Taking bits and bobs from the lives of strangers is one of the most time-honored traditions in fiction.
You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
Readit Newsjuliusmusseau commented on “Cat Person” and Me slate.com/human-interest/... · Posted by u/jasonhansel
Dead Comment
juliusmusseau commented on GPG-Tui, a Terminal User Interface for GnuPG orhun.dev/blog/introducin... · Posted by u/sbt567
Don't use encrypted email. Encrypted email is deeply problematic, for many reasons having little to do with PGP.
https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....
This reminds me of my father's advice to every client (he had a corporate litigation practice):
"When you feel the urge to write an email, pick up the f*king phone instead. When in 5 years you're being cross-examined you can say 'I don't remember saying that' and you won't be lying, because we're too old to remember things, and I won't have to bill you for the time it takes to read all the f*king emails."
juliusmusseau commented on A request for Pinboard old-timers prettyfwd.com/t/XiK8ArVIT... · Posted by u/Alex3917
The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.
80TB on AWS is $44K USD / year on their crappy (cheap rotational) "st1" volume.
juliusmusseau commented on A request for Pinboard old-timers prettyfwd.com/t/XiK8ArVIT... · Posted by u/Alex3917
I hate the phrase dogfooding. Who on earth eats dog food?
I don't really understand the need for an app vs. a website that works well on mobile (my current project). Since many people like standalone apps, I'm clearly missing something, and would love to understand better what the advantages are there.
Re: dogfooding - The word nice apparently comes the latin word for ignorant but do you mind if someone says you're a really nice guy?
I've had insurance from Arbor (Blue Cross) pre-ACA, from Erin's job at the Latin School (Blue Cross) pre-ACA, from Matasano (United), from BCBS on the ACA marketplace (and now at Fly, but that doesn't matter b/c...) and ambulance trips in all 4 of those, and all of them cost a fortune.
Later
Erin also points out that beyond the deductible cost, your ambulance has to be in-network, or it's not covered at all --- that bit our family too.
I'm a defender of our insurance system, weird as that sounds, but even I won't try to stick up for how we handle ambulances.
The ambulance rates where I live (Vancouver, BC, Canada) always make me blink:
Insured: $50 flat rate, ground or air.
Uninsured:
$848 flat fee (ground service)
$4,394 per hour (helicopter)
I study at FIU... I just don't see the point this bridge. Why would you spend 10+ million dollars on a bridge to cross a street, when the same problem can be solved by a simple crosswalk? We already have one of these bridges... and the majority of people don't bother to use it and simple take the cross walk. It just such a waste of money.
You clearly don't study any subjects in the fine arts.
:-p
What went wrong technically to cause the bridge collapse is only the second half of the story.
The first half of the story is that the stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design, complete with fake cable stays, and out of hubris decided they would use an all-concrete single-truss Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) design because all-concrete would look better and the university's (FIU's) engineering department sort of specialized in promoting ABC.
What could have been a much cheaper nice looking normally-designed bridge (which would be open today) ballooned (or you could say, was hijacked) into a $10mm+ bridge disaster that would be comedy if people hadn't been hurt and killed. A majority of it was even paid for by federal grants.[1]
This is why we can't have nice things. They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting deadlines — that they didn't/couldn't allocate sufficient resources to verify the design, verify it was built and moved into place correctly.
[1] see page 9 of https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/brie...
> stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design [...]
Nothing wrong with that!
> They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting deadlines
These are also good things.
To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software engineers. The independent peer reviewer they hired was not qualified to do the review.
> Louis Berger was not qualified by the Florida Department of Transportation to conduct an independent peer review and failed to perform an adequate review of the FIGG Bridge Engineers design plans and to recognize the significant under-design of the steel reinforcement within the 11/12 node, which was unable to resist the horizontal shear between diagonal 11 and the bridge deck.
This whole business of the engineers ignoring the cracks that the contractors kept needing reassurance about is also insane.
juliusmusseau commented on A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS (2018) hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05... · Posted by u/absqueued
Paul Vixie isn't making any sense here either.
If you can't trust your device, you can't trust it without DoH either. As I said upthread, devices don't even need to use DNS. They can open up encrypted C&C channels, using whatever protocol they'd like, tunneled over whatever they'd like. They can bake rendezvous IP addresses in, they can cryptographically verify endpoints to break MITM proxies, they can even sneak data out in ICMP packets. DoH has literally nothing to do with it.
What's insidious about this argument is that it preys on peoples legitimate concerns about uncontrolled devices on their network. We're all concerned about that! But that doesn't mean we should use plaintext DNS, or Paul Vixie's preferred "encrypted DNS with a killswitch for network operators".
Fighting against an HTTPS endpoint on 443 returning data in response to a query is kinda futile.
Might as well argue against using windmills to grind wheat.
It does make you wonder how much you can trust supposedly slice-of-life fiction, if a friend of one of the "characters" finds the story a poor representation of the person they knew. I suspect some of the darkness in Roupenian's stories comes from a twist in her own perspective, not necessarily from the awfulness of men she's dated.
Heck, even actual Biography (non fiction) isn't even judged that way.
Cat Person succeeds because it captures a deeper truth. And boy does that story touch a nerve - a mirror that is hard to look at because of its truth.