If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

Classful IPv4 was obsoleted 32 years ago. Only 8 years left before it’s literally older than a standard career.

It’s fascinating the sheer inertia that leads formally-trained IT professionals to use and perpetuate such profoundly useless and obsolete nomenclature. You’d think that having an incorrect use of the term “class A” and not having any use for classes B and C would tip off academia that they should cordon off classful networking to the “History of Computing” course next to ARPANET.

Maybe next time someone refers to 10.0.0.0/8 as a Class A network I’ll refer to it as the ARPANET Network. That’s only very slightly more anachronistic (3 years).

(They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)

I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them

Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).

I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.

It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.

Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.

I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with “standard” product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn’t a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don’t belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually “legacy big corpo” companies).

Where I’ve worked it’s more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you’re okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I’d want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

Nowadays “buggy” is not how I’d describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.

However it’s still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it’s inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK “design” choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they’re doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes… nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone’s voice from halfway around the world says “yeah we see your screen”. Unnatural is what it is.

I’ve wrapped plenty of sensitive electronics that I’d be comfortable throwing at a wall. Get a larger box than you think you need, some foam wrapping/bubble wrap from another package and use that to form a protective core. Fill the rest of the box with lightly crumpled scrap paper, or packing peanuts if you have them. It ain’t rocket science.

You just have to assume in the first truck the package will sit underneath seven other heavy packages, while the second truck will be completely empty as your package rattles around and bangs against the walls. Anything else is foolishness, you know damn well those trucks aren’t individually fastening every box for a couple euros of gross revenue per delivery.

I work in the industry (not MSFT) on cloud reliability so I have insight.

• The cloud itself is not as stable as some people may think. Standard is 99.9 % uptime. Which sounds great, but if your DB is 99.9 % and your compute is 99.9% and your storage is 99.9 % and your network and so on and any one of those going out breaks your application, then you don’t have 99.9 % but (99.9 %)^n which is a lot less impressive. You can make things fault-tolerant through redundancy but that comes with great complexity which can cause outages of its own.
• Apps like teams, like most B2B bullshit, provide added value by bundling together as much shit as possible. Chat, calls, calendar, spreadsheets, you name it. So now any one of those features going out individually can impact the whole app.
• Every one of those features in the bundle is managed by a different team, possibly in a different country and coming from a different company acquisition. So now you have to glue unrelated tech stacks together which is super expensive.
• The way you bundle things together in a SPA in a corporate environment with finite resources is by basically bundling together a bunch of iframes. Ever notice that the calendar tab on teams sometimes tells you to refresh your page to get new credentials? That’s why, this fucking thing bundles its own authentication lib and barely talks to MS Teams so it can’t properly refresh its tokens! If you like having one product’s technical debt, now think about having 20 products’ technical debt all conveniently forced to interact together in one web page!

Honestly I’m impressed by how well teams works with the very severe constraints they clearly have. Shit’s got more moving parts than Ryanair’s entire fleet and it only breaks once in a while.

It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).