justin66

Yeah, but which one?

Also, real businesses use -CURRENT, everybody knows that.

Present and accounted for ^^

Oh, sweet mystery of FreeBSD versioning. 15.1-Release already came out.

(Yes. I know.)

World class art museums have some staff on site 24/7, FWIW.

> I wonder how many more hours of downtime The Archive would have experienced in 2025 if no one was ever woken up out of bed to fix it. (If anyone was)

Wasn't 2025 the year a kooky pro-Palestinian hacker collective decided IA was a good target for their idiocy? There was a great deal of overtime involved there.

> a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine),

At least half of a modern library's lending happens digitally. But let's put aside the example of the library.

> what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind?

I thought the example above of hundreds of people being unable to start their work day until someone solves an especially serious IT problem was universal, not unique to a library system's network. It's relevant to the Internet Archive, and even relevant to...

> Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips?

Maybe not? Their entire WAN being down, affecting dozens of stores, possibly yes?

I'm not sure what's difficult here. Paying a person to be available to deal with a problem serious enough to justify the call makes sense. Sending trivial, less serious problems that can easily wait until business hours their way at night makes less sense.

Taking those calls isn't necessarily a bad job, but somehow that assumption is baked into what you're saying.

> Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night

Let's not do that, then.

At this point I think you’re just committed to the bit but you cannot possibly believe what you’re writing, as it’s a blinkered analysis and truly misanthropic in its effect. A metropolitan library system employs hundreds of people in a variety of roles and if we can prevent them from having a frustrating and wasteful start to their day, it’s worth an on-call person’s time.

> and on-call has a human cost.

In the context of this thread, we’re talking about this job description:

Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually

It’s not like we’re talking about indentured servitude or something.

> Perhaps put another way, is there any computer service now that doesn't need a guarantee? Or is everything just critical now?

That’s an interesting strawman you have there. I thought I killed it upthread when I wrote “Depends on the service.”

> a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in.

A single worker probably doesn't, yes. In contrast, hundreds of people being unable to do anything when they come to work in the morning is not a terrible reason to call someone and have them login for a few minutes.

Back to the IA, it seems to me our hundreds of thousands of users, employees and volunteers in time zones across the globe will be unable to access the service until we fix this is a decent reason for an institution that takes its own mission seriously to have an on-call. But you do you.

> Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine.

(this is my industry) Some of their online services are closed, yes. The hours they'll be closed are typically posted ahead of time to minimize the inconvenience to everyone concerned and to display an understanding on the part of the institution that downtime is taken seriously and to signal it is not the result of carelessness. In contrast to online services, most institutions consider it a major failure if something like the ATM system is down for more than a few minutes.

> This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason.

That's remarkably backwards. The need for humans to be on-call is a result of systems being overcomplicated, not a cause.

> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am?

Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously.

(3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe)

> My library is closed at 3am every day!

A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?

They have plenty of volunteers. You can't run everything in an organization using volunteers.

> the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel

Ouch.

Harsh commentary on the pi is nothing new. I’ve been a user since the 256mb pi b, so I’ve developed a sense of humor about it. I look back with amusement (and annoyance) at episodes like the Spanish hacker who heaped abuse on the pi team on Twitter for how they handled the drivers for their camera, even telling them they had pulled a “full Apple,” prior to dedicating years of his life to developing Linux drivers for macs. Or pretentious hn users with bios that include vc and starting their own companies complaining about the cost of a Pi b.

In what way is the pi5 faster than the Orin nano? Not gpu or inference, so… integer or floating point?

Jetson Orin Nano? Although I have no idea what those cost nowadays...

I will never understand why someone would pay $45 for a Raspberry Pi when they could assault a passing child and steal their Chromebook.

> no education software runs on them properly.

Anyone ever forced to use education software knows that’s a bonus.

I agree that it would have been trivially easy for him to give the museum a long-term future. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about what he cared about.

> His sister (at his behest??) decided to lean into a smaller number of projects for his money.

And didn't do any of the obvious things one might have done if they wanted to preserve the museum's existence, like finding a buyer or starting a foundation. She did the easy thing and scrapped it for parts.

(IIRC she was the executor of his will, trustee of his estate, and the CEO of the company he left most everything to, so she had all the agency she needed to do something responsible with the museum)

This is definitely not the first printed edition to omit those chapters. There’s a story there and I don’t know what it is.

The book entered the public domain since I looked into it. Fun!

The last I checked, it was weirdly difficult to buy a copy of Last and First Men and be certain you were getting the complete book as it was intended to be read by the author.

Oddly, this article is "adapted from Matthew De Abaitua’s introduction to Olaf Stapledon’s "Last and First Men," which says "abridged" on the cover. I wonder what that's all about.

I saw a photo of him sitting down in a very concerned about data centers interview and the thing that struck me was that his wheelchair was visible. This represents a change in his style. (if he thinks it's going to make him more sympathetic to the average person I'd cynically say that's probably true, since he's starting from zero...)

Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.

I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)

My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.

> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.

What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.

He almost always played a thug or heavy, and so I'm not sure what other film of his could have ranked higher than this. His scene sitting across the table from Holden is classic.

I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.

Yes. Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford didn't publicly agree on whether Deckard was a replicant for decades, but of course there's nothing wrong with part of a film being left open to interpretation.

The "Deckard is not a replicant" interpretation seemed like a heavier lift to me after the unicorn dream was included in the director's cut. But again, that's not Scott cynically changing the meaning of the film after the fact, as the OP suggested. It's him being allowed to present his own cut of the film after it succeeded in making money. (at least one of the producers thought the unicorn thing was Scott wasting their money on concepts he'd later use in the film Legend and so they left it out of the theatrical release, as was their contractual right)

It’s the fact or otherwise of someone having carried raw meat in their luggage that I’m questioning, not the fact of customs officials caring about food moving across international borders. I’ve had fruit confiscated at a border, but meat in luggage seems like… a different paradigm.

> people smuggle it in their luggage

Really?

It’s just about the only comic relief in the film. Possibly it’s acted that way deliberately.

> I think Scott shoe-horned his change in after the fact

The effect used in at least one indoor scene, in which Harrison Food is filmed with his eyes glowing like the other replicants, is an in-camera effect and the decision to use it was made prior to filming.

> sensible friends, family and neighbours

The trouble is that we need a majority.