Dave Cuthbert 🌲🍂🍁🦃

Nah, this is exactly what their customers want. But, keep in mind, their customers in this case are Hollywood studios and ad buyers.

Yeah, I was first thinking LEB128, but that didn't make sense with the zeros. Then, maybe, ASN.1 (ugh).

Oh, god, this brings back some nightmares.

At Amazon, circa 2025-2029, we were encoding various IDs as double precision floats because we were trying to migrate from 32- to 64- bit IDs and some of the crufty old platforms didn't support 64-bit ints. The double at least gave us 53 bits.

Attempted picture of the aurora from November 11, 2025. The sky is full of clouds with no aurora evidence seen. The silhouettes of fir trees are seen against the overexposed cloudy sky.

Alas…

TIL I can get The Goods Doordashed to me.

A Microsoft Outlook reminder dialog whose title bar says "1 Reminder," but there is no actual reminder. There are Snooze and Dismiss buttons that cannot be clicked.

Although this is coming from Outlook, I see a lot of these types of issues across various applications since updating to Tahoe. Lots of force quitting applications to get around stuck windows, etc.

It's... not a good release.

That's roughly what my connection looked like this morning while there were a few bucket trucks in my neighborhood this morning...

The Modern Leader A leadership newsletter for engineers, PMs, and technical leads who want to build clarity without the chaos.

@kvlly.com has a great article up, "You might be carrying an invisible gun." (Subtitle: "The more senior you get, the more your words start to sound like orders")

I have *so* felt this as loftier adjectives started getting added to my title.
modernleader.vercel.app/posts/invisi...

It looks just like a comet. Which is exactly what an alien spacecraft would do… 😂

Oof, another disappointment. I'm so ready to see a decent Raspberry Pi on steroids kind of machine without having to go all the way to an Ampere based box.

Possibly related to GPSR, which requires that they have an EU-based representative to contact about issues with quality and safety.

(I'm mostly concerned about the lack of carve-outs for non-commercial open source under the GPSR; CRA has this.)

What are you using for your email provider?

I'm on Microsoft 365, and there are a number of password-reset/email-verifications that can't handshake with it (to the point where their attempts don't even show in my delivery logs). It's frustrating me to no end.

Claude prompt and response after a number of gaslit responses to questions about CRC64/NVME: Me: I don't think I can trust you on any more information on this topic. Claude: That's completely fair and I understand. I gave you incorrect information twice, and you were right to call it out both times. I should have been upfront about my uncertainty rather than stating things confidently that turned out to be wrong. If you need accurate information on the NVMe CRC64 polynomial and its properties, I'd recommend checking the NVMe specification directly or looking at well-documented implementations. I clearly don't have reliable knowledge on this specific topic. I appreciate your patience in correcting me, and I'm sorry for wasting your time with inaccurate answers.

Have we reached AGI yet?

A 64k default stack size? What is this, a stack for ants?

Magnum PI?!

Missed an important meeting this morning because:
* Someone mistyped my email address
* Someone else saw this and forwarded it to me
* Somewhere in this the time zone was set to Pacific instead of Eastern (while keeping the numeric time intact)

Computers and time zones were a mistake.

Imagine being a millionaire and there's someone who is literally a million times richer than you.

That’s why I always create both doc.txt and doc.txt.backup on my RAID 0 array.

Hear me out: you know those pneumatic tube systems that banks used to have? Well, I figure there should be a bunch of surplus ones around, and if we just put each salmon into a cylinder, put the cylinder into the tube, fire it upstream, and— wait, don’t leave yet!

OpenAI is gaming this extremely well. Despite never turning a profit and not really having a path to profitability (the infamous step 2: ???), they are now "too big to fail"—if they fail, they will maim the rest of the tech sector (and now trying to link this to the US gov).

12 weeks if you don't mind not being paid (FMLA). Not paying workers seems to be a common thing here. 🙄

Some states are better (I was curious):
RI: 5 weeks
CA: 8 weeks (@60%)
CO, CT, NJ, NY, OR, WA: 12 weeks (varying%)
MA: 26 weeks
DE, MD: 12 weeks (starting 2026)

From:
mosey.com/blog/parenta...

Sandwich board at DCA: Red Warning Triangle Icon TSA Lost & Found is CLOSED until further notice. Did you forget anything at TSA? Phone; Wallet; Keys; Laptop; Jacket. Please go to the TSA website to file a lost claim.

I'm not sure if this is shutdown related or something else going on at DCA. But I did like the icon used in the QR code.

Also in the article: Softbank bought Ampere back in March, which I didn't know about.

My hunch is they won't combine Ampere with Arm to avoid angering Arm licensees. But it would be nice to be able to do a home-build PC with Arm chips. That's not feasible today.

SoftBank Said to Have Weighed Potential Takeover of Marvell SoftBank Group Corp. explored a potential takeover of US chipmaker Marvell Technology Inc. earlier this year, people familiar with the matter said, in what would have been the semiconductor industry’s...

Softbank was considering buying Marvell, to combine them with Arm. This would've been an interesting combo; there's a lot of weird memory tricks done with networking (RDMA, etc) in HPC systems to reduce latency. Having this on a single die/chiplets, etc. ... hmm.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

As someone who manages a few teams now… touché. 😂

I do mean org constraints more than management. We’re currently doing a bunch of things at work that make absolutely no sense, but it is currently illegal for us to do the things that make sense (until Congress officially funds us again).

Satellites signals are weak and fragile, though. If they're doing something that NationState™ doesn't like, NationState™ can just flood the uplink with noise and effectively deafen it.

Or, heck, Captain Midnight. But he, too, would be shut down by NationState™.

Tech is the easy part. Making the tech work around random organizational constraints is most of that damn 10%.

It was a mistake to shock rocks into thinking. They’ve only wanted revenge ever since.

post your space art
#art 🎨🌌🛰️

Washington Health Plan finder result for the recommended plan that covers facilities in my area, showing the Premera Blue Cross Cascade Complete Gold plan. The premium for my family is $4,642.09 per month, for a total yearly cost of $58,166, and requires that we pay for the first $2,000 out-of-pocket.

So, uh, this is one of the three health plans recommended for me, and the only one of those that covers providers locally.

Are we winning yet? I hope so; I can't afford much more winning.

(No, I won't be selecting the recommended plan.)