BRB. Building a wearable that sends out an ultrasonic screech to blow out nearby microphones.

Going to call it “Blow Me.”

Edit: looks like they already exist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328652-voice-jammer-stops-anyone-from-recording-you-speak/

https://archive.ph/unmYO

Also, paper with more detail: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08490v1

AI hallucination.

It’s a gimmick to get publicity. But if it happens, the company has to generate revenue to pay it off.

Guess how browser makers make money off a ‘free’ product?

Ran the 20B on a Mac under LMStudio. Pretty zippy and did OK on basic coding tasks.

By all means, run MCPs that give full access to your desktop. Nothing can go wrong.

Have been noodling on home batteries for a while. Curious. Can they remotely just turn on the return feed without your permission? Can you say: “Nah, not today” or is part of being tied into grid that they get to drive?

Also, is there any advantage to being tied to PG&E if you have enough solar and battery to cover your entire usage?

AI inside browsers. Fantastic way to collect ML learning data.

Enjoy!

“If the Dead Not Rise,” by Philip Kerr. Pretty decent so far.

Young whippersnappers.

If you want to talk bigger picture… they built a pedestrian/bike lane with zero access/amenities at either end (unlike the Bay Bridge). No staging area to load/unload your bike, no parking, no bathrooms, no water fountains. Good luck finding all-day parking on city streets in Pt. Richmond or… San Quentin.

Here are the directions: https://marinbike.org/news/getting-to-from-the-r-sr-bridge-pathway/

Once approaching/getting off the bridge, if commuting by bike, there is no direct connection to the Bay Trail. So anyone living in Marin and wanting to commute to, say, Berkeley or El Cerrito so they can get on BART (or even the Richmond Ferry) has to risk going through heavily industrial areas or dicey parts of Richmond. On the Marin side to/from Larkspur Landing, you had to ride unprotected on the shoulder of the freeway!

Only way to use it for commuters on either end would be to park and ride, but again, no parking and ride facilities. And there’s any wonder more people don’t use it? There’s wide open space at either end of the bridge to build staging areas, especially on the Richmond side right near the Toll Plaza, but nobody wants to make it easy. It’s such a gauntlet I’m amazed that many people use it.

The solution to traffic congestion is to make public transit and alternate forms of transportation more cost-effective, functional, and convenient. That includes offering easy transition/transfer points. It isn’t to open more driving lanes. They’ve known this since the days of Robert Moses in NYC, but keep doing it.

Preseidential edition: Wrapped in gold foil. Subscription service: Get one every month, come rain or shine SaaS: Obv/ Shit as a Service.

• Catch-22
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• The Handmade’s Tale
• Infinite Jest
• Name of the Rose
• One Hundred Years of Solitude

Others have already explained the secure boot process. But one thing that might impact gaming is that TPMs also implement cryptographic acceleration in hardware. Not only does it speed up operations, it guarantees that the binary code for the library running on the chip hasn’t been modified.

Some anti-cheat libraries might require the TPM and having secure boot on guarantees that feature exists.

This isn’t the first time Pelzer’s reading logs have earned him media attention, according to What Dan Read. The website features a copy of a 2006 article by the Columbus Dispatch’s Mike Harden, which details how Pelzer was making his way through roughly 80 books a year. He had recently read James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he wasn’t afraid to tell the journalist what he really thought. “The worst,” he said. “Pure torture.”

It’s gratifying to hear someone felt the same way about Ulysses. One of the few books I just couldn’t finish, even after multiple tries.

A few suggestions:

• Some of those components may end up costing a lot to operate. You said you’re doing it as a portfolio piece. May want to create a spreadsheet with all the services, then run a cost simulation. You can use the AWS Cost calculator, but it won’t be as flexible doing ‘what if’ scenarios. Any prospective employer will appreciate that you’ve given some thought to runtime pricing.

• You may want to bifurcate static media out and put them in S3 buckets, plus put a CloudFront CDN in front for regional scaling (and cost). Static media coming out of local server uses up processing power, bandwidth, storage, and memory. S3/CloudFront is designed for just this and is a lot cheaper. All fonts, js scripts, images, CSS stylesheets, videos, etc. can be moved out.

• Definitely expire your CloudWatch log records (maybe no more than a week), otherwise they’ll pile up and end up costing a lot.

• Consider where backups and logs may go. Backups should also account for Disaster Recovery (DR). Is the purpose of multiple AZs for scaling or DR? If for DR, you should think about different recovery strategies and how much down-time is acceptable.

• Using Pulumi is good if the goal is to go multi-cloud. But if you’ve hardcoded Aurora or ALBs into the stack, you’re stuck with AWS. If that’s the case, maybe consider going with AWS CDK in a language you like. It would get you farther and let you do more native DevOps.

• Consider how updates and revisions might work, especially once rolled out. What scripts will you need to run to upgrade the NextCloud stack. What are the implications if only one AZ is updated, but not the other. Etc.

• If this is meant for business or multiple users, consider where user accounts would go? What about OAuth or 2FA? If it’s a business, they may already have an Identity Provider (IDP) and now you need to tie into it.

• If tire-kicking, may want to also script switching to plain old RDS/Postgres so you can stay under the free tier.

• To make this all reusable, you want to take whatever is generated (i.e. Aurora endpoints, and save everything to a JSON or .env file. This way, the whole thing can be zapped and re-created and should work without having to manually do much in the console or CLI.

• Any step that uses the console or CLI adds friction and risk. Either automate them, or document the crap out of them as a favor to your future self.

• All secrets could go in .env files (which should be in .gitignore). Aurora/RDS Database passwords could also be auto-generated and kept in SecretsManager and periodically rotated. Hardcoded DB passwords are a risk.

• Think about putting WAF in front of everything with web access to prevent DDOS attacks.

This is a great, learning exercise. Hope you don’t find these suggestions overwhelming. They only apply if you want to show it off for future employers. If it’s just for personal use, ignore all the rest I said and just think about operating costs. See if you can find an AWS sales or support person and get some freebie credits.

Best of luck!

Catching up slowly. Now on S4E5. Sad it’s going to end. Great role for Tudyk.