Dispersal of liability if something goes wrong?

It's not the ground-based targeting system so that company can't be sued. It's not the onboard nav so that company can't be sued. It's not the software so that company can't be sued. It's not communication latency or interference so we can't blame it on a bad command decision to push forward without more reliable data points.

The only thing that will ultimately result in a nuclear weapon being dropped is if the guy with human eyes is looking at the target, makes a judgement call, and pushes the button.

All that being said, we should not be building more nukes regardless. This is dumb.

I am like a homing pigeon. I might not know where I am or how I got there but I can sure as hell navigate a city well enough to get home safely.

Couple of favorites

https://www.murrayscheese.com/dp/river-s-edge-up-in-smoke

https://www.murrayscheese.com/dp/jasper-hill-farm-harbison

Not scrolling through all the comments to see if someone mentioned this yet or not but every December I check what is on the best albums of the year lists.. Generally I check per-genre that I'm into. Like best black metal of 2023, best jazz of 2023, etc etc..

Other than that, bandcamp and YouTube are the biggest. I honestly buy more on bandcamp these days than I torrent though. It's such a great site.

My eyes rolled back in my head so hard I gave myself a concussion.

Those new key bindings and editor thing in github. I wish I could opt out and just get static pages.

Remarkably similar to software engineering.

I will add that there is a system widely used in the software world that is genuinely life changing and should be adopted everywhere. We call it "blameless post mortems".

The idea is that, if something goes wrong, it's not the fault of the person who happened to do the thing that caused something to break. It's a problem with the system that allowed that thing to happen in the first place. It gives people the freedom to be wrong without fear of repercussion and for your coworkers to work as a team to solve for this shortcoming together instead of heaping blame on one person.

A pallet of glass bottles fell over when Tony tried to move them with the forklift. Where they stacked correctly? Maybe less flexible packaging would reduce flex. How were the forks positioned when he started to lift? Could we make color coded indicators for where the forks should be before attempting to lift? If the forklift was moving, how fast? Should we have speed limiters installed/adjusted? etc etc..

I kinda don't care. The providers do all of the work anyway and, I think more importantly, terraform still feels like transitional tech. I might use it to stand up an initial working cluster but, in the long run and if given the choice, I'd want to use something closer to Crossplane for managing infrastructure.

Terraform is still quite manual and doesn't mandate consistency.. You have to build automation around it and because drift is so easy it results in a system that can't just be fully automated.. You always have to check to see if changing a simple resource tag is going to revert a manual IAM permissions change that was made to a service account 3 weeks ago..

I've been using terraform almost daily for years but I wouldn't be sad if it stopped existing.

Back then, shit was pretty rough though.

Bro no kidding.. You'd install and hoped your keyboard worked by the end of it.

I stuck with it though.. Well over 20 years for me now.

EDIT: I actually remember digging through dbus configs one time for HOURS because I couldn't get my mouse working. No joke I realized at like 3am it wasn't plugged in. Hahah.. It was such a pain in the ass back then you just assumed it was something insane.

It sounds like you're chasing something that doesn't exist. There isn't really like a point you get to when everything is "optimized" or whatever... That word doesn't really mean anything. Optimization is a process that you use for really specific situations. It's not a state you get to.

For example, if I was serving a website and the server was showing high CPU usage and disk activity, I might find what files are being accessed most often and add a caching layer (redis, varnish, memcache, etc). That would optimize for more efficient CPU usage and lower disk activity but it would also increase memory usage. That's a trade off I would need to consider before implementing that change. If the apps I am running are already consuming a lot of memory, I might run the risk of exhausting all the memory and having processes killed off (aka OOM errors). Maybe I try something else then.

You need to find what's happening with your system and then figure out what you can do to mitigate the behavior of any poorly performing apps. That all starts with good monitoring but beyond that its impossible to say because it's extremely dependent on how you have chosen to configure your system and what you are running.

This type of investigation is what gets you to be a real engineer.

As a US citizen you are technically always responsible for paying taxes no matter where you live. The US has a citizenship-based tax system (you owe on worldwide income regardless of where you live). Most other countries in the world have only a residency-based system (you owe only if you are actively living in that particular country). You are still required to file every year and you're going to need someone more sophisticated than the dude at H&R Block or a free Quickbooks whatever. You need someone who is comfortable working with expats.

"Doesn't that mean I have to pay taxes for both the US and my new country then?" No. The US has dual taxation agreements with most countries. That means that, basically, the US will not charge you taxes for things you've already been taxed for.

The main goal of paying less in taxes is to reduce your taxable income. The biggest chunk of this will happen with the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. That essentially says that the first $120k you earn in a year is tax free. You can qualify for it by staying out of America for 330 days per year. There is no requirement to have residency anywhere else.. You just have to be outside of the US.

That $120k rises every year. When you make more than that and do start to owe taxes, you will start to owe from the lowest tax bracket as well.

If you make $120k and do this, you just got a $30k raise in the form of taxes you no longer owe.. You can pretty much travel the world for free using this money.

Now, I said that most non-US countries have a residency-based taxation system. That generally only starts to kick in after living in that country for 181 days. If you stay there for less time, you don't owe them any money.

There are also countries who don't have income tax or do but actively tell you not to pay it.

Living in a combination of these places, and bouncing around every few months you avoid any real responsibility to anyone.

If you do earn more than $120k per year, you can reduce your taxable income even further by doing things like maxing out your 401k contribution.. That gets you to $142500 or so tax free. And again, you'd start paying taxes at the lowest rate above that.

Any other thing you mention in your US filing that can reduce your taxable income also contributes.. Getting married, depreciation value on a home (US or not), investment losses, etc..

Working remotely from the US also gets you a higher salary than if you had just taken a job in the UK or Germany or Japan or something.. So you can have the higher salary and the higher quality of live at the same time. You give up some employment protections and European style summer vacations but I'm personally ok with it.

Also, if you are working for a US company remotely, you can add these expected deductions to you W4 and never get charged for them in the first place.. You'd have a MUCH higher weekly salary and wouldn't have to wait for your tax return every year to take advantage of these benefits.

So spend summers in Italy, autumn in Japan, winter in New Zealand, and spring in Mexico. You earn an American salary, take advantage of lower cost of living, travel the world, and its all basically free.. Good luck trying to get me to move back to the US.

There's more but these are the major points.

I saw a thing with Hugh Laurie not too long ago and he said something like, "America is too big to even know itself. Someone in Georgia has no idea about the day to day life of someone in Oregon."

I've been thinking about that a lot lately.