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Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service (substack.com)
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forbes 30u30 strikes again
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At its core, this article argues that Delve fakes compliance while creating the appearance of compliance without the underlying substance. Wait till you find out about most of the compliance industry.
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Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319
US to deploy additional troops to the Middle East, officials say (reuters.com)
It is hard to predict the future, but to me it looks as if the USA already lost that war. Now, we can say "define losing", but in my opinion the strategy used by the USA is not clear here. Yes, they can shift constantly and willy-nilly define new goals, but everyone ends up being confused. In Iraq it was the lie that it is about weapons of mass destruction. They don't even seem to try for anything here now. The strategy used by Israel is clear - Netanyahu as ultra-right wing politician has the strategy of escalation. But this does not explain why the USA adopts this strategy 1:1. The interesting thing is that Trump is now stuck in the war, just like Putin is in Ukraine. They start forever wars and have no real way out of it, at the least not a simple one. That means the next "logical" step is that there will be US ground troops; the private media is already starting to prepare the population aka "we must occupy Kharg" (or any other area). This is somewhat similar to Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam. Step-wise expansion of the agenda. So WHO is really doing the policy in the USA? Clearly it is not Trump - he constantly changes his opinion.
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> The interesting thing is that Trump is now stuck in the war, just like Putin is in Ukraine. Trump still has a small bit of time to take an off-ramp. US casualties have been in the single digits; there's not much national pride lost in walking away. There may be lots of Trump's pride lost in pulling back, though, so yeah, he may be stuck in this war. The US is still better off than Russia, though, because we can get rid of Trump easier than they can get rid of Putin. > So WHO is really doing the policy in the USA? Events have their own momentum. Once you start the snowball rolling downhill, it's really hard to stop. Trump may not want to go to troops on the ground, but he's going to have to do that, or stop and pull back and eat his pride with Iran still unconquered (and angry). Since he will do almost anything rather than lose pride, he's trapped by the need to make this a win. In the same way, Iran is also trapped in the need to make this a win. (Not "need to win" - both sides need to make it appear to their people as a win, which is not quite the same thing.)
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> US casualties have been in the single digits; there's not much national pride lost in walking away. Fatalities are in double digits (13) though 6 are from a plane crash with no one claiming the Iranians caused it. Casualties are in the triple-digits, since it includes injured, not just killed. But yes, the numbers are still small enough we can pull out without that influencing the decision (from a public opinion perspective) substantially.
Retreating is a viable option for the US. The world will return to the status quo in a week or three, and he will look every bit the fool that he is. Nobody wants to get involved when Iran is fighting back against US aggression. The world would get a lot more interested in doing so if it were just conducting unprovoked, unilateral piracy in the straight. Withdrawal is a viable option for everyone but the man who started it. Congress can end this any time by not paying for this shit.
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I don't know, in my scenario, Iran will keep attacking the Middle Eastern countries, angering them enough to yell at Trump to fix the shit he's started. But maybe China could get them to stop... But this is amateur geopolitics commentary (A great quote about Internet commentariat when the Russian invasion started was "Last week I was an epidemiologist, this week I'm a geopolitical expert!")
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They won't. Their demands before restoration of the status quo are just internal messaging and posturing. If Russia withdrew all its troops tomorrow, Ukraine wouldn't keep bombing Moscow.
It will go down in history as one of the most monumental avoidable disasters of all time.
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It's so wild to me that the world invests in US treasuries to fund a country that spends like a drunken sailor on wars and stock buybacks, with no plan to ever pay down the debt, nor to invest in its domestic future via infrastructure or state capacity. "You need another $200B for a conflict with no purpose or need? Sure, here you go."
actually it is in Oregon. ] https://gcaptain.com/trumps-greenland-hospital-ship-arrives-west-coast-shipyard/
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Marine Traffic: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:453534/mmsi:367816000/imo:7390454/vessel:MERCY (IMO: 7390454)
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service (deepdelver.substack.com)
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Question: how likely is it that a number of 20-year olds have the passion of solving the problem of compliance auditing? I can hardly imagine that I'd even be interested in taking a look at the domain. It's just... so mundane. Or maybe the alpha-type overachievers don't care about the domain but the opportunity?
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The only job of a test is to fail, so if you never see the page red it's not doing anything. It's refreshing to see this being called out instead of going with the flow because "everyone is doing so".
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Great write up. What makes this interesting...I thought it was cool what they were doing...but also seemed too good to be true. I went ahead a booked a demo call with them. Great personas. Very friendly. Can't say they had all the answers, but they did bring a CISO on the last meeting, which seemed a bit scripted. They also never disclosed any breaches, even after I asked them. Yikes. Good luck to the orgs that went through all that process.
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I've been talking about this for a while now. For those of you thinking... Oh, I use a "good" company... think otherwise. https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1946302651383329081 The whole thing is a racket.
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There is a lot of serious allegations in here. But some of these complaints apply to most SOC 2 compliance services. For example: it points out that Delve provides pre-filled documents and encourages you to accept them as is. In my experience that is typical. I have seen companies just rubber stamp pre-created documents that describe IT processes that do not accurately reflect actual policy because the MBA[1] running the project didn't want to pull in IT and had no idea what any of it meant. [1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
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Giving you template device management policies is one thing, it's a whole other thing to say you don't have to have board meetings and generating fake minutes.
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100%, accepting pre-generated board meeting notes is egregious. This whole thing is awful and I am in no way defending it. The opposite, I think other compliance as a service companies also need to be scrutinized as well.
Compliance is something that no one ever wants and everybody hates. Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!" Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility. The regulator can ask whether you are compliant. You can present certificate from Delve or someone else and that's the end of it.
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Maybe no one wakes up wanting to deal with compliance, but it you found a company that has legal or moral obligations to be compliant with these standards, you sure have signed yourself up for it. Passing the responsibility off to some other company is, quite simply, irresponsible.
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> Passing the responsibility off to some other company is, quite simply, irresponsible. Then do not pass the responsibility. But here's the trick: the regulator would like to see an audit done by a firm and purchasing audit services is exactly that: passing responsibility. So legally you can't be compliant unless you passed responsibility.
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These compliance companies are not primarily tasked with auditing, as this article makes very clear. Delve is in control of the auditing process in a way that is inappropriate and unusual for this industry. The work that the company with these obligations should be doing themselves is generating the Section 3 description and the controls. The auditor then independently verifies their compliance with the controls. Thats a clear delineation of responsibilty, IMO
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Problem is, compliance is often detrimental to the cause. You want to encrypt users' data at rest? Illegal. You must store users data in a way prescribed by the law and it is extremely cumbersome, outdated and insecure.
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Not a single person wakes up in the morning thinking they wish to pay taxes and rent and do the laundry the other stuff that has to be done. I would be nice to smoke weed and play video games all day and order the deliveries. Some things just have to be done.
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> thinking they wish to pay taxes Wellll this is not always the case. I have moved from a shithole country to a nice one and oh boy I am crying in gratitude every month that I pay taxes. Because it is every day that I can see my money working for me in the environment. But your point stands.
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As a person who moved to a high-tax country I understand the sentiment. It's usually lost on the people who were always there paying those taxes. Somehow it often doesn't click that they get something in return. The same applies to all the audit and bureaucracy stuff. Does it do something? If you don't feel it does, does it mean it's not? I don't know really, but I hope somebody is rotating their key material as they provided in their security posture.
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When I worked in cybersecurity I had a similar realization. No one cared about security posture. They cared about insurance policies. People hired us to shift blame instead of improve security posture. this is not terribly different
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This is why I've said for years: If you want to drive best practices and policy with companies you can only do it with liability. Particularly non-insurable and non-tax deductible liability. If a company can't offload civil or criminal penalties to their insurance company and take the tax write down, they suddenly start caring about it. That said, this should be used sparingly; as it embeds a behavior deep. If that behavior later no longer makes sense it can be extremely costly to change it later.
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One of my FAANG security projects incidentally helped with some compliance efforts (I made very sure it was incidental, constantly said things like "I am thrilled that I can help you guys achieve your goals but I wanna be clear that I don't give a shit about compliance and I won't be allowing it to influence the direction of my product" in meetings, it must have been extremely annoying to work with me). At some point I was asked to look over the documents for the compliance definition and it was really hilarious. I had to give my engineering perspective on which aspects of the requirements we were and weren't meeting. But they were stuff like "you must have logs". "You must authenticate users". "You must log failed authentication attempts". Did we fulfill these requirements? It's a meaningless question. Unless you were literally running an open door telnet service or something you could interpret the questions so as to support any answer you wanted to give. So I just had to be like "do you want me to say yes?" and they did, so I said yes. Nothing productive was ever achieved during that engagement.
Wait what's the greptile story?
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It says right there, 7-day work weeks (no days off). Also they were part of the cohort forcing workers to stay minimum until 9PM. Like every AI company, their "product" is a Next.js website, OPENAI_API_KEY, and a Stripe checkout page.
The United States military?
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Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
The value of SOC2 is that it does take some experience to be able to plausibly fake the evidence which weeds out people that truly have no idea what they're doing. It also provides a blueprint of the stuff you should be doing if you actually care. But beyond that it's not worth a whole lot.
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yeah it's funny to see some defense of this practice as "well the whole thing is pointless anyway so nothing is lost by defrauding folks". Pretty hollow argument
Yes, but your team claimed this set off "voting ring" behavior [0] and it was suppressed for nearly a day because of that. I am very curious how you determine what is, or is not, "voting ring" behavior. I believe Dang is responding in another thread about that. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457689
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Obviously we don't publish how HN's voting ring detector works. If we did, it would quickly stop working. What matters in this case is (1) it's a software penalty that has nothing to do with the content of a story, (2) moderators didn't touch the submissions or even know they existed, and (3) once we did know that they existed, we merged the threads and placed the story on the frontpage - that is, we went out of our way to give this story more attention, not less - in keeping with the principle explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment .
Forbes 30u30 pipeline remains undefeated. How did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.
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This is the next one... https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035024494663016532
MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System (sharpai.org)
I'd like to recreate this benchmark using Qwopus on my M5 Max. I am curious if the theoretically improved reasoning capabilities from distillation improve its scoring. Adding this one to my to-do list for some point in the next few weeks.
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M5 MAX should be very capable, you have a great brand new MBP.
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I've been doing a lot of experimentation with Qwen3.5 models locally, and I've found for other tasks that the Opus 4.6 distilled versions of the model ("Qwopus") tend to perform better for other tasks. But this is mostly based on the quality of output, not necessarily from a performance perspective. I'll report back once I get around to running the benchmark. I'm also interested in applying local AI tools onto my local security setup (built on UniFi).
I have always envisioned a ai server being part of a family's major purchases e.g. when they buy a house, appliance, etc. they also buy a 'ai system'. Machine hardware evolution is slowing down, pretty soon you can buy one big ass server that will last potentially decades as it would be purpose built for ai. Things like 'context based home security' yeah thats just, automatic, free, part of the ai system. Everyone will talk to the ai through their phones and it'll be connected to the house, it'll have lineage info of the family may be passed down through generations etc, and it'll all be 100% owned, offline, for the family; a forever assistant just there.
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Based on our current trajectory, it seems more likely everyone will upload everything to the cloud and pay perpetual royalties to access their own data.
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I really think this is a temporary scenario, there will be advancements in ai's building the next generation of ais, where the scale of the model continually shrinks and maybe there will be some break through that allows us to double the use of existing hardware/memory etc. 10 years ago I couldn't do alexa at my house, now I'm pretty close with a Qwen3:8b / Ollamma LLM (I mean I never really wanted alexa to do anything other then play music, automate stuff, etc. zero interest in it teaching me how to code). I'm even thinking at some point we'll consider ai to be a fundamental human right to have access too as otherwise you are inherently in a disadvantaged position in terms of wealth prospects to those who do have access.
If you bought a big ass server for your home 10 years ago it probably wouldn't have even have had a GPU/AI accelerator at all. If it did, it would have been something with wimpy compute and VRAM because you needed the video encoder/decoder for security cameras or the like. I'm not sure that really gives confidence hardware has really slowed down enough to invest in it for decades. Single core CPU performance has but that's not really what new things are using.
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Yeah but, how long do mainframes last? Think of the COBOL systems used in government. No reason to update them, they worked forever; their job is discrete and they performed it well enough where intense updating wasn't a requirement.
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You also need to ask: How much do mainframes cost? They were engineered for backwards compatibility and reliability, with built in redundancy you don't find in consumer hardware. AI models are changing every other day. I have to rebuild llama.cpp from source regularly. We are no where close to a personal "AI mainframe."
I don’t think there’s anything different between what you’re suggesting and a homelab. Most people do not have a homelab and are happy to offload services like photo storage or security to remote providers.
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I'm thinking 'everyone needs an air conditioner', kinda need. Instead of 'some nerds run servers'. And this 'ac' is your 'ai'. Maybe even subsidized by the government. This will be a fundamental need.
I disagree. Let's take the M1 vs the M5 ( https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/10/apple-silicon-m1-to-m5-comparison/ ): - 6× faster CPU/GPU performance - 6× faster AI performance - 7.7× faster AI video processing - 6.8× faster 3D rendering - 2.6× faster gaming performance - 2.1× faster code compiling Over the span of 5 years. Plus, realistically what makes an "ai" server different from a computer? This "lineage info of the family may be passed down through generations" sounds nice but do you know anyone passing down a Commodore 64 or Apple II that remains in daily use? I fail to see how "ai" would protect something from obsolescence.
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Today, not much differentiates them. But as time passes our only option will be to further specialize the hardware to get realistic gains; at some point perhaps a 'purpose built analog' computer kinda thing will get to the point where it is so useful, that it would be like the 'Standard Template Constructs' concept in Warhammer 30k. So what you can make a faster ai but, the current one can 'teach everyone, basically anything'.
And it's not going to happen any time soon because there's no recurring revenue to be gained from users/homeowners for such a thing.
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Well, custom/bespoke training for your families particular needs perhaps, performed once every 5 years. I mean I envision analog/custom/bespoke ai hardware that is fundamentally 'good enough'. I mean as the market increases its need for these systems and as time progresses at some point it'll like warhammer 30k where these 'standard template constructs' are smart enough to basically teach you anything.
Buy a coral TPU for frigate - it can handle a ton of inference and is very cheap for what it offloads off the cpu
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I already run frigate. I am asking how this stacks up to it.
I'm not a hardware expert here but this strikes me as inaccurate, though the actual performance can be scenario dependent. The Jetson hardware is targeted to low power robotics implementations. The Jetson Orin is currently marketed as prototyping platform, and I believe it does not generally challenge recent Apple Silicon for inference performance, even considering prefill. In the latest Blackwell based Jetson Thor, the key advantage over Apple Silicon is its capable FP4 tensor cores, which do indeed help with prefill. However, it also has half the memory bandwidth of an M4 Max, so this puts a big bottleneck on token generation with large context. If your use case did some kind of RAG lookup with very short responses then you might come out ahead using an optimized model, but for straightforward inference you are likely to lag behind Apple Silicon. At this stage, professional inference solutions ideally use discrete GPUs that are far more capable than either, but those are a different class of monetary expense.
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You do have a deep understanding of AI hardware landscape. Thanks for your analysis.
90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective (mollywhite.net)
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns. Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle. It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win! One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
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>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns. Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
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Political campaigns certainly need money, but there are heavily diminishing returns pretty quickly. In races where all the candidates have money just throwing more in doesnt seem to accomplish much.
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Having been involved in some political campaigns and movements, I totally believe that nobody knows the ROI on where the dollars are going.
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1]. It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride. There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3]. Nobody cares about crypto. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/aipac-israel-illinois-primary-results-00833615 [2]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx [3]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-autopsy-gaza-harris/
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Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
Pesky thing called the First Amendment.
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If donating money is free speech why don’t you try giving some to a group categorized as a terrorist organization
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The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns. The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
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They really interpret the First to protect lobbying and campaign donations? I mean the Second as written also isn’t primarily about the right to pack heat, so it’s not that surprising.
Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
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I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists. And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.
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There was a really amusing article in Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago which pointed out that most of the really big donors just sprayed money at a unicause indiscriminately and that Michael Bloomberg was the only one that showed any sign of investing rationally. I mentioned that to my wife and she of course rolled her eyes because it seemed so self-serving to her. (Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about how much better The Economist was than Bloomberg Businessweek and how I finally canceled my subscription to the latter when they hired genius financial writer Matt Levine [1] to write a whole issue boosting crypto in a 200% cringe writing style just before the FTX scandal broke) [1] ... sent him an email about how sorry I was for him!
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
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Maybe it's a sign that your "pennies on the dollar" theory needs some work?
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
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The aim is not to influence the election it is to own the person who wins the election. The less likely they are to win the cheaper it is, but higher the chances it is all for nothing.
> The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes The people voted for candidates who were openly taking bribes from other people. > You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes? Crypto bros know better and wont hire the professionals
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Man get this South Park-ass analysis out of what could be a productive conversation.
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I understand the frustration but you realize how brazen the US is about bribes right? It's not a bribe unless you say "I'm giving you this money as a bribe." That's the legal standard SCOTUS has declared.
They are saying that was a bad strategy and not the usual one. I have no idea to what extent that’s true.
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It's the same strategy they used in 2024 to a great effect: if you are against the crypto industry we will attack you. Not support the other candidate, but just attack you. The intention is to not waste money on supporting candidates, but to attack those that challenge the crypto industry. It's a very unique strategy in US politics that has been deployed quite successfully at varying times (Bill Clinton, uber, airbnb). Now with the elites being so brazen about their opulence they're taking it to the extreme.
Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers' (portlandtribune.com)
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Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.
Why is that?
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The obvious reasons. People who do not have political agency should not have decisions made that prevent them from using their own devices in a setting that they are legally required to be in. That's not how things should work. One group of people should not be setting policy for another group of people in this matter. The victims of these policies aren't infants; they will be adults in about five minutes. Blankets bans and these idiotic 'oh just ban phones/computers entirely, pen and paper am i rite?' ideas have a ton of nasty externalities that no one seems to care about. They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC (having your actual voice on the device you carry day to day is nice, having a lesser experience without your actual data is intolerable + 'everyone' having the kind of device that you use for this purpose prevents you from standing out at all times) in service of chasing and responding to a moral panic. In the real world, kids just unenroll Chromebooks via the nine million exploits that have been found over the years (many of which are unpatched and some are hardware flaws) and load software that lies to the management system about the state of the device. They do whatever they want on on those devices - which is mostly 'doing their actual work without staff being able to spy on their screen/being able to play a simple game when they have no work to do'. The people using phones in class are the exact same people who were using iPods in class, were using non-smartphones in class to text constantly, using Discmans in class and so on. To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past involves gesturing towards pseudoscience and non-credible actors. For more on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000-kids-the-social-media-panic-doesnt-hold-up/ These policies have both possible problems - the 'gun control problem' (you can't really achieve anything that you claim to care about while also issuing kids laptops + you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026) and also the problem of the policy itself not addressing an actual real problem that exists - it's mostly a moral panic about social media, not some real problem of widespread usage of phones during class. The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that. People should be treated as individuals rather than a faceless blob of youth who need hostile policy designed for them. I'd also remind lawmakers that these people will be adults in about five minutes and resentment can easily carry over into the voting booth. By the way, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law.
> it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids That's such bullshit. - There is no emergency that require students to contact anyone. Communication can go through the school - Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school
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> Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school The tracker sends a notification when they're not at school, that's the point. Plus, I can lock down social media apps only during school hours. Blanket statements like this are plain ignorant. Also, I'm glad Utah finally passed a similar ban. Phones in use in class are a tremendous distraction 99% of the time.
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This is ridiculous. The school will notify you if the student is not at school, or the teachers will eventually (or their grades/missing assignments). Also you don't need to track your kids to enable school time mode, if you want to lock down their phone during school. What are you going to do when they go to college? Track them? Monitor them? Make sure they go to classes? At some point, you just have to trust your kids to do the right thing. It's a part of them learning how to grow up and be independent. It's better to make mistakes the younger you are so you can learn from them when there is less on the line.
It’s a lack of enforcement due to unruly, unparented children , in most regions’ school districts.
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I tend to avoid placing the blame on individuals (parents in this case) when the problem being described is so widespread. People act as rationally as they can, so if it's that common, it's a systemic failure. Scolding the masses is a fool's errand.
Don't get it twisted, almost every Portland-area school has gone full in on the stupid fucking Yondr pouches, and yeah it fucked up entry/exit: https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-cellphone-policy-with-mixed-reactions-from-parents They also begged parents to help pay for them: https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-parents-for-contributions-for-phone-pouches A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor and diagnostic tracker, and the exception only allows them to unlock the pouch under supervision when necessary.
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What a vulgar situation. Policy made from a moral panic and - look at that - it is negatively impacting actual people who exist.
"decreed by executive order" That's the only bummer here. I do agree with this policy, but no one voted for it. The governor just said "you're going to do this". Yes, yes, I know - people elected the governor. But this sort of policy seems like something that should require legislative approval, not just one person deciding the whole state must do something. For every time something good comes of that kind of behavior, there's 10 times when it's a disaster.
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This is a fun bureaucratic aside, but in Oregon the governor _is_ the statutory superintendent, rather than an elected official. (There are other oddities in Oregon: policy is otherwise extremely devolved, _and_ because property taxes are capped, funding goes through the legislature.)
The whole "browser game" industry is built on this phenomenon. It's about getting kids on school laptops mindlessly looping on something while shoving ads in their face. Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.
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What? Browser games were half of what made flash popular back in the day before laptops were even a normal consumer device. You're spot on with classrooms not needing tech though. They add complications and distractions on top of an already difficult task.
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Flash was founded in 1993, and while desktops were much more popular laptops were indeed a product sold to consumers
Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.
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TurnItIn.com was starting to be a thing when I was in high school. I found out it didn’t sanitize the papers you upload and had no CSRF protection, so I could upload a doc with inline JavaScript to hit the change-password and logout APIs. Was pretty impactful for my education, just not in the intended way
I surprisingly found this with my Apple Watch. was so concerned it would make me even more plugged in. But in reality now 90% of the time I get a junk email I just say “huh” instead of needing to open the phone to see what it is (and the other 15 notifications). Can’t have fomo if you know you’re not missing out, amirite?
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That's still quite insane. I get a lot of email daily but notifications onto about priority / important ones. Which is about 1-2 per _week_.
Do graphing calculators actually help people learn? We used them in high school, but when i needed to take calculus in university we didn't use them. I'm doubtful they are good for learning especially when trying to teach the foundations.
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In my case it did. I took "advanced math" (trig, mostly) in high school from an abysmal teacher. Ignoring her and developing an intuition through graphing was the best thing ever. I had the best final grade in the class.
Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything. All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.
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> BEDMAS I think I figured out what the B stands for, but where I'm from, we call it PEDMAS - the P standing for Parentheses.
Complete waste for anything math related for me. Did act as a proper gateway into coding though!
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I distinctly remember writing a minesweeper game, using the built-in programming language. Not the fast compiled one you needed a cable to transfer! Just button presses.
Note that in this case, you are getting what you pay for: I had a FIIO DAC that sounded amazing but was really bad about full-scale turn-on, sync and desync pops to the extent that it damaged my speakers. Yes, perfect power sequence hygiene would have prevented the problem, but one can't always be ready with the amplifier volume knob when their playback system crashes.
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ah good to know. Outside of having a very basic dac for my cans on my desktop, I wouldn't think of any serious equipment failures could happen. Probably wrong to assume that these things are engineered to be safe/redundant. This is going to be my first DAP in like 15 years, zune being the last one I had. Pretty excited to rock it out for a bit. There's a current fad out there to move to more single-service type of devices rather than using a phone for everything. Want to try it out myself to be more intentional with my digital actions and ween myself away from corporate social media.
Having Kids (2019) (paulgraham.com)
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Reading the post and >100 comments I've just realized there are differences between dad and mom mental experience. Looks like many dads are changing mentally when their first child is born or a bit later. Mine changed somewhere during the second trimester. Bonding is also almost automatic for mothers (especially who breastfeed), whilst it's delayed or never happens at the same level for fathers. My first child has never been close to father because he worked "9-9-6" and got 2 day leave. He could never really calm down crying baby or put her to bed. With the second child, thanks to large corp policy, he got 15 weeks bonding leave and it was a very different experience for father and child - baby didn't care on whose lap to fall asleep.
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My 2c is that it is not 'joy' or 'happiness' that kids bring to parents universally (although they might bring those things for some parents), but 'meaning'. Meaning is harder to define than joy/happiness, perhaps because it is less objective and more subjective.
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Having kids is a 4 billion year old life function (instinct). Simultaneously it is a highly sofisticated behaviour with multiple dimensions (raising). Genetics play a decisive role in kid's behaviour and powers/weaknesses. Next comes the mother, next the father and later the society. Let's not forget that parents are "kids" of the society that heavily influence their behaviour that eventually shapes their kids.
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I’ve always wanted kids, ever since I was a kid myself, but I was never really sure what it would be like to be a parent. Turns out it’s quite strange, because my kids bring me more joy than anything else. I’ll sit there for hours watching them play. You may think “that’s not strange—tons of parents say that”, but for my sort of personality, it’s very strange. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of overly analytical, detached, ambitious, and a bit obsessive. Not the sort of touchy-feely person who chases a two year old around with a smile on my face and likes watching videos of cute babies. Yet here I am. I enjoy it so much I’ve even tried to figure out if there’s a way I can take a sabbatical from work to spend the last two years with my youngest at home before he goes off to school (seems unlikely given how questions about a random two year gap on my resume might affect my long-term career). It’s funny that as a kid I always wanted to work at a tech company for the interesting tech, but now as an adult my favorite thing about it has been the 4 months of parental leave I was able to have with each newborn.
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You just write "spent two years raising my youngest kid [building tree houses and whatnot]". If you keep a bit up with tech, why would anyone think twice about that? They wouldn't where I live.
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My big learning from having a kid, was that there was more maturing and growing up for me to do (A ton to be honest). Once there was somebody else I had to keep alive and care for and think about I learned to better de-center myself in the universe. I am sure you can get to this perspective many other ways, but having children seems to be the easy mode for getting into the mindset of "it's not about me any more."
I'm 36, and unlikely to ever have kids. I'm both very grateful for the freedom that's afforded me in life, and occasionally feel grief for parts of the human experience I'll never feel.
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I have a kid and it's the greatest joy ever but I am very lucky. It's totally okay to grieve that, but I often tell other childfree folks: there are many things you can do to feel a similar kind of joy. Mentoring, volunteering, caring for friends etc. Having the joy of working for others and emotionally investing doesn't have to be exclusive.
I wish there was a way to make this decision rationally. My wife and I are coming up to the point of no return. We either do it now, or never. Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA. With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points: How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging. I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy? Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate. I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life. Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done. I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure. And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids. If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already. But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary. The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things. Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife. I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society. But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it? They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position. But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done". Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not. Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
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the easiest way to bypass all that existential anxiety is to have it happen on accident :)
There is nothing more narcissistic and selfish than having kids. There is nothing noble about fulfilling your biological imperative to leave a descendant. Quite the opposite, really, it's a rather primitive egoistical desire to somehow continue oneself after death.
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haha okay you definitely couldn't hack it
having kids and raising them unlocks completely new human skill trees that were previously hidden from you people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
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i used to not think this, but then i had a kid and realized it's very true
I think there are many ways to connect deeply to humanity and you are being dismissive of those other experiences. Yours is just another anecdote amongst the ones I presented. Would you dismiss your kids experiences if they decide not to have kids? I would not.
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name one that would make me care about what happens to earth after I depart?
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Are you capable of empathy only for people related to you?
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Sounds like you could use a soul
I would really like to have kids, but I don’t have my act together. I also feel like my partner is not suitable or capable of properly taking care of our kids. Feels pretty awful and am scared to not have any kids as I grow older. I worked hard to get a good relationship with my partner, and now that we have one I worry kids will only ruin what we have now
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your world will change in that hospital room the first day or two together with the new person in your family. it really is seismic.
Of course people are free not to have kids... But I've always find it weird to "celebrates childfree lives". And I'm frankly annoyed by the growing activism to ban kids from public places in the name of "adults quietness".
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many adults nowadays are less resilient than my baby
Kids cost time, not money. So the wealthier you are, the more difficult it is because you probably have less free time. You can pay someone else to raise your kids (daycare/etc.) but then you lose a lot of the value of having kids. This bullshit excuse that somebody can't afford to have kids is proven wrong by the fact that poorer people have more kids than rich people. You can even be unemployed. Gone are the days of destitute single mothers having to give up their child to the church and work in the poorhouse. We have social welfare for that. Maybe the fact that poor people can have lots of kids has taken away their value as a status symbol for wealth?
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> Kids cost time, not money. There's a well known aphorism about this...
Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs. But that didn't happen. We just carried on being Jason and his partner, but with a baby in tow. I had spent most of my 30s cramming in as much "living" as possible, to make sure I'd stocked away a lifetime supply of it. After all, I'd probably never get another chance to travel for long periods, keep up with climbing, and all that other stuff that Independent Jason could do. But it was all for naught. We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday. Life is just as much fun as ever. But now we have some kids to play with.
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It happened to me and now, after more than 8 years, I find myself still in the situation where I am serving my children's needs and not having time to satisfy my personal ones. They go to bed when I am also tired. Trying to having an hobby past their bed time means sacrifying sleep time. Travelling is also a challenge, since they lack interesting in seeing something new, but just want to have fun playing, especially playgrounds.
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> Before having kids, I expected it to be this huge life changing thing. That it would effectively end the part of my life where I was free to do whatever I wanted, and start the part where I was just Daddy, doing nothing except serving my childrens' needs. There are some huge changes. The largest is a lack of the mental downtime where deep thought and problem solving could occur. I can't get off work, hop on my car, and drive around for an hour mulling over technical work. I can't stay an hour past with coworkers and noodle solutions on a white board. I can't get up at 2 am to try something out that just popped into my head. I need to be in bed by 10pm every day. I have to get up at 7am every day. On weekdays 2 meals a day need to be planned, on weekends 3 meals a day. I can't try experimenting with some random new recipe that may fail, my kid needs to eat lunch on time not 2 hours late. Yes it is a lot of fun (theme parks! Trick or treating!), but I'm thankful I did a ton of amazing engineering work before I had a kid because there is no way I can dedicate the absurd amount of time to innovating/solving hard problems, that I used to.
> We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday. How do you keep a baby happy and quiet on long international flights? I currently have no kids but I may find myself in this situation in the next couple years. I'm dreading being the guy with a screaming infant on a 13-hour trans-Pacific flight that keeps everyone from sleeping.
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Babies want nothing more than to sit on your lap snoozing and feeding. It's more or less what you do at home anyway. The hardest part about flying with a baby is dealing with the added luggage (stroller, carseat, overpacked diaper bag, etc). It's only once they're old enough to have more sophisticated feelings (like boredom) but not old enough to communicate them (except by screaming) you get in trouble.
I'm 6 months in and it has definitely ended my life as it was and nothing is the same. I'm pretty lucky that my wife gives me almost 16 hours of free time daily, from which 8 I work and 8 is for sleep. If I want to work out or do something else I need to steal it from the sleep time. It's pretty early though so I might be looking back in a few years and think that it was not that bad actually :)
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A lot of gyms will watch your kids while you work out. Great opportunity to give both of you a break.
Depends on the baby. Some are nightmarish. That’s the main thing - each family and each child are different, so it’s kind of hard to base your decision on what you see and hear from others.
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Yeah mine was colicky and every time getting him to sleep involved rocking him for an hour+ while he screamed in my ear. And he woke up so easily. So I spent about 2 hours a day rocking and patting for the first year or so, not checking off a dozen countries on my passport. Never had a second for some reason.
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I’m curious what made you conclude that he was colicky as opposed to something else? I was labeled colicky as a baby and my own children turned out to have some digestive issues with certain foods that make them cry a ton when they or their mother eat them (and they get it via the milk). If I hadn’t debugged the food issues I might have labeled them “colicky”, but when we avoid those foods religiously they only cry when it makes sense and when the issue is solved they stop. I’m guessing I had a similar issue as a baby, my parents definitely didn’t attempt to debut it. No judgement by the way I’m just curious if you tried debugging things like that as I imagine “colicky” could encompass issues that aren’t possible to debug also.
> Bad parents = kids always throwing tantrums But sometimes there are legit behavioral issues that are extremely challenging, and are not the parent's fault. Sometimes what looks like a "tantrum" on the outside can actually be autistic overwhelm and meltdown, which can happen with even the best parents. Not to mention stuff like Intermittent Explosive Disorder. All this to say...if you see a kid in public throwing a "tantrum", you still shouldn't judge the parents without knowing the full picture.
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There is a difference between kids using bad behavior to get attention or blackmail parents vs kids who have actual behavioral problems they are working through. The first is an actual problem stemming from bad parenting and as a society we should indeed shame parents who raise spoiled kids who expect everything to be given to them.
Before kids, you take a look around a diner or a store or a playground and you see little ones happily eating some chips or browsing the foodstuffs or playing on a slide. You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc. Then you have kids and you know. You know . Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what. Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real .
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Uhm, who walks around believing kids are well behaved?
Badly behaved kids I am more understanding of now (at least the younger ones). But there are defintely easy ways out of problems some parents take that are not good for children.
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Yeah, with a kid I still judge. I'd rather see kids running around and playing and being kids in public than on a tablet. Even grocery shopping I see toddlers on tablets sitting in the cart. My son has been actively involved with meal planning since he as a a year and a half old. "What type of bread today? What type of fruit in your yogurt tomorrow?" I won't judge kid's behavior, so long as they are acting like kids. Sometimes that means they act out, that is normal. But, damnit, let them live in the real world and not just try to distract them with shiny things all the time. I remember going to restaurants in the 90s and early 2000s and kids would be running around playing with each other between tables. That is kids being kids, and it is perfectly acceptable (heck desirable!)
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I've been detained by police under suspicion of "kidnapping" for taking my kid to the park (my kid is a different "race" as me so it was "suspicious"). On another occasion my kid was interrogated because they were walking home from school on our own property, and someone wondered "why they were alone." On the other hand, no one has ever called the police on me for handing the kid a tablet and melting their brain inside. When I was a kid either of those people would be practically thrown in a loony bin for saying anything, let alone taken serious by the authorities. Now the CPS investigates almost every accusation and is legally barred from even telling you who made it. It's difficult to let them live in the real world not because some evil guy with a white van is waiting to offer "free candy" but that the evil person in a white van is actually the Karen who sees a kid on the street or the park as an inconvenience for her or an unacceptable risk and they can be the coward they are and make an anonymous complaint and cause weeks of harassments by CPS with the cell phone they have next to them at the ready wherever they might see a child.
My problem with that problem is that, well, people who have kids definitionally know (better?) about having them. Like being able to experience a book in its original version vs a translation. It's okay if you don't want to learn Spanish, but when people discuss the struggles and delights of reading Cien Años de Soledad they're not necessarily being arrogant, just stating their lived experience.
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But do you also go around and claim everyone that hasn't read that book in Spanish is losing out in life, or do you also recognize it's just not for everyone?
Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot (forbes.com)
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This is even after the Hindenberg research report that found numerous screaming red flags a few years ago. https://hindenburgresearch.com/smci/
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For a split second I read that as Super Mario shares
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same!
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Violating sanctions isn't exactly the same thing as smuggling. It also doesn't seem like it should be a crime to disagree with your state on who deserves what service... i never voted for the dingbats who control who is called a terrorist, let alone the people scared of china.
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> It also doesn't seem like it should be a crime to disagree with your state on who deserves what service... Seems like that's a pretty obvious and straightforward power for a state to have. The state has to make foreign and domestic policy decisions, and to be effective that would have to include trade restrictions. Otherwise you could have situations like businessmen profiting by selling weapons to the enemy to kill his own countrymen--and there are sociopaths who'd do that. > i never voted for the dingbats who control who is called a terrorist, let alone the people scared of china. So what?
Having a net worth of ~$474 million just isn't enough for some people, I guess.
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Ultra wealthy people are not in it for money. They like the game, and the money is a side effect. Many are willing to cheat evidently too.
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MICE is the acronym for categorizing the common motivations for espionage: M - Money/Greed I - Ideology/Divided Loyalty C - Coercion/Compromise E - Ego Sometimes, I think we look at people who are this wealthy and think they should be immune to these kinds of shenanigans, but I'd wager that the -ICE becomes even easier to exploit in people once they no longer need money, if they were already susceptible to it to begin with.
(I don't understand hardware well) Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form? I understand its complex and there many parts to it, but which is the most complex part making it difficult for China to copy it? Let's say they don't have access to 3nm process, what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance with CUDA compatibility? Or other option could be less tensor units, training will take longer, but they might be able to produce it cheaply
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> Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form? They have alternatives, like the Tian supercomputer was originally built with Xeon Phi chips that have been replaced with their own domestic alternatives. A big limitation is getting access to fab slots. Nvidia and Apple are very aggressive about buying up capacity from TSMC, etc, and China's own domestic fabs are improving fast but still not a real match, particularly for volume.
At 3 GHz, a signal can travel at most 10 cm per clock cycle. You can't really physically scale a chip up.
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You can you just have to use a tiled architecture. And microprocessors already have far shorter wiring distances than the simple speed of light calculation because it takes time for the gates to make the transition as well. With processors it's customary to use the "Fan out of 4" metric as a measurement of the critical paths. It's the notional display for a gate with fan out of 4, which is the typical case for moving between latches/registers. Microprocessor critical paths are usually on the scale of ~10 FO4. The largest chip at the moment is Cerebras's wafer scale accelerator. There the tile is basically at the reticule limit, and they worked with TSMC to develop a method to wire across the gaps between reticules.
GN used Bloomberg clips of US Gov officials speaking on AI chip matters, fully under fair use. And Bloomberg did a DMCA takedown through youtube, copystrike in parlance which pulled the video down for a week. GN had no recourse other than to wait and counterclaim. Week timed out, Bloomberg did nothing but be the bully. Louis Rossmann's excellent explainer video here on the Bloomberg bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJvrTC6oTI
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>Louis Rossmann's excellent explainer video here on the Bloomberg bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJvrTC6oTI As always, Louis is being a bit sensationalist and stretches the truth to whip up outrage. Contrary to what he claims, GN could have easily quoted the president without Bloomberg's video, and that would be fine. "that outlet now has a monopoly on who is able to quote the president" is just a totally false premise. Moreover he tries to argue that GN's video falls under fair use, because it's a 1 minute clip in a 3 hour video. However it's not think of a rebuttal to this. If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches, who would bother going out and making such recordings? Usually how this would be resolved would be by citing precedents, but he doesn't bother citing any.
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> If news organizations can copy each other's clips of official speeches Brother, wait until you learn about the associate press. In U.S. copyright law, the four factors evaluated to judge fair use are: 1: Purpose and character of the use: including whether the use is commercial or nonprofit educational, and whether it is transformative. 2: Nature of the copyrighted work: for example, whether the work is more factual or more creative. 3: Amount and substantiality used: both how much was taken and whether it was a qualitatively important part of the work. 4: Effect on the market: whether the use harms the potential market for or value of the original work. Courts weigh all four factors together. There is no fixed rule like "under 30 seconds" or "under 10%." GN's use seems to satisfy all four factors.
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>Brother, wait until you learn about the associate press. The same AP that licenses content to its members and charges non-members for the privilege of reusing their content? "Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. "
He used a clip legally under fair use without permission, which you don't need if it is under fair use.
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Equally important, it was of a US government official speaking, not content Bloomberg specifically created, such as one of their employees giving analysis.
I'm kindof surprised by this take. Did you think the hesitancy of westerners engaging and relying on Chinese labs was due to vibes? There are fundamental cultural differences at play, wether we are comfortable admitting that or not.
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If you're so brave, you should state what these fundamental cultural differences are.
It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.
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Supermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds. Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen. Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.
Ehhh, I think it's more like the CEO and others were Chinese assets for a long time. Remember the 2018 accusations of spy chips implanted in supermicro motherboards that everyone denied so strongly?
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This news doesn't magically make those 2018 accusations true.
And ideal effective market must have a zero margins. That's normal, what the economy strives for, what customers want. If some market has large margins, it means it has some inefficiencies.
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It is impossible to have (actual) zero margins.
I always figured that was the trade-off for paying 1/3 the price. Having to buy 3x as many to find a good one. :P
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"Another Slot A motherboard :(, maybe the 4th one I buy from AliExpress will finally be that X870 motherboard I want!"
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I've never received something other than what I've ordered. At worst the documentation is scant or missing entirely. Specifically with respect to motherboards, most of the aliexpress specials I've interacted with have had completely unlocked BIOSes. Which are easy to get yourself into trouble with, but kind of nice to have when you need them.
Chuck Norris has died (variety.com)
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What in the Hell could possibly take down Chuck Norris??? We are all DOOMED!!!
Trade chat (like /b/) was never great, but one of the first WoW addons I developed was designed to filter out garbage like this, and make idling with your guildies in Ironforge tolerable. It's funny for a while, in measured amounts, and then it becomes tiresome.
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Anal [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]
@dang, given Norris' contributions to Internet culture - the memes - shouldn't he be honored with the black mourning ribbon?
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He was known to be racist (at least in later life), so a black mourning ribbon wouldn't be appropriate.
Sorry, but these Chuck Norris jokes are more like Bruce Schneier facts: https://www.schneierfacts.com/
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I used to love the Schneierfacts, I mean I still do, but I used to as well. They were obviously a bit more niche, but that made them funnier to my mind. > For Bruce Schneier, all zeros of the Riemann zeta function are trivial.
[dead]
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It is something to be ashamed of. MAGA is an anti-American movement, they seek to destroy our nation and replace it with their fantasy version.
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It is absolutely something to be ashamed of, and a moral crime.
You are talking to deaf ears on this forum. Chuck was a great role model for real men, and I don't give a flying duck about what the majority on this forum thinks about that.
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Real men don't hate gay people and aren't scared about where people pee
Fred Rogers, Terry Crews, Lin Manuel Miranda, Henry Cavill, John Cena, Steve Irwin and Dave Grohl to name a few.
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Fred Rogers advised François Clemmons, an openly gay cast member, to remain closeted and even suggested he marry a woman to protect the show's viability.[1] Terry Crews? Porn addict. [2] Lin Manuel Miranda "blindly asks BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors." [3] Henry Cavill undermined the #MeToo movement saying he feared being called a "rapist" if he pursued women. [4] John Cena buries talent... used his backstage influence to undermine the momentum of new stars (remember The Nexus in 2010, CM Punk etc) [5] Steve Irwin fed a crocodille while holding his month-old son, putting him in danger. [6] Dave Grohl? Chronic infidelity. [7] All these men are way better than me, for sure. But you can see how these arguments against Chuck Norris are a slippery slope: > The homophobia? The racism? The infidelity? The conspiracy theories? You're cherry-picking virtues from people aligned with your politics and ignoring the good things your perceived "adversaries" have. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/30/847315345/officer-clemmons-mister-rogers-neighborhood-policeman-pal-tells-his-story [2] https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/terry-crews-pornography-addiction/ [3] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/12/9/unpop-opinion-color-blind-casting/ [4] https://culturess.com/2018/07/13/henry-cavill-missed-point-metoo-isnt-alone [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQr5ZD6fr0g&t=3s [6] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47343688 [7] https://www.gutinstinctmedia.com/latest-articles/a-rockstar-exit-dave-grohls-history-of-affairs
I saw this coming, that's why I made this point, which you ignored: > Could you give a couple of examples of what you would consider > "good role models for well-adapted men" ? I'm actually curious.
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Amy Coney Barrett. Supreme court judge, mother of 7, still finds time to go to the gym.
There were conspiracy theories in the 80s and 90s too.
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There is a huge difference between general conspiracy theories and the birther lie which was more racist astroturfing than a legitimate conspiracy
There was a period of like 2 years when I was a kid where chuck Norris jokes were all the rage on the playground and I made an iPhone app that listed them all. Jokes like “Chuck Norris is able to slam a revolving door.” Anyway, I “built” this stupid app when I was like 13, copy-pasted like 300 jokes in there and a random one would show every time you tapped the screen. Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.
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Jeff Dean got his Chuck Norris app published by Chuck Norris.
> would he be remembered anywhere as well? You underestimate how popular Walker, Texas Ranger was. It wasn't pulling ratings like Seinfeld, ER, or Friends, but it was a solid primetime staple for almost a decade. I never watched it myself, but the 50+ demo loved it.
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Personally I was at a prime age watching a lot of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show and one of his best skits was the Walker Texas Ranger Lever. They would pick the most ridiculous clips from the show and just run them out of context. IIRC Chuck Norris even showed up on the show one time to give him a "stern talking to". Also, he fought Bruce Lee! One of my favorite face-offs ever filmed, esp in the martial arts movie genre. Not many actors who could say that.
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Never heard about this series in France. I discovered him through the jokes. I am 55
I think that comparison is quite unfair to Teddy, and overly flattering to Chuck Norris. Historian, sheriff, war hero, governor, explorer, and a successful President who reshaped America largely for the better. While Roosevelt was human, he led a life that very few have ever matched. That said, the line does fit them both.
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Literally saved Football.
Java is fast, code might not be (jvogel.me)
When you're using a programming language that naturally steers you to write slow code you can't only blame the programmer. I was listening to someone say they write fast code in Java by avoiding allocations with a PoolAllocator that would "cache" small objects with poolAllocator.alloc(), poolAllocator.release(). So just manual memory management with extra steps. At that point why not use a better language for the task?
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This point gets raised every single time managed languages and low latency development come up together. The trade off is running "fast" all of the time, even when you don't have to, vs running slow most of the time and tinkering when you need to go fast. I've spent a fair few years developing lowish (10-20us wire to wire) latency trading systems and the majority of the code does not need to go fast. It's just wasted effort, a debugging headache, and technical debt. So the natural trade off is a bit of pain to make the hot path fast through spans, unsafe code, pre-allocated object pools, etc and in return you get to use a safe and easy programming language everywhere else. In C# low latency dev is not even that painful, as there are a lot of tools available specifically for this purpose by the runtime.
TBH, I do not see how Java as a language steers anyone to use one those shotguns. E.g. the knowledge about algorithmic complexity is foundational, the StringBuilder is junior-level basic knowledge.
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[delayed]
Knock Knock Who’s there? long pause Java
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The premise of this joke is dead since 2020, when ZGC was production ready.
Understanding algorithmic complexity (in particular, avoiding rework in loops), is useful in any language, and is sage advice. In practice though, for most enterprise web services, a lot of real world performance comes down to how efficiently you are calling external services (including the database). Just converting a loop of queries into bulk ones can help loads (and then tweaking the query to make good use of indexes, doing upserts, removing unneeded data, etc.) I'm hopeful that improvements in LLMs mean we can ditch ORMs (under the guise that they are quicker to write queries and the inbetween mapping code with) and instead make good use of SQL to harness the powers that modern databases provide.
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> ditch ORMs ... make good use of SQL I think Java (or other JVM languages) are then best positioned, because of jooq. Still the best SQL generation library I've used.
I'm OK being left behind, thanks (shkspr.mobi)
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Especially when people pushing it are trying to capture your attention, it’s good to be deliberate about the tech that you introduce.
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I’m running a solo saas. In the last six months, I’ve added about $300k in ARR. There’s zero chance I could have done this without AI. My velocity just keeps going up, month after month.
> Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? I wouldn't "invest" in lottery tickets because for these p is far too small (exception: if I found a loophole in the system of the lottery, which has been found for some lotteries). For casinos, there is additionally the very important aspect that the casino will scam you (if you start winning money (for example by having found some clever strategy that gives you an advantage), the security will escort you out of the building and ban you from entering the casino again). So, to give an explanation of the differences: - Because "the typical run" for such an investment will be loosing, you should never invest your whole net worth (or a significant fraction thereof) into such an investment. The advice that I personally often give is to use index funds or stock investments for generating the money for investments that are much more risky, but have huge possible payouts. - You should only do such an "early investment" if you have a significant information advantage over the average person. Such an advantage is plausible, for example, if you are deeply interested in technology topics - Lottery tickets have an insanely small p (as defined in my comment). You only do "early investments" into topics where the p is still small, but not absurdly bad. The difference is that for lottery tickets the p is basically well-known. On the other hand, for "early investments", people can only estimate the p. Because of your information advantage from the previous point, you can estimate the p much better than other people, which gains you a strong advantage in picking the right "early investments" to choose. But be aware that this is a strategy for risk-affine people. If you aren't, you better stay, for example, with index funds.
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> this is a strategy for risk-affine people If you’re paying a fair price for the risk, sure. Most of the examples you gave seemed to be in deep speculative territory to the point that they don’t very much resemble anything economic.
> It's use AI or be replaced by AI I think they want to sell that perception, but the biggest thing the tech execs want in their SWEs is fear. Fear that makes us stay in our jobs, even when raises and bonuses stagnate, because the market is scary with all the "AI layoffs" (which have largely been regular downsizing with the AI label slapped on). Fear that makes us use the LLMs and then put in extra hours when we don't see the 10x productivity gains that they expect. Fear that makes us erode our own skills and become dependent on these gatekeepers to maintain even a base level of productivity. So much of the advertising and discussion around AI is based around fear. It's inevitable. It will take your job. Render you useless. It will render humanity useless. You better get in now, or you'll both lose your job and could end up in a virtual hell ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk ).
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I think you're right that it is fear. But it's kind of a self fulfilling fear. Teams are requiring employees to use AI, probably because of this fear. Maybe it isn't directly taking my job, but it is necessary for me to use Ai to keep my job.
No, this thread and sub-discussion is about specifically early web fundamentals. The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. The rube goldberg machine that is modern JS dev still spits out an index.html result. Being a good professional developer means getting the primitives and the data model not horribly pointed in the wrong direction. So it's extremely helpful to be aware of those primitives. And the argument "nobody is better off knowing assembly as a primitive" doesn't hold because as-said the web is literally still html files. It's right there in the source.
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The discussion is centered around the idea that "adopting early" provides some future proofing in a rapidly evolving (and largely non-standard) terrain. I share the FAs' position that it does not. > The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. Fundamentals pay dividends, but what makes you think that what you learn as an early adopter are fundamentals? Fundamentals is knowledge that is deemed intemporal, not "just discovered". The historical web and its simplicity are as available to anyone today as it was back then. People can still learn HTML today and make table-based layouts. HTML is still HTML, whether you learned it then or today. But if back then you intended to become a professional front-end developer, you would still have to contend with the tremendous difficulties that some seem to have forgotten out of nostalgia. You'd soon have to also learn CSS in its early and buggy drafts, then (mostly non-standard) JavaScript (Netscape and IE6) and the multiple browser bugs that required all kinds of hacks and shims. Then you'd have to keep up with the cycles of changing front-end tools and practices, as efforts to put some sense into the madness were moved there. Much in all that knowledge went nowhere since it was not always part of a progression , but rather a set of competing cycles. Fundamentals are indisputably relevant, but they're knowledge that emerge as victorious after all the fluff of uncertainty has been left behind. Front-end development is only now settling into that phase. With LLMs we're still figuring out where we're going.
What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.
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This is largely due to the age old fact that corporations rarely make decisions based on actual data, introspection, and good judgment. Usually the decision is made first and then the justifications are invented afterwards. In this case, every executive is terrified of being "left out" in the AI race. As we saw with the mass layoffs across companies, most of CEO decision making is just adhering to herd behavior. So it is literally better for execs to have shoveled a shit ton of money into 'strategic' AI initiatives and have them fail than potentially deal with the potentially remote chance of some other exec or company succeeding with 'AI enabled transformation'. What makes it even more fun is that nobody really has a good understanding of how to measure the ROI of AI. Hence we have people burning a lot of money due to FOMO and no easy way of measuring the outcome, which is usually how the foundations for good Ponzi schemes are laid. This is unlikely to end well. However, as usual, it's us, the common plebs, who will suffer regardless of outcome.
As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.
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I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed. But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cycle. I’m pretty sure it’s the bots that are accelerating it so far behind a normal hype cycle.
They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
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Depending on the effect size a sample size of 16 can be plenty.
Technologies were imposed by management whether it made sense or not. Like, “all data exchange formats now have to use XML”, or “all applications must be J2EE now”, because it was the new hot thing. “You” weren’t making that choice, management imposed it. That’s the parallel I’m drawing.
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That was usually only the case where everyone had to be using it or it didn’t work. One person hand coding and one person having Claude still results in the same output that is compatible with each other. This is more like mandating that you use vim. I’ve never some something like that before in 20+ years.
You can ask the agent to check that it doesn't leave a database instance exposed to the public, and present you with proof for you to check (references to the code and the relevant Cloudformation documentation). Then repeat this for all the things you'd normally want to check for in a code review.
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In that case I'm just moving the reading of the documentation from reading it as I'm writing the yaml to when I'm doing a code review. Not saying it isn't helpful to have a pair researcher, just seems like I'm moving things around .
I find that can write features 5-10x faster with these tools than by hand, at a comparable level of quality (though it hasn't been long enough for me to judge what'll happen in a year).
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Would you be able to give an example of a feature? For my example, I need to query an ancient undocumented database , pull back a pile of data, do some validations on it, and then show it to the user or pass it along with another processing step. The human part is researching the database and the data living in it, and implementing the validation(s) while talking to a business user, everything else can be templated.
Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.
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So I have to do a lot of typing? Because the typing is the bit I don't want to do. Actually writing code is the fun and easy bit.
No, this is wrong. AI has drastically shortened the time and effort between idea and implementation. The upshot being, that not only do you get things done faster, but things you wouldn't otherwise countenance doing are now within reach.
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So where is all the new tech years into ai? Turns out that wasn’t the limiting factor. The limiting factor is still what it was 10,000 years ago in business: accumulating capital to start and finding a fit in the market to last.
HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025) (arstechnica.com)
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I am so frustrated that every company in the world seems to treat user support as a tax that they must must MUST eliminate at all costs. Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away. Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it. But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?
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The irony is that mandatory wait times are a form of monitoring failure. If you measured customer satisfaction with the same rigor you measure server uptime, you'd catch this immediately. Most companies monitor their infrastructure religiously but treat their support experience as a black box. The fix is the same in both cases: measure the thing that matters (time to resolution, not tickets closed), alert when it degrades, and make the alert impossible to ignore.
In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle. At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
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I've seen that option with other major vendors too. It's always worth the extra cost for a business - incidents' internal time to resolution, labor costs, and downtime (which impact user productivity) can drop dramatically. It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
I honestly don't know who is still buying HP products, haven't seen one around me in years, probably just clueless people walking into a store and thinking "I've heard this name before"
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[delayed]
My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent. What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process. Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access. Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
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Unfortunately, my experience with customer support at various companies matches exactly your description. Having heard many other similar stories, I assume that this is really how nowadays typical customer support is, so anything else, if such a thing exists, is a rare exception.
Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame. It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
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This comment is so spot on, it’s also big in military circles, especially over past 15 years. It can even be said that frequent (over) use of acronyms is based in insecurity
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old. The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)... Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
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I used to work tech support. Those lines are there because they work . In only 9 months, I had a few different people tell me they were pc repair techs and knew what they were doing, and I didn't need to do the basics. I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not , it fixed the problem. If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up. So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to. The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.
One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue. But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
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Ive been happy with US mobile - you can actually switch between their VZ backed network or their ATT backed network.
Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.) I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
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> Is Google Fi particularly cheap? If you travel internationally, they're really cheap relative to everyone else who will charge you absolutely ridiculous roaming fees.
I think HP was absolutely right in doing this. How many times have you opened a GitHub issues only to come back an hour later with "nvm I figured it out" and close it? The hope is always that you figure it out autonomously.
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If offering free support is too expensive, then they shouldn’t offer free support, instead of externalizing the costs by wasting the time of every customer who calls. Charge callers some small fee and refund it if it was a real issue.
France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app (lemonde.fr)
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All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off. Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
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Many questions: I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures? Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration? Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
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> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent? Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track. I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
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So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the sailors watch was direct to satellite. And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
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It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"
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Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740
Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats
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His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier. I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?
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Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.
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GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
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GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles. So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
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Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation? Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
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We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
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The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
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There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.
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Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?
Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava
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Here you go: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/article/2025/01/13/stravaleaks-dates-of-french-nuclear-submarine-patrols-revealed-by-careless-crew-members_6737005_108.html
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How about secret bases? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases
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Especially considering the limited jogging/biking space on a sub.
Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.
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Many sites? Can you show me any De Gaulle aircraft currently in-flight?
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If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
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Maybe, maybe not. When the US did their venezuela maduro operation they turned on adsb on f15e for whatever reason. And only turned it on for like a portion of the mission so maybe that wasn’t intentional.
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
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Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately. I have no doubt they do with China as well.
They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships was sunk near Sri Lanka.
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It was sunk there because it attended an on-off event in India before that. Iran's ships don't get on regular trips far from home.
Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
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Satellites only have to track, not find. Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar. So from there it is only a matter of keeping on eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys capital ships are.
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Ships are giant hunks of metal and radio emitters. They light up on SAR satellites[0]. Sentinel-1 gets whole earth coverage and a revisit time of 1-3 days[1] with two active satellites. And that's the public stuff, if you can afford a fleet or even some extra fuel to steer them into interesting orbits you can get faster revisits. [0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisit%20time.jpg?inst-v=8a216200-52de-4ba5-a3cb-f92d9541d94d
I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers decades ago.
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Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are trivial at panopticon scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc is a good overview of what's up there so far, and what's coming as they really try to scale the technology. Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that. I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission requirements.
Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial. Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
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How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
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Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable. Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at. This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it. But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
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SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry. Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you. Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you. A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar. > I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor? That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification. However, aircraft carriers are big , so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept. tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.
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was
You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.
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So you task the satellite to where you know the ship is?
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To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed. So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates? (of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
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Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks. It did not say if it had acted at the request of US authorities. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hold-back-161336526.html
Clouds occasionally happen
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SAR is not blocked by clouds.
What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates? (of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
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It would make tracking impossible, as no other country operates satellites.
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If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
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It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships. The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict. Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship. Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it. And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel. So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.
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In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.
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It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.
I kind of understand that, although of course i completely disagree with their line of thinking. Iran is everyones problem and open conflict like this would have been hard to avoid down the road. Point is they had months to anticipate this latest conflict, why did they do absolutely nothing to mitigate this? Why was the UK apparently completely unprepared? Europe's economy is suffering, more then America. Why do we even bother with a Navy if we don't wan't to use it? Also what military support did they drop exactly? Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever. I will point out that it was the US, through a combination of bombing and diplomacy that got rid of the Houthi threat to shipping. Nobody else succeeded.
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The pan of oil on the stove is everyone's problem, but when the dumbass decides the way to deal with it is to pour water on it, it is now in everyone's interest to leave the area.
It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime. It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
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I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.
I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.) [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-warship-survival/
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Well everything's impossible, until its not.
And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
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The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
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Yes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/19/commercial-satellite-imagery-leaders-see-increased-international-demand/ : “BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities. […] Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense […] Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
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Russia has very limited numbers of SAR satellites, it's very unlikely that Iran has any. Specifically, wikipedia suggests Russia has a grand total of 3 such satellites.
> Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
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Based on what? They said it would take a few days and now they're asking for $200,000,000,000.00 to continue it, because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered: https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&f=top&src=typed_query
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild (practical.engineering)
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Why is that picture an extreme recolor of the original? https://images.nebula.tv/5ba7e541-f57c-44cc-a91d-6a89bad158dc
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To make people click.
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras. NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras. So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
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Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
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Yep, Owens valley is basically an environmental disaster created by LA. So in the grand scheme of things, buying water from NorCal is better than stealing from the Owens valley through antiquated water rights. But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.
to put this to numbers... the exports are just about 0.5% of california's GDP. so yeah pretty much a rounding error.
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0.5% is a far cry from a rounding error..
Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
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We do not lose water on the east coast when the power goes out
Ok, but unfiltered does not imply untreated. Maybe that's where they got the idea, though.
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It is, indeed. I'd edit the post but... too late.
As long as we don't try to hide and externalize the cost of all the hyper-saline brine management that comes with desalination.
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We can store it in the remains of Owens Lake ;)
They wouldn't if you switched just Urban water use from natural sources to desalination. To do that you need to replace the ~5 million acre feet of water, ~6,167,400,000 m3, that goes into the Urban bucket which is all of the water used to keep people alive, clean, and all industrial uses of water. [0] That comes to ~ 12BkWh of energy needed to scale up batched reverse osmosis to take over just the life and job required water needs which is about 25% of the total solar power generated in all of 2025 via grid-scale solar farms. CA does export some during the day due to excess solar but is still a net importer of power. [0] p2 of https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf
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Those are the numbers I was looking for - that means that (ignoring build-out costs) total desalination for CA would be on the order of 10% of the 3 gorges dam yearly output (max).
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Using a system that's currently in a lab scale only and ignoring other energy costs like moving the water to the plant, mixing the briny output back down to acceptable levels, and then pressurizing the system to replace the gravity fed design it currently uses. For a rough estimate for replacing agricultural uses too ~6x that urban figure at least then weep at the amount of pumps you'd need to bring that water up and inland to the farm lands from the coast. At least for replacing urban use most of the population lives on/near the coast where the water would be produced.
Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout (entsoe.eu)
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That was quite the interesting read!
You need grid connected storage where you have (unpredictable) renewables. That doesn't negate the benefits of Nuclear baseload power. In an ideal mix, you need both, and also Gas for emergencies. One is not better than the other, they have different roles in a balanced grid.
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Nuclear has the same issue as (unpredictable) renewables, it is incapable of cost efficiently following the demand curve. As a result, just like renewables, it requires a form of dispatch-able power to complement it (gas, batteries, etc). Solar and nuclear fill the exact same role in a balanced grid - cheap non-dispatchable power. Or at least nuclear would if it was cheap, but since its costs haven't fallen the same way that the costs of other energy did... well new nuclear buildout really doesn't have a good role at all right now, it's just throwing away money. Solar and nuclear complement eachother fine - because their shortfalls (darkness for solar, high demand for nuclear) are mostly uncorrelated... a mix of non-dispatcahble power with uncorrelated shortfalls helps minimize the amount of dispatchable power you need... but batteries have made it cheap enough to transform non-dispatchable power to dispatchable power that nuclears high costs really aren't justifiable.
472 pages. That's going to be a nice bit of reading this weekend. It is very nice to see such a comprehensive report as well as the fact that it was made public immediately.
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Maybe practical engineering will make a video about it
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