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58 karma · joined July 1, 2019

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r-bar··on How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale
The committee wanted Cosmos, Azure, and Postgres all in the name and wouldn't compromise.
r-bar··on Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Lima (1) is a project that packages Linux distros for MacOS and executes them via qemu in the backend. Maybe you could solve your problem by launching one of their vms and inspecting the command line it generates. You might find an option you were missing.

(1) https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

r-bar··on K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
K3S includes some extras that make it nice for working in small local clusters, but are not part of the standard k8s codebase.

* Traefik daemonset as a load balancer

* Helm controller that lets you apply helm manifests without the helm command line

* Upgrade controller

* Sqlite as the default backing store for the k8s API

* Their own local storage provisioner

K0S has a lot of the same goals: be light weight and self contained in a single binary. But K0S tries to be as vanilla as possible.

Choosing between the two it comes down to your use case. Do you want light weight and compatible (k0s), or lightweight and convenient (k3s)?

Edit: formatting

r-bar··on Credit card debt collection
You are getting a lot of troll replies, but it is actually interesting to think about.

The waste is uncaptured value. It is some part of your software business's domain that is just too hard, expensive, or requiring physical intervention to encode the process in their system. So the business never chooses to build that feature. This leaves some part of your business's problem domain unsolved. Potentially someone else smaller could come in and try and solve that problem and capitalize on that wasted value.

r-bar··on The untapped potential of human programming (2022)
I think human programming is not untapped at all. This is describing every line of business application in existence. A great example of both the power and limitations of this is phone trees for customer support.

A product team and dev team encode business knowledge and flows into code and leverage a human to make judgement calls when necessary. The outcome is a program that can either be used by skilled workers to multiply their output or allow unskilled workers to perform tasks that would have formerly required a skilled worker to accomplish.

There are already (arguably) optimized flows and design patterns for application UX. Companies have already spent years trying to build and optimize this "human programming". Dev teams have developed many DSLs to make it easier to encode business logic into their applications more quickly.

I am not saying line of business applications are good or near some optimal final form, but to call "human programming" untapped is taking a very narrow view of the definition.

r-bar··on From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server
How does supabase not qualify as open source?

Their stack is primarily comprised of other independent open source projects. The one component that isn't is their "realtime" server that serves updates from postgres' WAL over websockets, but that is open sourced[0] under Apache 2.0. From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI. There are plenty of alternative management tools for postgres though. As you can export your database what else would you need to ensure your portability and independence?

Granted they make their docs fairly opaque for trying to self host. Presumably to encourage you to just use their hosted service. Hosting open sourced projects seems like a very ecosystem friendly way of monetizing.

[0] https://github.com/supabase/realtime

r-bar··on Financial innovations brought by technology
I have been dying for this. Currently I use privacy.com and their spending limits to get the most basic of functionality. I would my bank to provide an API and make this type of control and other information available. Maybe I could really dream and it would be standardized across banks.
r-bar··on Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
I don't think true python "one liners" are a thing, but the awkward thing about awk is sits in this place where what you are doing is complicated enough you need awk, but simple enough you need a one liner? Those cases have been exceedingly few and far between for me enough that every time I want to reach for awk I have to go lookup how to do anything more complex than printing fields. That completely defeats the point of the quick one liner.

May as well open up vim, write my 7 lines of python, and run it. Because I use it everyday and didn't have to look anything up it ends up far faster. Then when I am done I either delete it, throw it in a scripts directory, or make it part of some existing infrastructure repo. Now if I keep it because I used python it is much more readable than the awk 1 liner would have been.

I have tried in earnest to memorize awk's idiosyncrasies multiple times now. By the time I go to use what I learned the last time it is months later and I have forgot enough I need to go look stuff up.

So in a way, here I am: The guy that writes "one liners" in python.

r-bar··on Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022
They also seem to be the most willing to open up their GPU sharding API, GVTG, based on their work with their existing Xe GPUs. The performance of their implementation in their first generation was a bit underwhelming, but it seems like the intention is there.

If Intel is able to put out something reasonably competitive and that supports GPU sharding it could be a game changer. It could change the direction of the ecosystem and force Nvidia and AMD to bring sharding to their consumer tier cards. I am stoked to see where this new release takes us.

Level1Linux has a (reasonably) up to date state of the GPU ecosystem that does a much better job outlining the potential of this tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXUS1W7Ifys

r-bar··on MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT
The best solution I have found for developing locally on k8s is k3d [0]. It quickly deploys k3s clusters inside docker. It comes with a few extras like adding a local docker registry and configuring the cluster(s) to use it. It makes it super easy to setup and tear down clusters.

I usually only reach for it when I am building out a helm charm for a project and want to test it. Otherwise docker-compose is usually enough and is less boilerplate to just get an app and a few supporting resources up and running.

One thing I have been wanting to experiment with more is using something like Tilt [1] for local development. I just have not had an app that required it yet.

[0] https://k3d.io/ [1] https://tilt.dev/

r-bar··on You need Software Developers to believe in your project (2020)
I have had these types of "boring but fulfilling projects" as well. I have also been on the other side where I cannot feel any pride in what I am building and the only solice is at least I got to learn something new.

I think what makes the difference is the proximity to the user. In your printing company you got to know the process then build a solution that directly helped your co-worker and boss. Even if it only helps in a small way that feels very satisfying. Where I get frustrated is and lose all that empathy is when the company keeps multiple layers of indirection between the devs and the users (customer report -> Customer Service -> Product Management -> devs).

r-bar··on Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

r-bar··on Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever
I believe it is more of an English speaking world thing. The tropes of the white wedding come from people emulating English nobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_wedding

r-bar··on Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged
I think #1 is a signal of a failure in the online retail space. As a customer other than reading the (often gamed) reviews on amazon and watching youtube reviewers how do you know what to buy? Buying a bunch of options and returning them starts to look like a legitimate strategy. For some products (for me it tends to be laptops) you really do not know if you like it until you have your hands on the physical product.
r-bar··on Pattern matching accepted for Python
I always found it funny that there active efforts to speed up the language by adding more of the dreaded GILs to the runtime!

https://bugs.python.org/issue40512