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What, do people not remember Katrina? That was the sign to move, and it was 20 years ago.

I remember watching it on CNN from Ireland and it was a bizarre. For about two days before they were saying it's probably going to flood, about every 30 minutes on repeat, so I assumed people would evacuate if necessary. Then it did flood with people still there and something of a mess. Then George Bush was shown on repeat saying it's sad but no one could have foreseen this.

I'm not sure it was a sign to leave the place so much as the levees should have been raised about 2 ft higher to deal with the pretty predictable water levels.

This current thing is also kind of bizarre saing there'll be a sea level rise about 10x reality. Why can't people do maths and realistic estimates and planning? I assume it's some kind of politics that requires the untruths? I'm not American and don't really get the politics and why they can't do sensible calculation on flood defences like the Dutch say.


No, they don't, because only about half of people in Louisiana are old enough to remember it.

The median age of Louisiana is 38. Hurricane Katrina occurred 21 years ago.

Someone who was 7 during Katrina at that time is roughly 28 today.

Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.

So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.

But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.

So like I said, roughly half.


Claiming 9 year olds don't remember Katrina is quite an abuse of the word "roughly". The percentage of Louisiana's population under 25 is 33%, we can agree they don't "remember". Anything else requires considerable stretching with a hand-waving accompaniment. I can do that part just as well as any other internet person. Let's see, how about the fact that what followed Katrina was years of rebuilding? Someone from New Orleans probably saw its aftermath around them for 4-5 years.

Why are you assuming the rapid increase in LA’s population from 2006 to 2010 did not have a significant portion of temporarily displaced people moving back?

because the movement of people displaced by Katrina has been extremely well documented for the last 20 years?

Like, there are entire journals and programs of study devoted to it. I’m not just guessing here.


Oh, then you’re of course aware that many many people did in fact return, and that your earlier estimate of the number of people coming to LA after 2005 that hadn’t lived there before was over-estimated.

According to this study, almost a third of displaced people returned to the same dwelling by some time in 2006. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4048822/

Today, numbers suggest that around 60%, almost two-thirds returned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_after_Hurricane_K...


And most people don't remember anything from before age 5 anyway.

Exactly, humans famously have no memory until the age of 18

This was incredibly dangerous of the victim. In another version of events, the officer could have shot him and plausibly (unfortunately) claimed the victim had a vendetta against the cop for arresting him.


At first I thought, "Wow, he's much braver than I am."

But "audacious" and "bold" are probably better words to describe it. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but it's inherently risky to confront someone who has taken your property since they have already shown a willingness to break the law. It's a coin toss whether they will perceive the confrontation as a threat and react violently.

All that without even considering that he was dealing with a police officer who, de facto, will be given the benefit of the doubt in a confrontation and may behave accordingly. Not all cops are bad, I think most are good actually, but you have no way of knowing which one you will get in a situation like this. I'm very glad that this ended well (as well as it could have) for him.


The way this is supposed to work is that the victim says "I got screwed into a baseless DUI and I'm only out a predatory tow bill and my $2k Mackbook. That's $3k less than the lawyer's starting price. Golly gee it's my lucky day"

He's not brave. He's dense enough to still believe in the system. See also: Knocking on the door of a cop who you've got beef with.


I do not think the victim knew in advance that he would re-encounter the cop when he went to the location that the tracker was reporting.


Great, so they steal your stuff and you can't even confront them about it


Yeah it’s a sad state. But it’s also not worth putting oneself in harm’s way. Report it to the state authorities (not all of them are crooked). Or try another jurisdiction, like the local police.


The victim didn’t know whose house it was until the cop answered the door


IAM isn’t even really the most painful dependency. Route53 is. The control plane only runs out of use1.

Better make sure the only DNS operations you run during an outage are data plane queries and health check failovers.


They actually kind of fixed this recently, you can ask them to move your route53 control plane to another region in the event of us-east-1 breaking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/ac...

There’s a bunch of caveats but it’s worth enabling if you’re changing dns all the time (as most AWS networking doodads like to do).


Is there an architectural reason it’s not for replicas in the other AZs?


Are you saying F/G AND any line serving less affluent areas? Because if not, the G (save for maybe 2-3 stops in Bed-Stuy) is all affluent neighborhoods.


Right! I don't have hard data on this, but I would guess the only line that spends more of its run in affluent areas is the Q.


Pfft, there's no G train, it's just a psych experiment to see how long people will wait at a fake train station before giving up and seeking alternative transportation.


Why is this getting downvoted? How is this any less ridiculous sounding than the multitude of other, ever-shifting reasons Trump gave for starting the war.


I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number?

If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.


It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.


IPs are notoriously unreliable for identity pinning, particularly in this age of CGNAT.

If they can’t or don’t want cc numbers (makes sense considering how painful PCI guidelines are anyway) does that mean they need to rely on more tools from the processors or user accounts maintained by the merchant themselves?


CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.


The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.


That doesn't seem to be more than an order of magnitude off between available numbers and issued cards - a cursory search says there are over a billion credit cards in circulation in the US alone.


I think you're confusing the available number space per BIN (often used for a single card product) with the number of available numbers per network.

Visa and Mastercard each have 14 digits worth of permutations to play with, excluding the first and last digits. That's one hundred trillion numbers.

Assuming 8 billion people in the world, each person can hold 12,500 of either Visa or Mastercard before a collision happens. (As above, the number space is smaller because of how BINs are issued, but that's still plenty.)


Except the banks have "helpfully" provided a service to merchants to tell them, "this card has expired, here is the new number to charge" (or expiry/CVV).

I remember getting into an argument with a bank teller about me wanting to block/dispute transactions and how they kept approving transactions. "But you have an agreement with the gym..." That's between me and the gym, not for you to facilitate on their behalf.


Obnoxiously that doesn't cover all the edge cases for consumers. Payments from my watch recently started failing with a generic "declined" error. After calling my bank I worked out that my credit card had been replaced some months ago in advance of a recent expiry - I updated my phone wallet at the time, but my watch's wallet didn't give any indication that it was trying to use an expired card.


Declaring someone an enemy does not automatically lead to war. America considered the USSR an enemy of democracy for 50 years. They never went directly to blows.


Sure, but Iran did sponsor proxies that did attack Israel. And whether something is direct war or proxy war feels more like meaningless semantics imo.

Historically speaking I think it's clear Iran has been the aggressor in this specific conflict.

Not that I think Israel took smart actions, but that's a different matter.


Korea was a proxy war between the US and China - which is very different from a direct war between those two countries, wouldn’t you say?


That proxy war never reached China or the US borders.

The Israel - Iran proxy war is happening on/in Israel's borders, it's way more "direct", and not happening in some far away land.

Could you imagine if a Chinese proxy attacked the US directly?


For production Postgres, i would assume it’s close to almost no effect?

If someone is running postgres in a serious backend environment, i doubt they are using Ubuntu or even touching 7.x for months (or years). It’ll be some flavor of Debian or Red Hat still on 6.x (maybe even 5?). Those same users won’t touch 7.x until there has been months of testing by distros.


Ubuntu is used in many serious backend environments. Heroku runs tens of thousands (if not more) instances of Ubuntu on its fleet. Or at least it did through the teens and early 2020s.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/stack


Do they upgrade to the new LTS the day it is released?


Ubuntu's upgrade tools wait until the .1 release for LTSes, so your typical installation would wait at least half a year.


Not historically.


and they are right, this is because a lot of junior sysadmins believe that newer = better.

But the reality:

  a) may get irreversible upgrades (e.g. new underlying database structure) 
  b) permanent worse performance / regression (e.g. iOS 26)
  c) added instability
  d) new security issues (litellm)
  e) time wasted migrating / debugging
  f) may need rewrite of consumers / users of APIs / sys calls
  g) potential new IP or licensing issues
etc.

A couple of the few reasons to upgrade something is:

  a) new features provide genuine comfort or performance upgrade (or... some revert)
  b) there is an extremely critical security issue
  c) you do not care about stability because reverting is uneventful and production impact is nil (e.g. Claude Code)
but 99% of the time, if ain't broke, don't fix it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...


On the other hand, I suspect LLMs will dramatically decrease the window between a vulnerability being discovered and that vulnerability being exploited in the wild, especially for open-source projects.

Even if the vulnerability itself is discovered through other means than by an LLM, it's trivial to ask a SOTA model to "monitor all new commits to project X and decide which ones are likely patching an exploitable vulnerability, and then write a PoC." That's a lot easier than finding the vulnerable itself.

I won't be surprised if update windows (for open source networked services) shrink to ~10 minutes within a year or two. It's going to be a brutal world.


Too often I see IT departments use this as an excuse to only upgrade when they absolutely have to, usually with little to no testing in advance, which leaves them constantly being back-footed by incompatibility issues.

The idea of advanced testing of new versions of software (that they’ll be forced to use eventually) never seems to occur, or they spend so much time fighting fires they never get around to it.


all fair points, on the other hand, as a general rule, isn't it important to stay on currently-supported versions of pieces of software that you run?

ymmv, but in my experience projects like postgresql which have been reliable, tend to continue to be so.


There is serious as in "corporate-serious" and serious as in "engineer-serious".


I’ve seen more 5k+-core fleets running Ubuntu in prod than not, in my career. Industries include healthcare, US government, US government contractor, marketing, finance.


In other words, those industries that used to run windows before ?


I'd say about 2/3 of the places I've worked started on Linux without a Windows precedent other than workstations. I can't speak for the experience of the founding staff, though; they might have preferred Ubuntu due to Windows experience--if so, I'm curious as to why/what those have to do with each other.

That said, Ubuntu in large production fleets isn't too bad. Sure, other distros are better, but Ubuntu's perfectly serviceable in that role. It needs talented SRE staff making sure automation, release engineering, monitoring, and de/provisioning behave well, but that's true of any you-run-the-underlying-VM large cloud deployment.


A customer of mine is running on Ubuntu 22.04 and the plan is to upgrade to 26.04 in Q1 2027. We'll have to add performance regression to the plan.


Are you running ARM servers?


Tool calls (particularly fetching for context) eats the context window heavily. I explicitly send MCP calls to sub agents because they are so “wordy”.


Everyone who has not hit this bug thinks it’s user error… It’s not. It happened to me a few days ago, and the speed at which I tore through my 5 hour usage cap was easily 10x faster than normal.

Also: sub agents do not get you free usage. They just protect your main context window.


I'm on Max. This morning, just to test, before doing anything else whatsoever, I was at 0%, and I typed 'test one two three' into CC.

That put me at 12%.

I have no MCPs except the built in claude-in-chrome.

This is clearly a bug.


Readimg through this thread, it seems likely is a KV cache "bug". Theyre likely doing too many evictions of the LLM cache so the context is being reloaded to often.

Its a "bug" because its probably an intended effect of capturing the costs of compute but surfacing a fact that they oversold compute to a situations where they cant keep the KV cache hot and now its thrashing.


Caching helps them too, so I hope they fix it


Don't they consume less of the token quota in case the subagents are running cheaper models like Sonnet and Haiku compared to Opus?


Correct—I just wouldn't want folks to mistakenly think that the context fill % corresponds 1:1 with session token use.


Yes, sorry. I meant it more as a descriptor of how many tokens it consumes. You are still stuck burning money.


In the past it had less to do with seizing the vessels and more to do with keeping financial flows between organizations offering shipping services and oil hidden from the banking system. America could have easily seized any ship they wanted to during the sanctions over the past decade. They didnt because the sanctions are American constructs: they dont apply on the open seas where UNCLOS matters. America can still seize them, but the legality is murky and comes with a reputational cost.

Now with Hormuz closed, America needs every last oil barrel moving so the economy doesn’t grind to a halt. Remember, it’s a war of choice for the US. We don’t need Iran gone as much as we want low oil prices.


> the sanctions are American constructs: they dont apply on the open seas where UNCLOS matters

Technically correct. But the way these countries evade U.S. sanctions is by flying false or no flag. That, in turn, makes them vulnerable under UNCLOS's anti-piracy rules.


No flag is rare because that immediately opens them to anti-piracy.

But coming back to my original point: it isn’t America’s determination that a registration is fraudulent. It is the flag state’s.


> it isn’t America’s determination that a registration is fraudulent. It is the flag state’s.

Sort of. If there is no flag, it's America's determination. And in many of the seizure cases, the flag state confirmed a fraudulent registration. (I believe there was one around Venezuela falsely registered with Panama.)


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