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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).






  • Market capitalization is just simple math, multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares that have been issued. Tesla has issued roughly 3.2 billion shares and is currently trading at around $550, which makes their current market cap about $1.75 trillion dollars.

    I don’t understand how the value can be that high compared to all of the other companies, especially China.

    On its face it seems utterly nonsensical that Tesla is worth as much as all other auto makers combined, when Tesla only accounts for something like 5% of total US car sales. There are two reasons I can think of why this is currently so:

    • Tesla accounts for roughly half of all US electric vehicle sales, and electric vehicle sales are roughly 10% of all US vehicle sales. If electric vehicles largely replace ICE vehicles and if Tesla maintains that share of EV sales, then Tesla will be an extremely valuable company. Investors might be betting on a) electric vehicles and b) Tesla continuing to the win the lion’s share of electric vehicle sales.
    • Tesla investors are irrational. Personally, my money is on this one. I think long-term Tesla is going to get crushed by cheaper and better-built EVs, probably from China but also possibly from other existing car manufacturers. Sometimes I’m tempted to short Tesla’s stock based on this belief, but to quote John Maynard Keynes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”




  • OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

    Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.


  • My dream was to work as a game developer. This was nearly 20 years ago. I actually got an offer in that field at one point, and the salary was like $20k less than what I was already being paid. I was the main bread-winner in what was a (mostly) single-income household at that time, with my partner pursuing her PhD. Gave up the dream, and I’m glad I did based on what I later learned about that industry. If I went into the game industry I’d be making far less money and have far less free time to do the things I enjoy, like playing the games other people make.


  • It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).


  • Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

    • Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
    • Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

    Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.