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karlmdavis

878 karma · joined February 11, 2011

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karlmdavis··on Design and Implementation of Sprites
I love absolutely everything about this… except for the lack of cross-platform support. I know how ludicrous it is to expect that, but… most workflows I’m considering solutions like this for are crippled by their inability to run Xcode or a native Windows build. Heck, I’m pretty sure I’ll even run into glibc version mismatches that block work I care about.

Frustrating that the best solution is still, “well, if that’s important to you, then set that up in your home lab or rent some extra (pet) VMs in the cloud.”

karlmdavis··on Comparing AI agents to cybersecurity professionals in real-world pen testing
I would take the other side of that bet.

  # if >10 then was_created_by_agent = true
  $ grep -oP '\p{Emoji}' vulns.md | wc -l
karlmdavis··on SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit
I find it kind of baffling that this toolkit is so popular when it makes handling database joins so difficult. After bashing my head against it for a while, I moved to Diesel, and while that has its own set of problems, I am generally able to get through them without resorting to horrible hacks or losing compile time checks.
karlmdavis··on Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
I suspect they meant “scenario”.
karlmdavis··on Axum 0.8
I almost gave up on Leptos, because I was trying to use it with Actix, which it supports less-well than it does Axum (and I’m too stubborn for my own good and wouldn’t switch).

I came back to it recently after the Leptos 0.7 release, though, and it’s MUCH smoother.

Still early days for a framework like this, but I think it’s got a lot of magic.

karlmdavis··on PostgreSQL High Availability Solutions – Part 1: Jepsen Test and Patroni
What an absolutely delightful little project and write up.
karlmdavis··on Show HN: COBOL-REKT, a toolkit for analysing and reverse-engineering COBOL
A number of US federal agencies still have astonishing amounts of it. The world’s largest insurer, Medicare, uses 10M+ lines of COBOL to process the claims it receives — total dollar amounts that make up 3% of the yearly GDP.

Maintaining and modernizing these critical systems is important work.

karlmdavis··on SPQR 1.3.0: a production-ready system for horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL
From personal experience, it scales very well vertically. Have a system in production with tens of billions of rows and north of 12 TB of storage total. That system is read-heavy with large batched inserts, not many deletes or updates.

Biggest limiter is memory, where the need for it grows linearly with table index size. Postgres really really wants to keep the index pages hot in the OS cache. Gets very sad and weird if it can’t: will unpredictably resort to table scans sometimes.

We are running on AWS Aurora, on a db.r6i.12xlarge. Nowhere even close to maxed out on potential vertical scaling.

karlmdavis··on It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load
You and I must work in very different contexts, as these questions are so obvious that they first seemed like satire to me.

You enforce API contracts in a monolith (or any codebase, really) via an at-least-modest amount of typing and a compiler. You diagnose performance issues via any number of tools, prominently including metrics and profilers.

My context for this is a lot of years working with backend languages like Java, Rust, etc. though the same assurances and tooling are available for most every platform I’m aware of.

karlmdavis··on Matter, set to fix smart home standards in 2023, stumbled in the real market
Looks perfect for me with one show stopper: no Home Kit support. I love the idea of Home Assistant but do not have the free time to pick up another service to support in our house.
karlmdavis··on Using command line to process CSV files (2022)
Nu is using a data frame abstraction to drive this and it’s really quite powerful and fast.

I was rather skeptical on the value of having this stuff as a shell built in, but it won me over. Very convenient!

karlmdavis··on Synthea: Open-source synthetic patient generation
I’ve used Synthea for a whole assortment of small and large projects and it’s been boring in the best possible way: reliable and easy to use.

I’ve also had the pleasure of working directly with the team at MITRE that owns it on a consulting engagement (we needed some improvements to it) and they are a delight to work with.

karlmdavis··on A brief history of APFS (2022)
I don’t really understand how any file system designed in the last 20 years could be lacking data checksums. Data integrity is job #1, and yet.
karlmdavis··on Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
“Year of Efficiency”? Hoo boy… is Zuck picking up his management strategies from a podcast/YouTube channel? I mean, I shouldn’t/wouldn’t be surprised by that but still, wow. Playing in the kiddie pool.

(Strongly reminiscent of the Cortex podcast’s “yearly themes”. Which I like! But… I’m not running one of the world’s largest companies, am I?)

karlmdavis··on Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
Man, playing with Mindstorms is some of the most fun I’ve had as an adult. This announcement is a shame.

I spent some time going through all of their basic examples in Rust, which was just delightfully silly.

karlmdavis··on An Accident at SpaceX
To extend that line of argument a bit, what about a more professional tool/system, e.g. cherry pickers?

Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you to design and engineer cherry pickers such that the bucket can’t be moved unless a safety harness is attached?

karlmdavis··on Critical CSS? Not So Fast
“It helps build fast rendering sites, sometimes even sub-second renders…”

That has to be a typo, right? Or sarcasm?

I weep for what we’ve all done to the beautiful speed and simplicity of the web.

karlmdavis··on Technical Writing Courses from Google
“We are raising your plan’s rates.”

versus:

“The plan’s rates have gone up.”

karlmdavis··on The Great Tech Salary Crash
That… is not my understanding of the word “salary”; this article is conflating it with total compensation. Rather confusing.
karlmdavis··on Show HN: Monolith – A stylish and functional computer frame
Very pretty. Hilariously dangerous and user unfriendly for anyone with kids.
karlmdavis··on Rustdesk – Remote desktop software, an open source TeamViewer alternative
Underexplained, permanent system config changes? That just about counts as malware, in my book.

(Since I use sway on Ubuntu, rather than gdm, I’d argue it’s a capital offense, but YMMV.)

karlmdavis··on Flutter 3
From their What’s New: “ Flutter now supports variable refresh rate on iOS devices with ProMotion displays, including iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro. On these devices, Flutter apps can render at refresh rates reaching 120 hz, which were previously limited to 60 hz. This results in a smoother experience during fast animations such as scrolling. See flutter.dev/go/variable-refresh-rate for more details.”
karlmdavis··on Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language (2018)
I’m really not clear what’s going on with the null implementations… aren’t those just very boring mocks?
karlmdavis··on What we lost
This is all true, but incomplete in some important ways, I think.

The losses can be somewhat mitigated. As mikewarot’s comment here hints, you can slow down the meetings and take care to encourage everyone’s thoughtful participation. It requires a lot of intentional awkwardness, but I actually hope I carry this skill back to in-person meetings. “Let’s give folks a minute to think about that before we move on,” and “what are your thoughts Sally and Bob?” are useful phrases.

There are many important positives to virtual meetings. I work with a couple of new parents whose lives are greatly improved by being able to attend meetings while keeping an eye on their littles. Meetings can be much more casual and that can help us open up to each other. Meetings are often taken outside when the weather is accommodating, which is just incredibly refreshing. Folks are less able to randomly interrupt my workday just by walking by. Most importantly, time lost to commutes is returned to us and our families.

There are also negatives he left out. The biggest, by far, is just how many more meetings everyone is scheduling. Without the added back pressure of commutes, conference room availability, and real lunch breaks… everyone has gone meeting-crazy. It’s really hurting my office’s productivity.

On balance, though? Remote wins. By a mile.

karlmdavis··on The Session Extension
Please don’t ever use time stamps for synchronization. You will have a bad time.

Clock skew is an insidious problem: things may look like they’re working, but they’re not. Given all of the clock bugs out there it’s sometimes not even safe to rely on the clock on a single machine. Across multiple machines it’s hopeless.

Please note that this doesn’t apply if you have a fancy time source like Google uses in their fancy cloud DB (whose name escapes me at the moment).

karlmdavis··on 1632 by Eric Flint (2000)
I think “deep commitment” is rather debatable. We’ve moved in the right direction, generally, but only slowly and with far too much foot dragging. Remember, gay marriage was only legalized six years ago. Six!

And that’s just one example out of many.

karlmdavis··on Closing email with “thanks” gets the most replies
Note to self: avoid “thanks” on most business emails —- I don’t need to get more email back (for most things, anyways).
karlmdavis··on My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
This seems to rather callously disregard the parent commenter’s lived experience. Perhaps, just maybe, not everyone is like you; it might be different for different people? Just a thought.
karlmdavis··on NATO Classified Cloud Platform Compromised
Technical government employee here. :waves:

Your observation is, in general, quite correct! Back in the 80s or thereabouts, the conservative administrations started a MASSIVE shift towards outsourcing of federal government work. This was for all of the usual, largely shortsighted and inaccurate “cost saving” and “efficiency” reasons.

The worst part of it is that they outsourced ALL of the technical expertise in many agencies, leaving them without the expertise needed to effectively manage the work being outsourced.

This is starting to shift, thanks to recent efforts like the USDS, 18F, and such but it’s the work of decades to really change. Come join us!

karlmdavis··on The joys of creating Xcode project files
Check out Amethyst for Mac OS. It’s a bit buggy, and it’s not Sway, but it’s Sway-like enough for me to get by on my work system.
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