Readit Newsgrahameb commented on Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut had something to say. We have it on tape nytimes.com/2025/12/19/bo... · Posted by u/tintinnabula
Direct link to the Vonnegut recordings
https://www.92ny.org/archives/kurt-vonnegut,-jr
grahameb commented on Is life a form of computation? thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/redeemed
It often seems that people think that the answers to the important questions must align with the subject they know best. Statisticians think life is all about probabilities. Economists think it's game theory. Computer scientists think it's computational.
"Everything can be understood through mathematics" is usually said by a mathematician.
I've noticed this – I'm a former software engineer, now a full-time priest. It's been fascinating to reflect on how the base of my analogies has shifted from software/tech to theology/the Christian tradition. Not entirely though, there are many times when I've found resonances in between.
One extension I'd make from your comment is how rich interdisciplinary work can be, because all the resonances between different fields can come to life and some really wonderful creativity happens.
grahameb commented on I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework simonhartcher.com/posts/2... · Posted by u/deevus
Wouldn't that mean that Intel Macs would have a much worse battery life than they did while suspended? Even suspended they did better than the same laptop running Linux.
Intel Macs aren't PCs... Apple did a lot of the wider platform beyond the CPU themselves.
grahameb commented on A New Internet Business Model? blog.cloudflare.com/cloud... · Posted by u/mmaia
grahameb commented on A New Internet Business Model? blog.cloudflare.com/cloud... · Posted by u/mmaia
I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.
I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly.
I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.
It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.
It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead':
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
grahameb commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev
grahameb commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev
I recently set up passkey-only sign ins for a webapp I'm writing using Authentik [0](Python OIDC provider, with quite a nice docker-compose run-up, took only minutes to stand up.) It was surprisingly easy to configure everything so that passkeys are the only thing ever used.
If anyone would be interested I could write it up? I was surprised what a nice user flow it is and how easy it was to achieve.
grahameb commented on Fun with gzip bombs and email clients grepular.com/Fun_with_Gzi... · Posted by u/bundie
I ran into one of these in the very early 00s; was working at a university (back in the days when a couple of people would run all the central servers, running Linux on beige PCs.) We had some anti-spam/AV software that looked at every incoming email hooked into Postfix, and the server kept running out of disk space.
Eventually tracked it down to an email which contained a zip of stock trading data – just the three letter stock code and the shift. It wasn't malicious, it just had an extraordinarily high compression ratio!