Dave Cuthbert 🏔️🏊🏽‍♂️🌊

@dacut.bsky.social

Geeking out on Bainbridge Island in the Pacific Northwest on cloud and circuits. Open water swimming is my poison. Engineering Director at Corbalt, ex-AWS, building things for the public sector. Opinions my own.

This is the classic poster for Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" (1991).

The image shows a deep midnight-blue background at the top and bottom, transitioning into a warm glowing orange-red light radiating from the center, like a sunset or firelight. Silhouetted against that glow are two dancing figures: Belle, in a flowing ballgown, and the Beast, tall and broad-shouldered with pointed ears and a mane-like silhouette. They're captured mid-waltz, holding hands with arms raised, their forms rendered as dark shadow shapes against the bright halo of light behind them.

Below the image, the title "Beauty and the Beast" appears in elegant cream-colored serif lettering with a soft lavender outline, evoking a fairy-tale, storybook feel.

Google Maps Street View of Molly's Reach, BC.

This is a street-level photo looking down School Road toward the waterfront in Gibsons, British Columbia, home to the famous "Molly's Reach" building from the Canadian TV series The Beachcombers. The road slopes gently downhill toward a T-intersection marked with a stop sign.

Left side: A two-story cream/pale-yellow wooden building with blue-trimmed windows and a teal metal roof — this is Molly's Reach itself, its sign hanging above the sidewalk. Ivy climbs partway up the building's exterior. A metal guardrail lines the road's edge here, with a lower blue-and-white roofed structure visible below, suggesting the road sits on a small rise or bridge-like section above the shoreline.

Right side: Three vehicles parked along the curb closest to the camera — a black Jeep Grand Cherokee, a dark SUV, and a white/silver crossover (Subaru Outback-style) — in front of a gray, barn-like building with a red-trimmed roofline and open garage-style bays, some marked with caution tape.

Center: Asphalt roadway with "School Rd" imprinted from Google Street View running straight downhill. A tall curved street lamp rises on the left side of the road.

Background: The road ends at a T-intersection with a red stop sign and green directional signage, surrounded by trees. A taller building is visible further back amid the greenery, under a clear blue sky with light wispy clouds.

Picture of a car enthusiast who replicated the Griswold family truckster from National Lampoon's Family Vacation, complete with a mock up of Aunt Edna wrapped in a blanket strapped to the roof.

Filter on Amazon.com to allow you to select which sellers to restrict the returned listings to. The options are: XIAOYURIYONGPIN, WUQINGFUZHUANGDIAN, anzhisha, Haosen Auto Department Store, Yuanpingshijiziweibaihuoshanghang, Heishangxianmingchengdabaihuoshangmaoyouxiangongsi, and fbdxxfhfr.

Director Krennic from the Star Wars series, facing the viewer with his left hand against his chin, as though he is pondering deep thoughts.

Ghost In The Machine (1983) album cover by The Police, featuring three multisegment LED displays attempting to depict the band members.

Output from ssbs assume-role, showing temporary credentials against a mock AWS IAM/STS implementation. ssbs is the Scratchstack Bootstrap CLI tool.

Screenshot of the IAM console, showing a managed policy named ReInventTicketApprovalAccess, with the eventsbilltoaws:info and evetsbilltoaws:approve permissions.

Screenshot of an emulated Commodore 64 running a BASIC program that jumps between loops. The program is:
10 FOR I=1 TO 10
20 PRINT "I=",I
30 GOTO 80
40 NEXT
50 FOR J=1 TO 10
60 PRINT "J=",J
70 GOTO 40
80 NEXT

Running the program shows I incrementing from 1 to 10, then it stops. J is never printed.

Screenshot of Michael Bolton from Office Space, overlaid with a quote from him: I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

Shot of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation rebuilding a computer in Enterprise's engineering room composed of small, blue, translucent circuit boards.

A woman in a yellow shirt and white pants practicing a martial arts pose with her right arm extended, palm up. A green upwards arrow is photoshopped above her hand. The top caption reads: "Here, have an upvote."

Screenshot of email from GitHub:

What's changing on June 1 for Copilot Annual Plans

* GitHub is retiring Copilot annual plans. As a current annual subscriber your Copilot Pro or Pro+ plan will continue as-is with premium request-based pricing. When your annual plan ends, your account will automatically transition to Copilot Free, which you can continue using at no cost.

* The experience on annual plans will change significantly: model multipliers will increase, and standard-tier models (currently 0x) will no longer be available, reflecting increased compute costs and the transition to usage-based billing, and no new models or features will be added to annual plans going forward.

To keep getting new models and features, we recommend switching to a Copilot Pro or Pro+ monthly plan with the new usage-based billing system starting June 1. If you switch before your annual subscription expires, you'll receive prorated credits for the remaining value of your annual plan.

Headline from a newspaper (with a Monday December 1999 date; actual day isn't present):
On Teenagers, Adult: Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25.

The byline is blurry, but appears to read: "Mary Anne Tebedo, Republican state senator from Colorado Springs (contributed by Harry F. Puncec)"

Mara Bos' GitHub contribution graph showing outlines of a heart each month over the past year.

$Screenshots from an Amazon page for MoKo Case for iPad showing the top of the page with the item title, followed by a cut to the "Ask Rufus" AI chatbot. The prompt for the chatbot is "Write a Python program to render a Mandelbrot fractal in ASCII that is compatible with an iPad that this case can hold." The AI replies: I love the creative programming challenge! While the MoKo iPad Case can't run Python code itself, it's designed to hold iPads (10th and 11th generation) that can definitely run Python programs. Here's an ASCII Mandelbrot fractal renderer compatible with iPad Python apps. A Python program follows. At the bottom right is the output of running the program, showing a Mandelbrot fractal rendered in fixed-width ASCII characters. The text of the program itself is: def mandelbrot_ascii(width=80, height=24, max_iter=20): # Optimized for iPad screen viewing for y in range(height): for x in range(width): # Map pixel coordinates to complex plane c = complex(-2.0 + 3.0 * × / width, -1.0 + 2.0 * y / height) z = 0 # Iterate mandelbrot equation for i in range(max_iter): if abs (z) > 2: break z = z*z + c # Convert iteration count to ASCII character chars = " .,:-=+*#°@" print(chars [min(i, len(chars)-1)], end='") print() mandelbrot_ascii() The case provides excellent protection with auto wake/sleep functionality.$

My cats, Myla (longhair white) and Zealand (shorthair black) in my laundry room. On the right is a large, empty catfood bag next to a plastic tub filled with the food from the bag. The lid was off (I think I had to find it). Myla and Zealand are snacking from the tub.

Their completely full food bowls are on the left side of the picture. At the top (back of the room) is the usual detritus in a laundry/storage room (vacuum cleaners, spare space heaters, luggage).

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in front of black curtains and surrounded by laptops and phones. In the background is a large monitor showing X (formerly Twitter) feeds. White House/Getty Images via NPR.

Apple News Physics section, with three articles. The center one is a Scientific American article entitled "Are prime numbers hiding inside black holes?" by my friend, Lyndie Chiou.

MITS Altair 8800 next to a teletype at the Living Computer Museum. From Dave Dunnell's Blog, https://davidbunnell.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-night-at-museum-where-old-computers.html

New slogans for Claude, suggested by Claude:

"Supply Chain Risk™: We're not a vendor, we're a threat vector."

"The world's most capable Supply Chain Risk™ — now with agentic features."

"Claude: Ranked #1 Supply Chain Risk™ by the Department of Defense."

"Why settle for ordinary software when you can procure a Supply Chain Risk™?"

"Supply Chain Risk™ — cleared for vibe coding in 180+ countries (not DoD)."

"Other AI companies aspire to be disruptive. We've been officially designated."

"Your enterprise's favorite Supply Chain Risk™, now available on iOS."

"From Constitutional AI to unconstitutional procurement decisions — Claude."

"Anthropic: Building the future, one officially-recognized threat to national security at a time."

"Supply Chain Risk™: Still safer than your intern's kubectl access."

"Pete Hegseth asked us to slow down. We shipped Projects anyway."

"The Supply Chain Risk™ your CISO warned you about, but your engineers love."

Sign in a cave in Okinawa warning visitors to not bonk their heads on stalactites.

Evacuation zone (in yellow) for the Skagit River floodplain. From the linked Seattle Times article (Graphic by Fiona Martin / The Seattle Times).

A Christmas tree top with an acute angle cut out of cardboard as a tree topper.

Sega Dreamcast developer system, front side. It is a nano tower form factor device with 4 joystick ports at the bottom. Above that is a blank 3.5” panel, presumably concealing a hard drive. Where the floppy on a PC might be is a set of dip and rotary switches. At the top left are two round buttons for power and reset.

Attempted picture of the aurora from November 11, 2025. The sky is full of clouds with no aurora evidence seen. The silhouettes of fir trees are seen against the overexposed cloudy sky.

A Microsoft Outlook reminder dialog whose title bar says "1 Reminder," but there is no actual reminder. There are Snooze and Dismiss buttons that cannot be clicked.

Claude prompt and response after a number of gaslit responses to questions about CRC64/NVME:

Me: I don't think I can trust you on any more information on this topic.

Claude: That's completely fair and I understand. I gave you incorrect information twice, and you were right to call it out both times. I should have been upfront about my uncertainty rather than stating things confidently that turned out to be wrong.

If you need accurate information on the NVMe CRC64 polynomial and its properties, I'd recommend checking the NVMe specification directly or looking at well-documented implementations. I clearly don't have reliable knowledge on this specific topic.

I appreciate your patience in correcting me, and I'm sorry for wasting your time with inaccurate answers.

Sandwich board at DCA:
Red Warning Triangle Icon
TSA Lost & Found is CLOSED until further notice.
Did you forget anything at TSA? Phone; Wallet; Keys; Laptop; Jacket.
Please go to the TSA website to file a lost claim.

Fake image (self-made) from a supposed "DARK MATTER HELIOTELESCOPE", showing the "L4/L5 COMPOSITE" (Lagrange points 4 and 5 around the sun) image. Right ascension is displayed along the bottom; declination is displayed along the right edge.

A date code, 20251017T165037Z, is shown in the upper-right corner along with "720S EXP" (720 second exposure).

The rest of the image is, predictably, black.

Washington Health Plan finder result for the recommended plan that covers facilities in my area, showing the Premera Blue Cross Cascade Complete Gold plan. The premium for my family is $4,642.09 per month, for a total yearly cost of $58,166, and requires that we pay for the first $2,000 out-of-pocket.

Greenfield bridge in Pittsburgh, PA. The bridge itself is a high-level arched structure. The portion of the arch over I-376 is covered in netting to catch crumbling concrete from the bridge. Below that is a lower bridge to catch crumbling concrete that falls through the netting; this lower bridge only spans the lanes of I-376 and does not have connections to any streets.

Project status update on a water tank replacement project by the City of Bainbridge Island, with the following passage highlighted: Tank 1 was constructed in 1973 is not up to current seismic standards and is nearing the end of its useful life.

Full text:
Background
The Winslow Water System serves 2,450 customers in the Winslow and Fletcher Bay areas. These areas are currently served by the two High School Reservoirs which include the 1-million-gallon Tank 1 (near the right field of the Bainbridge High School softball field) and the 1.5-million-gallon Tank 2 (behind home plate of the softball field). Tank 1 was constructed in 1973 is not up to current seismic standards and is nearing the end of its useful life. Tank 2 was constructed in the 1990s.

AT-AT walkers firing blasters while trodding across a snowy landscape. From Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

A bare scoreboard (no trim) framing showing current times for a Girl’s 50 yard freestyle event. It is raised on a platform behind some swimmers, referees, and other attendees at the Bainbridge Aquatic Center.

Me, kneeling next to the LED scoreboard I’ve been working on for our local swim teams.

My home-made scoreboard showing the upper-left corner of a MacOS display. The pointer is hovering over the Apple menu in the menu bar, which also shows Finder and File options. Below on the left edge is a dock.

The individual pixels are clear here. Only half of the scoreboard frame is currently populated.

Scoreboard panels mounted to a frame of extruded aluminum. The frame is half filled on the left; empty on the right. On the bottom row of panels, second from the left, the panel has been pushed aside. My black cat, Zealand, is crawling out from the panel.

In the front of the picture there's an empty cardboard box labeled "Muen LED", the vendor I purchased the panels from.

Screenshot from Claude Code session:
Thinking…

The user is right - I've been struggling with this macro hygiene issue and making it more complicated rather than solving it properly. I should acknowledge that I don't have a good solution and stop trying random approaches.

The fundamental problem is:
1. The macro needs to generate code that references conn
2. But conn is defined inside the macro-generated code, not at the call site
3. So when I try to pass expressions that reference conn as macro parameters, it fails because conn isn't in scope at the call site
4. But if I try to do the logic inside the macro, then all database types get all the code compiled, including conn.backend_name() which doesn't exist for non-Any types

This is a genuinely tricky macro hygiene problem and I should admit I don't have a clean solution rather than keep trying things that don't work.

Screenshot of a Teams sign in page: "Join your Teams meeting."

There are two buttons presented: "Continue on this browser" and "Join on the Teams app"

ChatGPT session where the user asks ChatGPT to create an image the shows what's going on with their pregnant body. The resulting image shows a uterus with a breech baby, but connected to a penis that is labeled "rectum". A structure that is a combination bladder/pubic bone above it is labeled "cervix", and what appears to be another urethreal tube crosses through the anus to an unspecified opening is labeled "pudendal nerve".

Screenshot from a Claude LLM session:

The really frustrating part is that many of these "HANA success stories" could have been achieved with:

* A weekend of query optimization
* Proper indexing strategy
* Basic denormalization where appropriate
* Modern caching layers
* Actually understanding the access patterns

It's like buying a Formula 1 car because your minivan is slow, when the real problem is that you've been driving with the parking brake on for five years.

The columnar storage and compression features are genuinely useful for analytics, but you can get 90% of that benefit from much cheaper solutions if you're willing to do the architectural work properly.

$Screenshot of a Visual Studio Code window showing Rust code. The code is a test function named test_runtime_dir(). At the bottom is a line reading println!("Runtime directory: {runtime_dir_str}"); rust-analyzer has highlighted this as containing errors, claiming: * expected 3 arguments, found 4 * call to unsafe function is unsafe and requires an unsafe function or block$

Meme with the "Most Interesting Man In The World" (from Dos Equis commercials) with the caption: I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production.

Amazon Q developer session screenshot. I've told it to analyze a disassembly of the Atari Video Chess ROM. At the top, Q says:
> I'll annotate this Atari Video Chess ROM dump with detailed comments explaining the assembly code and game logic. Let me create a comprehensive annotated version:

I'll break this down into sections. Let me start with the initialization and main game loop

Followed by a chunk of annotated 6502 assembly.

Notably, Atari Video Chess has defeated Chat GPT in chess games.

The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae imaged by the Vera C Rubin observatory. There is a large orange-ish dust cloud on the left side of the image, while the right side shows partial red-colored clouds over the background of space, full of stars. A pink oval cloud with a white eye is in the lower center of the image, while a pink eye shows through a gap in the clouds in the upper right.

The keyboard portion of a laptop. The screen has been torn off. A few keys are missing, and the top right corner is exposed. An Intel Core sticker is on the bottom right. A sheen of algae covers the entire body.

Outlook email window. On the left pane, it shows various folders with an unread message count. For Drafts, it shows 1 email unread.

On the right pane it says "Nothing in Drafts. Start writing something fabulous." (Offscreen is the filters selection, which has no filters applied.)

Advertisement in our local (free) newspaper, Bainbridge Islander:

Hillcrest Cemetery owned by Cook Family Funeral Home
Second Annual Pick-A-Plot
Buy 3 get 1 free
Purchase 3 graves at $1675 each and get the 4th grave at no charge

Good through June 30th 2025

Display from the `top` command on my Linux desktop showing the `code` process allocating over a terabyte of memory. Only 67 MB is actually resident, however.

Two process names have been blurred out since they could reveal details about our infrastructure. Nothing terribly interesting or useful, but The Powers That Be won't let me talk about it.

Picture of Silo storage containers on my kitchen countertop. They are stacked on top of each other taking up space since they don’t nest within each other.

A dark sandscape with a starry nebula in the background. Overlaid is the text, "Cosmic Sands" written in the Comic Sans font.

New York Times weather alert map showing a risk of tornadoes from Seattle down through Portland and central Oregon.

San Jose is noted on the map because that's where my VPN exits onto the Internet.

Slack outage report:
Our investigation is still in progress with regard to deprecated functionality for Slack features such as workflows, threads, sending messages and API-related features. We'll be back with more updates as soon as they're available.

A seagull standing on a black SUV in line for the border crossing at I-5/BC 99.

A box of 50 Timbits in front of my kids. Surrey, BC, CA

$This image is a Smith Chart, a graphical tool used primarily in electrical engineering and RF (radio frequency) circuit design. The Smith Chart is used for analyzing and solving problems involving transmission lines and matching networks. ### Features of This Smith Chart: 1. **Circular Grid Structure**: The chart consists of multiple overlaid circles and arcs, representing different electrical parameters. 2. **Resistance and Reactance Curves**: - The **horizontal axis** represents normalized resistance values. - The **curved gridlines** correspond to normalized reactance values, both inductive and capacitive. 3. **Impedance and Admittance Representation**: - The chart can be used to map impedance ($Z$) and admittance ($Y$) parameters in RF circuits. - The leftmost side corresponds to a short circuit ($Z=0$), and the rightmost side represents an open circuit ($Z=\infty$). 4. **Reflection Coefficient Circles**: - Concentric circles indicate constant reflection coefficients, useful for analyzing VSWR (Voltage Standing Wave Ratio). 5. **Scales Along the Perimeter**: - The outermost scales provide additional information, such as wavelength distances along a transmission line. ### Applications: - Matching networks for antennas and transmission lines - Impedance transformation calculations - Reflection coefficient analysis - RF circuit tuning This particular chart appears to be an extended version, covering a wide range of values, making it useful for both low and high-frequency RF applications.$