From what I’ve investigated as a recipient of spam calls, I’ve been called from legitimate mobile numbers from my own mobile telco. The only thing that explains that are SIM card banks.
Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to report abuse to the telcos (and regulators).
Why would AWS refund 100Gbps on egress since the account actively used that bandwidth? AWS would not know if this is legitimate traffic, a (D)DoS or whatever...
At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't see how AWS would be sympathetic to providing any refunds.
AWS is known for refunding or partially refunding people if they accidentally rack up a huge bill in a short amount of time. They even reduce the bill in this case. (I do think reducing a bill in the tens of thousands to hundreds is unlikely though)
I mean if this story is to be believed, AWS reduced the bill from 6500 to 1800.
I think developers accidentally racking up unexpected thousands in costs on their first AWS project is a pretty common phenomenon that their support has standard rules for handling.
I do think the discount is believable, but we don't know the line items AWS applied a discount/removed charges.
The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.
Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.
Eh, NTFS supported long paths since forever, the problem is with applications using Win32 APIs that are limited to MAX_PATH (260 characters) path length.
There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.
I retired a few years ago, but I still write a fair bit of code. I was using Copilot's code completion before I retired, but coding agents hadn't come around yet. I've been wanting to try them, but I kept putting it off, and now the price increases make it hard to justify.
So I just started trying CodeWhale (https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale) with DeepSeek V4. I expected to be impressed by the abilities (which still require plenty of oversight). I didn't expect to be completely shocked by how cheep it is. After most of a week of using it 4-8 hours a day, which would amount to a full week of coding in many jobs after you account for non-coding activities, I'm about to hit $3 in total usage. So we're talking $10-20 per month for single-agent use by a full time software developer? And I'm sure some of my usage is waste as I'm still getting my head around things like compaction. If I take a break for a few weeks, I pay nothing because there is no subscription.
If DeepSeek and Xiaomi MiMo stay within a few months of the US-based models in terms of capabilities and US companies don't figure out how to drastically cut prices, I can't see how China hasn't already won. Protectionism would be one reason, but that might be ceding 50-90% of the total addressable market, and bring us closer to moving knowledge work out of the US the same way we did with manufacturing because it's too expensive in the US.
Holy F.. $3 .. once I'm done with my base cursor allocation, each nontrivial question costs $5 . And yes, I'm now switching to a mix of codex and ds4pro
My initial use was in a repo where I create models for 3d printing using a library called build123d. There are a handful of parametric models and then many instances of those models with parameters (one that's 24 mm in diameter with a cutout, another that's 42 mm in diameter but no cutout, etc.). I tend to be in a hurry when I want a new parametric model, so I've ended up just copying the one that's the most similar and changing what I want to be different.
The first big task was to find the common bits and abstract them out. It did a great job of creating a plan, summarized in a table, that gave a name to shared chunks, the line numbers in various files where they appeared, line counts of new functions vs. removed bits, and some pros/cons about splitting out each chunk. It was very well "thought out", so I told it to go ahead. It did a nice job other than straying from my coding conventions. That gave me a chance to build out my AGENTS.md file (it helped with that, too).
Once that was done, I had it create automated tests for the newly abstracted parts. I think this is probably a bad practice... I believe humans should at least define what the tests are testing so that there is a deeper understanding of what oversight is in place. But I was just trying things. It surprised me how well it did. The biggest surprise was that the tests seemed quite inspired by vision. It would try different parameters and then have comments about making sure the shape protruded in a certain way, then code that did that. I expected it to refactor a bunch of the code to make it more testable. It found a way to not touch the code while testing everything I asked it to with just two simple mocks - I hadn't foreseen that, but it felt quite practical. It was passing around several opaque tuples in the tests and accessing items in them by index. I prompted it to replace the first one with a frozen, kw-only dataclass. Then a second. On the second request, it saw the pattern and did the rest without me asking. It created 44 tests across a handful of files.
The next part is where I was the least happy. I use ruff and ty to check my code with almost all checks enabled. It was mostly good about the ruff issues. But for the type checking, it just wanted to disable 6-8 rules for the entire repo in pyproject.toml, or at least for all the tests. I had to repeatedly tell it not to and it kept telling me it wasn't recommended. When it finally gave in, it fixed most of the type issues (build123d has lots of types specified, but many operations result in type conflicts because things are so deeply overloaded). The things it didn't fix, it just left a comment to ignore type checking altogether on that line. After I did a little more brow beating, it finally changed the comments to only disable specific rules. To be fair, and unlike most of my other repos, I've had to spend way too much time getting types right in this repo myself.
My last task involved a small library management system for our little town library (tracking library cards, books, DVDs, check-outs/check-ins, etc.). I inherited it from someone who had built the entire web app out of bash/awk/troff scripts with the data in text files burdened by a lot of schema changes that he didn't really know how to deal with. I'm halfway through moving it to Python/FastAPI/SQLite. I asked it to do a security audit of the entire code base, both the newer parts and the old parts that are still in bash/awk/troff. It found everything I knew about and a few things I didn't know about. It made a decent assessment of the risks/impact of each issue. It also called out design decisions that were good security practices. One of the next big tasks will be to see how it does at continuing the migration - it has enough examples of how I've done it that I suspect it can do something fairly consistent with my thinking. I'll probably have it do one or two web pages. When I feel like it understands what I'm after, I'll tell it to use sub-agents to do the rest. I'll be very happy if I don't have to tease apart any more troff scripts that are generating PDF files!
> You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
Eh, not Vivado, but back in my undergrad days I RE/cracked a tool used in a very specific niche and definitely kept my mouth shut as the developers could a) do some investigation and then sue me, a student without any legal budget to spare; b) improve copy protection on future releases; and/or c) prevent my access to future versions of the tool that I was using for my thesis.
On other threads about Denuvo you always see somebody saying they've got the chops but the risk to their livelihoods is not worth it.
I think there are a lot of (now) hobbyist reverse-engineers that learned the craft back in the day and kept the knowledge for themselves.
At least JPEG contains downscaled thumbnails embedded into it as part of the EXIF stream. There's no need for the receiving device to rescale it again.
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