2025-11-18 15:17:51 <KipIngram   > Ugh.  More internet problems.  Looks like this morning it's Cloudflare.
2025-11-18 15:24:26 <veltas      > Damn didn't know cloudflare would pop the AI bubble
2025-11-18 15:24:30 <veltas      > Makes sense though
2025-11-18 15:30:39 <KipIngram   > It seems to affect a lot more than just AI sites, though.
2025-11-18 15:31:18 <KipIngram   > For a while this morning it was affecting Quora too, though that seems to be working for me now for some reason.  Maybe Quora temporarily disabled their Cloudflare protection.
2025-11-18 15:31:48 <KipIngram   > I did comment a few weeks ago on our reliance on centralized systems.
2025-11-18 15:31:58 <KipIngram   > We've got the whole damn architecture of things wrong.
2025-11-18 15:32:26 <KipIngram   > We should be treating these little episodes as warnings, but I suspect we probably won't.
2025-11-18 15:33:01 <KipIngram   > We should be trying to DEcentralize as much as possible instead of going the other way as hard as we can.
2025-11-18 15:34:08 <KipIngram   > We've just hung big bullseye targets all over the net.
2025-11-18 15:34:39 <KipIngram   > I assume there must be some economic incentive to do so, since that's why we do everything we do.
2025-11-18 16:08:53 <veltas      > I think the main stakeholder here is the state, western states generally need to better understand their role in defense (not invading the middle east 'defense')
2025-11-18 16:09:53 <veltas      > Unless critical infrastructure is regulated to avoid this kind of centralisation (which generally has a trickle down benefit for the larger market, i.e. accessibility requirements for state software), they are leaving themselves seriously vulnerable
2025-11-18 16:12:02 <veltas      > The beacons are too late if the armada has already arrived
2025-11-18 16:19:45 <KipIngram   > Yeah - I guess I have just always hoped that the military has been smarter about this than the business world.
2025-11-18 16:20:14 <KipIngram   > That may be a silly hope, though.
2025-11-18 16:22:36 <veltas      > Ah but critical infrastructure is not the military, they're just part of that
2025-11-18 16:24:29 <veltas      > When aws farts and food stops showing up in the supermarket people will understand
2025-11-18 16:27:22 <veltas      > Over-complex and over-centralised society will have a rude awakening
2025-11-18 16:37:06 <tp_         > veltas, as they did when the JIT supply channels were disrupted with covid ?
2025-11-18 16:37:50 <tp_         > all the fine tuning over many years was destroyed in one instance, and it all stopped
2025-11-18 16:43:17 <veltas      > Yep
2025-11-18 16:49:48 <KipIngram   > Oddly, my own perception during covid was that the problem wasn't really that things weren't working - it's that people freaked out and THOUGHT things were going to stop working, so suddenly everyone started showing up at the same time and buying truckloads of stuff.
2025-11-18 16:50:08 <KipIngram   > DEMAND went nuts, and the stores couldn't keep stuff on the shelf.
2025-11-18 16:50:17 <KipIngram   > Especially toilet paper.
2025-11-18 16:51:20 <KipIngram   > At one point someone posted a picture of a dragon sitting on his hoard - of toilet paper.  I practically laughed myself sick.  It so perfectly captured the whole situation.
2025-11-18 16:52:28 <tp_         > KipIngram, I was thinking more of the chip industry
2025-11-18 16:52:41 <KipIngram   > Ah - yes, that definitely seemed to glitch.
2025-11-18 16:52:50 <KipIngram   > And for a long time, too.
2025-11-18 16:53:26 <tp_         > toilet paper supply was bad, but how easy is paper to make compared to chips ?
2025-11-18 16:54:43 <tp_         > the chip process was very finely tuned and timed, the flow proved to be critical when it all broke
2025-11-18 16:56:22 <tp_         > but it was a product of decades of slow evolution and refinement where the flow wasnt interrupted
2025-11-18 16:57:13 <tp_         > then in came the govt heavy handed power freaks who shut it all down with no idea of the chaos they unleashed
2025-11-18 16:57:32 <tp_         > kinda like now with all the tariffs ?
2025-11-18 16:58:31 <KipIngram   > Yeah, I've seen Peter Zeihan talk about that - mentioning how some chips have like 9,000 companies in their web of production dependencies, and in some of those cases there's only one company that fills a particular slot in the process.  Hugely vulnerable.
2025-11-18 16:58:50 <KipIngram   > And they're scattered all over the world, so local glitches can have global impact.
2025-11-18 17:00:02 <tp_         > in my case I had purchased a lot of 500 STM32F051 mcu's in 2014 when a American firm dumped them ... lucky ... so I was not affected thru the whole covid thing
2025-11-18 17:00:31 <KipIngram   > He's a fairly interesting guy - he bases most of his conclusions on population demographics and such fundamental things.  Also a big factor he drum beats on is that for decades after WWII the US used its destroyer fleet to police the high seas to ensure smooth global trade.  But the nature of our navy has changed - we don't have those destroyers anymore - and he thinks our interest in playing that
2025-11-18 17:00:34 <KipIngram   > role is declining too, starting around when the Soviet Union rolled over and died.
2025-11-18 17:00:54 <tp_         > I watched my stock that I purchased in 2014 for $0.65 each hit $12 ea at one point
2025-11-18 17:02:09 <tp_         > 'now theyre worthless again, but I still have them even tho that series is obsolete now
2025-11-18 17:03:32 <tp_         > KipIngram, yeah a lot has changed since ww2
2025-11-18 17:04:37 <tp_         > I still fondly remember the 'army surplus' era of the 1960's when I could buy awesome electronics parts for peanuts, all army surplus
2025-11-18 17:05:13 <tp_         > all that stuff was the best quality that could be made, all millspec
2025-11-18 17:05:30 <tp_         > and all dumped as it was no longer needed
2025-11-18 17:05:49 <tp_         > from awesome electronics parts to scrap overnight
2025-11-18 17:06:49 <tp_         > now I live in a completely opposite era, where availability is carefully controlled to maxamise profits
2025-11-18 17:21:27 <KipIngram   > Yeah, I feel like the era of my childhood and early adulthood was a sort of "magic time" that we likely won't ever have again.  Maybe I'm just getting old, but I tend to watch older TV shows and often just the "look of the world" portrayed makes me nostalgic.
2025-11-18 17:23:11 <KipIngram   > That's not at all to say that we haven't made some of the problems associated with those times at least somewhat better, but I definitely don't think all of the changes have been good ones.
2025-11-18 17:23:19 <X-Scale     > KipIngram: i feel that so vividly when i now watch "Family Ties" which i loved so much back in the 80s.
2025-11-18 17:24:04 <KipIngram   > That was a fun show.  There were a lot of fun shows, and I can have a nice trip down memory lane just getting on YouTube and spending an hour watching the opening them songs of old TV shows.  Really stirs my memory pot.
2025-11-18 17:24:17 <KipIngram   > theme
2025-11-18 17:24:44 <X-Scale     > Where Michael J. Fox played the unforgettable Alex P. Keaton.
2025-11-18 17:25:16 <KipIngram   > I was already getting to be an older kid by the time of Family Ties, though - my memories go back further than that, but still do include that period.
2025-11-18 17:26:08 <KipIngram   > My earliest TV memories revolve around things like The Big Valley, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, etc.
2025-11-18 17:27:20 <KipIngram   > Westerns dominated TV when I first really started watching it.  Then around the late 1960's / early 1970's westerns were replaced by detectives, and we got a big era of that.
2025-11-18 17:28:06 <KipIngram   > And maybe the next big wave was the nighttime soaps, when everyone started trying to copy Dallas.  Which kind of came out of nowhere.
2025-11-18 17:29:19 <KipIngram   > And then I just stort of stopped watching TV once it got taken over by reality shows.  I find them entirely worthless.
2025-11-18 17:29:28 <KipIngram   > Stopped watching new TV, that is.
2025-11-18 17:30:27 <KipIngram   > And streaming (thus a huge number of "channels") has just innundated the world with crap.  Maybe there are a few gems in there, but I don't know how to find them.
2025-11-18 17:30:43 <X-Scale     > I remember several in the 70s like "Little House on the Prairie" and "Columbo"
2025-11-18 17:31:34 <KipIngram   > Yes, and alongside Columbo you had Kojak and Starsky & Hutch and McMillan & Wife and Hart To Hart and Banacek and Cannon and Barnaby Jones and... well, you get the idea.
2025-11-18 17:31:43 <KipIngram   > Detectives everywhere.  :-)
2025-11-18 17:32:18 <KipIngram   > A little earlier there was Mannix, which was a bit more of a "pioneer" in the detective wave.
2025-11-18 17:32:42 <KipIngram   > Oh, and The Rockford Files, which was one of the best ones.
2025-11-18 17:33:05 <KipIngram   > And had more or less the best music, though McCloud had really good music too.
2025-11-18 17:33:55 <KipIngram   > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2wjvoOmVM
2025-11-18 17:36:11 <KipIngram   > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg1Cx26-928&list=RDyg1Cx26-928&start_radio=1
2025-11-18 17:41:19 <KipIngram   > I think that detective wave evolved out of the spy stuff - The Man from UNCLE, Secret Agent Man, etc., which had of course been kicked off by the success of the Bond movies.
2025-11-18 23:42:01 <veltas      > Finally, I'm home https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/