I disagree with this article—its premise relies too heavily on the oft repeated, oft misunderstood line “there is no security in obscurity.”
This concept is used to argue that obscurity shouldn’t be used at all as a defense mechanism, when really all it means is it shouldn’t be your only line of defense.
Obscuring aspects of a system can contribute to its overall functioning: it’s a filter for the laziest of adversaries, and it creates an imperative for more motivated ones to probe and explore to understand the obfuscation, creating signal and therefore opportunities to notice their behavior and intervene.
I think for anyone who has dealt firsthand with mitigating online fraud, hackers, spam, trolls, cheating etc, the idea of having completely transparent defense mechanisms is pretty much ludicrous.
Also, to be fair, for money laundering it does raise the barrier to entry quite a bit. Doesn't matter if you have billions of dollars to launder, could already make quite a bit of a difference if you only have millions of dollars to launder.
People in my circles in the US (in an area with tons of alternative options) look at me like I have two heads when I say we don’t have Prime and never shop on Amazon. For many, I think, Amazon has simply been the default option to buy anything for long enough now that it’s ingrained muscle memory.
Big part of that is just that it's insanely easy to use compared to most of the competition.
But still, most people go to the shop to buy toilet paper. Once you get used to Amazon, it just saves so much time and effort. The prices aren't bad either, I just checked toilet paper on amazon.com and 30 rolls of good quality amazonbasics toilet paper costs $0.22 more than the equivalent kirkland product on costco.com
You can order almost everything you need in the same app, whenever you feel like it. Just a couple of clicks, no need to fill in delivery information or anything.
The only part where YMMV is receiving the parcels obviously.
I did have Prime for like 10 years, I just eventually realized that between the not-infrequent annoyances with shipping and the endless search results full of total junk and/or fake products it wasn’t as convenient as I’d thought, it more so just became my default.
There’s a corner store about a two minute walk from my front door, I’m certain their toilet paper is more expensive than Amazon’s, but I can have it right now if I want, and I’m not dealing with the stupid interface asking me if I want “18-count (345 sheet, 9 pack)” or the “XL 27 count (256 sheet, 5 pack)” version of the same product.
Target will deliver anything i want next day for free, without a subscription, and same day with a subscription. Walgreens, 2 days. There's almost never anything i need faster than 2 days time that one of them doesn't have. And if i do, well, then worth the premium to go to an actual physical shop.
A lot of my notes and tasks wind up having bits of code and sometimes large data files associated with them, so I've landed on a similar path of using plain text/org mode files, but aided by a little shell function `today` that creates-if-not-exists a new subdirectory named for the date whenever I use it:
function today() {
TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/"
DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ];
then
mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
fi;
echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
}
So I just do something like `emacs $(today)/tasks.org`. Easy to grep across time, copy things forward (I guess I could do with having `yesterday` and `tomorrow` as well). It's really nice to just use basic CLI tools and little scripts to manage notes and todo lists. Project specific stuff gets a subfolder name every day so it's easy enough to glob ~/today/*/{project}/....
It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.
I always figured it was an engagement optimization thing—there were people mass producing content using popular characters and just throwing tons of stuff at the wall, and the ones that veered unsettling/bizarre wound up getting lots of engagement so they kept doubling down on it. That kind of feedback loop is certainly responsible for many other curious traits of online content that is circulated in algorithmically-curated feeds.
The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.
The notable source of bad tailpipe emissions in NYC are heavy diesel trucks, which, to my understanding, produce a large proportion of tailpipe particulates (and NOx) in the US, despite being a small fraction of overall vehicles on the road. There are strong correlations with heavy truck traffic and asthma rates.
If you're interested in much faster LLM coding, GLM 4.6 on Cerebras is pretty mind blowing. It's not quite as smart as the latest Claude and Gemini, but it generates code so fast it's kind of comical if you're used to the other models. Good with Aider since you can keep it on a tighter leash than with a fully agentic tool.
An interesting test in this vein that I read about in a comment on here is generating a 13 hour clock—I tried just about every prompting trick and clever strategy I could come up with across many image models with no success. I think there's so much training data of 12 hour clocks that just clobbers the instructions entirely. It'll make a regular clock that skips from 11 to 13, or a regular clock with a plaque saying "13 hour clock" underneath, but I haven't gotten an actual 13 hour clock yet.
Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters. Once upon a time, I believe, some American cell providers would give you one for free if you had bad signal at home, which mattered a lot more before phones all had wifi calling.
> Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters.
No, those are different. They are describing a femtocell. I still have one site with a T-Mobile one. It basically VPN’s to T-Mobile’s network core through the cable ISP, uses GPS to check its location for licensed spectrum, and then broadcasts its own LTE signal. It does not boost/repeat the signal of a nearby tower, it runs its own.
Do they work for 5G? I think just amplifying the signal (like 2g signal boosters did) would mess with a lot with all the fancy RF tricks that make 5G fast, stable, low-latency and quite low on package loss (5G has impressively low package loss on the IP layer).
For most use cases WiFi should be the better solution. VoWiFi works well for calls. Should be enough for home and office use.
That shouldn't be the case. There's an extension to VoWiFi to support SMS over IP. With 2G and 3G going away it's not like your carrier has a choice anyway.
What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev environment, but I really don’t know what I would have gotten out of replacing it every year since. It’s still blazing fast.
Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.
> This is self indulgence justified as « investment ».
Exactly that. There's zero way that level of spending is paying for itself in increased productivity, considering they'll still be 99% as productive spending something like a tenth of that.
It's their luxury spending. Fine. Just don't pretend it's something else, or tell others they ought to be doing the same, right?
I think my point was lost, then. I agree with you there is a HUGE falloff in productivity ROI above maybe $2k/year.
My point is that the extreme right end of the slider, where you go from “diminishing returns” to “no return whatsoever”, still costs less than leasing a Kia. It costs less than my minsicule shabby office in the sketchy part of town. Compared to serious computer business revenues, it isn’t even worth spending the time to talk about. I spend more on housekeepers or car insurance.
Given that, why not just smash the slider to the right and stop worrying about it? For serious computer professionals the difference between a $2k/year hardware budget and a $7k/year hardware budget does not matter.
Disclosing that you spend half the median income on top-spec Apple hardware every year is a confession, dude. There's no justifying that spend, past, "I like having the newest toys." Happy for you and whatever sales rep whose performance review you're making a slam dunk. It's still not good advice for the vast majority of people who use their computers for work.
You're an economic elite living in what is commonly known as a "bubble"; consider the response to your initial post a momentary popping of it.
I don’t spend anywhere near that. It resells for 60-80% when I replace it a year or two later. That offsets the cost drastically.
Spending $700 per month on your work tools (where that represents 2-3% of revenue) is not unreasonable. My minuscule office space in the shitty part of town costs as much.
I think anyone running their small business that depends on high performance computers should have an annual budget of at least 1% of revenue for hardware.
It's still thousands in unnecessary spend. You've likely thrown away a few years of post-retirement funds, and at least a few months of runway in the case of a crisis or emegency. It doesn't matter if it seems like a reasonable expense as a percentage of revenue, because the marginal improvement in productivity, for the vast majority of people, is going to be insignificant.
You can justify it to yourself however you like, but outside of your bubble, it's a poor allocation of money.
My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4 build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for that upgrade.
I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.
There’s a difference between something that has existed for a few years that lots of people have heard of, and something that people have been buying their entire lives, and that their grandparents also bought for their entire lives. As to distribution—the internet certainly makes it logistically easier to get your product to consumers, but an infinitely large store shelf still means you’re competing for consumer attention, and the big players already have that attention for their existing successful products.
This concept is used to argue that obscurity shouldn’t be used at all as a defense mechanism, when really all it means is it shouldn’t be your only line of defense.
Obscuring aspects of a system can contribute to its overall functioning: it’s a filter for the laziest of adversaries, and it creates an imperative for more motivated ones to probe and explore to understand the obfuscation, creating signal and therefore opportunities to notice their behavior and intervene.
I think for anyone who has dealt firsthand with mitigating online fraud, hackers, spam, trolls, cheating etc, the idea of having completely transparent defense mechanisms is pretty much ludicrous.
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