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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Frankly, another choice virtually forced by the broader IT.

    If the broader IT either provides or brokers a service, we are not allowed to independently spend money and must go through them.

    Fine, they will broker commercial certificates, so just do that, right? Well, to renew a certificate, we have to open a ticket and attach our csr as well as a “business justification” and our dept incurs a hundred dollar internal charge for opening that ticket at all. Then they will let it sit for a day or two until one of their techs can get to it. Then we are likely to get feedback about something like their policy changing to forbid EC keys and we must do RSA instead, or vice versa because someone changed their mind. They may email an unexpected manager for confirmation in accordance to some new review process they implemented. Then, eventually, their tech manually renews it with a provider and attaches the certificate to the ticket.

    It’s pretty much a loophole that we can use let’s encrypt because they don’t charge and technically the restrictions only come in when purchasing is involved. There was a security guy raising hell that some of our sites used that “insecure” let’s encrypt and demanding standards change to explicitly ban them, but the bearaucracy to do that was insurmountable so we continue.





  • Ours is automated, but we incur downtime on the renewal because our org forbids plain http so we have to do TLS-ALPN-01. It is a short downtime. I wish let’s encrypt would just allow http challenges over https while skipping the cert validation. It’s nuts that we have to meaningfully reply over 80…

    Though I also think it’s nuts that we aren’t allowed to even send a redirect over 80…


  • So on mine, I haven’t bothered to change from the ISP provided router, which is mostly adequate for my needs, except I need to do some DNS shenigans, and so I take over DHCP to specify my DNS server which is beyond the customization provided by the ISP router.

    Frankly been thinking of an upgrade because they don’t do NAT loopback and while I currently workaround with different DNS results for local queries, it’s a bit wonky to do that and I’m starting to get WiFi 7 devices and could use an excuse to upgrade to something more in my control.




  • I think an ai could outperform my executives.

    One of them sent out an email about how we weren’t making enough money. But don’t worry, he has a strategy that we will execute on and fix it.

    The strategy is to raise prices and get more sales at the same time… That is literally it. Not even picking “high value” versus “high volume”, just a declaration that we can do both. If this genius plan doesn’t work, it’s just because the sales people failed to execute against his brilliant strategy well enough.


  • It’s pretty much a vibe coding issue. What you describe I can recall being advocated forevet, the project manager’s dtram that you model and spec things out enough and perfectly model the world in your test cases, then you are golden. Except the world has never been so convenient and you bank on the programming being reasonably workable by people to compensate.

    Problem is people who think they can replace understanding with vibe coding. If you can only vibe code, you will end up with problems you cannot fix and the LLM can’t either. If you can fix the problems, then you are not inclined to toss overly long chunks of LLM stuff because they generate ugly hard to maintain code that tends to violate all sorts of best practices for programming.





  • This all presumes that OpenAI can get there and further is exclusively in a position to get there.

    Most experts I’ve seen don’t see a logical connection between LLM and AGI. OpenAI has all their eggs in that basket.

    To the extent LLM are useful, OpenAI arguably isn’t even the best at it. Anthropic tends to make it more useful than OpenAI and now Google’s is outperforming it on relatively pointless benchmarks that were the bragging point of OpenAI. They aren’t the best, most useful, or cheapest. The were first, but that first mover advantage hardly matters when you get passed.

    Maybe if they were demonstrating advanced robotics control, but other companies are mostly showing that whole OpenAI remains “just a chatbot”, with more useful usage of their services going through third parties that tend to be LLM agnostic, and increasingly I see people select non OpenAI models as their preference.



  • Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.

    The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.

    IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.


  • Unlikely.

    Businesses generally aren’t that stoked about anything other than laptops or servers.

    To the extent they have desktop grade equipment, it’s either:

    • Some kiosk grade stuff already cheaper than a game console
    • Workstation grade stuff that they will demand nVidia or otherwise just don’t even bother

    On servers, the steam machine isn’t that attractive since it’s not designed to either be slapped in a closet and ignored on slotted in a datacenter.

    Putting all this aside, businesses love simplicity in their procurement. They aren’t big on adding a vendor for a specific niche when they can use an existing vendor, even if in theory they could shave a few dollars in cost. The logistical burden of adding Steam Machine would likely offset any imagined savings. Especially if they had to own re-imaging and licensing when they are accustomed to product keys embedded in the firmware when they do vendor preloads today.

    Maybe you could worry a bit more about the consumer market, where you have people micro-managing costs and will be more willing to invest their own time, but even then the market for non-laptop home systems that don’t think they need nVidia but still need something better than integrated GPUs is so small that it shouldn’t be a worry either.