sakisv

Been meaning to write more, but things have been getting in the way for a while now.

It does an "explain like I'm 13" for how the idea of markets and money started, how and why it changed through the centuries and where we are now.

It's so easy to read, that it took me a couple of days to finish it.

They didn't have them when I first joined a few years ago but, when they added them, they did it the right way.

Coupled with the fact that you can use anything you want before the @, it makes for a very powerful way of organizing your mails.

I spent the last 6 years on various linux laptops (even a system76 one), but unfortunately I couldn't get the same polished experience as with a macbook.

  $ dig NS service.gov.uk +short

  ns-cloud-e4.googledomains.com.
  ns-cloud-e3.googledomains.com.
  ns-cloud-e2.googledomains.com.
  ns-cloud-e1.googledomains.com.
  ns-831.awsdns-39.net.
  ns-1983.awsdns-55.co.uk.
  ns-117.awsdns-14.com.
  ns-1080.awsdns-07.org.

GOV.UK for example uses both aws and gcp for DNS

That way you maintain a linear history, you get clear marks of when each pr was merged and you can see what happened in between.

The obvious downside here is that you'd need to add yet another step in your process and come up with a meaningful system for this.

My main problem with Jenkins was that its architecture made it extremely difficult to automate its provisioning without having to click through the ui at all.

This led to the second big problem which is that updating either Jenkins or one of its plug-ins when they got a new cve (which was every other day) was quite stressful because you could never be sure if something would break - especially for plugins that depended on other plugins (case in point this post)

I have since moved to concourse which has a much more sane architecture - at least for these things.

It takes some getting used to, but I really got to love its concepts for resources/inputs/outputs and how they work together to get you actually reproducible builds.

In the beginning of the pandemic I tried to reduce social media exposure, to maintain some degree of mental health and reduce distractions.

The way I did it was first to remove all the apps from my phone. This had the added benefit of improving the battery life. This meant that if I wanted to go on fb or Twitter, then I had to use the browser versions which are generally slower, not so optimized for phone usage, and overall the UX is much worse.

Even this though was not enough. Firefox would gladly save my session and despite the subpar UX, I still found myself going back to it more often than I would like.

The solution to this was simple:

Incognito.

Coupled together with a 2FA and disabling the password manager autocomplete by removing the URL from the relevant entries, it made such a huge difference.

Then I started using incognito for more things, like HN, where I would open 6-7 tabs "to read them later" and I never did, so they kept piling up.

For me this works great, especially on the phone. If I really want to read something I read it there and then. If for whatever reason I don't, and android decides to terminate my Firefox then so be it. If I really want to I can search for it again, but then I ask myself whether it is worth it.

Speaking of free services, one thing I've been looking for with not much luck is a Google groups equivalent. It can be paid as well, just not hosted by Google because I don't trust them to not discontinue it in the (not so distant) future.

I'd be interested to hear more about this, care to elaborate?

This is not a backdoor, this is frontdoor, plain and simple.

1. I've only used monorepo professionally once in a big org and it was SVN based 2. I'm going to look at monorepos from the perspective of git and github

The main argument I can think of in favor of monorepos, is to maintain the cohesion as high as possible between different parts of your system. For example, if you want to make a change to the load balancer regarding TTL, you can also go and make the same change in your API and your mobile clients and in the end you create one single PR and you have your tests run against that single revision.

Compare and contrast the same scenario in the traditional multi-repo approach: You make your changes to your `infra` repo, then you make the same change in your `api`, `android-client`, `ios-client` repos and in you create 4 PRs, that need to be reviewed at the same time. Which one would you prefer to do?

Potential arguments against are:

1. Too much noise - If multiple people are working on the same repo, you'd be getting emails for PRs for parts of the code that you may not care about.

2. Longer clone/pull times - In the same vain as before, the initial `git clone` and maybe every `git pull` after that will be bringing in a lot of code that you may not care about, increasing the time of each operation and increasing your frustration.

3. Access control - How do you limit who has write access to which part of your repo? AFAIK this isn't possible in git but it may be possible with codeowners in github, I don't know.

4. Organization - How do you structure your monorepo? Do you know in advance how many components it's going to have? How is a restructuring going to affect your history and/or dependencies between different components of your code?

5. History and code sharing - With a monorepo it's more difficult to share/open source just part of your code and keep the history intact.

Having said all that, I think the monorepo is a good match at a service level, not at an organization level. I know Google and Facebook have gone all in at an org level, but first of all they don't use git and second, they have the luxury and the resources to make it work for their use case. At a service level you should have a good idea of your boundaries, your applications and your infrastructure and assuming a relatively small engineering team (~10-12 people) eventually everyone would be confident enough with all parts of your system.

Personally I really like the idea of having one hash define the entire state of the world. I have a few common utilities that I use across my projects and I find it too annoying to keep them all up-to-date between different repos. I hope that eventually I will find some time (or be annoyed enough) that I will converge everything in one repo.

Thanks for pointing it out.

Also, fuck you Facebook. You had multiple chances to redeem yourself and start being not-so-corrosive for the society and you intentionally went out of your way to make the wrong choice every single time.

Given that the witnesses in this case have a tendency to die, and the DAs that get assigned this case have a tendency to resign, flee the country, or just drop the case, I'd be worried if I were the author.

However, I've got to admit, this entire case and the mafia-like way it's playing out is quite impressive and quite a first for Greece. Sure, as a country we had our fair share of corruption, but I think this takes things to a whole new level.

One could argue that the victims in this case are the people whose profiles had been hacked.

As for having full blown security getting in the way of getting stuff done, try replacing "Twitter" with "Equifax", a company that handles arguably more sensitive data and should have the "full blown security" you mentioned.

Did they suffer any tangible consequences?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=996OiexHze0

It's about 1h long, but it's really worth it.

Allow me to disable any kind of indication that someone is talking, not just to me (red dot) but anywhere (blue dot). Not everything needs my attention and having the tray icon change its state is distracting.

You can mute the channels, sure but why not make that as an option in the notifications settings?

Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.

Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air.

Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.

The argument about "latest == safest" may have some validity when it comes to browsers, but for everything else a notification that there is a new version would be more than enough.

The next step for me is to remove Facebook from my password manager. Having to type a 20+ character password on a phone is definitely going to add significant friction.

This is not a stab against the people who developed it, in fact I know some of the people involved in the development of the application and they have the highest ethical standards.

The problem is that in the post-Snowden era, no matter the good intentions behind such projects it is naive to not ask for as many safeguards as we possibly can.