Ewen Cheslack-Postava
Which seems more natural: The extraordinary measures are needed to deliver on a campaign pledge, Trump says. or Trump says the extraordinary measures are needed to deliver on a campaign pledge. It’s a trivial change in sentence construction, but any normal person would use the latter. New York Times? The former. 1 When they provide attribution matters. The former showed up in a daily update…
You know how some security conscious people call out “curl pipe to sh”? Referencing random repos, without pinned hashes for reference is the same. An example of the “curl pipe to sh”: curl -fsSL https://deno.la I just came across another example today in the USB/IP docs for Docker. If it was pinned to a specific hash, assuming it had been reviewed there at least…
I got yet another recruiter spam email today about a job with the title “Founding Engineer”. Not unusual in the Bay Area, but today’s came from OpenAI, which as of the whole Sam Altman fiasco was at least 770 people and now could easily be close to or over 1000 employees. What do these companies think the point of specifying “founding engineer” rather than just…
TIL AWS will suck up your money with EBS backups because they can’t build a competent lifecycle management system to handle backups. I expect money-sucking, but this feels more like they didn’t even do the product basics in order to milk users for revenue. Snapshots are orphaned under a bunch of conditions, without notification unless you read the docs very carefully, and as far as I…
If you need dot files to graphically explain the relationships of various entities in your business scheme with careful labeling to distinguish the different legal entities, you might want to start by working on naming them clearly. The “there are two hard problems” jokes have been overdone, so I’m not going to repeat them . The most prominent example of this recently was OpenAI…
To get the process off to a smooth start, just lie and say you’re moving to a foreign country… Unfortunately, returning equipment turned into a bit of a nightmare. For somewhat stupid but unimportant reasons, I’ve been maintaining an Xfinity (Comcast) subscription even though I moved more than 18mo ago to a new house and have much better service and no caps/overage limits via…
I looked around for some options for taking notes today, personal wiki style. For notes specifically, Evernote was, for a long time, the goto service/app. I think it’s probably fallen out of favor, and also seems like it may have just stagnated as a product. Keeping a product focused is good, but not if it’s also kept overly simplistic. I’ve used Notion for work and like the…
In the past couple of years, I’ve increasingly noticed just how much I’ve lost the ability to do focused, in-depth reading of long form work. Or more accurately, how weak those mental muscles have become. I tend to skim, switch between different articles or tasks, and get easily distracted. So it was a nice coincidence that on an off-week The Ezra Klein Show podcast re-ran an episode…
TIL: Commonplace books are the original notebooks. The origin of the name is interesting, if confusing – “common” refers to a “literary topos”, i.e. a topic or theme. The note taking process was eventually formally taught to students, at least as early as the 17th century. I feel like at some point maybe there was some brief discussion of note taking in my own…
We’re not really “post-COVID” , but it’s been more than a year since people loosened up and largely went back to normal life. I had thought by now most discussion of return to office would be resolved by now, but the discussion seems to just keep going . One positive outcome of COVID was that it made people question that status quo. Personally, long commutes have always…