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Worth knowing in this context:

Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone.

Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.

You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.

Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.

When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?

So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.


There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.

When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.


Here's my (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) rubric:

- If it's an internal project (like migrating from one vendor to another, with no user impact) then it takes as long as I can convince my boss it is reasonable to take.

- If it's a project with user impact (like adding a new feature) then it takes as long as the estimated ROI remains positive.

- If it's a project that requires coordination with external parties (like a client or a partner), then the sales team gets to pick the delivery date, and the engineering team gets to lie about what constitutes an MVP to fit that date.


Rabbi Haim once ascended to the firmaments to see the difference between the worlds. He first visited Gehenna (Hell).

He saw a vast hall with long tables covered in the most magnificent foods. But the people sitting there were skeletal and wailing in agony. As the Rabbi looked closer, he saw that every person had wooden slats splinted to their arms, stretching from their shoulders to their wrists. Their arms were perfectly straight and stiff; they could pick up a spoon, but they could not bend their elbows to bring the food to their own mouths. They sat in front of a feast, starving in bitterness.

The Rabbi then visited Gan Eden (Heaven). To his surprise, he saw the exact same hall, the same tables, and the same magnificent food. Even more shocking, the people there also had wooden slats splinted to their arms, keeping them from bending their elbows. But here, the hall was filled with laughter and song. The people were well-fed and glowing. As the Rabbi watched, he saw a man fill his spoon and reach across the table, placing the food into the mouth of the man sitting opposite him. That man, in turn, filled his spoon and fed his friend.

The Rabbi returned to Hell and whispered to one of the starving men, "You do not have to starve! Reach across and feed your neighbor, and he will feed you." The man in Hell looked at him with spite and replied, "What? You expect me to feed that fool across from me? I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of a full belly!"


Regarding just the headline, at this point it's not really about immigration, this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons. The two people who have been killed so far were themselves citizens and at best were political dissidents. They were not themselves subject to detainment due to immigration status.

Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.

But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.

What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.

It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).


"My email is now being hosted by Microsoft..."

Out of the pan, into the fire.

my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.


The headline is misleading. It says that Microsoft will provide the key if asked, but the linked statement to Forbes says Microsoft will provide the key if it receives a valid legal order.

These have different meanings. Microsoft is legally entitled to refuse a request from law enforcement, and subject to criminal penalties if it refuses a valid legal order.

It does illustrate a significant vulnerability in that Microsoft has access to user keys by default. The public cannot be sure that Microsoft employees or criminals are unable to access those keys.


Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.


> At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.

> O'Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.

Minnesota permit-to-carry requirements: https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/bca/public-services-bca/firearm...

> Q: Do I have to disclose to a peace officer that I am a permit holder and carrying a firearm?

> A: Yes, upon request of a peace officer, a permit holder must disclose to the officer whether or not the permit holder is currently carrying a firearm.

So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process. (The penalty for permitted carrying without possessing the physical permit card is $25 for a first offense and forfeiture of the weapon; it would've been his first offense per Minneapolis police.)

If ever there was a 2A violation, it's a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.


I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").

The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input - rather, it's an invitation to do the work and to stop looking for permission. Which is really the core value of open source - no need for permission, "just do it". Forks also don't generally split communities because forks live within the community (and good community leaders foster the tolerance of forks).

As an example, I have a fork going of someone else's open source project which I made to meet my client's needs. I've got an email thread going with the project owner, it's all very friendly, and one day the fork might merge back in again (probably in parts). I think this is how most forks work, with the exceptions making big headlines partly because they're juicy gossip but mostly because they are exactly that - exceptions.


They could just ask before uploading your encryption key to the cloud. Instead they force people to use a Microsoft Account to set up their windows and store the key without explicit consent

This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is building orchestrators i also noticed claude is already the best orchestrator for claude.

Someone captured the beginning of the shooting victim’s interaction with ICE. It certainly doesn’t look as though the person is aggressive or brandishing a weapon.

The DHS public statement that the victim was going to “do maximize damage and massacre law enforcement” is outrageous…

https://x.com/David_J_Bier/status/2015125221938770324


Future federal reserve chair Caroline Ellison.

Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees.

Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes up specific agents based on folder (Kanban) state.

Product Owner (Claude Opus 4.5): Strategy. Cuts scope creep

Scrum Master (Opus 4.5): Prioritizes backlog and assigns tickets to technical agents.

Architect (Sonnet 4.5): Design only. Writes specs/interfaces, never implementation.

Archaeologist (Grok-Free): Lazy-loaded. Only reads legacy Java decompilation when Architect hits a doc gap.

CAB (Opus 4.5): The Bouncer. Rejects features at Design phase (Gate 1) and Code phase (Gate 2).

Dev Pair (Sonnet 4.5 + Haiku 4.5): AD-TDD loop. Junior (Haiku) writes failing NUnit tests; Senior (Sonnet) fixes them.

Librarian (Gemini 2.5): Maintains "As-Built" docs and triggers sprint retrospectives.

You might ask yourself the question “isn’t this extremely unnecessary?” and the answer is most likely _yes_. But I never had this much fun watching AI agents at work (especially when CAB rejects implementations). This was an early version of the process that the AI agents are following (I didn’t update it since it was only for me anyway): https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I


After owning a product, I've developed a lot of sympathy for the people outside of engineering who have to put up with us. Engineers love to push back on estimates, believing that "when it's done" is somehow acceptable for the rest of the business to function. In a functioning org, there are lot of professionals depending on correct estimation to do their job.

For us, an accurate delivery date on a 6 month project was mandatory. CX needed it so they could start onboarding high priority customers. Marketing needed it so they could plan advertising collateral and make promises at conventions. Product needed it to understand what the Q3 roadmap should contain. Sales needed it to close deals. I was fortunate to work in a business where I respected the heads of these departments, which believe it or not, should be the norm.

The challenge wasn't estimation - it's quite doable to break a large project down into a series of sprints (basically a sprint / waterfall hybrid). Delays usually came from unexpected sources, like reacting to a must have interruption or critical bugs. Those you cannot estimate for, but you can collaborate on a solution. Trim features, push date, bring in extra help, or crunch. Whatever the decision, making sure to work with the other departments as colaborators was always beneficial.


> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.

Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.



Russia is at war with Europe.

Briefly, this morning, I had the opposite effect happen to my Gmail inbox in which things that would normally land in the social and updates folders ended up in my primary folder. I don't know which I'd be more freaked out by: a broken Gmail spam filter or 18 inches of snow.

> Li correctly points out that the Archive's budget, in the range of $25-30M/year, is vastly lower than any comparable website: By owning its hardware, using the PetaBox high-density architecture, avoiding air conditioning costs, and using open-source software, the Archive achieves a storage cost efficiency that is orders of magnitude better than commercial cloud rates.

That’s impressive. Wikipedia spends $185m per year and the Seattle public library spends $102m. Maybe not comparable exactly, but $30m per year seems inexpensive for the memory of the world…


No surprises.

No matter how we look at it, EVs are much friendlier and safer to the environment. Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again, but in today's world we are rapidly moving away from it and towards nuclear/hydel/wind methods for generating power.

I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.


That's the most clear murder I've ever seen, zero question about intent or anything else. After the four agents have thrown the guy to the ground and are pinning him down you can see the fed on the left pull out his gun and shoot the defenseless man in the back, and then the others jump back and join in.

This is truly unreal. Even more unreal that we know nobody will get prosecuted for this murder and we'll see another one just like it within a few days.


>Speed. The GitLab web interface has always felt sluggish to me.

10 years later the same problem remains. While Gitea / Forgejo have very little performance problems. And will only get better once Go 1.26 is out. Which is a much bigger release than a single digit version number upgrade.


Is it going to take more than two hours?

Is it going to take more than two days?

Is it going to take more than two weeks?

Is it going to take more than two months?

Is it going to take more than two years?

If you can answer these questions, you can estimate using a confidence interval.

If the estimate is too wide, break it down into smaller chunks, and re-estimate.

If you can't break it down further, decide whether it's worth spending time to gather information needed to narrow the estimate or break it down. If not, scrap the project.


From the bottom:

> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.


That's a summary execution in broad daylight. I have no words.

before anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct.

It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.

As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.


I don’t think the right question is “should vaccines be optional?” I think it’s “to what extent should public and private institutions be expected to accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance, choose to opt out of the collective responsibility to public health?”

Am I allowed, as a business owner, to pass on an antivax candidate? Am I, as a school administrator, permitted to keep an unvaccinated child from my school system?

Vaccines were always optional in the sense nobody ties you down and makes you take them, and certainly all requirements have exceptions for people with, i.e, immune system issues.


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