I don’t think that is true. Not much at Google really bought into the UUID hype. At least not for internal interfaces. But really there is no difference between a UUID v4 and a large random number. UUID just specifies a standard formatting.

It is true, don’t do it.

Even at huge companies like Google, lots of stuff was keyed on your email address. This was a huge problem so Google employees were not allowed to change their email for the longest time. Eventually they opened it up by request but they made it very clear that you would run into problems. So many systems and services would break. Over time I think most external services are pretty robust now, but lots of internal systems still use emails (or the username part of it) and have issues.

IIUC Google accounts now use a random number as the key. But there are still places where the email is in use, slowly being fixed at massive cost.

I thought that was the problem at first too. But unless there are fields that are searchable but not visible at all to end users I have definitely found many cases where the term (and no stemmed version of it etc…) was in the listing.

Not to mention that Amazon search is happy to ignore most of the words in your search. So you end up sorting through pages of results that don’t match. Absolutely infuriating and one of the reasons that Amazon is my last choice now. Someone decided that it was unacceptable to show “no matching results” and lost my business.

What I do is take a capture of the page, then if they haggle on the refund I can clearly show that the product is not the one I ordered.

Most credit card issuers don’t issue credit cards to random apps by solo developers.

I would pay a lot of money to see Nintendo’s conniption over having to allow home brew and non-approved software on their game consoles. I would love to release emulators for older Nintendo consoles for the Switch so that they don’t get to keep charging people again to play old games on newer consoles.

1. I can usually pull out my phone faster than taking a card out of my wallet.
2. Phone-based cards typically have significantly higher limits than physical cards. (I can tap hundreds of dollars with my phone, only about $100 on my card.)
3. The phone needs to be unlocked which is safer than the card which just needs to be tapped with no other authentication.
4. One less thing to carry around.

Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone’s HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn’t really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.

It’s not “inherently insecure” at least not to that degree. (Once could argue that lack of E2EE is insecure.) If you stand up an unrelated instance you shouldn’t be able to access private messages that don’t relate to an account on your instance. So only bugs in your instance, or your conversation partner’s instance, will be able to leak those messages.

The last lines of the song are:

Me and my baby in a '69, oh, oh

It was the summer, summer, summer of '69

So I think at the very least it is intentionally ambiguous. Just like Big Balls is about hosting parties.

Funerals are one thing. That is basically a party and I think people can choose to do what they want. But I think that basic body disposal should be provided (and separated from any funeral provider as much as desired).

Yeah seriously, everybody dies (for now at least) let’s just provide basic disposal for bodies as a government service. If you want to have a funeral or other celebration you are welcome too and if you want a “fancier” disposal (like burying in a cemetery) you can pay for that. But it seems like basic disposal should be provided.

I’m using Kagi. I find that it does a better job at finding “legitimate” sites rather than blogspam and content marketing. However I’m not sure I will stick with it a long time. I seems like it has mostly stalled and the team is getting distracted by making a browser, non-relevant AI (I have no problem with the few AI experiments tied to searching) and other side projects. We’ll see. I really hope that they pull themselves together and focus or it might not last. But for now they seem like one of the better options available.

Bing’s new “Deep Search” where it has some sort of LLM refinement iteration process has also been helpful sometimes. Probably the best AI search product I have seen, but definitely doesn’t replace most searches for me.

Because it is amazing to live downtown where I can walk to dozens of different great restaurants and shops, work and anywhere else I need to go on the average day. If I have kids they can get around easily without needing to wait until they turn 16 and can get a drivers license.

City life isn’t everyone’s preference but it is clearly desirable by many people. $1M is a huge price tag but if you can afford it and you want to live in the city then you will pay it if you need to. Many people do.

The only hope is that with supply increasing the price tag will start dropping. Additionally to dropping price of current stock hopefully builders will start targeting lower pricepoints as well. (Right now most of the new condos are targeted at more “luxury” audience because it is more profitable, now that the market has been saturated other markets will start to be addressed.)

I’m just waiting for the bubble to pop.

Oh, flac fixes for HLS. I wonder if https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8722 was fixed. I’ll have to try it out today.

Two regions of one provider isn’t really a reliable backup. What if the provider goes out of business, hacked, closes your account or has a software bug that affects all of their storage.

I also had a bad experience where I had a test website under a megabyte in a storage bucket. It was under the free tier and sat there for a few years. Then one month they sent me a bill (it was small, a handful of cents). Contact support saying that this use is under the free tier. They said that data was added then removed from the bucket. I hadn’t logged into the account, no living API keys. They wouldn’t forgive the charge.

Luckily my credit card had expired so they just locked my account.

With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

Wait until you have 2 services that use the same resource. Now you need:

1. When both are enabled the resource is set up.
2. When either one is enabled the resource is still set up.
3. When neither is configured the resource is removed.

Doing this with Ansible is a nightmare. And 99% of the time you don’t even realize that you have this problem until your configs don’t work for some reason.

It really depends on the quality of software you are running? A SMTP, IMAP, Mumble, Photoprism, Jellyfin, bittorrent, Tor, Subsonic compatible server, who even remembers what else? Fine. One small Minecraft world? Boom you’re dead.