Last one was when I was the victim. Driving down a 4 lane highway in an SUV with my wife in moderate traffic when we heard tires screeching about 1/2 a second before being hit in the rear corner. We ended up spinning 360 degrees across 3 lanes of the highway in a matter of a couple seconds. How we weren’t hit by any other cars I have no idea. It was the scariest few seconds of my life.

The other driver was ultimately arrested for DUI.

I’ve never seen a Waymo in person but I’ve seen plenty of edge cases while driving that I wonder how any self driving car would handle it.

Just one recent example: I was at a red traffic light crossing another road that had virtually no visibility to the right due to thick vegetation. Just as the light turned green I heard the sirens of approaching fire trucks from the direction where I couldn’t see. I waited, and didn’t actually see them until they were about 20 feet from the intersection. My gut feeling is that pretty much any self driving car would have seen the green light and then driven right into the path of those approaching emergency vehicles. And what would have happened next? Would the self driving car have slammed on the brakes once it saw the fire trucks? Would it have just continued, forcing the fire trucks to stop?

None of that helps if you grant the LLM access to the production database and it decides to drop table user; to free up some space. That’s when you find out if your database recovery process actually works. You do have database backups, right? Or is that not a thing when vibe coding?

Guy gets shot and the impact sends him flying across the room, out the window, etc. Physics says “oh hell no”. The guy who fired that shot would have likely had his arm dislocated from the recoil if he was able to even hold onto it.

I’d be very careful about using copper this way. While ingesting small amounts of copper is ok, and in fact a good part of a diet, Ingesting too much copper is not a good thing, and can be toxic.

Having copper piping, etc. in close proximity to a garden risks having it leach into the plants, which might then be ingested. Since copper is a fairly soft metal then rain could slowly corrode it and introduce it to the plants.

A bit more on copper toxicology here.

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.

Our TV picked up ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and one or two independent TV channels from New York. Our antenna was on a rotator so that you could point it in the optimal location for each.

Born in 1967. I remember as a kid during the summer that pretty much every afternoon 10-20 neighborhood kids would get together to play games like hide and seek or kick the can. We were in a semi-rural neighborhood so kids could live up to a mile away or so. The parents were more than happy for us to be somewhere random with a bunch of other kids.

When parents had to call kids home for dinner they’d use bells, whistles, or other noisemakers. Pretty much every kid recognized the different sounds and knew which kids it applied to.

My grandparents lived in New Hampshire. Their telephone was on a party line shared with 4 or 5 neighbors. We learned to answer it only if it rang twice in quick succession.

Haven’t you heard the price of memory is skyrocketing?

I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.

I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.

I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.

For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…

For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Something about the lyrics just makes me smile.

I got my first tickets to a Rush concert later this year as well. I never thought I’d have a chance to see them live so I jumped as soon as I heard about it. I only wish Neil Pert was still around…

My wife & I saw this late last year. We agree that it was amazing. What’s truly incredible about it is that the actors were all members of an amateur theater in the UK where it took them years to write & refine the show. They started performing it at their little amateur theater where it eventually got noticed, took it to London’s west end (their version of Broadway), and after a few years there brought it to Broadway in NYC. It’s done so well on Broadway that it’s run there was extended something like 8 times, and it’s now starting a tour across the US.

World War Z, the book, proved this wrong.

I have a few decades programming experience, as a professional software engineer, an open source developer, and a DevOps engineer. There is no way in hell I would do a code review where 15k lines were added and a similar amount of lines removed without having a long discussion with the person who made those changes. I’d want to ask a lot of detailed questions about the changes, questions that an LLM isn’t likely to answer, and most definitely not questions I’d be inclined to try to type into an LLM to try to get an answer.

Over the years I’ve dealt with all manner of bugs, from overflows & underflows, to bad assumptions about logic flow, and much much more. The whole purpose of pointed questioning of the author is to be comfortable with decisions made in the code and to minimize the chances of all sorts of potential bugs.

Aside from his regular-ish parody tours, we’ve also seen him do an acoustical tour of only his own music without any parodies, costumes, etc. We also saw him tour with a 30+ piece orchestra. Two words: “OBOE SOLO!”

My wife & I have seen Weird Al 4 times now and will be seeing him again this summer. While he mostly does a big show of his parodies with costumes & props we’ve also see him do a low-key acoustical tour where he only played his original music and none of the parodies. We also saw him tour with a full 30-piece orchestra, which was really fun as well.

Space cash

Thanks for the heads-up!