I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.

This includes things I have expertise in.

AWS is clearly not in a low-margin business, though.

> a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan

And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.

I mention this because:

1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.

2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)

3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.

It’s done some pretty decent ones as well. Western Europe including West Germany, Japan, arguably South Korea although they went through a period of dictatorship, but all are staunch US allies. There have been failures too for sure. Over all of I was going to be invaded by somebody, with America at least there’s a chance it might be a least worst option.

Interestingly, you can also choose not to say it on your own blog.

Why the heck would you use the phrase "Why the heck" in any circumstance other than to avoid censorship/algorithmic penality on a social media platform?

Well, one good reason is that a person who generally doesn't "swear" can then choose to use them very effectively when the situation warrants. If you always go to strongest words when mild ones will do, you're out of things to say when you need to make a stronger/more forceful point.

And there is nothing better to use for the headline than a minced oath if you explicitly don't want to swear? Make it make sense.

Perhaps instead of worrying about someone else's free choice to use certain words iver others, it would be wise of you to ask: why would you complain about forced speech patterns in the context of censorship but then be angry when someone uses their free speech differently then you would use it?

Because being consistent helps prevent mistakes in circumstances where use of regular curse words is contraindicated. And why the fork should you care?

I say "heck" instead of "hell" all the time. I'm not religious, so the invented "heck" is more of a swearword.

These things tend to get ingrained in you so you continue to use them even if you could technically use the words they replace.

In that case you can't write markdown without Obsidian.

> And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.

Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization.

And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on.

The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.

Maybe they want to add quantum to CPLEX!

There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.

It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.

In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.

I can drive 2+ Gbps vrfs, nats, ipsec, complex firewall rules and several routing tables through an Atom C3558. This is just using stock linux kernel networking. There are other services running on that box too.

Depending on details, it can go higher (e.g. without the ipsec being handled on the atom box, and using the 10G ports built into the chip, offload becomes helpful for TCP and UDP flows).

This is traffic in one 10G port and out the other, in this case. Multiport flows were not tested since they were out of spec for the use case.

This is not a one off - this is a product I built and has been tested in many deployment scenarios. (I can't provide more details due to employment reasons, and I won't name the employer)

I'll write a one-off shell pipeline to inspect something on 10^5 servers - it will be sent to each of those servers and run once or a handful of times, and the results will be transmitted back and that's that. Kind of a map-reduce shell thing, for ops type tasks.

Sometimes those will actually need to process through a bunch of data unexpectedly.

Sometimes those will be run on a loop - once per second, N per minute (etc), and the results will be used to monitor a situation until a bug is fixed or a spike in load is resolved or a proper monitoring program/metric can be deployed.

Sometimes those are to investigate a pegged CPU and the amortized lower runtime across all the tasks on the CPU is noticable.

We run our machines hot and part of the reason we can do that is being in the habit of choosing lower cost (in cycles) tooling whenever we can. If i can spend a little time and effort learning a tool that saves a bunch of cpu in aggregate, its a win. When the whole company does it, we can spend a lot less on hardware than it costs in engineer time to make these decisions.

Another way of putting it is: its a type of frugality (not cheapness, just spending wisely). If you save a dollar once, its nothing. If you have a habit of saving a dollar every time the opportunity arises, it adds up quickly. By having a habit of choosing more performant tools, you're less likely to hit a case where you wish you did use more performant tools, and are practiced at it when the need arises for pure parsimony and it's less painful.

My local makerspace is building a memory lab. It's very cool. In addition to the obvious "let's get that old media that's becoming harder and harder to play and/or is degrading digitized", there's some really cool stuff you can do.

A very useful on is workshops - older folks are often the keepers of the family archive and aren't comfortable using technology at all, so teaching them not just how to use the equipment, but also safe-keep the digital product (backups, etc) is important. Additionally teaching concepts like infinite free reproduction is helpful because many older folks I've talked to stress about how to divvy up the archive among the children/grandchildren/etc, and are delighted at the idea of "everyone gets all of it", and are also delighted at the idea of "make a family archive that includes a more extended group of people and their archive combined".

Other cool things we've explored and/or are planning to explore:

* making collages and memes and digital scrapbooks for the family as a way of telling the family history/story, doubly cool because you don't have to sacrifice the only copy of a picture to do so. People feel liberated to do some really interesting things.

* having digitization be a community process by hosting regular memory-lab nights. Digitizing everything is a daunting task sometimes. There may be a lot of material. There may be a lot of context that one wants to capture with the material (labeling photos, explaining the photo, etc - I've heard some great stories from the old-timers as we digitize their photos). Not all memories are good ones... sometimes someone will get to a photo and it brings up bad memories. One woman was very glad we were there when we got to a section of her photos of her child who had died and we were able to give her a hug and let her cry and talk about it, and help her work through a difficult thing while preserving the memories.

* I've often heard tech people say "sometimes its hard to do skilled volunteer work with my tech skills...", particularly in a way that is also social and community-building. Helping in these sorts of community digitization processes is a nice way to use your skills and also bond with community members.

The US maintains over 150 elementary schools on military bases around the world.

Although it does make sense that the land of school shootings would use the children of it's military as bait.