Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
Thanks, this looks great. I've been playing with Huggingface's Smolagents, which is fun to tinker with and relatively easy to read through. But it is so tightly coupled to its two agent implementations - ToolAgent and CodeAgent - that it's not trivial at all to add your own state transformations.
This framework looks really well designed, I'm going to take it for a spin.
The one thing I wish was better developed is persistence and streaming - they give sample code to stream, but it’s essentially a complete implementation of streaming that every client needs to implement.
Depends on where you are in the US. There are a lot of brick and stone buildings in the northeast. Florida because of hurricanes they tend to build houses out of cinder block. In California because of earthquakes they tend not to build with masonry.
That said the US historically had a lot of wood. Most everywhere. So it was cheap and light[1] easy to transport. And wood if it's kept dry is durable. My house is 70 years old. The wood framing is totally solid. Previous house is 115 years old. The framing is also solid.
[1] House built of wood is probably 1/4 the weight of a house built of masonry.
It goes up much quicker and requires less highly skilled tradesman to build and to maintain.
There are new developments in the states where they produce the frames for the various housing 'templates' off-site, and then ship it to the plots and build the house there, almost like a lego kit.
For my gf (in the usa), it's aesthetics. Though I look at brick and think "longevity." Perhaps historically it was cheaper/easier to use local wood and that image stuck with people?
Nothing is built with brick anymore. If you see a newer than 1940s brick house, its a stick frame (wood) with a layer of brick outside it for aesthetics. Also people associate brick with longevity, but as several of my friends in old ass brick row homes, their foundations are crumbling, and are usually in need of serious structural repair. Brick isnt bomb proof like people think it is. Its even more susceptible to long term stress from wind shear.
It has to have the ME silicon and the AMT enabled firmware. According to Matthew Garrett, who I'd generally trust on this stuff, Apple hasn't ever shipped AMT-enabled firmware.
It's nice to see that for once it's a good thing that Apple hardly ever ships standard firmware and instead usually leaves out all the components and features they don't plan to use.
vPro isn't a CPU, it's a particular combination of CPU, PCH (southbridge), Intel NIC/WiFi, and AMT firmware. There's no evidence that Macs have AMT or vPro.
You're right about that. Intel's product lineup is a huge mishmash of optional features that no one understands and now it's going to bite them. (But not really, because what else are you going to buy? A Ryzen laptop?)
I joined a startup wholly-owned by GOWEX 5 months ago. A startup that is now defunct.
I know it sounds crazy but we all believed those numbers, we were happy, money everywhere.
But from time to time one of my mental alarms would go off, and I would just ignore it. "What could possibly be wrong with this company? It's a publicly-traded company, after all."
The moral of the story is: pay attention to your instincts.
"I know it sounds crazy but we all believed those numbers, we were happy, money everywhere.
... 'What could possibly be wrong with this company? It's a publicly-traded company, after all.'"
Sounds like we've already forgotten about Enron[1]. They seemed to be rolling in cash, were hyped by Wall Street analysts and the media, etc. How could it all have been a scam?
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
reply