Thought Bricks

The open-source fork of the now not open source Terraform called OpenTofu is getting close to operational readiness. It is being run by The Linux Foundation and has the backing of a number of companies and people. From what I can tell, the only thing missing right now is the registry for Terraform providers. I’m sure a new registry will be available soon and then it’s off to the races. I’m planning on revisiting a couple of the things I’ve done with Terraform over the past few years to see what, if any changes, are required to make them go.

In yet another example of why Ticketmaster should be broken up 404 describes how scalpers game the system. Essentially, scalpers are pros at buying up high-demand tickets and they are much smarter and more motivated than Ticketmaster who throws up some weak-sauce barriers to them. It’s an interesting discussion of the techniques used and how they short-circuit efforts to prevent multiple ticket sales. I can’t say that I’ve got a brilliant idea off the top of my head to prevent this abuse but with the money that Ticketmaster rakes in, you would think they could come up with something.

This article in WaPo by Brian Merchant makes some very good points about how tech has changed over the years and mostly not for the better. In the 1990s, the internet was so interesting and fresh and fun. There were a lot of crazy things that happened and most of it was driven by real people. Fast forward to the 2020s and the internet as it was is gone and replaced by the semi-walled gardens of content and information hosted by big tech companies.

I really enjoyed this Strange Loop presentation by Jack Rusher. He covers a whole lot of ground in a humours and compelling talk about the dumb ideas that persist in programming. People in tech like to think they are on the cutting edge. In fact, we still follow many of the same theories that were invented many years ago. In many cases, we haven’t moved on from the basic structures that were used when people programmed with punch cards.

In a surprising turn of events, it turns out that 95% of NFTs are worthless. I’m shocked. To make things even worse, all of these dead NFTs are consuming energy just by being maintained on the blockchain. That energy adds carbon to the atmosphere to the equivalent of “2,048 US homes, 3,541 US automobiles, or 4,061 passengers flying from London, UK, to Wellington, NZ” per year. NFTs were fun when we were all locked down, but can we move on and put a stake through the heart of this vampire?

WaPo has an article about Bob Ross’s first painting going under the hammer for $9.8M. It’s definitely worth it. The painting itself is not too exciting but it’s a cultural icon. It would be fun to have something he did during an episode on display. The show itself is pretty awesome. Very calming. I was in some waiting room a bit ago (maybe getting an oil change or something) and “The Joy of Painting” was on without volume and it was absolutely fascinating.

The rates on short term bonds and CDs are insane right now. Over the past few years under ZIRP those instruments were very boring and didn’t give you enough over cash to bother with. Now is a completely different matter. I’ve been buying three-month CDs through E*TRADE starting at the end of last year to manage cash and the rates went from 5% to 5.25% to 5.5% to 5.7% now. It makes things a little more complicated because you have to look at it and, on real terms after netting out inflation, probably not more beneficial than getting the ~1-2% on cash balances in a money market in the past.

Wired has an article about how some ski resorts are giving up on skiing and moving towards other uses of the mountain - most notably mountain biking. On this, I’m ahead of the curve. I used to ski a decent amount every season about 20-30 years ago. It wasn’t terribly expensive and a day at the slopes was great fun. Then it trickled down to maybe a time or two a season as it got much more expensive and it seemed dicey weather wise (purely anecdotal - I have no idea if it actually snows less than it used to in the mountains).

I went to my first large concert since the onset of covid-19 last week. The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie were great. The show was at Merriweather Post Pavilion. I grew up nearby and it has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. It’s much more modern than the rustic bandstand in the woods that it used to be and is still a great place to see live music.

Awk is pretty ancient (1977) but is a nice tool to know for text processing. I’m no expert, but I do use Awk from time to time for various simple tasks. A second edition of The AWK Programming Language is coming out in October and it looks interesting based on what I read through on O’Reilly. This article shares some of the highlights including a chapter on data analysis and an updated simple version of Make in Awk.