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einhverfr

5,546 karma · joined November 3, 2011

Previously mst active developer on the LedgerSMB project (http://www.ledgersmb.org). Co-founder of Efficito hosted ERP (http://www.efficito.com). I have a blog on development stuff at http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/ so stop on by. Now I am mostly looking at how to push Postgres past standard limits.
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einhverfr··on Goodbye from a Linux Community Volunteer
A second thought is that open source software rose up in the era when we were trying to build a great interconnected world of business, communications, and more. Now that there is an effort to tear that apart, it isn't at all surprising that open source software can be caught in the crossfire. I think this is the tip of the iceberg and one reason I plan try to focus work on projects which are set up in a way which doesn't enable a single country to say who can or cannot be a part of it.
einhverfr··on Goodbye from a Linux Community Volunteer
This is a shot across the bow of pretty much anyone working on the Linux kernel from outside the G7. Living in Southeast Asia, I will certainly be having plenty of conversations as to whether *BSDs are likely to be better bets for countries in the Global South.

The problem is that everyone outside the G7 lives under the constant threat of ever-expanding US sanctions. Successful open source projects will likely find ways to avoid being told who they can or cannot have contribute to them.

einhverfr··on The "email is authentication" pattern
Not reusing passwords at all is pretty impractical. If you really want to depend on a single password manager then you have some other issues. Usually I have settled for rotating, compartmentalized password modules which allows me to somewhat rather than fully contain a compromised password. And if your modular password has three slots (term taken from linguistics) then you can compose passwords which reuse parts, are memorizable, and not automatically reusable on other services.

The problem though is that since one has a number of passwords which may be different but closely related, a human may be able to infer a few possible passwords from a few compromised ones. In other words it still dramatically shrinks the key space an attacker might want to try to brute force. Preventing re-use is then a problem for 2fa regimes.

For my part I won't use passwords I cannot memorize and keep memorized in relation to the web site.

einhverfr··on CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
People in crisis mode do stupid things. This is why the first thing you should do in a crisis is wait a few seconds. Then calm down and think things through. Evidently they never got this memo.
einhverfr··on CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
"Bulls do not win bullfights. People do. People do not win people fights. Lawyers do." -- Norman Augustine, "Augustine's Laws" 1985.
einhverfr··on CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
The comment was US-specific. Similar doctrines are found though in Canadian, British, and continental European (though not so much in Scandinavian systems which often do allow totally one-sided contracts in the idea that promises are binding but with other limiting factors).

The idea in systems which have this rule is that contracts are exchanges of promises and there must be an exchange in order to be valid.

einhverfr··on CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
Crowdstrike: Irredeemable just like their vouchers!
einhverfr··on CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
It seems to me that this is what happens when you have nobody in leadership who can do crisis management.

First thing you do in a crisis? Take a few breaths and calm down. Take the pressure off of yourself. Agree to a timeline and start gathering ideas. Brainstorm. Engage in risk assessment. Then decide, act, and re-evaluate.

einhverfr··on NixOS commits a "purge" of "Nazi" contributors, forces abdication of founder
This is becoming a larger trend and it will hurt open source generally because of the efforts at pushing American culture war issues globally.

I try hard to work with projects which are not Western-centric for this reason or at least which have a commitment to a community which admits of disagreement on issues.

einhverfr··on Cruise Robotaxi vs. Bus Crash Caused by Confusion over Articulated Bus
In the UK, traffic accidents don't happen? Of course someone is at fault, though.
einhverfr··on Cruise Robotaxi vs. Bus Crash Caused by Confusion over Articulated Bus
This is an outstanding postmortem of this incident. I really did not expect it from Forbes.

Accidents will happen. One thing that will be important going forward is a proper operational response to the problem and this is likely to become more complicated as time goes on. After all if these have been on the road for 5 years, would it really be necessary then to stop operations?

einhverfr··on S.686 – Restrict Act – Internet Censorship and Surveillance Bill
It is truly scary.
einhverfr··on Ban 1+N in Django
I don't know.

Hand-written SQL means a bunch of work and you have to know SQL. But it is simple and transparent.

ORMs automate a lot of simple and repetitive SQL, but to use them effectively you really have to know SQL extremely well and understand the ORM deeply as well.

So I guess it depends on what you are doing. ORMs can be useful but they require a lot more knowledge to use effectively than hand-coded SQL does.

einhverfr··on BlenderGPT: Use commands in English to control Blender with OpenAI's GPT-4
So, really, all we need then is a language sufficiently precise enough to specify what a program needs to do and we can then feed it into a program which can write software that implements that specification, possibly adopting safe transformations of it into equivalent forms.

Now, that safely describes a modern, optimizing C compiler.....

einhverfr··on Meta Layoffs
I think the problem of engineering management is that componentization is a hard problem. One needs to recognize that Conway's Law is an inevitability, but it can be a positive as well as a negative thing. If you design your organization around needs for components, then you end up with limited contracts.

Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions.

In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense.

But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."

einhverfr··on Leaving China
I am in Jakarta. was thinking of moving to Bali but that isn't practical.

I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say

'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'

Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.

That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.

I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.

einhverfr··on Leaving China
I think a more likely scenario is that all countries did what they could and China succeeded better than any other major land country. But then, as victims of their success, the costs of doing less increased with each new wave and when Omicron hit Hong Kong, the death rate soared in a way it didn't in the West.

Hong Kong was not the only place to have high death rates from Omicron. New Zealand did as well. But none of the countries which had difficulty controlling earlier Covid outbreaks did.

We are often prisoners of our own successes more than we are victims of our errors.

einhverfr··on Leaving China
I am an American expat who just moved from Germany to Indonesia about six months ago. One thing I see is that the comments he makes about China echo my views of the West. Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression (though in the US, we outsource this to the private sector so that we can actively argue that it doesn't exist). What is driving a lot of this in the West is the effort to sever economic ties with both Russia and China. I can imagine that this provokes a similar though opposite-facing response in countries like Russia and China, as if Newton's Third Law applies to geopolitics as well. My brother lives in Beijing, though.

What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.

Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.

I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.

einhverfr··on Which is worse when working on production databases? Being drunk or tired?
I wonder how the context by which these enter the production environment affect the relevant harm caused by either. For example, drunkenness happens via escallations to those not on call, while tiredness comes into play routinely and at all levels.

As a result drunk individuals usually are facing narrow technical problems where thinking is required, and judgments already made, while tired people are facing the whole situation.

einhverfr··on Self-Host All the Things?
Over time, if you come to understand the technology, you can fix things a managed service cannot, so you might actually risk less downtime if you prioritize that.

At least that's my experience based on fighting weird bugs on managed database services.

einhverfr··on Which is worse when working on production databases? Being drunk or tired?
In my experience drunk and unexpectedly called means careful and tired means "screw it, I want to go back to sleep."
einhverfr··on Which is worse when working on production databases? Being drunk or tired?
Let's imagine a scenario here:

On call engineer wakes up to an alert. Realizes there is a major problem developing that he or she is underqualified to handle. Escalates the call.

Eventually this gets escalated to the top subject matter expert in the company. He's not on call, has been out partying, and is drunk.

Where does this become unacceptable? I am certainly not saying people should show up to work drunk, but unless you say anyone in the escallation chain may never be drunk, it is going to happen.

einhverfr··on Which is worse when working on production databases? Being drunk or tired?
I think there are contextual reasons why drunken incidence response, despite being largely unavoidable (you cannot expect your subject matter experts never to consume alcohol) causes few problems.

However, I think one under-recognized problem is that there is a complacency that comes with being tired. And when I look at the really big incidence response disasters, that has always been a major factor.

And yet we celebrate people who put us at risk....

einhverfr··on How to hire engineering talent without the BS
Generally good tips, but I have noticed a few other things too.

1. If there are challenges, particularly if they are take home tests, it is important to make these reflect the sort of work someone will do without raising concerns that the work will be used by the company without pay. Candidates will spend time on relevant challenges and be happy. They will not be happy about irrelevant challenges. And interviews go both ways.

2. Dispense with "good questions" and go instead with "what do I want to know about a candidate.

3. Ask yourself before you start hiring, "What makes those who are successful at this company successful?" And from there, start building your interview structure.

Not every company will be the same, or will be good matches for the same candidates. The key should be to figure out what you need and use the interview to determine if the candidate actually is a good fit.

Unfortunately this cannot have data because it relies on a bunch of human judgment calls.

einhverfr··on Show HN: Lander, a lunar lander style web game
I now have joined the club too

Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth

Score: 314.8 point crash

Speed: 2657.5mph

Angle: 174.1°

Time: 471 seconds

Flips: 0

Max speed: 2657.5mph

Max height: 179734ft

Engine used: 4 times

Boosters used: 83 times

https://ehmorris.com/lander/

einhverfr··on Self-Host All the Things?
https://pgconf.in/conferences/pgconfin2023/program/proposals...

Maybe check back in a week and see if they have the video up.

einhverfr··on Self-Host All the Things?
At PGConf India, one of the keynotes addressed exactly this topic. The largest stock broker firm in India had made the decision to self-host everything. The CTO made a number of points that I think are missed in this discussion and article, namely:

1. You may think you are a software company, but HR, accounting etc are just as critical to your operations as the customer product. Therefore there isn't really a distinction between core business and non-core business that people like to think, and

2. By self-hosting you ensure you learn the technology and can therefore respond to problems yourself. In an environment where businesses are increasingly on the hook for defects in their services to the end user, that's a good thing.

Obviously hiring knowledgeable people is probably the bottleneck but it is still a cost saver and it is important to create an organizational culture where people can learn the technology on the job.

einhverfr··on The Coming Storm: Geopolitics and PostgreSQL in a Changing World
Certainly geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people. This has good and bad effects. A major aspect of open source software though is that it ensures that these boundaries can be crossed by labor but not necessarily by capital. I.e. anyone can contribute but sanctions, laws, etc. are more effective at preventing businesses from accessing these markets. This represents a sort of bottom unity that's really powerful.

That is required is a global leadership perspective. One thing I fought for heavily in the PostgreSQL community was to try to have the Code of Conduct Committee be geopolitically and culturally diverse. I would say that any time you can have a geopolitically diverse leadership team, you can figure out how to avoid interference by building a positive leadership culture.

einhverfr··on The Coming Storm: Geopolitics and PostgreSQL in a Changing World
the beauty of open source is that you can use it without relying on the other for development, but both are enriched by cooperation and sharing.

If a Russian fork of a project reviews changes from an American fork and uses whatever they want but the reverse is not true, then the Russian fork gets ahead. So the incentives stack up for interdependence.

einhverfr··on The Coming Storm: Geopolitics and PostgreSQL in a Changing World
The illiberal forks copy from the liberal fork but not the other way?
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