drewish

Keyboard Display Stand

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I cloned a 3D printed keyboard display stand I’d seen on Etsy.

It’s up on Printables if you want to make one. The Fusion files are included so you can easily adjust the dimensions.

Walnut Planck

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to show off the wooden keyboard case case I made.

I got a nice piece walnut from another member of the maker space.

For the first operations I used the 1/2” bit to remove most of the material and then faced the top and sides. With the painters tape and super glue holding it down, I’m able to cut all the way to the spoil board.

Drilled out the screw holes.

Put a nice 45° chamfer on all the edges.

For the USB cutout on the back, I put it in a vice.

I forgot to get a picture after that finished so here’s one from later in the process that shows how nicely the wood held the detail.

Now we flip it over and hog out the inside. I felt bad turning such nice wood into chips.

I used a 1/8” bit to hollow out the depression for the USB port. It was interesting to see the difference in the finish between what that and the 1/2” bit left.

Put a chamfer on the top edges and we’re done.

Now I’m ready to start sanding.

Used some Rowdy Rooster hard wax oil to finish it.

I threw some rubber bumpers on the corners and mounted the PCB.

The clearance on the USB isn’t quite right. I’ll adjust that if I do another version.

Other than that I’m very happy with how it turned out.

CNC Work Holding

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite method of work holding for the Shopbot is one of the simplest: make your own double sided tape using painter’s tape and super glue. I’ve used it successfully with wood and plastic.

Clean off the spoil board and stock
Apply the painters tape to the stock
Apply the painter’s tape to the spoil board
Apply the glue liberally
Hold the taped surfaces together

A few notes:

The stock needs to be flat. If it’s able to rock you won’t have a reliable connection. Figure out how to do a facing operation first.
Make sure you have enough surface area to hold your work. Most of the force should be lateral so try pushing the stock once the glue has set and make sure there’s no movement.
The glue sets up almost immediately. You won’t have much time to adjust the piece so make sure you check the alignment before you set the stock in place.
Removal can be tricky. If you’ve done a good job applying the tape and used lots of glue it can be hard to lift your part. A spatula or screw driver under the tape on the spoil board will usually do the trick.

Some things I've leaned from Jiu Jitsu

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On January 10th, 2026, I received my purple belt. I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at Easton in Boulder at the end of 2018. I was inspired to try it out after listening to a bunch of episodes of Jocko Podcast. They continually talked about how great it was, and they were right.

In honor of the occasion, I wanted to post this draft I’d started back in 2019 on some of the benefits.

A little over a year ago, I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at Easton in Boulder. My initial goals were simple: I wanted to get in shape and learn how to defend myself. I’ve also discovered a lot of unexpected benefits. The least expected has been improved communication with others, specifically giving and receiving feedback. In almost every class you are paired up with a new person, so each time is a chance to learn how to build rapport and communicate.

If you’re the junior partner, you’re likely to get some feedback after you perform a drill (maybe you skipped a step, or did something incorrectly). Here, you get a choice: be defensive and argue–guaranteeing your partner won’t bother saying anything else–or try to understand what they meant, adjust, and act grateful. At the beginning, I found it helpful to remind myself I was new, didn’t know anything, and was in class to learn. As I progressed, I discovered if I asked a question early on and made sure to apply their answer, it would encourage them to point out other things I could improve.

As the senior student, things get more interesting. With more experience, you’re in the position to give feedback and you decide how to best communicate with your partner. Do they seem open to comments? Should you focus on what they’re doing wrong, or what they’re doing right? With a brand new student, it’s probably best to focus on what they’re doing right and continue to encourage them. If you’ve trained with them a few times, you can probably point out something wrong straight away. But is there a way to phrase it that’s more diplomatic?

I found dealing with peers to be the most challenging situation. When you’re with a partner who is close to your level there’s no clear authority to defer to. If they commented that I was doing something incorrectly, was it because they’d already been to several classes this week and really learned the technique? Or did they misunderstand the coach’s instructions? I had to listen to what they were saying and evaluate it on its merits. It was challenging in the moment but I finally learned to just reply, “Thanks for letting me know. Do you mind if I do it again?”

Once I started noticing this aspect of martial arts, I started looking for other areas of my life where I could apply it. At home, I’ve found focusing on the things my children do right is much more effective than nagging them. I still correct them but now negative comments are a much smaller percentage of what I say. At work, we have a formal quarterly review process to give performance feedback, but it’s hard to master something you do that infrequently. Now, I try to give more small, immediate, feedback to coworkers. And when people give me feedback at work, I try to be appreciative and responsive to it.

I’ve learned that Ju Jitsu is about more than just getting in shape or self-defense. A large part of it is studying human nature and finding ways to shape the behavior of another person. Often you’ll do so by physically pushing or pulling them, other times you leave them an opening where you would like them to move, but occasionally your words are the best choice.

Leaning CNC machining

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Let me catch you up on my hobbies in 2025. Back in March, I discovered mechanical keyboards. Then in July, the algorithm lead me to Joe Scotto’s video on building a hand wired keyboard. Suddenly building my own keyboard seemed far less daunting. Rather than buying a 3D printer, I joined the Solid State Depot, a maker space in Boulder.

After taking the tour, the draw for me was that, in addition to 3D printers, a wood and metal shop, they had a ShopBot CNC router and a Tormach mill. My plan was to learn how to use the ShopBot to make some stuff from wood, then learn to use the Tormach to start machining stuff from aluminum. I still haven’t gotten to the aluminum, but I’ve learned a lot of other stuff.

I started off with a quick, 3D printed, hand wired macro pad:

I’m going to try to start doing more project posts on the various aspects: CAD/CAM in Fusion, beginner machining topics like work holding and touching off, anc customizing keyboard firmware with QMK and ZMK,

Until then, I’ll share some photos of a few things I’ve made with the Shopbot. My first project was some simple oak trays:

My mom came to town and we made a magnetic pin cushion for her in the same style:

I made a couple of Nevada shaped trays as gifts:

And I made a collet holder for the shop:

Recurly & Stock Options

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a week late with it, but I did want to comment on the news that Recurly was purchased by Accel-KKR, a private equity group, earlier this month. The gossip I’d heard was that with Recurly doing so well in the Corona environment, the investors felt it was a good time to sell and free up some money for their other investments.

It was a very welcome surprise for me, since the deal completed inside the 30-day period I had to exercise my stock options. I had only exercised a small portion, as doing so fully would have cost $115k and come with a $50k alternative minimum tax bill. Neither of which were in our budget. So leaving Recurly meant giving up that possibility of a future windfall. It’s a strange feeling to have written something like that off and then days later find out that it could, in fact, be very valuable… but only if circumstances entirely outside your control align by an arbitrary date. Well, it made for a few sleepless nights.

Even having seen the upside, in the future I’ll be hesitant to take a position where a large portion of my compensation would be options with only 30-days to exercise them. The exception would be if I was planning to exercise them immediately or had a bonus to help offset the cost. It sounds like 90-days (for ISOs) or multiple years (for NSOs) are becoming the norm so I’m hopeful it’ll be less of an issue next time I jump back in the startup pool.

To all the folks that went through the unnatural act of creating a company and either stuck with it to the end or came up with the money before they left, my sincere congratulations. As one colleague put it:

Man, you gotta be grateful for how lucky we are. I was thinking back about all the things I could have done differently. In a way it’s like, even people who win the lottery still made a bad financial decision. Just counting my blessings now.

I also have to tip my hat to Dan Burkhart, the CEO. Over the years he repeatedly announced to employees that he wasn’t going to take on investors or sell the company if it meant screwing over employees and existing investors. He was true to his word.

Links!

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Giving Tree- Alternate Ending:

“Look, I was fine with giving you the apples
to help you get on your feet.
they’ll grow back next season anyway.
But no, I’m not giving you a house.
You know, I’ve seen boys like you
pull this nonsense
with other trees in the forest.”

Corona

The 1918 Flu, Masks and Lessons for the Coronavirus Pandemic:

Arrested on Kearny Street in January, Mr. Cocciniglia told the judge that he “was not disposed to do anything not in harmony with his feelings,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.

He was sentenced to five days in jail.

“That suits me,” Mr. Cocciniglia said as he left the stand. “I won’t have to wear a mask there.”

Scientists Worry About Political Influence Over Coronavirus Vaccine Project: If you wonder what would create an entire generation of anti-vaxers:

“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out.’”

Cerberus-Backed Hospitals Face Life and Debt as Virus Rages:

But almost as soon as the state monitoring period ended, Cerberus did what many private equity skeptics feared. In 2016, Steward sold off some of the hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion. The hospitals now had to pay rent to use buildings they once owned.

Change

Freedom House Ambulance Service — File this away for the next time someone says we shouldn’t take responsibility and funding for a task away from police departments:

John Moon can still remember what the emergency services provided by the police were like in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, “The public was faced with … ‘swoop and scoop’ which meant you’d call the police and they’d pick you up, throw you in the back of a paddywagon, and rush you off to the hospital.”

These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism:

That’s when Gazin and Dwyer introduced a third cofounder: Keith Mann, an aptly named fictional character who could communicate with outsiders over email.

Business

Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google – Until you see the old screen shots it’s easy to forget how Google used to prioritize links to other sites:

We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties

Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google Faithful Face Regulatory Risk:

Monopolies are impregnable money-minting machines, so everyone wants a piece of them. It’s no accident that Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook are four of the seven biggest companies in the world by market value. Nor is it surprising that their profits have trickled down to shareholders. An equal investment in the four tech giants since Facebook — the youngest of the bunch — went public in 2012 has produced a return of 31% a year, including dividends, more than double the return from the S&P 500 over the same period.

U.S. ‘Clean Network’ Campaign Attempts to Wall Off Chinese Hardware, Software, and Cloud Services:

If I’m reading all of this right, the U.S. government has set a forty-five day countdown on a prohibition of financial relationships with TikTok and WeChat, citing concerns about the amount of data both apps collect on their users, and theft of intellectual property. This is likely to cause retaliation, according to the chief executive of a company that just released a clone of TikTok.

Major American Companies With a Consumer Internet Presence in China:

But AAPL shares are trading at an all-time high so I’m sure all is good and Apple has nothing to worry about with a rapidly escalating trade war with China and a cornered-rat deranged narcissist steering the U.S.

Why SPACs Are the New IPO:

That’s why the most compelling explanation for the SPAC boom is not that the IPO process is costly (it’s expensive but cheaper than a SPAC), but that it takes a long time. And that’s especially challenging for companies that want to ride a hype wave.

College football: Athletes push back on playing amid COVID-19 pandemic:

But instead of being treated as crucial partners in an entertainment enterprise, they are being asked to function as essential workers so that schools who have spent lavishly and irresponsibly for years on facilities and coaching salaries can minimize the difficult decisions they’re going to have to make and TV networks can recoup some of the money they’ve lost without live sports to show for much of this year.

Development

1 Million Hours of Stratospheric Flight:

Over 1 million hours of flight, we’ve been surprised by some of the clever and complex navigational behaviors to emerge from this system. These are not prescribed behaviors or ones directed by the engineers building it. Instead, they emerged as the system sought to maximize the navigational efficiency of the Loon fleet.

Tales of the Autistic Developer – I’m not on the spectrum but I’d developed some similar techniques to deal with problems focusing and tracking what I’ve done:

In one recent meeting we were discussing what it meant to be neurodiverse at varying levels at the company. In the process of that discussion I’d realized all the tools and tricks I’d used to perform at that Senior level, how I dealt with the expectations, handled the stress, and was able to deliver. These are insights that have helped me survive with autism and ADHD in work, and in many cases have allowed me to thrive.

Documenting Architecture Decisions – It so important to capture the factors that went into making a technical decision so that years later when the requirements have changed and you need to reevaluate the decision, you’re able to recreate context:

One of the hardest things to track during the life of a project is the motivation behind certain decisions. A new person coming on to a project may be perplexed, baffled, delighted, or infuriated by some past decision. Without understanding the rationale or consequences, this person has only two choices:

Blindly accept the decision.

Blindly change it.

At Recurly we’d setup an RFC process based on the one used by Rust but there’s plenty of options to choose from. The important thing is to just start recording the information.

Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google:

We examine the first large real-world data set on personal knowledge question’s security and memorability from their deployment at Google. Our analysis confirms that secret questions generally offer a security level that is far lower than user-chosen passwords.

You don’t need to actually read it now. Just bookmark it so you can pass it along to the future product manager that asks you to implement them.

Fun

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels:

At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of these interfaces look far more chaotic than others. Most interfaces in our world contain a blend of digital screens and analog inputs like switches and dials. These LEGO panels are no different.

Someone pulled out the clean, lower angled version, bruh pic.twitter.com/oZe79KD6IQ
— Omar ✈ (@izqomar) July 30, 2020

One line command to generate a pass phrase

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to select some random words to use in a pass phrase and came up with the following one liner:

ruby -e 'puts IO.readlines("/usr/share/dict/words").sample(5).join.tr("\n"," ")'

Links: The Disaster Continues

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I guess as a disclaimer for this first story I’ll mention I took a position at Amazon. We’ll see how much it reduces the number of links to Matt Stoller and Scott Galloway.

MacKenzie Scott is donating her billions much faster than her ex Jeff Bezos – I’m impressed by so many things about her approach: She’s moving quickly, using simple process, giving money to groups run by those with the lived experiences of the people they serve, and she’s letting them decide how to do it:

“I gave each a contribution and encouraged them to spend it on whatever they believe best serves their efforts. Unless organization leadership requested otherwise, all commitments were paid up front and left unrestricted to provide them with maximum flexibility.”

The Trump Corona Disaster

Why doesn’t Trump try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?:

“The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now, where the economy is reopening, where jobs are coming back,”

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

A harsh lesson in the reality of COVID-19:

I admit I voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I admit traveling deep into the conspiracy trap over COVID-19. All the defiant behavior of Trump’s more radical and rowdy cult followers, I participated in it. I was a hard-ass that stood up for my “God-given rights.”

Coronavirus Disinformation Video Seen 20M Times Before Facebook Took It Down:

Think about a large casino. There might be thousands of people gambling at any moment. Casino management can’t pay attention to them all. But if someone starts wagering at a pace of, say, $1 million per hour — over $15,000 per minute, every minute — yeah, I’d say casino management is going to take a close look at that person very quickly.

Teachers as lab animals:

In other words, teachers are going to be lab animals used to see how much kids spread the virus and how deadly it is for the adults who are near them, in closed spaces, for hours every day.

In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.:

And I speak from a position of significant privilege. We were, until recently, a two-income family with savings, paying for more than the minimum of child care hours that we needed each day just to cover what-ifs, living in one of the most expensive cities on earth. We have laptops, tablets, Wi-Fi, and didn’t think twice before panic-ordering pencils, paper, markers and anything else we thought might help our children.

How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation:

I’ve been really struck by how much the federal government scrambled to save the airlines — “Oh, wouldn’t it be terrible for our economy if we lost all our airlines?” I guess it wouldn’t be great. But how terrible would it be for our economy if we lost all our child care and our schools? That would be way worse than losing our airlines! That would leave not only the current working generation unable to go back to work in the same way, it would mean that we are not preparing the next generation so that they have skills. I mean, it is so substantially worse than losing your airlines. And yet we gave less money to the entire child care sector than we gave to one single airline, Delta.

Why Your USPS Packages Are Delayed:

DeJoy may try to intentionally disrupt USPS services in order to sabotage the mail-in ballot system ahead of the November elections, that he is hellbent on privatizing the USPS, and that he is in cahoots with Trump. But at the same time, they dismissed the possibility he is responsible for current or past package delays.

Change

“We came out here in t-shirts, they started gassing us. We came back with respirators, they started shooting us. We came back with vests, they started aiming for the head... And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.” @MacSmiff https://t.co/quc0qwfncg
— William Yu 유규호 (@its_willyu) July 30, 2020

Competing protesters converge on Breonna Taylor’s hometown:

By the time Black activists dressed in black fatigues arrived in the heart of downtown Saturday afternoon, most of the white militia members had already left. Police in full riot geared looked on.

How Police Unions Fight Reform:

Police unions enjoy a political paradox. Conservatives traditionally abhor labor unions but support the police. The left is critical of aggressive policing, yet has often muted its criticism of police unions—which are, after all, public-sector unions, an endangered and mostly progressive species.

Georgia sheriff Harry Young seeks reelection against Black opponent:

His case for the job was his 24 years of experience as a resource officer for the county schools, and more recently, as a Cairo police officer. He had coached football and basketball and felt he had the trust of Black and White parents across the county.

It’s Funeral Time for Colonial Monuments:

“By creating a hole large enough to bury the statue, the work’s excavation (along with its title) suggests the burial of the Cook monument itself, along with the burial of destructive governance and treatment of Indigenous land, Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge.”

John Lewis: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation:

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me.

James Hong: The actor with 600+ credits and counting – Two bits really highlighted the importance of creating your own spaces:

Realizing that Hollywood wouldn’t be able to provide the roles Asian Americans deserved, Hong set out to carve his own space. Along with actor Mako Iwamatsu, Hong helped organize an Asian American acting group in Los Angeles. […] East West Players has nurtured great talent over its 55 years. Actors such as Randall Park, George Takei, John Cho and Daniel Dae Kim have all been associated with the theater. And according to East West Players’ current artistic director, it is thought that at one point, 70% of Asian American actors in Hollywood had a connection to East West Players.

Technology

The golden rule of software quality – Frustrating how clearly they explained something I’ve thought about for a long time:

Prefer to push fixes upstream instead of working around problems downstream.

Turning the IDE Inside Out with Datalog:

tl;dr: I made a prototype IDE in which language semantics are specified in datalog, powered by a datalog interpreter written in TypeScript, running the browser.

Why Protest Tactics Spread Like Memes:

But Hong Kong does play a central role in the activist imagination, scholars and activists said, thanks both to the tactical ingenuity of protesters there, as well as Western media’s willingness to cover pro-democracy demonstrations extensively.

Fun

The moment you’ve been waiting for: Kentucky Fried Chicken x @Crocs Classic Clogs available now. Complete with chicken-scented Jibbitz! Not for human consumption. https://t.co/9FwPxWrE7w pic.twitter.com/l75e3Jj8Ny
— KFC (@kfc) July 28, 2020

KFC Crocs sold out less than half an hour after launch - Business Insider – I personally asked Deana to buy me these as an anniversary present but was told they were “repulsive”:

The shoe collab, which features clogs painted like fried chicken buckets topped with a chicken-scented charm, was first unveiled at New York Fashion Week in February.

Tony Hawk breaks down skateboarding’s legendary spots - YouTube – This history and architectural aspects of skating are interesting, but what I really enjoyed is looking at the way they told this story as a WFH documentary with Zoom interviews and Google Earth flyovers:

A big, late batch of links

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m getting ths up a few days later than I’d intended so it’s bigger than usual. Hope you enjoy!

Politics

AOC’s Powerful and Historic Floor Speech:

A young congresswoman from New York delivered one of the most thorough thrashings the Capitol has seen since Representative Preston Brooks brutally caned Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856.

Out of Portland tear gas, an apparition emerges, capturing the imagination of protesters:

A woman wearing nothing but a black face mask and a stocking cap strode toward a dozen heavily armed agents attired in camouflage fatigues, lined up across a downtown Portland street.

Political impasse over jobless claims just as they mushroom:

The problem is that the pandemic has made unemployment insurance claims so high that even yesterday, 4 months after the lockdown, the initial claims numbers were twice as large as they were at their worst in the Great Recession over a decade ago. So, seasonal factors have a massive – and I believe distortionary – impact.

‘A very dark feeling’: Hundreds camp out in Oklahoma unemployment lines:

Ashley Love, 31, a former customer advocate for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, had risen at 4 a.m. to take her 2-year-old daughter to her mother’s home before heading to the convention center, only to be told she had to come back the next day. She was laid off in March, when the pandemic nearly obliterated the travel industry. Her benefits inexplicably stopped four weeks ago, the agency website saying only she was on a “verification hold.”

David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics:

You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.

How to Take Over a Small Country in 10 Easy Steps:

In order to avoid a coup yourself, you will need more than repressive secret police — you will need to generate some Gross Domestic Product for your country. If you can grow them, poppies or coca leaves yield more revenue than, say, rice or whatever the World Bank is pushing these days. And then people will pay you not to grow them, so it’s “win-win.”

Corona

Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus:

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, talking to Mr. Kushner, Ms. Hicks and others, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Walmart Workers Are Terrified of Enforcing Mask Rules:

One of her managers “told a woman that we now require face masks in the store and the guest just yelled “go F&ast; yourself” and walked out,” Julia told The Daily Beast via email. “I watched another manager simply tell another lady that we required them and she just yelled, ‘I have a doctor’s note’ and walked off.”

Wow: Delta Has Already Banned 100 Anti-Maskers:

Delta is no longer using the “honor system” for wearing masks. Any passenger found to be making false claims about a disability or health condition in order to obtain an exemption can have travel privileges on all Delta flights suspended for as long as the airline is requiring passengers to wear face masks.

Inside college football’s coronavirus information war:

Unlike professional leagues like the NBA or NFL, there was no single commissioner who could wrangle all the different voices with different motivations to adopt a collective plan for moving forward.

Race & Justice

Historical Whiteness Of Running:

The Limits of Restorative Justice in Jacksonville:

The defendant had agreed to tell Mike and his family everything about the murder and to plead guilty. In return, he would be spared the death penalty and instead spend his life in prison—but only if the Lileses felt satisfied that he had told the truth.

Technology

The video is so good because they designed a compelling product that is feasible to build with late 80’s technology:

Leaf-blower wars: How Portland protesters are fighting back against tear gas and forming ‘walls’ of veterans, lawyers, nurses:

Part of the reason the blowers are so effective against tear gas, experts said, is because despite the name, the chemicals in the canisters are actually an aerosol rather than a typical gas. That means tiny powder-like particles are dispersed into the air, where they hang and drift like a menacing fog. […] When the leaf blowers turn their blast of air on the chemical cloud, Nelson said, it sends the cloud in another direction. If the protesters push the tear gas back toward federal agents, the particles could latch onto their uniforms, helmets and other gear.

“Cocaine Logistics” for the Marine Corps:

To address this logistical conundrum, the United States should mimic drug traffickers. These undeniably resourceful adversaries have developed a vessel ideally suited to routinely smuggle tons of critical supplies (i.e., cocaine) thousands of miles past the most technologically advanced and well-resourced nation on Earth to their distributors in North America.

India, Jio, and the Four Internets — India is poised to have a big effect on the internet:

That is exactly what Jio did: it spent that $32 billion building a network that covered all of India, launched with an offer for three months of free data and free voice, and once that was up, kept the free voice offering permanently while charging only a couple of bucks for data by the gigabyte. It was the classic Silicon Valley bet: spend money up front, then make it up on volume because of a superior cost structure enabled by the zero-marginal nature of technology.

Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API — If you saw a bunch of GPT3 tweets go by and have no idea what they’re about here’s the hype reducing answer:

However, a 30-40% success rate implies a 60-70% failure rate, which is patently unsuitable for a production application. If it takes seconds to generate a React component and it takes on average 3 tries to get something usable, it might be more pragmatic to just create the component the hard, boring way.

IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude — Some great background on why IPv6 adoption is always 5 years away:

Or we can ask that question another way. Why are there so many web pages that advise you to solve your connectivity problem by disabling IPv6?

Because automatic failover is a very hard problem.

Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad — I can’t quite pick a quote but make sure you read all the footnotes.

You don’t need no Service Mesh — A good reminder to check that you have the same the constraints that defined someone else’s solution before you adopt it:

The service mesh concept wasn’t introduced to address problems that hadn’t been addressed before but rather address them in a way that doesn’t require any modifications to the application code, which is incredibly convenient when it’s hard to introduce an RPC layer into an existing heterogeneous microservice environment.

Fun

I made a M1 abrams main cattle tank:

For Aspiring Performers, The NBA Is The Best Place To Be A Mascot :

FiveThirtyEight analyzed each primary mascot in five North American sports leagues — the NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL and MLB — to get a sense of what type of creatures populate the sideline. […] We classified each mascot according to where it could be found: on land, in the sea, in the sky or in the world of make believe.

The Man Who Cracked the Lottery:

This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Investigators didn’t even know if a crime had been committed.