Miscarriage

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Illustration in origami style featuring two people, one appearing male and the other female, standing beside a baby stroller, with stylized plants on either side. The figures are conversing, with speech bubbles above them indicating a dialogue. The scene conveys a sadness

We are in the process of a miscarriage and I wonder, is this the worst part of it? Waiting to pass a dead child, old enough to have had a heartbeat but far too young to survive ex-utero, or was it sitting in the doctor’s office, holding my wife’s hand as our hearts are broken — again?

Maybe the worst part comes later, after the physical is over, and we’re just… sad.

There isn’t another good word. There’s no upside to this. There’s no, “they’re in a better place,” or “it was time,” or “they aren’t suffering any more.” 

In the meantime, it’s just heightened anxiety, hoping we don’t end up in the ER again like we did on Mother’s Day.

No, there isn’t really a worst, it’s just all bad.

Several lit candles of varying sizes arranged on the ground with pink and purple flowers, creating a tranquil and reflective atmosphere, possibly for a vigil or memorial.

Delta Nudge: Trip Protection

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The authors of Nudge talk about all of the ways organizations can “nudge” people to make a certain decision, here is a stellar example form Delta.

Let’s look at everything going on here/

First, the obvious “RECOMMENDED” in green.

Next, the of the four reasons I ought to protect my trip three cover fear of loss, only the last posits something I’ll gain (help).

Third, I am required to make a choice. I assume they can’t opt me in by default, so the next best thing is to force me to make a decision, especially after the two previous nudges.

Fourth, we have another set of green text to encourage me to hit that YES button.

Finally, we’re given a VERY specific number of people that have chosen this recently. 34,291, that seems like a lot! Except that 170 million people fly Delta a year, they forgot to tell us that 105,4351 people did not choose to protect their trips.

Delta must make a decent margin on these sales given how interested they are in getting people to buy.

Section titled Trip Protection, offering insurance for a $1,685.90 trip to Los Angeles. Benefits include up to 100% reimbursement for cancellation or interruption, protection for baggage, reimbursement for pre-paid expenses due to covered delay, and 24/7 assistance services. A required choice is presented to either protect the trip for $56.90 per passenger ($113.80 total) or not, with the protect option being recommended. Below, a statistic states that 34,291 Delta customers protected their trip in the last 3 days. Insurance is provided by Allianz Global Assistance. Terms and conditions apply.
  1. Calculated with some high level averaging. ↩︎

Creating Parallels VMs for Old macOS Releases

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Parallels for macOS lets you create macOS virtual machines out of the box with the most current version of macOS, but not previous ones. Fortunately, you can install a previous version of macOS if you are willing to use Parallels from the CLI.

First, you will need to download an IPSW file with the macOS version that you want. You can find them at https://mrmacintosh.com/apple-silicon-m1-full-macos-restore-ipsw-firmware-files-database/ https://ipsw.me/product/Mac

Check the URLs: they should be direct from Apple.

Starting with Parllels 20 the command line commands changed. Here are the two commands you need to create a macOS VM with a custom hard drive size:

prlctl create sequoia --ostype macos --no-hdd --restore-image ~/Downloads/UniversalMac_14.6_23G80_Restore.ipsw
prlctl set sequoia --device-add hdd --type plain --size 512000

SaaS Alerts Acquired by Kaseya

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I asked SaaS Alerts a year ago if they had been acquired by Kaseya and was told in no uncertain that this had NOT happened.

IIRC, they were then listed on the portfolio page of the company that owns Kaseya (Insight Capital Partners) and had made a legal filing that suggested, but didn’t prove, that Kaseya had purchased them. They were also requiring 3 year contracts for the first time.

Now, maybe are splitting hairs over whether being owned by Insight Capital is the same as being a Kaseya company. Or maybe it wasn’t a controlling stake, or something else. I do know that this was not a fully honest response.

Update 2024-10-31: I asked SaaS Alerts for comment on the difference between being owned by Insight Capital vs Kaseya. Chip Buck responded that they always “knew it was a possibility” that Insight Partners would fold them into Kaseya, but that they hadn’t at the time of the initial investment.

Official email:

Dear Valued Partner,

I’m thrilled to share some exciting news! This morning at DattoCon, Fred Voccola announced the acquisition of SaaS Alerts by Kaseya. 

We understand that any change brings questions, and I want to assure you — SaaS Alerts will continue to operate as a standalone product, maintaining the platform and support you know and trust. On top of that, SaaS Alerts will be included in Kaseya’s new 365 User offering — a comprehensive cybersecurity suite designed to secure every aspect of your end users’ IT environment. 

You’ll still work with the same familiar team and all of our existing integrations will continue to be fully supported and expanded to meet your evolving needs.

So what’s next? With the support of Kaseya, we’ll be able to deliver innovations faster and more efficiently — helping you unlock even more value from the platform you rely on to Cover Your SaaS. 

I know you have many questions, and we’re here to address them. Join us tomorrow, October 30th at 1pm ET for a special Saa$y MSP Community call. Add it to your calendar here.

We’re excited about this new chapter and look forward to continuing this journey with you. 

See you on the Saa$y call! 

Best, 

Jim Lippie

CEO, SaaS Alerts

Coding with o1-preview

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o1-preview is the most recent model released by OpenAI as of this writing. Less a model than a GPT wrapped in the API that runs your query through multiple steps on OpenAI’s end instead of you doing it yourself.

I think they may have made adjustments, because it has been getting better for me.

I’ve used o1-preview extensively for a Python script to search a disk for duplicate files. It is 443 lines of actual code at this point. The script is moderately complex, allowing users to choose originals based on path, a preferred list of directories, or within a specific directory, delete duplicates, have a dry run, and more. These features require tracking a small set of variables from start through finish to insure proper processing.

Not a big deal for most humans, but something I’ve found LLMs to struggle with in the past. It’s been like they can only keep track of the changes in one or two of the most recent functions they’ve seen. o1 doesn’t seem to have this problem.

My conversation is over 8,000 lines long, and with every change it has properly tracked the context of the entire script at once. Any changes I’ve asked it to make that require updating multiple functions its handled perfectly. It’s accuracy has been very high, with only a single mistake made that I’ve spotted.

This isn’t revolutionary, but it is a major step forward, and I believe will allow much faster development of simple to moderate-complexity scripting, even for non-devs.

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