Wow! That is a big bean!

Torture isn’t useful as an intelligence-gathering tool, but that’s not what it’s being used for here. Torture works quite well for manufacturing confessions to use as propaganda to justify further killing/torture/other crimes.

I don’t know. I might say “Matrix” and run a private server? But that’s a bunch of IT work. It’s attractive to use a SaaS because you don’t have to do any long-term planning or hiring; just pay Slack a crazy amount of money and it all works.

Corps also like a commercial paid service because they get a contract with an SLA (even if it’s rare to actually get anything from these SLAs).

You haven’t missed anything; there isn’t any such place. There’s a bunch of suggestions on how you could patch such a thing together StackOverflow: Is there a way to list pip dependencies/requirements?. Basically either running pip or querying the PyPI API to discover transitive dependencies. Sounds like a fun little programming project! 😀

Not an answer to your question, but I thought this was a nice article for getting some basic grounding on the new AI stuff: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/

OpenTofu is mostly getting users from the corporate world. My work is on Slack and we’re moving to OT. The lowest-friction for me as an OT-when-at-work user is to add another Slack. (I’d personally rather that they used an open platform. But it’s easy for me to see why they didn’t.)

it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers

Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself…)

Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe “a running server process” and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I’d need to have like aws_beanstalk_service { ... } and gcp_application { ... } and kubernetes_manifest { ... } and systemd_service { ... } and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I’d need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).

The job market is not terrible. But there is a frustrating thing where a “senior” developer with 3 years of experience will get tons of recruiter-spam offering them $200k+ positions, while a junior developer (your position) will get ghosted when you apply for a job that’s offering to pay $50k. So it can feel demoralizing because people you see as your peers are having a very different experience. (And if you go in some circles the FOMO just never stops; people telling you you’re wasting your life not being a Meta dev getting $800k TComp or founding a unicorn start-up…)

You say you enjoyed programming, which sure sounds to me like you could enjoy getting paid to do it. But it’s easy to overwork yourself because your boss says that real developers pull 80-hour weeks. Or burn out because it’s so frustrating to watch bad decisions ruin your good work. If you can find the right balance of caring and not caring, you can make good money and enjoy your job.

And it only takes a year or two to get rid of the “junior developer” label and then jobs are a lot easier. (Others have said that the market is bad. And it is bad compared to how it was in, like, 2020. But it’s still a very good market all things considered.)

I notice you asked for an explanation and then only sort-of read the first sentence.

The national parks are amazing. But who knows if they’ll still be around since we’re firing everyone who maintains them. Not sure if the plan is to destroy them or to give them to some oligarch as a little play-area.

There’s substantial Israelis who aren’t calling for genocide. But it’s like the US after 9-11 and they’ve mostly gone into hiding because the right-wing media presence is so overpowering and successful on the “with us or against us” message.

Consent in a situation like this is difficult to establish, to the point of it being pointless. Your comment implies to me that you think if the person said “OK” to a search request then whatever happened next is their own fault.

Consider just the situation where you’re in the immigration line and two uniformed officers walk up to you and say, “please come with us.” If you go with them, is that voluntary? If you say “yes” I just think “voluntary” doesn’t hold much meaning. What happens if you don’t volunteer to go with them? Surely, they say, “come with us now or you’ll be arrested.” And if you don’t volunteer at that point, they’ll physically restrain you and take you away.

Since most people are able to understand the subtext of the situation, they’re able to tell that, “please come with us” actually means “you are required to come with us now. You may either walk of your own accord, or we will take you captive and punish you beyond whatever we initially intended.” So, there’s not any consent happening. Just deciding whether being beaten and dragged away in public would be helpful to you, and in many cases it is not.

You might be confusing US law around unlawful search and seizure with US law around border crossings. While the ACLU’s position is that the 4th amendment trumps CBP, CBP’s position is that it does not and that you cannot stop them.

I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they’re getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn’t have, then Plex came out ahead.

Sure, I’m not saying Plex has to do a single-payment model. Just that it’s a think that’s been done successfully (and for longer than Plex has existed). Everyone’s pushing subscription models so hard that it’s easy to think “this is the only possible way that anything can work”.

I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/

I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.

Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I’m fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.

Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work…

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”

Just Egg works very well as a sub for liquid eggs, but it’s expensive AF and goes bad fast. I prefer the powdered egg-replacers for baking, because they keep, and outside of baking I like my eggs runny or hard-boiled which Just can’t replicate so I prefer to go without.

Most of my cookie recipes use eggs!