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Recently, I purchased a Samsung 980 SSD which had a firmware upgrade available. I would normally not upgrade firmware on SSD/HDD devices, or even bother looking for it, unless there was a problem I was trying to solve. Well, turns out this SSD model has some temperature problems1. (The second link is an Internet Archive one, because Samsung doesn’t like to keep forum posts up to help folks in the future?) Anyways, off to figure out how to update the firmware on this Samsung SSD using a Linux OS! ...

…probably not, no. Not today anyways. An excellent video from Paul Hudson at Hacking with Swift explains. What is remarkable about the code which ChatGPT (and, I assume, other Large Language Models) can produce is how close to a correct solution it is, but how wrong it ends up being. All is not lost, of course. A human who knows how to write SwiftUI code could quickly fix up these flaws. The potential benefit here is saving time by having the computer write all the boilerplate code for you! It’s a fancy form of auto-complete. Another benefit is in the education of new and existing programmers. ChatGPT can spit out code which compiles (sometimes), and follows the syntax of the language. For a student, or anyone new to the programming language, the ability to get code samples that (a) attempt to solve your specific problem and (b) are written in proper syntax could remove a barrier to entry to learning that new language. Personally, I know the frustration of learning of new programming language and trying to write the code I already know how to from another language, while messing up the syntax in the new language. It is infuriating. ...

Everything about this study is interesting: Contentedness does increase steadily in line with incomes and even accelerates as pay rises beyond $100,000 a year — as long as the person enjoys a certain baseline level of happiness to begin with. That’s according to the authors’ study of 33,391 people living in the US, published March 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. They say the effect can be observed in salaries up to $500,000, though they lack conclusive data beyond that level. ...

Just like last year, spent another winter weekend in Stowe, Vermont back in January. It was a great time of skiing, beer, and hot tubs - all of my favorite winter activities. Below is the video summary of the trip. Compared to last year, I have upped my GoPro game to include additional angles that create more variety in the final product. This 3 minute video was made from tens of hours of footage, and I think I only just had enough to make it interesting. ...

What a great story this is: For those who stay the course to become Cravath partners, it is a lifetime career that comes with a guaranteed annual salary of several million dollars. Underscoring the “lifetime” part are traditions such as the Cravath Walk: every partner is entitled to a procession of past and present partners at their funeral, after which the assembled lawyers chant: “The partner is dead, the firm lives.” ...

Of all the things Twitter could do to drive me away, they’ve done two of the top-tier items over the past week or so. First up, we have “Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first”: When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s. ...

From Thomas Rid at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies: Last week brought two related features of artificial intelligence in education into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about plagiarism and cheating and abuse is uninspiring and counterproductive. Yes, some unambitious students will use this new tool to cover subpar performance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or disincentivize such behavior. The far more inspiring conversation is a different one: how can the most creative, the most ambitious, and the most brilliant students achieve even better results faster? How can educators help them along the way? And how can we both use machines that learn, and help learn, to push out the edge of human knowledge through cutting-edge research faster and in new ways? ...

While listening to the latest Stacktrace podcast today during an indoor bike training session (nothing like Apple Tech and a high heart rate!), the guys were discussing the latest rumors from Mark Gurman that broke a few days ago: A high-end configuration of the Mac Pro, a model with 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores, has been canceled. Instead, Apple plans to release a version with the M2 Ultra, making it unclear — beyond the machine’s expandability — why most users would buy it over the cheaper and smaller Mac Studio. In another disappointment, the new Mac Pro will look identical to the 2019 model. It will also lack one key feature from the Intel version: user-upgradeable RAM. That’s because the memory is tied directly to the M2 Ultra’s motherboard. Still, there are two SSD storage slots and for graphics, media and networking cards. ...

It appears I forgot to write a 2022 November Month in Biking post. Oops. Regardless, it’s the final day of the 2022nd year here and in the spirit of reflecting and resolutions and all that, I can dig up some stats1 across the entire year. 2,453 miles This is 22% more than last year where I eeked out a paltry 2,012 miles and only just crossed the 2k mark. Comparing to 2020 and 2019, though, it’s was not enough to beat out the 2,955 and 3,062 miles I pulled out those years, respectively. Damn hamstring/groin injury. ...

Perhaps best to call it the “Last warning you’ll ever need to flee LastPass” breach. Best summary and take I’ve seen is from Wladimir Palant: Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face. ...