>It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.
To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.
If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).
> Roblox is one of the main online destinations for kids these days, above even minecraft servers it seems.
It really is. I don't play many video games these days, much less block-like games, so I always saw Roblox as a successful long-running title and not much more...up until I saw their public peering arrangements [0] and had my mind blown. Even if they massively inflate their playerbase, they're still huge - you don't just build out a multi-terabit network on a whim, and network operations aren't exactly the strong suit of most investors, so it's unlikely they would fake network capacity or build it out for show.
I wish we could properly compare Minecraft vs Roblox traffic, but the distributed nature of Minecraft multiplayer makes this quite difficult. A quick search on Google Scholar isn't showing much in the way of network volume, so it seems to be an unexplored/unexamined area.
> Mountain towns and roads flood when it rains a lot.
> Chimney Rock, it floods with 3" to 5" inches of rain.
This was no ordinary flood - Chimney Rock was basically wiped off the map. This isn't a "dry it out and replace the sheetrock" situation, most of the town is gone.
That's not to say building several feet above a mountain river is a smart idea (or any river, for that matter), but this level of destruction hasn't been seen since the 1916 flood.
> This is not to make excuses for Intel ME, which is entirely unauditable by third parties and has harbored significant security vulnerabilities in the past. But, remember, we all use one processor architecture from one of two vendors, so Intel doesn't have a whole lot of motivation to do better. Lest you respond that ARM is the way, remember that modern ARM SOCs used in consumer devices have pretty much identical capabilities.
I actually took advantage of one such security vulnerability to unlock my old Moto X's bootloader! The details of the exploit are quite interesting:
> This created a minor emergency for me, because it was an other-than-minor emergency for some contractors I was working with.
> Many contractors are small businesses. Many small businesses are very thinly capitalized. Many employees of small businesses are extremely dependent on receiving compensation exactly on payday and not after it. And so, while many people in Chicago were basically unaffected on that Friday because their money kept working (on mobile apps, via Venmo/Cash App, via credit cards, etc), cash-dependent people got an enormous wrench thrown into their plans.
I never really thought about not having to worry about cashflow problems as a privilege before, but it makes sense, considering having access to the banking system to begin with is a privilege. I remember my bank's website and app were offline, but card processing was unaffected - you could still swipe your cards at retailers. For me, the disruption was a minor annoyance since I couldn't check my balance, but I imagine many people were probably panicking about making rent and buying groceries while everything was playing out.
The really admirable thing about this is that Patrick acknowledged that it was "an other-than-minor emergency" for the contractors and took steps to ensure that they were paid rapidly. In a similar situation many people would have shrugged and taken an attitude of "sorry, bank's down. I'll pay you when it comes back up."
The 14th gen is so similar to the 13th gen, Intel took a lot of heat for it in the initial reviews. It's no surprise that they both suffer the same ails.
It's not similar. It's literally the same silicon. They didn't tape out any new dies for the products branded as "14th gen"; not even a new stepping. Just minor tweaks to the binning.
I didn’t know that. I would like to know how to get more informed about these kind of structural differences on CPU generations.
Going back to the what you said, Intel selling the same silicon as two different generations (even if this is still just marketing terminology) is a bit lame on their side.
I remember seeing a quote for 500/500 metro E from Comcast several years ago. $12k to install, $1.2k/mo. And that only involved laying a few miles of fiber, no redundancy. Dedicated lines are no joke. If you're AWS or GCP, you can be your own ISP and mitigate this to some extent, but that's just the physical connection they save on.
You can always save by going on-prem, assuming you have no uptime requirements. But the moment you sign an SLA, those savings go out the window.
I was thinking the same thing. Lots of corporations rely on UPNP for printers and the like, so if you were to embed a UPNP spammer in a malicious invoice...
To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.
If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).