alexpotato

4 ms·

1.
by alexpotato 6d ago
So I ended up doing something similar: - Create a Git Hub project board for issues - Connect Grok to the above - Use Grok voice mode to take ideas, have Grok refine them with me and then save them as issues - Created slash commands in OpenC
2.
by alexpotato 6d ago
When I retire and/or get "F You" money, I'm going to publicly tell a story about multicast, bittorrent and "not invented here" syndrome.
3.
by alexpotato 6d ago
I've worked at trading firms where the "reference data master" file is usually a big json or equivalent. To get the file out to 100s or 1000s of machine they would often use private bittorent to distribute the file out.
4.
by alexpotato 7d ago
When you combine: - mechanizing language creation - A/B testing - rapid and automated iteration based on the above You quickly realize that building propaganda engines is getting easier and easier. If you then fold in large amounts of
5.
by alexpotato 8d ago
"You Are Two" [0] is a video that talks about what happens when the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is severed. If you've never seen it I HIGHLY recommend it if only to show how weird our brains actually a
6.
by alexpotato 8d ago
A lot of small businesses use self storage facilities as mini warehouses. e.g. let's say you are starting a painting business You have a lot of equipment you need (ladders, sprayers, buckets, etc) but you live in a small apartment. A s
7.
by alexpotato 8d ago
I used to run a traveling pro sports league and we transported our own scoreboards. A bunch of foam pool noodles, a blanket and plastic wrapping tape can very quickly and cheaply get you a padded container that is easy to add handles to. We
8.
by alexpotato 9d ago
I remember first watching the Matrix. They they made the Animatrix as a companion piece. The Second Renaissance [0] episode of the Animatrix talks about how the machines came to power in the Matrix universe. At the time, it made sense withi
9.
by alexpotato 9d ago
The greenhouse vents example reminds me a lot of a float valve (or ballcock). It's a simple mechanism that used buoyancy to either open or close valves as water level changes in a container. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
10.
by alexpotato 9d ago
For people asking "do these small tricks/trivia really matter??" I have an example of when they do: - having strange networking issues on the blue side of a blue/green deployment - networking engineers are involved - nob
11.
by alexpotato 9d ago
I've found Spaced Repetition (via Anki etc) to be great for remembering these things. Was originally turned on to this by Derek Sivers: https://sive.rs/srs
12.
by alexpotato 9d ago
Sat next to a fusion researcher once on a commuter train. This particular line struck me: "When oil prices go up, so does money for fusion research" Feels the same for sail and cargo ships.
13.
by alexpotato 9d ago
When doing Disaster Recovery (DR) planning as a SRE in the New York City area, I sometimes use the phrase "Hurricane Sandy 2" to describe an event so big that it knocks out the power/compute/etc for an entire region. I m
14.
by alexpotato 11d ago
We ran RustFS in production at a past job. Was the backend for an archiving service and we found it to work well on baremetal machines and seamlessly integrated with existing services that used the S3 api. This was on an internal network so
15.
by alexpotato 12d ago
Less is more when it comes to visualizations. Don McMillan has a great comedy bit about charts that you can watch here btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYE3GtXqDV0
16.
by alexpotato 12d ago
There is a great article [0] that has some interesting points about this: - Nike used to be very "male coded" e.g. "Be like Mike" - So much so that they were one of the only companies where men bought more clothes than w
17.
by alexpotato 12d ago
There is a similar point to be made about those fake "update on your loan" robocalls. - The carriers know, for a fact, that these are spam calls. - The spammers know that the carriers know this as well. - The payout on a successfu
18.
by alexpotato 12d ago
Knots and lashings were one of those things that "just made sense" to me as a child/teenager. So much so that even though I never took pioneering merit badge as a Boy Scout, people who were taking it had me double check their
19.
by alexpotato 13d ago
At a past job I owned both the migration to and running of a centralized alert aggregator. The idea was that any team at the firm could use a standard logging library or Prometheus style metrics to send alerts etc. We were migrating from a
20.
by alexpotato 13d ago
As always, it boils down to incentives and rule enforcement and this affects humans too. e.g. when Bank of America rewarded employees for getting customers to open accounts, BoA employees started opening fake accounts The reverse is also tr
21.
by alexpotato 13d ago
> We could have gotten it done faster, but we were well aware of the potential for slop and thus paid an absurd amount of attention to (and tokens for) code quality. For example, there is a 100% test coverage requirement in both server a
22.
by alexpotato 13d ago
This post reminded me of the story about Jeet Kun Do [0] after Bruce Lee [1] died. JKD was supposed to be a martial art that adapted the best techniques from other martial arts. e.g. "have no style" because your style is constantl
23.
by alexpotato 14d ago
I def have taste preferences e.g. I like grapefruit better than orange juice. Another example is Sriracha tastes great to me as it's spicy but not too spicy. Too spicy and I just can't taste anything. In other words, I have the sa
24.
by alexpotato 15d ago
Some books, from off the top of my head, that use interesting color film processing or other "photographs saw something humans can't: - The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith [0] IIRC, archaeologists use side lighting and IR film + lenses to
25.
by alexpotato 15d ago
Been a lot of talk about how you NEED to use AI to analyze logs etc. Figured we should talk about how to do it the old fashioned way.
26.
by alexpotato 16d ago
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]: it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters a
27.
by alexpotato 16d ago
Dave Beazley has a great talk about using Python built ins. Def worth a watch as he is funny but also super cool to see someone use a REPL this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDLAutA88s
28.
by alexpotato 16d ago
> Fair enough they advertise a higher precisio This is, for me, a game changer. The new AirPods have both: - the ability for the CASE to send a sound using Find My - have sub-foot accuracy when using a kind of "radar" via the p
29.
by alexpotato 17d ago
> Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. This is an excellent point.
30.
by alexpotato 17d ago
The most likely scenario at this point it: - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents - so either insurance will be cheaper for them - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up - even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance w

More ›