karlmdavis

Indeed! Instead, you’d get to live under a much smaller, less experienced, and more resource-starved government —- possibly a corporatocracy. Yay!

Communities aren’t people? What in the actual fuck is going on with this university’s IRB?!

Have you ever tried writing the same application on both a JVM language and in Rust, and then measuring the latency & throughput differentials? Blew my mind the first time.

Of course, if speed isn’t a concern for you, then please carry on.

Both of these things are true:

1. Developers can be far more productive when they can run everything locally. 2. Until you’ve deployed into and tested against production, you don’t know if your shit actually works.

In fact, they’re complementary: developers should have excellent local dev facilities and excellent facilities for running experiments in production.

As a desktop user, not so much, no.

I want things to work. I don’t want to spend my time arguing with my tools, just for the sake of having the latest and greatest. I might go through and upgrade everything every couple of years, at most.

Beyond that, I just want security upgrades to happen without me having to think about them.

Needs air quotes: “started”.

I’m considering proposing this just to watch my security friends’ heads explode.

I mean... Rust literally doesn't have a GC, in the usual sense -- certainly nothing resembling most GCs' generations, mark, sweep, etc. approaches.

Steve lays it out far better than I could, coining the term "static garbage collection": https://steveklabnik.com/writing/borrow-checking-escape-anal....

And to your "without pretty significant extra work" qualifier: I really don't find that to be true with Rust. The initial learning curve was a bit rough, but certainly far less so than other languages/platforms I've picked up (hello, ML). In the end, I find that it's just a nice, helpful, productive, and ludicrously performant language.

> Again.. we are running in circles, and this industry will never learn, because most “senior” people haven’t been around long enough.

And that likely won't change in our lifetime, given the rate of growth in demand for software: we literally can't create senior engineers fast enough for there to be enough to go around.

As an aside, I have the privilege of working with a couple of senior folks right now in my current gig, and it's pretty fucking fantastic.

This is a fine basic intro to the topic, but the whole argument is hung on a very sketchy benchmark (as noted by the article itself in a footnote).

Some things that'd help improve the argument:

1. Account for table/row locking in the benchmark: is it a factor or not?

2. Re-run the benchmark with for some of the proposed solutions, e.g. local connection pooling and PgBouncer.

I'm a software developer so for me: dev tools, basic shell utilities, PostgreSQL, Docker, etc.

> I want my technology to work out the box, and Mac does that.

Same here, but with a twist: out of the box, Linux makes it easier for me to install the things I need to do my job. The display, power management, etc. issues are all frustrating, true, but ultimately not as important.

Different folks have different priorities.

You forgot the <sarcasm/> tags, I think (I hope).

From personal experience: PostgreSQL's COPY commands aren't really all that performant, indexes or no.

Our project saw SIGNIFICANTLY better performance with batched multi-threaded INSERTs. If you can run a few hundred load threads and manage the concurrency correctly (not trivial), it will chew through big loads like a monster.

If I ever have the time/excuse, I want to go back and try a multi-threaded COPY. But if you need speed and have a choice between multi-threaded INSERTs or a single-threaded COPY, go with the INSERTs every time.

One side note I'll offer: don't view the change as a permanent one. I've bounced back and forth over the 10+ years of my career, and that's been a surprisingly good idea.

As an engineer, I have a better understanding of team dynamics, business needs, and other "big picture" items. As a manager, I don't have to worry as much about "losing my edge" technically -- I'll be back into code 6 months or a few years from now.

Best of both worlds.

Apologies if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're not that familiar with Ansible's roles and the public Ansible Galaxy repo for them?

https://galaxy.ansible.com/intro

There are tons of roles available, for just about everything, and the quality isn't always great, but still higher on average than what I've found for most Chef recipes and Puppet modules.

And that's not to mention the very high number of high quality modules that are builtin to Ansible.

I've lived in Baltimore now for three years, and this has to be literally the only time where I (a very not-interested-in-sports person) wrongly that something DID involve football.

The National Geographic domain gave it away.

I'd love to know, too. Best as I can tell, the only really secure option is to read them in from STDIN.

Depending on how the process is running, it may also be reasonably secure to read the secrets from files. But getting this right is tricky, and really prone to human error: all it takes is one errant chmod/chown to remove the security.

Honestly, given the challenges of those options, keeping secrets in environment variables seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

I don't think I've ever read about an engineering culture that I agree with more than this one. It sounds shockingly humane and practical.

From the somewhat... wistful tone in places, I gather things have taken a bit of a downward turn there. I wonder what pressures caused that? The acquisition, perhaps?

My 2017 Volt is amazing for these reasons and more: best car I've ever owned.

It's also completely gameified me reducing my carbon footprint: I do everything I possibly can to avoid letting the gas engine kick in, mostly just because it makes me happy to win that game.

Or they could just, you know, use cruise control.

I almost never touch the gas pedal once I've reached the speed limit: I just turn on cruise control and focus on the road, rather than my speedometer. Makes me a far safer driver, with the added bonus of also being a law-abiding one.

> but there's nothing that says it is pervasive

Untrue. There are many, many accounts from current and former employees that say it is pervasive. That is far from "nothing."

I totally get that -- and it's a perfectly reasonable stance. Every distro doesn't have to be all things to all users. Yay for distro choice!

But I'd keep my more general point in mind, too: that thread had the wrong question and the wrong audience to answer the "what should Fedora do?" question. You might try to start a similar, separate Fedora-specific thread in a few months and see what feedback you get. I'd bet it'll be significantly different.

As a couple of other folks have mentioned, it’s important to keep in mind that the premise of that original post was, "what could Ubuntu do better?" In that context, what you DON’T see there are the things that Ubuntu does well already, but that folks feel might be lacking in Fedora.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that a HUGE part of the reason I stick with Ubuntu are their LTS releases. Those are just super important to me: more than most anything, I value a desktop that I don’t have to overhaul/reinstall on a frequent basis. Ubuntu’s five years of support puts it way out ahead of Fedora’s one.

(As a developer, I of course need to stay more up to date than the LTSes themselves are, but that’s what /usr/local/ is for. It’s trivial to keep those things up to date myself, and frankly, even Fedora would be too slow for me with most of that.)

[Note: I also cross-posted this comment on the blog itself.]

Where in the government do you still have to fax things?

I can absolutely understand why you would want this, but for me it'd be a huge net negative. I'd guess that points towards it being a configurable option somewhere.

I'm not sure about having it enabled by default, but I would absolutely love for it to be just installed by default, and with solid control panel integration to manage it.

Sadly, the ctrl+alt+f# trick doesn't work for me (OP). I wish!

And btw (should have mentioned this): ThinkPad W530 running nVidia drivers.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Please, please, please fix space issues with /boot.

- DESCRIPTION:

I'm constantly running out of space in /boot, due to kernel updates. It drives me so incredibly batty. If I had to guess, this is due to poor defaults in the installer for folks that opt to encrypt their whole disk. Even still, this system was setup back on 14.04 (don't think it started on 12.04), and I have no intention of reinstalling from scratch just to fix it.

Publish something official on how to fix this problem! Make it easy and stress free! Yell at the people who didn't catch this bug before it went out! Sorry, but this is just a really bad problem: it leads to folks like me wasting time, and probably a whole bunch of other folks just not being able to install updates, and no idea why.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software developer in the federal government

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: More stable dock/undock and sleep/wake handling.

- DESCRIPTION:

I've noticed that my system often hangs unrecoverably with a blank screen during dock/undock and sleep/wake events. I've learned, though, that I can reduce the likelihood of having problems by trying to minimize the number of state changes that the system has to handle at once. For example, if I'm leaving the house with the laptop, I'll first open the lid, wait 10 seconds to see if the display wants to turn on or not, undock it, wait 10 seconds for it to adjust, and only then put it to sleep. Same thing waking it up: one step at a time, with 10 second pauses in between. Seems to reduce my problems by about 90%. As a developer, this screams "race conditions" to me, but what do I know? If there's a bug filed for this already, I wouldn't know -- no idea what I'd search for.

I take the uptime game pretty seriously: having to reboot means that I lose a ton of context. Right now, I've got nine separate workspaces/desktops going, all with several browser, terminal, etc. windows. A reboot means I'll spend anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes installing updates and recovering all of that state. It's painful. Right now, my system has only been up for 9 days, which is weak sauce.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software developer in the federal government