Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

robots.txt is 100% honor based. Well known bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. definitely honor them. But there are also plenty of bots that completely ignore them.

I would hope the bots used to collect LLM training data honors them, but there’s no way to know for certain. And all it really takes is one bot ignoring it for the content of your website to end up in a random set of training data…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

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My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.

I hope you realize that virtually every CDN provider does the exact same thing in similar ways. Sites that use Akamai, AWS, Google cloud, Fastly, etc. all give those companies access to unencrypted content. It’s just how CDNs work…

Getting rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. Had all of about 1 second of warning when she slammed on her brakes and started skidding.

My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.

The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.

Quick! Change all the textbooks to “clay tablet theorem”!

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‘21 Model Y long range. Overall it drives well, and the supercharger network is really nice. We took it on a trip up & down a good portion of the east coast last year and never had any issues charging it. We have a couple 30 lb dogs that love going for rides, so things like dog mode are really nice as well.

Things I really do not like:

• The reliance on cameras for all sorts of features like auto high beams and auto wipers on top of traffic aware cruise control (aka autopilot) (and full self driving, if you have it). I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days. The auto high beams are so unreliable I don’t use them, and that means no autopilot at night. I have no faith in even trying out FSD because of how glitchy everything else is.
• The minimal use of physical controls. I have to take my eyes off the road just to switch wiper speed/mode.
• Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
• The maps have lots of routing issues. It shows roads in my neighborhood that don’t yet exist (new development under construction), regularly routes me wrong ways (there’s a left turn near my home that it thinks it can’t take so it tries to route me two sides if a triangle as a result), and on our road trip we found a stretch of highway that it thought it couldn’t drive on and kept trying to route us along side streets. And there’s no way I know to report these issues so they can be fixed. Apps like Waze make that trivial.

Pretty much all of these are reasons why I refuse to even try FSD and discourage others from using it. About the only way I’ll give it another chance is if a truly independent third party tests it and says all these issues have been resolved.

I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:

• Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
• When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.

About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

Saw Queen perform with Adam Lambert a few months ago. They played one or two pieces written by Brian May that really tied those two professions of his together. It blows my mind that he’s worked with NASA and the like quite a bit over the years.

Some CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare have options to optimize images. We use the Akamai one where I work. It means our creative teams, customers, etc. don’t need to worry too much about whether an image is properly optimized when they upload it. Akamai will, behind the scenes optimize the quality, color palette, and image type (jpg, web, png, etc) and create a number of different versions of the images. Then when a client requests the image Akamai looks at the client device (mobile vs desktop, screen resolution, browser version, etc) and serves the copy of the image that’s best optimized for that device.

So even if the URL ends with .jpg you might be sent a .webp. If you use the browsers developer tool to inspect the response headers you’ll likely see the Content-Type header says it’s .webp as well.

You died every week (from diabetes)?

Criminal trials don’t find defendants “innocent”. They find them not guilty, which is a huge difference. It means the prosecution didn’t bring forward enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The presence of doubt means they weren’t found guilty. Not that they were found innocent.

He was proven liable in the civil trial. The additional evidence uncovered by the lawyers in that case was damning. Civil trials typically don’t require a unanimous verdict, but it was unanimous in this case.

I got royally screwed by the federal government personnel data breach that happened a number of years ago. As a result I have free identity theft monitoring with a really good company for the foreseeable future.

A well thought out and implemented backup system, along with a good security setup is how you deal with malware. If backups won’t protect you from malware then you’re doing backups wrong. A proper backup implementation keeps a series of full backups plus incremental backups based on those full ones. So say your data doesn’t change very often, then you might do a full backup once a month and incremental ones twice a week. You keep 6 months of the combinations of full & incrementals, you don’t just overwrite the backups with new ones.

If you’re doing backups like that and you suffer a malware attack then you have the ability to recover data as far as 6 months ago. The chances you don’t discover malware encrypting your data for 6+ months is tiny. If you’re really paranoid then you also test recovering files from random backups on a regular basis.

My employer has detected and blocked multiple malware attacks using a combination of the above practices plus device management software that can detect unusual NAS activity and block suspect devices on our networks. Each time our security team was able to identify the encrypted files and restore over 99% from backups.