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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Sending messages like this isn’t uncommon.

    Back in the early 1960’s my dad had a high level security clearance at a defense contractor. He was one of a handful of people who knew the full details of a project to “identify, track, and destroy a hostile satellite”. This was in direct response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The President of the US was another one of the handful that knew the full details of the project.

    After a lot of R&D work a test was performed. A rocket was launched from somewhere in the South Pacific. It tracked a derelict satellite used as a target, closed on it, and disabled it. At that point my dad’s involvement on the project ended.

    A few months later while at home he & my mom were listening to a speech by the President. In the middle of the speech he announced to the American public that the USA now had the ability to identify, track, and destroy hostile satellites. My mom says all the color drained from his face but she had no idea why since the entire project was still highly classified. In fact when my dad got to work the next day there was a memo waiting on his desk telling him that he was not to confirm, deny, or even discuss anything he may have heard on the radio or tv the previous night.

    The President didn’t make that announcement for the benefit of the American people. He was sending a very public message to the leadership of the USSR.

    (And my dad never told this story until well after the 25 year time frame established for routine declassification of such materials.)


  • I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

    My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.









  • ‘21 Model Y long range. Overall it drives well, and the supercharger network is really nice. We took it on a trip up & down a good portion of the east coast last year and never had any issues charging it. We have a couple 30 lb dogs that love going for rides, so things like dog mode are really nice as well.

    Things I really do not like:

    • The reliance on cameras for all sorts of features like auto high beams and auto wipers on top of traffic aware cruise control (aka autopilot) (and full self driving, if you have it). I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days. The auto high beams are so unreliable I don’t use them, and that means no autopilot at night. I have no faith in even trying out FSD because of how glitchy everything else is.
    • The minimal use of physical controls. I have to take my eyes off the road just to switch wiper speed/mode.
    • Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
    • The maps have lots of routing issues. It shows roads in my neighborhood that don’t yet exist (new development under construction), regularly routes me wrong ways (there’s a left turn near my home that it thinks it can’t take so it tries to route me two sides if a triangle as a result), and on our road trip we found a stretch of highway that it thought it couldn’t drive on and kept trying to route us along side streets. And there’s no way I know to report these issues so they can be fixed. Apps like Waze make that trivial.

    Pretty much all of these are reasons why I refuse to even try FSD and discourage others from using it. About the only way I’ll give it another chance is if a truly independent third party tests it and says all these issues have been resolved.


  • I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:

    • Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
    • When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.

    About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.




  • Our house has 5 heating & 2 AC zones that I installed Ecobee thermostats on. Three rooms also have skylights that can be opened. When we open the skylights the thermostats all turn off, and when closed they turn them back on to the mode they were previously set to.

    Our house is set back in the woods on a long driveway. When either me or my wife arrives home after dark all the driveway / walkway lights turn on. And when we’re both away they all turn off.

    I also have a “bedtime” button on my phone that turns off all the lights, locks the doors, turns off our WiFi speakers, puts all the Ecobees into sleep mode, etc.







  • Back in the 90’s Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” and not a search engine. They had teams of human editors that would curate answers for popular questions. During the dot com boom of the late 90’s they realized they needed to automate that system so they started buying other small startups that were doing more with search technologies. They acquired one search company in New Jersey called Teoma and another in Massachusetts called Direct Hit.

    The executives at Jeeves at the time were not very smart though. They were very hands on with these technologies they didn’t fully understand and made some stupid decisions. For example, Direct Hit had a simple advertising platform they had developed where anybody could sign up and bid for ad placement on search results pages. It was largely automated and generated a lot of revenue. The Jeeves CEO said “we’re not in the business of advertising so get rid of it”, so it was sold off. It was sold to that scrappy little startup you mentioned and transformed into AdWords. Jeeves squandered other tech advantages in similar ways.

    In a similar vein, they had a huge internal project for many months to create an adult (porn) search engine that they were going to co-brand alongside the Jeeves character they used to use. They planned to call it “Ask Mimi” and had registered domains, created a French maid character to go along with the Jeeves butler character, etc. After a huge push the company decided they didn’t want to tarnish their image with porn and dropped it all pretty much overnight. There used to be an article about all this archived on CNet’s news.com site but I can’t find it anymore thanks to their terrible search engine….

    Source: I worked for one of those startups that Jeeves acquired.