tg180 (u/tg180) - Readit News

tg180 commented on EU cave in on vehicle trade rules will cost European lives transportenvironment.org/... · Posted by u/latexr

rich_sasha · 3 days ago

I wonder if they will even sell. You may change the regulation but surely the economics of fuel consumption and insurance will be awful. Not to mention, good luck parking it at any old European town, or even a modern shopping centre.

tg180 · 3 days ago

This! They won't sell in big numbers. Parking these huge vehicles in Europe will be nearly impossible.

Americans would need to send over engineers, architects, and builders who follow the "bigger is better" philosophy.

I'm waiting for the moment when we'll tease someone who can't manoeuvre their truck when it simply doesn't fit.

tg180 commented on Outside of the top stocks, S&P 500 forward profits haven't grown in 3 years insight-public.sgmarkets.... · Posted by u/Terretta

moduspol · 16 days ago

I looked into somehow hedging against the Mag 7 in my portfolio (which is otherwise almost entirely in an S&P 500 index fund), but it seemed surprisingly difficult for something that is probably quite widely desired.

Though maybe I'm just unsophisticated. And it feels a little hopeless because there's no telling how long the smoke and mirrors will continue working, and whenever it stops, undoubtedly the rest of the economy is going to suffer, too. Bleh.

tg180 · 16 days ago

Investments can never be identical for everyone, but in my case I switched my assets from an MSCI World to an MSCI World ex USA.

For the U.S. market portion I adopted a more complex strategy based on factor / smart-beta investing (making sure that none of the top holdings include AI-related companies).

tg180 commented on Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform Will Be Coming Together thenewstack.io/red-hat-an... · Posted by u/mooreds

desktopninja · 3 months ago

Yay! Terrible!

tg180 · 3 months ago

Someone did this! https://github.com/89luca89/terrible

tg180 commented on Abuse of power at Germany's elite research institution [video] dw.com/en/max-planck-inst... · Posted by u/Koaisu

throw627357 · 5 months ago

I personally know all about it, having spent many years in that system.

Warning, long comment. Skip forward to the paragraph starting in "Where it becomes specific to Max Planck" if you already understand the psychological roots of toxic work environments in academia.

Some of this is due to the psychology of the scientific mentor-mentee relationship, which has toxic elements nearly everywhere.

Essentially, you have young, highly ambitious people fresh out of college, who dream of achieving big things in science.

They go work for people who have achieved everything they dream of, and who have been successful to a degree only one in thousands of young grad students will ever be. (That's literally the odds if you go work for a Max Planck director.)

The supervisors also happen to have the power to waste many years of the grad student's life - a power only comparable to being able to hand out long prison sentences on a whim.

This alone is a social situation perfectly suited to generate abuse and toxicity. The worst supervisors will cynically take advantage of the situation. The best ones only will have been corrupted by years of bootlicking and pandering into thinking of themselves as the second coming of Christ.

Up to here, this is a structural problem common to all elite research institutions.

Where it becomes specific to Max Planck is in its so-called Harnack principle, a principle that essentially codifies a cult of genius, making it the explicit goal of the society to give nearly limitless financial freedom and executive power to the institute's independent directors and putting the entire organization into these individual's service.

This principle turns that ostensibly modern institution into a time capsule of late 19th century Germany, a Wilhelminian relic. It's poignant and fitting that the society was renamed from Emperor Wilhelm Society after the war.

That this institution specifically is the crown jewels of German science is truly a danger to the standing of German science in the world. Because the society is completely 'democratically' run by its directors, who profit fantastically from the status quo, and due to the near complete lack of accountability and oversight, it is unable to reform.

The moment people speak up against this system, their career is over - making it very easy and convenient for the society to ignore those voices as "anonymous". Of course they are! The fact that we hear about this anyway, every few years, over decades, should tell you all you need to know.

tg180 · 5 months ago

This isn’t just a problem specific to German academia, it extends across the entire European academic landscape.

I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.

The only explanation I've come up with is that the system naturally weeds out those who resist or speak up by stalling their careers. As a result, it selects for individuals who don’t make trouble, those who passively obey and endure even the worst forms of dysfunction.

In the end, this leads to the normalization of abuse, with people rationalizing it as "if I went through it, others should too", a way to protect their own ego.

The only thing even worse is when the abuse turns passive-aggressive: denying opportunities without ever saying it outright, hostility disguised as kindness, ambiguous and demoralizing feedback, delaying responses, making people miss crucial deadlines, assigning pointless or overwhelming tasks. They excel at this too.

If I ever had children, I would never let them attend a European university.

tg180 commented on Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited? mattsayar.com/why-does-cl... · Posted by u/MattSayar

nichochar · 7 months ago

We're building our startup infra on cloudflare over the other major hyperscalers and it turned out to be an amazing decision...

Generous free tiers, pricing scales very competitively after that, and their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS.

I highly recommend this stack.

tg180 · 7 months ago

> their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS

Underrated.

Until recently, all the features were grouped in a very clear manner within the dashboard. Now, even Cloudflare is complicating its management interface, but they still have a long way to go before reaching the level of confusion of AWS and GCP.

tg180 commented on Tell HN: The Quiet Collapse of US Defense Research Infrastructure · Posted by u/ipunchghosts

tg180 · 8 months ago

> But the current structure of defense funding makes this nearly impossible. VC-backed defense startups aren't the answer either. They're making the same mistakes - small compute, off-the-shelf models, requiring relocation from experienced 40+ year old scientists who won't move. They're essentially just spending the money the government can't, without solving the fundamental issues.

Have you tried to express your perplexities to one of the DARPA PMs?

Theoretically, a significant part of their work should precisely consist of receiving feedback on the mistakes made in order to iterate more quickly toward effective solutions.

tg180 commented on U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions krebsonsecurity.com/2024/... · Posted by u/mmsc

jcpham2 · 8 months ago

“Law Enforcement wants to put you in jail for a very long time”

The CFAA[1][2] is an arcane and ancient piece of legislation that could use an overhaul, especially with some of the vague language it contains. A person would definitely want to make sure they are authorized prior to touching a computer or even data that may not have authorization for.

Unauthorized use of a computer is the easiest felony to commit accidentally it would seem. Although in this case I don’t think that’s a legitimate argument to be made. This person or persons knew they were committing crimes.

I’m not defending the hacker either, the quote at the end of the article rings true.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-48000-computer-fraud

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

tg180 · 8 months ago

> The CFAA[1][2] is an arcane and ancient piece of legislation that could use an overhaul, especially with some of the vague language it contains.

I imagine that this is the reason why the charge is "unlawful transfer of confidential phone records", which is something much more specific.

From PACER, it's also stated that he filled out the CJA23 financial affidavit to demonstrate his inability to afford a lawyer (it's quite something to get caught like this and not even manage to earn enough to pay for a lawyer).

Additionally, "the defendant waives the rights provided by Rule 5 and/or Rule 32.1 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure" means that he is choosing to streamline the initial procedures and is waiving supervised release or probation, suggesting that the prosecution's case is strong and that he is opting for an expedited process.

tg180 commented on No NAT November: My month without IPv4 blog.infected.systems/pos... · Posted by u/Bender

qwertox · 9 months ago

> If you don't, you'll get tired of Cloudflare's "checking if your connection is secure" becomes pretty tiring pretty quickly.

Is this really related? I'm on IPv4 and get these "checking if your connection is secure" all the time as well. I think that this is unrelated to CG-NAT, because, after all, Cloudflare does mostly use the browser's properties to determine if a manual check should be done (click the button...).

tg180 · 9 months ago

> Cloudflare does mostly use the browser's properties to determine if a manual check should be done

Cloudflare uses the threat score of each IP address as a signal to determine whether additional checks are necessary. A shared IP address is more likely to be associated with "issues", such as a compromised IoT device being used for DDoS attacks, one of your neighbours spamming a forum, ...

tg180 commented on Advent of Code 2024 adventofcode.com/2024/abo... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

schneems · 9 months ago

> So perfectly fine to skip some days and still it's possible to solve some of the next ones!

You try telling that to my brain. That guy doesn’t listen to me.

tg180 · 9 months ago

This is why I usually do the simpler ones and then stop... Otherwise, I just can’t skip, it’s stronger than me.

tg180 commented on Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation thenewstack.io/why-compan... · Posted by u/panrobo

Agingcoder · 10 months ago

Thanks.

I work for a very large org, and cloud benefits are not obvious to me ( ie we’re large enough to absorb the cost of a team managing k8s for everyone, another team managing our own data centers around the world etc ).

I view cloud as mutualizing costs and expertise with other people ( engineers and infra), but adding a very hefty margin on top of it, along with vendor lockin.

If you’re big enough to mutualize internally, or don’t need some of the specific ultra scale cloud products, it’s not an obvious fit to me ( in particular , you don’t want to pay the margin )

I understand that for a significant chunk of people it’s useful provided that they use as many mutualizing levers as possible which is what going native is about.

Is my understanding correct ?

tg180 · 10 months ago

Yes, the profit margin for cloud providers is very real—and quite costly.

I think one point that’s often overlooked is the knowledge gap between the engineers at cloud providers (such as systems, platform, or site reliability engineers) and those that an individual company, even a large one, is able to hire.

This gap is a key reason why some companies are willing—or even forced—to pay the premium.

If average or mediocre management skills and a moderately complex tech stack are sufficient, then on-premise can still be the most cost-effective choice today.