atx.pub is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon.
Keep the fediverse weird. atx.pub is a server for Austinites, people who used to be Austinites, people who want to be Austinites, or want to visit Austin. Honestly, all are welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

16
active users

Learn more

Elze<p>Today social media brought me an artificial intelligence joke about Genly Ai, the protagonist of the Six-Fingered Left Hand of Darkness.</p>
Elze<p>These are not the peaches you are looking for.</p><p>They are not ripe.</p><p>They are not yours.</p><p>Do not pick them from the trees.</p><p>In the tradition of Keeping Austin Weird, Obi-Wan Kenobi protects the peaches in a tree in someone&#39;s front yard.</p>
Elze<p>My good deed for the day was to convince a neighbor that it&#39;s NOT safe to look at the solar eclipse with sunglasses. Luckily, we had spare eclipse glasses to give her.</p>
Elze<p>New Crobuzon is an imaginary world from one of my favorite writers, China Mieville, so I was happy to see this here (in the Interimaginary Departures lounge at the Austin airport).</p>
Elze<p>Maybe it&#39;s old hat to everybody, but I found this just today. Austin airport has a little lounge called Interimaginary Departures that has a departure board with science-fictional destinations.</p>
Elze<p>I was listening to BBC news today on NPR. BBC announcers often insert an extra &quot;r&quot; at the of a word that ends in a vowel, e.g. China -&gt; Chinar, Gaza -&gt; Gazar. This announcer said &quot;lore enforcement&quot; instead of &quot;law enforcement&quot;. I thought this could be a prompt for a whole urban fantasy novel. <br />Then again, it probably has been done.</p>
Elze<p>I still fondly remember this recent (now gone) LaunchDarkly billboard &quot;Let your feature flag fly&quot;. I appreciate that LaunchDarkly thinks of Austin as a place where there are enough people to understand this message, and a place where people still let their freak flags fly.</p>
Elze<p>It&#39;s been said that &quot;you guys&quot; is not a good way to address a group, as it is non-inclusive; but on the other hand, trying to cast it into the possessive form leads to interesting linguistic contortions!</p><p>Overheard at a meeting today: </p><p>&quot;We are limited only by your guyses creativity&quot;.</p>
Elze<p>The Santa that visited us last night must have been our cat in disguise, because the present was a freshly-dead roach on the kitchen floor. But, as my daughter pointed out, better that than a live one running around. So our cat does understand the meaning of Christmas!</p>
Elze<p>(I only marked it as sensitive content because otherwise Mastodon blows up one word in the image, and it looks ugly. It&#39;s not really sensitive, it&#39;s just I guess the job ad writer snuck it in there to check if the reader is really paying attention.)</p>
Elze<p>Sometimes you are looking at a perfectly normal, unremarkable software development job ad, written in standard corporatese, and in the middle of it you see this:</p>
Elze<p>So then they gave me a generous credit -- bigger than what I spent for the entire tutorial; and said they will monitor my account to see if the charges keep growing. It&#39;s been nearly 2 days, and they stayed constant.</p><p>The biggest surprise in this scenario was that unlike all other free cloud services (Google Docs, etc.) where you can&#39;t even get in touch with a real support person, with AWS I was not only able to do that, but THEY took an initiative to call me! 5/5</p>
Elze<p>I checked that all my dashboards showed 0 of any resources, and then opened the support case with AWS. The first phone call and subsequent email from them were just restating the basic instruction &quot;terminate all your resources&quot;, so I sent them screenshots of my dashboards showing that I had 0 instances of all the relevant resources. 4/5</p>
Elze<p>After you delete your resources, you are not supposed to be charged for them. Yet the next day, when I logged into my account, I saw that the charges grew by about 50 cents. Small, but worrisome. Did I leave any resources running that were undetectable by AWS dashboards? How could I, by merely following tutorial instructions, break AWS in such a fundamental way? 3/5</p>
Elze<p>My case seemed strange. I completed a tutorial on certain AWS services, and at the end, deleted all the computational resources I created in the course of the tutorial - following the commands in the tutorial. It tells you what charges you will incur, and the estimation was pretty accurate. (The charges were small.) 2/5</p>
Elze<p>That moment when you almost don&#39;t answer the phone, because the phone call is coming from an unrecognized number from Costa Rica, but curiosity gets the better of you and you pick up the phone. And it&#39;s not a spammer -- it&#39;s an AWS support person. <br />That was really unexpected, because I only have a free tier AWS account, so I thought I would be lucky to even get an email when I opened my support case. Instead, AWS support representative called me less than 2 hours later! 1/5</p>