plainnoodles

There is some level of importance in bigness. All the major public resolvers let nameserver operators (well, anyone, really) clear cached records. Which turns out to be a not-uncommon occurrence. I wrote my own DNS server, so I've been paying a ton of attention to this stuff, and I've found several scenarios where website operators (even, for instance, instagram!) seem to have wanted to change some DNS records but weren't happy with the TTLs they'd advertised on them, and instead of waiting them out, just cleared caches with the major resolvers and then gone ahead and turned off the old IPs.

With the end result that I had to go in and remove those records from my cache, too.

I have 3 layers:

Online: A big BTRFS "raid 1" (block-based mirroring) array. This is what Plex runs off of. If I lose a drive, I just replace it and rebalance. I run btrfs scrubs weekly.

Offline: I have a WD external hdd with a plain old ext4 hdd that I rsync all files to weekly. If my btrfs array shits itself, I just copy back over from this hdd.

Emergency: If the above process doesn't work (say: the external hdd is dead when I go to restore from it, or I can't physically find it, or my house floods and everything in the basement is lost, etc), then my fallback is:

I sync all truly critical stuff that can't be replaced (so, basically just family pics and videos) to S3 as deep archive storage class. Costs pennies. I don't do any fancy tar/archiving, encrypting, or compressing (since video and image files are generally already compressed). I figure the risk of people snooping at our family pics is smaller than the risk of me needing to restore from a backup and not being able to because of stupid reasons (lost gpg key, some kind of problem with tar, etc).

This is small, since most of my disk use is from things like rips I've made of BluRay/DVD's, FLACs from bandcamp or rips of music CD's, etc. Things I can recover with appropriate effort.

There is also a real reason for it not to be done with NFTs: it would take about thirty seconds for someone to be scammed and open a support ticket with [whoever - it won't be the right person, but I guarantee someone is getting a support ticket] and they obviously won't be able to reverse the transaction, and also unclear if they could even ban the scammer (right now, bans are per-server, unless server owners have coordinated otherwise, which they generally don't). Regardless, the user is going to have a bad time, versus a system using a mutable system, where a human could investigate and reverse the issue.

Obviously support agents make mistakes sometimes too, but that's a heck of a lot rarer than scams in MMOs.

Isn't that supposed to be how capitalism funds and incentivizes R&D though? There is market demand for a Thing, if you can figure out how to make Things then the market will reward that with profit.

Honestly, for being the firm to develop a vaccine for a global pandemic, $33B in revenue sounds a little light? Apple made 83B in revenue just in Q3 alone and all they do is make phones that aren't even improving that much year-over-year.

It is! Trading your own account in front of a client's order with knowledge of your client's order is, indeed, frontrunning!

However, given domains are not securities and domain registrars are not FINRA members or registered securities broker-dealers, I don't think this is "frontrunning" in the sense that you're used to hearing the word.

So who knows if it's even illegal, and even if it is, who knows what recourse anyone has about it, given how quasi-legal and international the ownership of domains is.

> Even SPF and DKIM with DMARC probably won't be enough to get over the blacklist rating.

I can confirm this. I recently tried to set up being able to send emails from an smtp server in my homelab to my gmail address. Even with all the good stuff - a domain, tls, spf, dkim, dmarc, gmail just straight up refuses to receive mail from residential IPs. I ended up proxying it through my VPS, which works better but still requires me setting up gmail rules to NEVER send messages from my special domain to spam. Which it would otherwise do for no apparent reason sometimes.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, aside from knee-jerk reactions to any questioning of taking the vaccine being perceived as being in bad faith. Which is perhaps fair as of late. But I think your comment asks a fair question, too.

I would then it would then look beyond the benefit to the self and take into account civic duty. If your own personal probability of mortality is exactly the same with the vaccine and without, then we need to ask, what is then best for the system within which I live? (Remember, never send to know for whom the bell tolls.)

myocarditis isn't contagious, but covid is, and if left unchecked, might (will?) mutate into something that might be a lot more than 1% deadly to you. So you expected value of taking the covid vaccine will be higher than not.

I really think we should encourage people to be willing to think objectively like this. There IS a set of efficacy and risk numbers that would make the vaccines not worth it. They're just obviously not the numbers we have (which make it very worth it). It's just unfortunate that such an astonishingly large portion of the populace apparently can't do the math right enough or objectively enough to come to the same conclusion.

I think the biggest challenges that Ruby faces are:

* No built-in type hinting (you have to reach for Sorbet which is a lot more than just hinting) * developer ecosystem seems to struggle to get gravity around anything that's not web-related.

Python has so much diversity of packages. You need simplex noise? Package. You need a terminal ui library? Yep. You want to use wxwidgets or qt? Yep and yep. You want to do computer vision? yep.

Ruby can check some of those boxes, to be fair, but ime the ruby solution tends to be less-used, lower-quality, and more likely to just be thin bindings around the C APIs (if relevant) than a more holistic language-native implementation.

I'm a little sad because I honestly like Ruby more than python just from a language perspective. RubyGems alone are better than the trillion packaging solutions that python has churned out. I like ruby's preference for method chaining vs python's list/set/dict comprehensions (just look at what a "2-layer" list comprehension looks like :( )

Also, for the type-hinting thing, maybe it's just me, but the only reason I don't consider python to be a trap is because it added type hinting as a first-class thing. Eventually, as a project grows, you just need types sometimes. I don't like that Sorbet is a) third-party and b) pretty heavy-weight (does a lot more than just type hinting) and I also think it's just not as pretty (it's not part of the grammar so it has to be tacked on, like if python type hinting had to be done via decorators.

I know ruby recently adopted some kind of native type hinting thing, but it's in a separate file, right? Like adding typescript hints onto js code? I don't like that either, it's just going to rot. I haven't been following this closely though, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised there.

> But 20 years of studying algorithms or general language concepts

I don't think that's quite what's valuable though. I'm right in the middle of "senior/not" (~7 years of experience) and I think in general, even our new hires can code fairly well, and can even design quite well. What seniors have over juniors is just battle experience.

I liken software devs to jungle guides. Even the best jungle guide hasn't seen every scrap of jungle and probably doesn't even necessarily have the best map of the jungle you're going to go through. But what they do know is how to use a machete and rope like its an extension of their arm, and what all the different kinds of quicksand and poisonous frogs are, and which water holes have clean water.

Similarly, experienced software devs are going to know when it feels right to use various stacks of various complexities, when to KISS and when to do big-brain CS stuff, when to argue with someone else's manager and when to pick their battles. They'll just generally be more acquainted with the entire techno-social process of developing software that drives business value.

"20 years of studying algorithms or general language concepts" would leave me with a pretty uninterested view of a candidate since those are frequently the least interesting parts of driving business impact.

This. It just never ends well. The only people I tell are coworkers with whom I'm close enough that I have their personal phone number for texting.

Family: hard no Friends: harder no Random strangers on the internet: maybe? People I barely know but will potentially see again: absolutely hard no never

I also have a couple anecdotes:

Family: Told my sister how much I make. Now my brother-in-law won't stop making random comments about money. They're not in poor humor, but it's uncomfortable.

Friends: In high school, our friend group was held together by anime. So you had a weird cross-section of people in terms of academic achievement. My friend and I were basically the top two, and the rest of the friend group... let's say they didn't prioritize academics and though we two were a bit odd for trying so much. Anyway, we two go to college, fast forward four years and I graduate with an offer for 80k/yr (where I live, this is 2x median household income), and the standard offer is 50k. I told my friend, hoping that it would help her evaluate her offers. Instead, suddenly the entire friend group won't talk to me. I can understand where they're coming from, to some degree - fresh out of college I was probably making 4x their salaries. But I learned from the harm this caused. It wasn't a big deal, since we'd drifted apart after high school, as friends do, but it was still unfortunate. My peer friend had just accidentally revealed the numeric aspect of my offer, and she apologized to me after she realized how much it upset everyone else in the group.

Dunno. I find it hard to calibrate. I now make more than double that offer, and yet know of many peers (principal/staff engineers) who make double or triple my current salary, and I don't fault them for it. Maybe it's just because I/we know our industry is kinda stupid (right now? for now?) and the money is sloshing around everywhere, so we don't take it personally when someone manages to get a sweet offer, and I'm happy - and proud!- that they manage to get such great remuneration. But I also know not everyone has these opportunities and I'm fairly privileged.

But yeah. I have a very short list of folks I share with now.

I think this is a bit of an uncharitable comparison though.

NFTs and crypto are explicitly supposed to have real-world value and uses that are more or less completely divorced from their use in these games. If you delete the game, the items themselves still have the majority of their purpose.

Whereas for the things on the p2p marketplace, their value is entirely predicated on the game they exist within.

Given Steam is a games platform, I think it is pretty straightforward for them to want to keep non-game-related stuff away. Even if it's just from a pragmatic point of view: as weird as it is, lawyers and accountants at this point are very familiar with how to handle users trading in-game things. Pulling in things that exist sufficiently in real life to be in danger of being considered a security is absolutely a big departure from what Valve is used to supporting on its platform.

I think that's a PRETTY uncharitable analogy and interpretation of the OP's actions.

I would say it's more like:

You are walking down the street, and notice that there is a public noticeboard. It has a list of names, yours among them, associated with a number of steps each. It instructs you to walk a certain number of steps down the street, and then look up at the paper taped to the sidewalk that many steps down.

So, you do, and upon looking down, you see some personal information about yourself! You are a little perplexed, since this doesn't seem very secure. So you take one step back, and look down. Wow, yep, not very secure, there's information there too!

Being a human, you are naturally a little nosy and curious, and as these are publicly posted, after all, you glance through a couple more before finally regaining control of your better sense of civic duty, and report to the owner of the notice board that there is a problem with their "security".

I think this is a better analogy because:

* browsing to a web page is NOT the same thing as going into someone's house. * the internet is public. * there was CLEARLY no malicious intent. The OP clearly didn't harm or intend to harm anyone here, even if perhaps he should have immediately stopped when he began to suspect the website had a flaw and he shouldn't be able to see this information. I see no evidence of malice here.

I do agree that in general, just because a system responds 200 OK, you're not necessarily clear to do anything you want when when you're doing is obviously wrong. But at the same time, we should NOT be prosecuting or blaming people when they're able to access more than they're supposed to be able to PLAINLY due to the software's design insufficiencies and there's otherwise clearly no intent to cause harm.

We really need to take a more even-handed approach to this. And, we REALLY need some kind of a professional bar in software engineering. I would expect a student in their final year of CS to be able to produce a more secure system than what the OP described, so the fact that it exists in a quasi-government website is a complete fucking joke, if you'll pardon my language.

    </tr><!--- {{ str(row) }} ---> 

I don't find it TOO much of a stretch....

(I don't know what it actually looked like in the html, just saying I could see it happening pretty easily)

Agreed. I personally carry a Citi card (double cash) because it has the best (for me) rewards, but I also carry an AMEX blue cash preferred for which I pay an annual fee. The customer service I get from amex is DRAMATICALLY better than from Citi.

With Citi: * it's non-native-English support. No judgement of course but I don't appreciate the language barrier when the entire job of customer support is communication. * Support generally seems to be very low-context and low-power. The person you talk to generally can't actually do anything, only escalate. * Support seems very disjointed and prone to missing details.

I was burned by Citi support in a pretty big way:

1. I was moving cross-state, and we were selling (under contract) our old house and not yet closed on the new one. In between, we were living with my parents.

2. Literally the first day we were at my parents, some fraudy charges showed up on my citi card. I called, they cancelled the card, etc. I told them I was not currently at my address on file, I was at my parents, is this OK, etc. They said yes, that's fine, they'll send replacement cards to the new address. I very specifically verified with them that they were sending them to the right place, and the person even got a little tired of me being so tight about it. Ok, I figured, I feel like I've gone above and beyond on my end to make sure this works right.

3. 2 days later, I see on my security camera that the old cards have been delivered to the front door of the old house, 300 miles away.

4. I call back, and they tell me they don't see any record of me having requested a different address. Sigh. I ask if they can cancel those cards and re-send them to the right address this time. They say yes, we go through the loop again, etc.

5. I wait a day or two and no cards show up at either location. I call back again. I get told there's no record I asked to cancel these cards or re-send them. This rep finally tells me they can't re-issue the cards again so soon, and need to wait 5 more days. In the meantime, these active cards are just sitting on my porch in a big envelope that says "CITI - URGENT - PLEASE STEAL ME" written all over it.

And, you know, I really needed to use this card since I was trying to buy appliances for the new house.

I ended up resolving this by just making an extra trip back to the old house anyway just to finish cleaning it up and to grab the cards since I needed to go one more time anyway. I called back to make sure they weren't going to cancel these cards, and of course there was no record I'd ever asked to cancel them, etc.

Compare this to AMEX support. Native english speakers, they seem to have the power to actually just fix things for me, etc.

So, while I still use my citi card just to keep the credit line open, my Amex card is my pinch hitter and cornerstone.

I think the most salient part of this is the remarking that being a billionaire is immoral.

I don't think being a billionaire is necessarily immoral, but I definitely think it's incredibly difficult to do so without being immoral. I think the closest examples I can think of are people who weren't even trying to become wealthy - I doubt anyone whose goal was to make fat stacks of cash would, for instance, start writing young adult fiction on napkins in a pub in Britain, or start writing a voxel-based crafting game in Java. And unfortunately even these two individuals aren't remotely close to paragons of virtue.

That said, I think the biggest sin of Jeff Bezos' is just being complicit in the whole system that keeps our tax code a disaster. I would feel a lot better about the wealthy, and mega corporations, if I felt like they were appropriately paying for the community resources they use, for example:

* public universities and education that educate (and train, to some degree) their workforce * public services that cultivate the kind of safe and secure society that allows people to focus on things that aren't subsistence or physical security * infrastructure that makes their existence possible - roads their employees drive on, DMVs that their employees register their vehicles at, water systems their employees drink at both work and home, power systems that provide stable electricity, etc etc etc * And it's not just your employees, it's your customers too. If we didn't have all of the above, people would have a lot less psychological, financial, and physical safety to need anything Amazon sells. * And something that I think really goes under-noticed: the world's best-regulated, safest, most reliable, most well-understood, and most liquid securities market. Both private and public. So much goes into making all of that crap (I say this semi-affectionately as someone who used to work in the sector) work, and it's where an enormous percentage of both these companies weath both lives and came from.

I think you see where I'm going with this. All of the wealth that's generated here is entirely predicated on, and a product of, this incredible foundation we've built collectively as a society. And the bigger you are, the more wealth you generate, the more of this system you've taken advantage of in one way or another (with some of the secret sauce of these companies being that their employees and company take a relatively small amount of it, while their reach scales to so many more customers, that they disproportionately (compared to other companies) take advantage of huge swathes of the customer side of "benefiting from the social foundation".

This is the main thing that irks me. They would be nothing without all of this, and yet they can use their wealth to skirt out of paying their fair share, even though it really seems to me that paying their fair share - paying back into the system they benefitted from - is probably better for them in the long run (50+ years) as they'll have more educated employees, more stable customers, and so on. It's a giant feedback loop that they're short-sightedly intentionally not paying back into.

IME, it's because when you view vim as just another element in a list of "things that let me write code into files", where sibling elements are "IntelliJ", "vscode(ium)", etc, then vim comes off as looking like "gedit but with keyboard shortcuts and no discoverability, oh but you can research and install and configure a million plugins with no overarching design cohesion and you also have to maintain and update them". As opposed to many other editors/IDEs that are designed holistically and more intentionally, and have a much higher "just works" and discoverability factor.

From that angle, yeah, it's probably fair for people to look at vim and go "what even is this".

I think the right way to look at vim is "it's a powerful editor that is installed on almost every linux box everywhere that is deeply customizable and extremely flexible".

Seldom a week goes by where I'm not ending some ridiculous shell pipeline incantation with "| vim -" to dump it into vim and then do further investigation there (with regex, find/replace, etc etc support).

So, I consider myself a vim fan, but I don't use it for day-to-day coding but I still consider it an important tool in my toolbox.

I do think there's a crowd, too, for whom customizability for the pure sake of customizing is a big feature. And that's fair too. But I think that really tends toward being for amusement rather than productivity gains. Which is fine! Lots of software is for having fun, and having fun adjacent to being productive and make it easier to be productive. So I'm really not bashing anyone here, promise!

Yeah, I know they exist. But they're never going to replace youtube in the foreseeable future, so having tools like youtube-dl, which would allow us to load content from youtube into peertube, for instance (or to archive it anywhere else), is important.

This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important.

It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it.

Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, and they're also exactly the wrong ones to be hosting our collective shared culture for posterity.

It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't really work for various reasons, both legal and social.

So, short of that, at least being able to download stuff important to us as individuals is an important right to preserve.

My personal stake in this fight is a video of "Scotland the Brave" that I used to listen to a lot, which featured an older Scottish gentleman standing in the beautiful highlands, loudly and proudly calling down through the glen.

It got randomly copyright-removed recently and I've been unable to find it elsewhere. I don't even know who the person in the video was.

Seconded, though I think my array is perhaps only... 8ish years old?

Yes, but as someone who ran a medium-sized server (200ish players), depending on what your map looked like, you occasionally found yourself spending a lot of time doing GC tuning, especially back in java 7 days when we didn't even have the first generation of G1GC.

Ah, good times. I currently work in Hadoop and it's honestly stupid how much tuning a Spark job is like tuning a Minecraft server (from the JVM level anyway). Life's path is strange sometimes.

I've changed, but not in my overall opinion.

At first, I didn't like bitcoin because of its energy use and lack of regulation (which protects end users, believe it or not).

Now, I don't like it because it's become this bizarre quasi-legal gambling addiction predating upon an entire generation of tech-forward but economically downtrodden youth. I see ads on 4chan that shill shitcoins, for heavens' sake.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls.

As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.

But as-is, normal people who took precautions to get vaccinated are being hurt by anti-vaxxers when they get an unrelated illness or injury (car wreck, infection, etc) and then suffer worse outcomes (including death) just because the ICU beds are full of people who could have literally just decided not to be in them (given how effective the vaccine is at preventing hospitalization).

Our society is far too interconnected for almost anything to not at least indirectly affect someone else, even if the first-order effects are well-limited to "just you".

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

I think that's their point, though. When people know their only option is to storm the hijackers, they do.

It's even more obvious when you flip the relationship around. What's it called when your broker lends you money, at a fixed interest rate, for you to then go and invest in risk assets?

It's a margin loan. Which I hope I don't need to say is NOT risk-free.

I agree, I really like both Java and Python and I've typically used Java for anything that's a service and I've never been let down. I've owned a few python services and have been... disappointed with them overall but generally never because of *python* specifically. Usually the code just being an enormous untyped spaghetti blob and also being just bad code on top of it (the kind of thing where you look at it for 5 mins and could probably cut the runtime by 70% but you don't because nobody asked you to and this internal web page being slow is not high on your list of things that annoy you overall).

I recently started a side project and decided to use python for the backend and I'm not too far into it so far, but I can already tell I'm going to miss 2 main things:

1. the ridiculous amount of information a jvm provides by default (e.g. jmx) 2. java's speed/jit

So far, python seems fast enough, and I feel like I'll be able to make anything that I need to do scale in python, and that if I end up with enough users to make that not the case, I have bigger problems (like "my side project's customer support is competing materially with my day job for my time"). So I don't even think the tech, much less python, will be the scaling weak point with this project. But I'm still keeping an eye on it.

I'll throw in my 2c and say that I thought they were just fine. I wasn't verbally guffawing at their Sims-esque loading humor but the first time I saw it I thought "oh heh they're doing the sims thing" and then literally never thought overmuch about it again.

I agree. I feel like there's 3 phases to learning a new language.

Background: English first language, French second, and I've been trying to learn Japanese.

The three phases are:

1. Learning basic alphabet (if different from your own), basic grammar. Unlocks: being able to access more learning material and more rapid progress. Progress on these first building blocks is slow and can be discouraging.

2. Learning full grammar control. Even the most basic prose uses ~all of the tenses and conjugation rules. Unlocks: reading/watching non-educational native material.

3. Learning the culture and filling out vocab. Lots of languages are idiomatic, and understanding real-world usage can require just as much that you read Candide as that you memorize flashcards of more-obscure vocab (more-obscure meaning things like "chandelier". It's not an uncommon word, but a second-language learner probably won't run into it in wordbanks or anything.)

I think Duolingo is good for doing 1, and like, half of 2. I don't think it can get you to 3.

But I think most people and tools consider "containers" to be volatile storage, like RAM. Non-volatile storage would be volumes.

Honestly I think there is a lot to be said for making the writable layer of a container read-only. It makes sure that things like logging, if you care about them, go somewhere safe, or if you don't, get turned off explicitly. And also prevents gotchas like "oops wrote important data to /var/lib/notavolume when I meant to write to /var/lib/therightvolume" that show up at the worst times.

I think it gives it a clearer indication that it's a version number, whereas "Society 5" either sounds like either yet another sequel to Society, or part of the title itself.

Also, point-oh sounds cool in English and just based on how much they use fractional percentages in Neon Genesis Evangelion, I assume it sounds cool in Japanese too.

Basically what the other comments said. I specifically work on data stuff so it's all python and java/scala on linux servers.