I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

Same. I used Apollo almost exclusively for Reddit. I left the day it shut down and haven’t been back.

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

My wife and I plan 6-12 month out, and sometimes more. At least for the dates of our vacations. My wife runs a small dog boarding service out of our home, and limits the number of dogs she boards. As a result she has clients that will schedule boarding up to a year in advance. So we need to block out our vacation time early enough to prevent clients from making reservations at those times.

At some point after we block out the time we’ll figure out where we want to go.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

You get that with virtually any domain/registrar these days if your contact details are public for any amount of time.

I’d mail my younger self a list of dates when I should invest in various stocks, and when to sell.

Our greyhound knew what “road trip” meant. He LOVED going for rides in the car, and if he heard one of us say that then he’d immediately be at the door, jumping excitedly…

As far as BitTorrent itself goes, your optimal speed is also going to depend a bit on your client and the number of peers in the swarm.

Suppose you’re seeding a file to 3 peers. It’s not very efficient if your client uploads part 1 of your file to each peer, then uploads part 2 to each peer, etc. A more optimized upload would upload part 1 to peer A, part 2 to peer B, part 3 to peer C, etc. Then the peers can share each of those parts with each other. This way you are effectively only uploading the file one time before other nodes start seeding as well.

The thing is, this sort of seeding only works well in specific situations, including when there’s only one seeder, etc. And not all clients support this. Take a look at qbittorrent’s super seeding option for an example of one client that does.

Many years ago I had to try to debug a memory manager written by a really talented software engineer, with an interesting take on naming things…

• He referred to blocks of memory as “cookies”.

• He had a temporary variable named “handy” because it was handy to have around.

• He had a second temporary variable that referenced the first one that he called “son_of_handy”.

• If corruption was detected in a block of memory then it would set the flag “shit_cookie_corrupt”.

• If too many cookies were corrupt then the system would halt by calling the function “oh_shit_oh_shit_oh_shit”.

I’m an old geezer, having graduated from college over 30 years ago now… This doesn’t have to do with piracy, but with professors. One advanced course I took covered topics that included AI and chaos theory. It was taught by a visiting professor from another country and she was terrible. It was clear she was just regurgitating what was in out textbooks without trying to really understand it.

One day she was out and we had another professor with an actual background in AI fill in. We learned a lot that one day.

Our college had anonymous evaluations that students would fill out on the last day of a course, and the college really pushed the claim that they were taken seriously. Before the day came to fill these out most of the students in the class got together and formed a plan. We all agreed on how we would fill out the questions. For example, one question asked what we liked best about the course. We all agreed to write something along the lines of “the day the professor was out and the other professor taught instead. We actually learned a lot that day”. We never saw that professor at our college after that year ended, and like to think our evaluations were a big part of the reason. The bottom line is that we provided a united front for our grievances through those anonymous evaluations.

If your college offered similar sorts of course/professor evaluations I would have tried to do the same thing in this case. Get as many members of the class to band together and point out the issues of having to “obtain” MATLAB, and being unwilling to consider free alternatives. If your college doesn’t do these sorts of evaluations then getting multiple students to write complaints to the department head, etc. might be a viable alternative.

Anybody remember “I’m Rich”?

Dick Tracy predicted two-way wrist radios decades ago. My Apple Watch does that plus more.