To prevent automatic firmware updates, ads, and any other spying I'm not aware of, I block these in DNS:
*.samsungcloudsolution.com
*.samsungosp.com
*.samsungqbe.com
*.samsungcloud.tv
*.samsungads.com
The first one gets the most hits.
I also don't connect my Samsung displays to Wifi anymore. Unless I notice a problem that I have to search to fix. Then if there's a firmware update that fixes the issues, I'll do it.
NextDNS and ControlD are helpful for blocking this sort if thing, or Pi-Hole if you want to set it up yourself.
My samsung was so noisy that I went to forget the wifi network... but it couldnt. So I ended up blocking its mac at the router. Prior to that it was always the #1 blocked device on my pihole.
AWS, for one example, provide a feed of upcoming "events" in EC2 in which certain instances will need to be rebooted or terminated entirely due to whatever maintenance they're doing on the physical infrastructure.
If you miss a termination event you miss your chance to copy that data elsewhere. Of course, if you're _always_ copying the data elsewhere, you can rest easy.
Getting Things Done and Seven Habits set the foundation, and then just iterating on those principles until I found systems that worked for me. Big believer in not using the Inbox as a task list, and apps that make setting, repeating, and organising reminders very easy.
My optometrist set the adjustable lenses to what he thought was in the right ballpark and then had me read the chart at my requested distance for the computers lenses. A few adjustments, and done. They're perfect! Bonus: text is a bit bigger now, and I can read smaller fonts than I could before getting computer glasses.
The downside of this is that I now find it very difficult to read computer screens and my phone while wearing my distance lenses. The practice of holding things further away to be able to read them always was, I suppose, inevitable.
For Civ it is. It's a pretty big title. It's the easy entry into the genre of big sprawling tech+strategy games, but it's not meant to be EU4. I play Civ as a casual game when I'm burned out from EU4. (I should really pick up and continue my Mare Nostrum attempt.)
I was one of the first users of the AWS Elastic File System because I had an ideal use-case for it exactly when it was first introduced. Everything worked just fine for 30 days, and then the web site basically locked up. It turned out that EFS had an initial "grace period" during which IOPS were unlimited, then it would become proportional to the GB of stored data. We had just a few hundred megabytes, so it worked out to something like 0.4 IOPS. Slower than a floppy drive! Support immediately reset the grace period for us, flipped some internal flag to make it not expire, and then a few months later the product itself was fixed to have a reasonable minimum IOPS per account irrespective of the data volume. At the time there were zero mentions of any of this on Google, I must have been the first few people to hit this issue after general availability.
A direct comparison is a nearly identical issue with Azure SQL Server Managed Instance. It too had IOPS proportional to the size of each file of a database. We migrated a database that used many small partitions (per month I think?), each with its own small file. Its performance was horrendous, easily 100x slower than on-prem. The support team could barely speak English, got repeatedly confused about the product (Azure SQL Database != SQL Managed Instance), couldn't understand the problem, and even insisted that totally broken performance "was a feature" and we should redesign "our database". Sure buddy, I'll go tell the third-party vendor that, meanwhile Microsoft themselves insisted we should migrate all of our legacy databases to this garbage. We did, it took months, cost a ton of money, and now it basically doesn't work! We abandoned the product, as have many other people. At the time, this had been an issue for many years with Microsoft engineering basically whistling at the ceiling as they cheerfully ignored it. More than a year later they fixed it, but you've got to wonder what else is still wrong with it that support can't help with.
There's more examples, but that pair stuck in my mind because they had the same root cause but wildly different outcomes.
Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk
I’ve had the same experience, both as IC and a manager. It’s a nice framework, just not for human organizations (KPI for next framework: result in less “no true Scotsman” replies whenever a post details why the framework sucks in their organization)
