Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3842 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
Tesla did not invent efficient power over air.
If anything, Tesla might have invented a reasonably efficient gas discharge tube that made him think he was transmitting huge amounts of energy through air. Carbon filament lights back then were probably less than 1% efficient. A 10% efficient glow tube right next to a Tesla coil might have appeared to be a clever invention. You can read the details of his plans and it was definitely crazy nonsense.
I lived a mile from an AM radio station at one point. The energy transfer is anything but efficient, but it does end up where it's unwanted. There was 1V @ 1MHz on practical everything. You could get free power if dimly glowing LEDs counted.
Back on topic, DARPA clearly made this to access funding that's not available for weapons. The power density of laser light is key for weaponizing it. Stating a goal of sending high power through a fine cable is clever.
I had a job interview where I was asked how to design an app that lets you chat with nearby people. I asked what "nearby" means since population density varies. A 1 km radius could be 10000 people at an urban event, or it could be in one of the many areas were the next nearest person is 20+ km away. I have privacy and usability concerns.
(I failed the interview for asking too many questions. I found out that I was talking to the actual product manager for that actual product, so they failed the interview too.)
Temporary use generators do not run clean even if they're running from a relatively soot-free fuel. There's also no smokestack visible in photos. Scale this up large enough to run an AI datacenter and I'm surprised there hasn't been a still air day where everyone suddenly dies from CO2 poisoning, CO poisoning, and/or NOx asthma.
Conventional heat tolerant electronics starts malfunctioning at 90 to 100 C but immediate damage doesn't happen until it's much hotter. Since the cooling fans were were running, it's surprising that all that heat didn't trigger fire suppression.
Or maybe no fire suppression either?
Are the Optimus robots going to have the same level of product support as the Cybertruck? Essentially, "Not used as intended; warranty voided." Do you get banned from Xtter if you discuss flaws in the product? Do you have to publicly kiss Elon's ass to cut ahead in the 6 month repair queue? Even cellphone manufacturers would cringe at Tesla's support.
I'd be upset if my big business domain was being delegated to GoDaddy. Besides the customer support and sales horror stories, they're maliciously compliant with registrar requirements when they have an auto-responder bot as an abuse contact. They could suddenly cease to exist if one of their customers causes enough trouble.
Keeping a key safe is easy. Renewal is complicated, even if there's enough tooling on top to make it seem simple.
The scenario I see being the easiest is a social engineering or vulnerability attack that puts ownership of a domain name into question. The faster certs expire, the less time there is for a resolution process to complete.
This makes sense. I discovered that their datasets knew about MPEG-TS specifications that are behind $$$$ paywalls. Unfortunately, the data structures it confidentiality recites have invalid bit alignment. If you tell it that, it apologizes for omitting padding then produces a new invalid structure.
This can be a two-way nightmare. Project has crazy goals and lowest bidder staffing pool says yes to everything. Staffing pool bangs on the keyboard furiously for months without progress. Project gets trimmed down. Staffing pool says the trimming broke feature dependencies. Need to trim more or less to fix it. Project owners work on it. Time has passed and the pool has been reallocated elsewhere. Need to re-hire and re-train new ones.
The impressive part is how fast the money evaporates. $300+ million could hire a lot of top 20% software developers, but I know they're the bottom 5% assembling pieces of Stack Overflow like a puzzle.
I switched my home desktop and server to Linux over a decade ago. MacOS felt like it was getting harder and harder to use for serious work. The $$$$$ Apple was asking for their aging trash-can Mac Pro was hard to swallow too. I went with Linux on a custom BTO machine. I needed a VM to run old Mac apps for a while, but not forever. I've been occasionally upgrading those machines every since and am very happy with the switch.
At my last job, several of us were having trouble doing software development on new MacBook Pros. Apple's increasing restrictions drove a lot of work into VMs. Corporate budgets would never buy a Mac with enough RAM. We got permission to switch to Linux. It worked. The corporate tools were still usable and the $1200 laptop hardware worked very well. A lower quality screen was the only thing to complain about. And goodbye to the cursed USB-C hubs that you practically need to tape to the back of a MacBook!
Cloudflare serves the most sophisticated phishing operations I see on the Internet. It's not just some a fake web page. It's a very large number of interconnected sites - large enough to fool search engines. There's also the tooling, the accurate cloning of interactive content, click-through tracking, multi-level obfuscation, and high volume domain registration. The gang hacks web services on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to send spams through existing business accounts. I know a victim and this gang even has high quality counterfeit products delivered to reduce suspicions.
They've been on Cloudflare for probably over 10 years.
I could infer why Cloudflare might be helping organized crime when they sell protection from organized crime, but The Register is a Cloudflare customer. My post would be deleted.
I used Skype overseas and they locked my account for "fraud." No refund of the remaining credit. They wouldn't even mail a check. I guess that's their actual revenue stream.
I smiled a little when Microsoft extended their cold, suffocating embrace to Skype.
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