cyberpunk

Apparently related to damage caused by their gear getting fried in the previous incident.

Why they’re still running prod on gear that’s likely thermal damaged to the point it can fail remains the obvious question.

It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.

Don’t forget that the American MacAuthur granted most of these “scientists” immunity.

Python is used as a kind of 'visual basic' language in a lot of banks especially in front-of-house trading software, e.g murex or frontarena. Migrations between major versions of these can take years, costs 100s of millions and involve thousands of devs. Mistakes can be _expensive_.

It is kind of 'insane' but also, meh..

There's more dragons out there than we've been led to believe :}

check out solstafir too!

I have to admit, this one has pissed me right off. I build systems that survive datacentre failures all the fucking time, it's inexcusable that a single site going dark removes access to something I pay like 200 euro a year for.

I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate.

It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.

I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.

Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.

Well, you can at least run "freebsd-update IDS" on this system to verify the base system, "pkg check -s -a" would check the integrity of files installed via pkg also.

It will only take a few min..

His latest one, polostan, may be the worst book I’ve ever read on the other hand.. No idea what happened.

What exactly is your point, besides the self aggrandising? None of this is news to anyone, but I'm sure we're all glad to hear you're so shit-hot at everything.

Russia dominates "Europe"; what, that Russia who can't even beat Ukraine? That can't even make ball bearings anymore? That has to pull North Korean troops in? We're fucking terrified man.

I think Poland alone could defeat Russia, if it even still exists in the current form in a few years -- add the finances of France and Germany and it's even more one sided.

These days if i need to scale sideways — mongo. I shifted most of the work my db was doing into my apps, and it’s… fine? It requires a different architecture tho for sure and has its own problems, but I’ll take those over the pain of cassandra gladly.

Yep, the pain is real. We don’t mention sstableloader in polite company. Add in kubernetes and getting your rf/racdc.properties right in a 3 az cluster so everything doesn’t just die on a netsplit with local_quorum (harder than it sounds) the joys of the ‘repair’ cronjob, backups, and commitlogs only occasionally not corrupting to the point the 8th out of the 15 nodes in your kube sts can’t restart after a bad exit() (e.g during worker upgrades —- good luck with this one!) …. yeah. hate.

Postgres isn’t the answer for my workload tho we really tried, i even wrote custom sharding for our postgres and it couldn’t handle the writes the cassandra setup shrugs off, but for sure this isn’t a ‘normal’ requirement most applications have.

We live in wildly different worlds, I think. How is postgres comparable to 6-12 nodes of cassandra? One really giant one with 200k worth of storage? Is there even a multi-master setup yet? every time i’ve looked it’s just around the corner. multigres from supabase seems promising, but im not touching it for at least a couple years…

I’d love to use postgres, and have in various times in the past and love it (it never broke) — but one machine isn’t nearly big enough for really any of my current applications.

Drop in with same schematics? It's not going to be easy, I don't have an answer. It's unpopular, but probably I'd architect my software more towards a sharded mongo cluster for write heavy workloads these days, rather than lean on cass/scylla/cockroach.

Mongo bit me a lot pre-wiredtiger and I refused to forgive them for years, but I'm using it again since 8.x and it's really... Boring, Scalable. There are many ways to skin a cat though, and I know not everyone has the luxury of redesigning their apps to fit the persistence layer.

I'm sure for some workloads, cassandra is 'ideal' or at least was 10 years ago.

What I can say though (as someone running thousands of cpus worth of cassandra at the moment); is that I deeply dislike this database. It's an operational nightmare, and I will not miss it even the slightest bit if it goes away forever.

On the other hand, I'm sure glad to see a bit of life in cassandra dev, it seems to have been dormant for a while; but would I pick it for new applications in 2026? No. I'd strongly recommend against using it unless you have the money to pay for a dedicated team to maintain it, and even then just.. No.

Mostly people just want to talk, at least initially, I've found you are much more likely to make connections with people by asking them questions than trying to introduce them to things. That can come later.

edit: by talk maybe i mean "speak" but I don't mean it to sound quite so harsh/jaded.. Just how most people seem to work until you know them better.

I would happily ditch my phone entirely if i could have ms authenticator (needed for work), signal and my train ticket app working on it, alas no. Maybe someday.

put them both inside another directory and share that? what am i missing?

1) you ack the ack, then ack the ack ack ;)

2) depends, i have a database that farks up a pretty complex distributed system when clients write from another az, latency really can be an issue for some workloads

I had a chinese friend who was apparently really into fighting them, which seems a bit of a fringe sport…

The release announcement has better details: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html

So your argument is that they should have gotten it exactly right first time and stuck to their guns?

I mean come on. The Golang team created a useful language people use for building real things — it’s easy to work with especially on large teams, and when the lack of generics turned out to be a pain point in the end (after years of production reality) they understood what the community wanted and actually… added them..

Now what, it’s not good enough?

No one forced you to use go.

No programming language is perfect. I personally find the language has served me well.

And after being so very pro generics myself, i actually find myself not even really using them that much apart from calling the slices module etc which has them under the hood anyway…

Apparently there’s a proxy somewhere on github which munges it into an openai-alike api which you can then feed to those. May give it a shot if i’m bored soon.

Can you use it with pi or opencode etc?

well I mean okay, but it happened to me, and i had to pay a lot to an accountant to do this paperwork and i resent it utterly. I guess it’s unpopular here to be dissatisfied with the insane bullshit tax system in this country.

I didn’t make a profit, it’s not commercial — but apparently getting to almost break even on my energy bills is a “profit”.

Except in germany where if you install too many you get classed as an energy company and have to pay extra tax. yay.

I’ve never enabled swap on a production system in ~25 years, so i have to say it’s not really my experience.

Shared memory can be a problem, sure, which is why I don’t generally use that either. Erlang, of course, generally does not use shared memory outside of some cases with ETS etc which must be used carefully but i’d rather solve those problems myself.

Concurrency systems in other languages i’ve written, for example Go, there are ways to architect to avoid it also. I’d rather go slightly slower and copy be value than have to solve mutex contention and trying to make everything atomic and so on. YMMV, I don’t work in HPC just large complex busy systems.

Pre-Emptive scaling ala erlang can help with scenario one somewhat, if the jobs aren’t locked on some resource. For example, on my erlang system 20 would all run just each slightly slower as they get a smaller amount of scheduler reductions each.

It’s a hard/interesting problem, and harder still once you’re running across a lot of machines — but if they all get slower under the load it turns out that it’s easier to scale / work out a good balance of idle capacity to guarantee x time sla under x requests.

Fast ramp up for additional capacity is important too, but less so if you know to start the process once median execution time drops to some % of your worst target