Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2024-05-03 · open the original ↗

• The web has no identity layer; decentralized identifiers would supply one. Scarlett, a staff developer advocate at TBD, a Block incubator, relays Angie Jones's framing: her own usernames on Twitter and GitHub are linked only because she made them, and her data cannot move with her. A decentralized identifier (DID, a W3C recommendation) would travel across the web, stored in a phone wallet much like a debit card, and users need not know it is there; she cites Bluesky as already using DIDs under the hood. Hanselman counters that even Bluesky's domain-based check and Mastodon's WebFinger demand a domain and a web server, which is beyond a non-technical parent.
• TBD's aim is cheap, easy cross-border payments. Scarlett says Block, owner of Cash App, Square and Tidal, wants to bring that ease to sending money between countries, where services like Western Union mean delays and high fees and many recipients have no bank. Its exchange protocol, tbDEX, is currency-agnostic. Hanselman adds his own family's experience: an international wire costs about $30, some relatives pay with phone minutes, and picking the wrong day to convert can lose them $50.
• This is not crypto: no coin and no blockchain. Scarlett says TBD at first used a Microsoft DID method anchored to a blockchain but has built its own, did:dht, which stores DID documents in a distributed hash table anchored on BitTorrent. Hanselman, who says he does not support crypto or web3, presses the point, and TBD's GitHub describes the network as "permissionless" and blockchain-free.
• Verifiable credentials disclose only what a verifier needs. An issuer such as a motor-vehicle department signs a credential with standard public and private keys; the subject holds it; a verifier, such as a bar checking age, sees only "of age" and not name or address. A holder can present it on the subject's behalf. Whether the verifier keeps the data depends on the wallet and its policy, though Scarlett says verifiers are not supposed to. Hanselman's test case is a laid-off friend locked out of a GitHub account whose recovery ran through a work email.
• The stack is unfinished, but some companies already use it. It is not yet at 1.0, and some TBD packages are at version 0.41. The project's "are we web5 yet" site shows 85% overall, with DIDs and verifiable credentials at 100% and decentralized web apps at 62%. Scarlett cites FormFree's Passport platform, where borrowers disclose only the necessary data and lenders compete for them, which she presents as reducing bias in loans. Hanselman calls the "Web5" branding "off" because web3 is burned; Scarlett, who was not part of the naming, likens the goal to OpenAI making AI usable by everyday developers.

2024-04-25 · open the original ↗

• Accessibility work should centre on disabled people, not tools. Kalcevich, head of accessibility innovation at Fable (a former Fable customer from two decades in government), says tools matter for the volume of large sites, but testing with assistive-technology users shows which of the many standards failures to fix first; she presents Fable Engage as the way to do this remotely.
• Disability is far more common than people admit. Hanselman cites about a billion people of 8 billion (one in eight); Kalcevich says it is closer to one in four in Ontario, and one in two over 65, though most seniors do not identify as disabled. She adds temporary disabilities (a broken arm) and situational limits such as glare on a phone screen.
• "Accessible or not" is a false binary; measure it instead. She argues no continually updated product is ever fully accessible, and a yes/no hides why and whether it is improving. Fable's Accessible Usability Scale is a free 10-question survey given after usability tests with assistive-tech users, averaged over critical task flows like checkout; she would also measure staff knowledge and processes.
• Empathy exercises can lead teams to do the wrong work. Hanselman recalls having engineers use screen readers with their laptop lids closed for a day; Kalcevich warns that daily assistive-tech users are far more skilled, so simulating disability without engaging disabled people can make a product less accessible. He says his exercise worked because it pushed engineers to work with blind engineers.
• Build flexibly, because users bring their own accommodations. She relies on Chrome's live captions and OS-wide font sizes rather than hunting for each site's options, and combines hearing aids, captions and lip reading; native HTML rather than custom components preserves that flexibility. She noticed Hanselman's podcast transcripts were hard to find.

2024-04-23 · open the original ↗

• This gateway is built for large deployments, not homes. At an MSRP of $599 USD as of recording, it has about twice the capacity of the UDM Pro and UDM SE: 200 or more UniFi devices and 2,000 or more clients, by the host's account.
• Its onboard switch assumes you bring separate PoE switching. The 8-port gigabit switch has no PoE (unlike the UDM SE) and no Etherlighting. The WAN can be port 8, the new 2.5 GbE RJ45 port (up from gigabit) or either 10G SFP+ cage. In the host's reference design, two gateways uplink over 10G to a USW Aggregation feeding USW Pro Max 48 PoE switches, with a USP RPS on both.
• It is rated well above the UDM Pro with IDS/IPS on. It is rated for 10 Gbps wire speed with the firewall only and about 5 Gbps with intrusion detection and prevention, against 3.5 Gbps for the original UDM Pro with IDS/IPS. These are rated figures; the host did not report a throughput test.
• The drive bays only mirror, and failover does not sync footage. Two drives configure themselves as a RAID 1 mirror for UniFi Protect, with no RAID 0 option; the host's two 1 TB surveillance drives synced in about 2 hours. Under high availability, Protect footage is not copied to the secondary, so he advises a second drive set where recording must never lapse, otherwise moving the drives over by hand.
• Shadow Mode high availability brings automatic failover within seconds. Due in UniFi OS 4.0, it links two gateways directly, using port 7 as the heartbeat. Unplugging the primary on an alpha build cost a few dropped pings. Both units must be the same model, which Ubiquiti told him covers all rackmount Dream Machines; he tells installers to budget for two units.

2024-04-22 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2024-04-20 · open the original ↗

• Reading raw magnetic flux sidesteps old formats and file systems. Hanselman says discs vary by sides, density, 35 or 40 tracks, and FAT, Amiga or Commodore file systems; the Greaseweazle, open-source hardware bridging USB-C to floppy drives, captures the flux and leaves decoding to software such as FluxEngine and Aaru.
• A vintage drive needs its own power and cabling. His drive is a Fujitsu 5.25-inch IBM PC drive bought on eBay for about $30, in a 3D-printed case; it needs 12V from a Molex adapter because USB supplies only 5V, and the twist in the ribbon cable decides drive 0 or 1. The Greaseweazle appears in Windows as a USB serial port (COM3), not a drive, because COM ports are the easiest lowest common denominator to program to.
• Most failures were his own setup, so recheck assumptions. gw info reached the device, but reads returned "no index" and FluxEngine said the device did not recognise the command; the cause turned out to be the 12V cable he had bumped loose.
• Check each image with separate tools and an emulator. The HxC floppy emulator reported errors, possibly from the wrong file system setting; Aaru (by Natalia Portillo) confirmed a raw image and its sector count; the VICE emulator then ran a lunar lander game and a chess program whose BASIC source he could list.
• Bad sectors call for re-reads with different settings. FluxEngine flagged bad spots, and Pac-Man and Donkey Kong at first would not load; after re-reading with another density setting, Mario Bros loaded slowly under true drive emulation and Donkey Kong eventually ran. He says the discs, found in a garage, date to about 1981–82.

2024-04-20 · open the original ↗

• Outline view needs styles, not manual formatting. The viewer's presentation outline used hand-set colours and sizes with no styles, so Word's outline view showed nothing; Hanselman selects each heading from the left margin and uses "create a style" in the Styles pane to make H1 through H5.
• Multilevel lists are what tie styles into levels. Under "Define multilevel list" (distinct from bulleted lists) each level is linked to a named style, whose name does not matter; then Tab and Shift+Tab move a paragraph between levels.
• The hidden link is a paragraph setting inside each style. Outline level lives under Modify Style > Format > Paragraph, which he calls the part no one figures out, along with an option to start collapsed; once each H style has its level, and ordinary text is left as body text, Outline view's Show Level collapses and expands the document.
• Levels must look consistent to work. Each level carries one fixed size, so a heading that should look different needs a different level; the viewer's mixed sizes forced choices, such as jumping from level one straight to level three.

2024-04-18 · open the original ↗

• Developers need only enough design to communicate and not be bad. Nanz, a senior developer advocate at Progress with a fine arts degree, says few ask "should developers design?" though many ask whether designers should code; she would have devs design with the tools they know, CSS in the browser or pen and paper, rather than learn Figma, and says designers who know CSS and semantic HTML work "two steps ahead".
• Foundations like colour and hierarchy explain why something looks off. Her free, roughly 200-page ebook Foundations of Design for Developers (Progress) opens with colour, not components, mirroring how a fine arts course restarts students on perspective and value; being able to say why is what lets you catch a design that feels unprofessional.
• Design starts by defining the problem and the feeling. Hanselman describes giving designers feeling words ("this isn't energizing") instead of solutions; Nanz agrees, saying colours cannot be chosen intentionally until the emotion and goal are known. She adds that developers write more copy than they think, in error messages, button labels and tooltips, often at the moment a user most needs help.
• Same-looking websites come from templates, and iteration is the fix. She attributes the homogeneous web to Squarespace- and WordPress-style templates, which she does not criticise, and denies Figma is a monoculture; to Hanselman's "80% fine" she answers that design is iterative like refactoring, 60% to 70% and onward.
• Gestalt principles are shorthands, but users' mental models constrain them. Proximity, grouping and cards work because of how people parse visuals; she says designers must be distinctive without breaking expected patterns, which Hanselman illustrates with a tax site's custom dropdown that ignored typing. She cautions that ease and speed sometimes matter more than delight, as with tax software and Duolingo's animations.

2024-04-15 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2024-04-12 · open the original ↗

• The existing network hangs on a solar-powered router up the hill. Internet from an ISP in Lone Pine reaches a solar receiving station: a 100 W panel and two batteries powering a MikroTik router, a NanoBeam AC Gen 2 and a 120° LiteAP AC point-to-multipoint radio that feeds the Hoist House and the Gordon House. Coverage was spotty, metal-sided buildings got none, and the ISP's own solar antenna loses power under snow, according to the owner, Brent Underwood.
• The design moves the network core off solar power. A NanoBeam AC Gen 2 there feeds WAN 1 of a Dream Machine SE in a locked 4U enclosure with a 1U UPS. The SE adds dual WAN, so Starlink can serve as primary or backup (too power-hungry for the hilltop solar), plus Protect cameras against theft. The host accepts the double NAT this creates as a trade for getting the core off solar power.
• Every building gets the same simple, sparable kit. A Rocket Prism AC with a 10 dBi omni on the General Store feeds NanoStation AC or NanoBeam AC Gen 2 stations at each building, with U6+ access points behind wood covers inside. The host keeps the Gordon House's NanoStation AC and UAP-AC-M, which runs off its 24 V passive PoE port, and replaces the bunkhouse's mesh-fed UAP-AC-LR. The metal-sided church gets its own station.
• The Hoist House needs its own link, not VLAN trickery. It has no line of sight to town, and routing it through the hilltop solar station would be too hard to troubleshoot at a site this remote. The host proposes a point-to-point link from the bunkhouse, possibly from a pole or the outhouse about 30 ft uphill, reusing the Hoist House's NanoBeam. Contacts on site are still checking the line of sight.
• The favoured mine design skips levels rather than run power down. In Dave's preferred option, a USW Pro 8 PoE at the Hoist House powers Switch Ultras and UK-Ultra access points at the 100–200 ft levels over PoE++. The 400 and 550 ft levels are skipped, and a Game Changer extended-reach Cat6 run carries data to 700 ft. There the pump's AC power runs a switch, an AP and a camera on the pump, with a single Cat6 drop to 900 ft.

2024-04-11 · open the original ↗

• Secure the account first: "don't ever skip leg day". DePriest, GitHub's deputy chief security officer after 15 years at the NSA, names two-factor authentication and no internet-open storage accounts as the core; GitHub spent about 18 months making 2FA mandatory for active contributors because too many incidents start with password spraying or leaked credentials. It does not require YubiKeys or passkeys, citing users without phones or modern hardware, though he favours passkeys.
• GitHub Advanced Security bundles three scanners, now with AI. He describes code scanning on CodeQL with AI autofix suggestions in the pull request (described as "just recently announced"), Dependabot and dependency scanning for supply chain, and secret scanning that AI extends beyond high-confidence tokens to usernames/passwords and SSH or RSA keys; he says most of it is free on public repos, which Hanselman urges listeners to turn on.
• Block secrets before they land, because pushed secrets must be rotated. Push protection sits between the editor and GitHub, inspects incoming pushes for credentials and blocks them, with overrides and enterprise-tunable responses; he says GitHub used it to clear and keep secrets out of its own codebase. Secrets are better fetched on demand from enterprise vaults via APIs, or at minimum stored in GitHub's secrets feature.
• Free compute draws abuse and raises sustainability questions. With 100 million developers, a counter-abuse team uses machine-learning pipelines and auto-detection against spam, crypto mining and ToS-violating binaries; on whether free scanning lasts, he says leadership values the community, though GPU-bound AI features are harder. CodeQL keeps up via per-language models, GitHub's own vulnerability researchers and AI-assisted modeling; compiled languages still often need build integration.
• Copilot is filtered for insecure code but still needs checking. He says its models are tuned for software development and filtered, with Microsoft, for security issues such as SQL injection and for toxicity, calling it early days; developers should still run security scanning and tests. Its context comes from open files and Copilot Chat, and he credits it with fixing an unfamiliar Jupyter notebook in about five minutes.

2024-04-08 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2024-04-07 · open the original ↗

• Trump's fraud liability came from false statements, not high valuations. Answering a viewer about the Jon Stewart comparison, he says Stewart merely sold a house. Trump's problem was lying to reach his valuations: claiming an apartment was 30,000 square feet when it was 10,000, and omitting a conservation deed restriction on Mar-a-Lago. Truthful statements reaching the same values, he says, would likely have been fine.

2024-04-06 · open the original ↗

• For a whole generation, birth dates sum to their ages. He noticed a viewer turning 57 on 3/30/24, where 3 + 30 + 24 = 57, and worked out that a roughly 30-year age band, about 28 to 58 in 2024, shares the pattern. He says it holds for them for the rest of the century and resets in 2100.

2024-04-04 · open the original ↗

• A zoomed-in UniFi Protect live view pans as you tilt the phone. In landscape, after zooming into any camera's live view, turning the phone left, right, up or down shows more of that side of the image. In portrait mode, sliding down enlarges the image and allows the same left-right movement. The host says he learned of it only the day before recording.

2024-04-04 · open the original ↗

• A custom extraction model reads fields from same-format documents. Giard says Document Intelligence Studio, at documentintelligence.ai.azure.com, is the rebranded Forms Recognizer with new features added. It offers prebuilt models for invoices, receipts, health insurance cards and tax forms. He uses a custom extraction model instead, for a set of five PDF invoices that share one layout but carry different text. He says it also accepts JPEGs, Office documents and images.
• Creating a project provisions the service and its storage. You don't have to set anything up in the Azure portal first. The project wizard asks for a subscription and resource group, a service name, a region (he picks East US) and a pricing tier. He says the free tier limits calls per minute and document size, and calls standard "pretty cheap" for a small sample. The API version defaults to the most recent. The wizard then creates an Azure storage account (he takes the cheapest tier) and a blob container for the documents. He expected about 60 seconds and says it took about a minute and a half.
• Label one document by hand, skipping auto-label. After the upload he picks "run layout", which skips auto-labelling, because auto-label needs an existing model that matches the form. He clicks words to highlight a span, then names it as a field. The type options are field (static text), selection mark (a true/false checkbox) or signature (handwriting). A table icon detected the column names on its own. He makes the table dynamic rather than fixed so it can handle invoices with more than one row. He labels only one of the five documents.
• Neural training fits this case; template suits handwriting. Giard says the template option needs more than one labelled document, takes longer and is better for handwritten notes. He trains a neural model on the single labelled invoice and says labelling more documents would probably raise accuracy. Training on five documents took about 15–17 minutes.
• The test pulled the right fields, with uneven confidence. On a test document the model found the invoice number and date correctly, with about 96.8% confidence on the vendor address and 98% on the customer address. Other fields came in as low as 36% and 29.5%. Giard says real use would call the model from an application through its API. The studio shows the endpoint, API version, service resource and container, and he says he will cover the API calls in a future video.

2024-04-03 · open the original ↗

• He sees Trump's bond as a trap with no clean exit. Reporting that Trump's bond was rejected for lacking a financial statement, he asks attorneys whether drastically lowering the figures could be read as an admission of guilt on appeal, or whether resubmitting the old figures would be fresh fraud. He says plainly he is not a lawyer and offers no answer.