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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I was asleep in bed one night many years ago and heard a loud bang, startling me awake. I thought for sure somebody was trying to break in a window or something. Went out, checked the house, nothing amiss. Went outside, checked around for any signs of something being off, not a thing. I then sat in my living room for 30 minutes trying to decide if it was a dream or if it would happen again. Still, nothing. I went back to sleep.

    The next morning I made coffee and sat down at my MacBook Pro. It was an older model but I immediately noticed something was wrong. The entire laptop was elevated off the table slightly. The battery had apparently expanded in the middle of the night and with enough force ripped the bottom aluminum cover through three of the screw holes. Found the source of the noise, and immediately took it for disposal.

    I was very lucky it didn’t catch fire, although it would have quickly solved my midnight mystery.









  • bluemellophone@lemmy.worldtoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksMurica
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    4 months ago

    Taking a vacation road trip from Florida to the Grand Canyon with three kids with only bikes also comes at quite the cost. Bikes are great, but in many practical scenarios they are slow. Not all of us live in Manhattan, or a dense city, or even a well connected and safe to traverse suburb.

    Bikes cost time.











  • This.

    You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.

    Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.


  • $350k includes the salary but also all of the health insurance benefits, taxes, stock options, office space and perks, compute hardware, software services… the works. An employer will have an averaged overhead factor for their skilled workforce, which can be anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 typically. A worker with an annual pre-tax salary of $140k could cost Google $350k in overall expenses per year. Labor is expensive.

    Also, these people weren’t just making simple Python scripts. Most of them were contributing core functionality into Python itself and managing the internal Python version and the ecosystem of Google software stacks that depend on it.