at another question – who actually uses VBA in the first place? In 2021 I ran a poll on /r/vba where I asked redditors why they code in VBA. From these data, we can clearly see that the majority of people who use VBA do so mainly because they have no other choice. Many organisations run their entire business processes with Excel, and when a little bit of automation is required VBA is usually #1 on the list.
Source: Why do people use VBA?
I was just ranting about this to my kids a couple days ago.
Even in large companies, with massive IT departments, and lots and lots of internal databases and information systems, US businesses are still run on Excel. That’s not subjective. I’ve worked for decades inside three Fortune 250’s (and a couple smaller shops), and bad Excel “applications” are in use at all of them. And after one person learns enough VBA to get a spreadsheet dealing with a particular issue to save a little time for themselves, they start sharing them with their colleagues, and the problem gets worse. Half of my career has been built on making “real” applications out of Excel spreadsheets that were wobbling under their own weight.
But why?
Back in the old days, IT grew out of the accounting department. They had the only computer in the building, and it was an IBM mainframe. Great stuff, right? Saved a lot of time and paperwork, right? Except that it didn’t. It quickly ossified the company’s work flow, and permanently hobbled its ability to adapt to change. It would take years to get any changes made in the mainframe group, and people were frustrated. Along came spreadsheets, and everything changed.
I saw it myself in my first engineering job in 1993. We got new computers with Windows 3.1 and Quattro Pro. (And AutoCAD. And, of course, on mine: DOOM!) After weeks of bugging the lady who ran the mainframe — who apparently had to write a whole program — I got her to dump the BOM for a couple of our products to compare for similarities. I downloaded the 2 files to my PC with a token ring mainframe interface card. I think they were only about 1MB each. With 8MB of RAM, I had twice as much memory as our System 36, and I could open both BOM’s in a spreadsheet, and analyze them to my heart’s content. Understanding that I had more processing power on my desk than the freezer-sized unit in the other room was eye-opening.
American manufacturing companies (at least) never got the message. The invention of the spreadsheet spared them from facing the fact that the mainframe had become the black hole of their IT world. As changes were becoming impossible to get from the mainframe group, PC’s with Windows and Excel allowed people at all levels and in all job functions to start working around the mainframe and its limitations.
Now, these kinds of companies are decades behind the curve. They thought “outsourcing” was going to fix all of their problems. When it didn’t, they thought “consultants” would be the trick. Surely “agile” will do it this time, right? No. It’s not the process; it’s the mainframe. Forcing every corporate workflow and piece of data to be kept canonically inside a 40-50-year-old legacy system’s limitations is quite literally killing the company. It’s certainly killing their competitive advantage.
My current company still breaks our primary software component into 8 pieces because that’s what would fit on floppies to send to the plant to program the hardware. Every IT system — and every spreadsheet — in the company has to deal with this 40-year-old legacy issue because that’s what we programmed the mainframe to expect, and now that’s the only way to bill a customer for it. So the logistics of dealing with multiple trees and branches of software (and multiple trees and branches of documentation about the software) is multiplied by a factor of 8 to this day. There is no escape from this black hole. You can’t re-engineer this situation. It’s too ingrained.
I worked for one group which, on every engineering release, had to get a giant table of software versions — each with their 8 part numbers — into the mainframe. The process was so onerous that they would spend days clicking through mainframe terminal emulator screens to get the information they needed, to make a spreadsheet in a particular format, which they would send to another group to actually enter back into the mainframe. Part of the problem was the spreadsheet had to be in 3 columns, but the mainframe screens were in 4 columns (or vice versa), so a lot of it was purely formatting. I wrote a little program to automate all of this, but I’ve left the group, and I’m sure no one uses it any more. The particularly stupid part of this story is that people fought me to write a little software that saved these people 10’s of hours a week in the name of their own job security.
And no one in the corporate hierarchy cares. In this day and age, the executives are all just playing the waiting game, letting things atrophy — saying all the right things publicly — while they wait until the financials are inverted enough to make the company a juicy prospect for a buyout in an industry-wide rollup by private equity.
Meanwhile, actual people have to get stuff done to stay employed and feed their families. Inside the company, the managers have to look at the three year lead times to get a simple application written by “corporate IT,” and can do nothing but just continue to throw bodies and VBA macros at it. Or, in my case, have me write something to do it. That is, until it gets successful enough that people notice, and it gets taken away from me, but that’s another story…
The Joy of Coding
I’m writing a program to read a large JSON file to insert tens of thousands of rows of data into a graph DB using PySpark, but the development loop still evokes the same joy and magic as when I was typing in a program from a magazine on a Vic-20.
And, to me…
Concerns over Cryptocurrency Mining and the Environment
When BitCoin prices were spiking a year ago, people concerned with such things started pointing out that the energy required to perform all the mining could power a small country, and lamented the implied acceleration of the destruction of the environment due to the CO2-producing energy sources that were running overtime because of it.
It occurs to me that a massive portion of the US economy now relies on digital advertising, which is unquestionably one of the least efficient investments in the world. Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs per dollar of ad revenue is? I mean, it must be profitable, or they wouldn’t do it, but it surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. So, sure, complain about cryptocurrency “setting the earth on fire” to make some investors billions, but Google gets a free pass on miles and miles of private server farms cranking away 24×7 running their ad services and the auction house to make their trillions?
And that’s just Google, the poster child of this kind of thing. Where’s the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? I can’t remember anyone ever bringing this up. I think it should make people wonder why this isn’t seen anywhere. Could it be that the very companies making the most money from this activity are actively suppressing this kind of criticism?
Stealing Dolmens in Cyrodill
I’ve completely ignored achievements in Elder Scrolls Online up till now. There are so many, it’s overwhelming. But coming back to the game after over a year, I notice that I “already” have about half the “points” in the game, without even thinking about it, so I’ve started paying more attention.
Finally managed to get all achievements. It was a long run but finished.
Source: I have finished the game. — Elder Scrolls Online
This guy “finished” the game on PC. In the comments, he says the new command in the game \played says he has 1,000 days in the game. That’s 24,000 hours.
I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)
Source: I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)
This guy “finished” the game on Playstation. He figured he has 18,000 hours in the game.
What I’ve discovered is that, after a couple thousand hours in the game, I have a whole bunch of achievements which are almost done, just by nature of having played the game, and finishing them just needs a couple more things to be done. I’ll admit, it’s been its own kind of fun doing them. Most unlock new titles or colors to use in the dye stations, which are so esoteric and unimportant, they become special in their own right.
I “ran” all of the delves in Cyrodiil a long time ago, to farm their skyshards, but in the achievement tracker, I noticed that I had not killed the secondary bosses in a half dozen of them. I ran to the far corners of the map to complete the achievement, and then thought, hey, why not keep running the vast landscape to at least discover the dolmens, so that I could see which one was active on the map, so that I could come back, and eventually do all of them too.
Came up on one, and saw that it was actually running! Great! Except I saw that there was an enemy player doing it… He was on the last boss… and it looked like he didn’t have full health… What the heck!? A dude so weak that he’s half dead fighting a dolmen boss? I immediately overcome my reticence, jump in, and basically stab him in the back. He dies easily. I finish the boss, and get the chest.
My heart is POUNDING. I’m out of breath. I run to the next closest dolmen. It’s running. He’s there. On the last boss again. I kill him again.
I can see that one of the dolmens I recently discovered is running now. I run all the way over to it. Yup! Again, he’s there, and, again, on the last boss.
I “stole” 3 dolmens on the last boss from this poor guy in 15 minutes.
I felt a little bad.
Then I ran into a ditch and died from lava, and quit while I was ahead.
Honestly, there is NOTHING in this world that makes me so nervous as PVP in ESO.
It’s kind of sad to say, but, at least in a way, I never felt more alive than getting the skyshards in the enemy bases in Cyrodill, running away from a dude trying to chase me in my “speed gear” to get the very last one.
Of course, chasing down the easy-to-complete achievements will just lead me to the ones that need a whole lot of work, and then to the trial trifectas. Where do I cut it off, and do other things? I don’t know. But again, the recent additions to the game that allow “marginal” people like me to access “the whole game” make it fun to at least explore, and see where that line lies for me.
Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband | Techdirt
On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.
For 25 years, I’ve been saying that every house needs to have a fiber drop, owned by the city, just like electricity, water, and sewer, through which the resident can contract with service providers to get whatever digital services they want. Looks like this may be exactly what’s happening in Cleveland. Finally.
Uncle Buck’s Niece
The movie Uncle Buck was released in 1989. Like other John Hughes movies, I enjoyed it, but the real highlight for me was the girl played Uncle Buck’s niece, Jean Luisa Kelly. To me, she was nearly the epitome of feminine attractiveness: a perfect mix of cute, pretty, and hot.
Little did I know that I would meet the following smokeshow just a couple of years later. The first time I saw her, our mutual friend was introducing her down a line of people, and I was at the end. By the time they got to me, I had picked my jaw back up off the floor, and tried to play it cool.
Right after we met, she went to Colorado to get a paralegal certification. She came back. We started talking. We both got jobs working night shift. We spent hours on the phone every night. After four years, I put a ring on it.
I kept thinking that I had seen someone that looked just like her, and I finally put two and two together. I was just reminded of all of this because I just rewatched Uncle Buck on some streaming show, and then I happened to see some of Sue’s old pictures from high school on the floor of the bedroom.
The thing that slays me, to this day, is the fact that she revealed herself to be even more beautiful on the inside, as if such a thing were possible. She’s my rock and my best friend, and I don’t know what I’d do without her.
Why I Ripped The Same CD 300 Times
CDs store digital data, but the interface between CDs, lasers, and optical diodes is very analog. Read errors can be caused by anything from dirty media, to scratches on the protective polycarbonate layer, to vibration from the optical drive itself. The primitive error correction codes in the CDDA standard, designed to minimize audible distortions on lightly used disks, are not capable of fully recovering the bitstream on CDs with a significant error rate. Contemporary CD ripping software works around this with two important error detection techniques: redundant reads and AccurateRip.
Source: Why I Ripped The Same CD 300 Times
Found via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33499646
There’s an enormous latent anxiety about this subject with “audiophiles.” It cracks me up. On the one hand, sure, you want to get exactly what’s on the CD to the hard drive. But when you get an encoding error, we’re talking about one bad value for one channel of stream encoded at 44.1 KHz. Are these guys really telling me that they think they can hear a defect in an audio stream that occurs within 23 nanoseconds? And if they’re really telling me that, do they really expect me to believe it?
Demagnetizing CDs?! – YouTube
Follow up to this.
It’s just a scam. Everything in the marketing copy is a lie. Nothing about it will do anything to the sound produced by the disc. Yet there are still articles at the top of Goole search results, talking about how much better CD’s and DVD’s are heard and seen after using this… device.
Let’s break this down.
The layer of metal that CD’s use to reflect the laser light is aluminum oxide.
We could stop right here, because the entire idea of “demagnetizing” a CD is a farce, since, as everyone understands, aluminum isn’t magnetic. But let’s set that aside for a moment, and continue. There’s an even-more ridiculous reason this whole idea is patently stupid.
A molecule of aluminum oxide, consisting of Al2O3, would be approximately 478.5 picometers across.
CD lasers run at 780 nanometers.
Even if the molecules of aluminum were somehow “inverted” from their original, stamped orientation, due to “magnetism” induced by the label printing process, first, it could have no effect on the signal produced because there’s no part of the laser decoding that depends on molecular orientation, and second, any material in the disc substrate that has been “flipped” would be invisible to the CD laser, as the molecules themselves are 1,500 times smaller than the laser can distinguish.
But, yeah, someone made this, and people have bought it, and I’m certain that they “heard things they’d never heard before” in their music. Further, I’ll bet it’s still being offered for sale in “audiophile” magazines.