stonith

Aptira | Fully Remote AUS/NZ | Full-time | Senior SRE

We're an Australian consulting company currently building out a multi region baremetal Kubernetes cluster for a client experiencing explosive growth and looking for SREs to help keep it running.

At the base: Kata Containers, Kyverno, Cilium, TopoLVM and Ceph

Workloads: Python microservices, Kafka, Postgres, Valkey and MongoDB

Observability using Grafana LGTM and automated using Ansible, Helm and BitBucket.

We're looking for a Senior SRE with some Kubernetes experience, decent security chops and good systems knowledge to help out on the platform engineering team. If that sounds like you, get in touch with us via careers <at> aptira <dot> com

Aptira | Fully Remote US/CA/UK/EU/AUS/NZ | Full-time | SRE

We're an Australian consulting company currently building out a multi region baremetal Kubernetes cluster for a client experiencing explosive growth and looking for SREs to help keep it running.

At the base: Kata Containers, Kyverno, Cilium, TopoLVM and Ceph

Workloads: Python microservices, Kafka, Postgres, Valkey and MongoDB

Observability using Grafana LGTM and automated using Ansible, Helm and BitBucket.

If you're a Linux nerd with a few years of experience under your belt and you're looking to dive deep into platform engineering, get in touch with us via careers <at> aptira <dot> com

> which is what actually matters, why does anyone care about raw power?

Raw power determines whether games run smoothly, how fast things compile, how fast a render takes etc. The performance per watt determines battery life but for some people that isn't particularly important. I can only run the Unreal Engine Editor for about an hour before the battery runs out on my laptop (5800H/16GB/3070). The raw performance when plugged in is much more useful to me than trying to squeeze another 20 minutes out of it. Of course I prefer using my desktop for those tasks, but sometimes I need to travel or demo so laptop (with charger) it is.

> Did it make a meaningful improvement to the environment?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-07/most-plastic-bags-gon...

It's not completely clear from this article if the measurement includes the thicker bags, but my guess is yes.

The RTS example is even worse - Starcraft: Brood War and Age of Empires 2 are still unmatched in terms of multiplayer. The Relic games he mentions are fun but they're not exactly timeless classics and Relic have generally struggled to balance their games.

> It's like telling a guitarist that AI will empower them because now the computer will play music for them.

I don't need AI for that - we've had drum machines for ages and now VSTs that can emulate pretty much any instrument. They do empower me because now I can create music that isn't limited to the instruments I own and can play without needing to hire an orchestra.

What did you do about Reaper? I'm in a similar boat and I'm not super excited about moving to another DAW.

EDIT I didn't realise there's a linux build for Reaper now! I guess I'll still have to sort out how to run my VSTs but that's probably a case by case thing.

> in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man

I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.

> You do make me wonder, though, about who the vocal users are: RHEL is not important enough to license, but important enough to not move to a different distro?

The scientific community, who run extremely high core counts and thus get a raw deal on licensing, but need the drivers for their hardware to be completely reliable as well as software compatability to work with anything from proprietary vendors that their community might need. Eg. CERN who are backing Alma linux.

I don't know anything about CS, but in the Starcraft scene the meta is always evolving because new maps come into rotation that push players to develop new strategies. I guess LoL does something similar by adding new characters.

I see Qantas, which is a western airline by most definitions.

Though it's worth noting that Qantas have been acquiring smaller companies then slapping their badge on the planes and their uniforms on the pilots. It's only a matter of time before they start to slip down this list and regress to the mean.

Nothing. Continue as we currently are where artistic style is not protected, but output is. Artists get work making art as they always have, but they're competing against AI that can pump out shit quality work very quickly. If you can't do better than that as an artist then you should find another line of work.

> So let's say, if an artist developed a particular style and someone wants to hire them for a business project like a game they can't feasibly just learn that style and use it so they hire the artist. Later other people catch on this style and develop over it. It only works because monetising through copying the style is not very feasible.

I don't think copying an art style is that hard. Professional artists in your example of the game industry can absolutely imitate each other upon request. If using the same style as another artist were so difficult games with multiple artists wouldn't have a coherent art style, but they do because the studio will develop a style guide and use their senior artists to guide the juniors.

> How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style?

They haven't been in the past and they shouldn't be. They're compensated for the specific works they produce which are granted copyright. This is a good thing because otherwise the artistic domain would be horrendously polluted with claims, and producing original art would be like navigating a legal minefield.

A large part of the practical application of art is mechanical skill. Some people have an active imagination but have not trained sufficiently to bring forth what they see in their minds eye.

Art has existed for much longer than copyright.

We have no idea if character arcs and payoffs are well set up in the first two episodes because we haven't seen if anything is paid off or resolved later. It's been a while but I remember the first season of Game of Thrones being similarly slow and ponderous to start with. I enjoy the slower pace, it suits the scale of the conflict and it suits the source material which never felt like it needed to hurry along.

> Copyrighted works can be copied without the authors consent if it falls under fair use

"Fair Use" is a uniquely US concept and does not exist in copyright law elsewhere, so for any kind of global release this isn't correct.

> In particular, if we're having a conversation about copyright but we don't talk about scraping for search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) or other aggregation services, then I'd ask why Google is allowed to aggregate information but everyone else isn't.

Author's Guild v Google is probably the closest we have to a tried case, but Fair Use rulings are both limited to the US and specific in their nature, so I'd be wary of generalising one domain (text) to another (images). Eg. Fair use takes into account harm, and the potential harm to human artists is nontrivial.

> Also, to not talk about the over reach of copyright, the nearly 100+ year copyright terms and the level of automation to demonitize and bully smaller artists using copyrighted work fairly is negligent.

I agree with you - Copyright needs an overhaul and it's offensively lopsided in favor of the powerful as it currently stands.

Not sure most dev work is single threaded. Test suites can be multithreaded/multiprocess and so can compiling, just for two examples.

We used vote kick to get rid of them. The server would clear quickly if the vote failed so it wasn't a huge issue.

I'm in a similar boat, the other thing the gaming laptop lets you do is demo your gamedev work at meetups and similar.

> Which begs the question why save games couldn’t do this

Replays weren't added until 1.08[1] so it may have changed sometime post launch, but I'd have thought because it means you have to run the sim to get to the eg. 30 minute mark where the save is, and even on modern machines running remastered that takes quite a while. A more constrained machine from the times wouldn't be able to do the x16 speed fast forward used today.

[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Patch_1.08

> Whats more incredible is that inside Australia people genuinely think it's a good thing, because the Government is finally "taxing" Google... they actually believe the money is going to the Australian government (schools, hospitals and all that) and have no idea the money actually goes directly to Murdoch.

Every media outlet was shouting loudly in favor of it, even the Guardian. Zero integrity when the rubber hit the road.

It's not a fair ask, because Google were also not allowed to simply withdraw from displaying news. The whole thing was a shakedown. Initial drafts didn't include the public broadcaster ABC or SBS and only benefited the commercial entities.

> Why wouldn't you want to run JS outside of a browser?

Not OP, but as someone working on backend, infra, and some part time game dev, JS isn't in my skillset in any meaningful way so I don't use tools within that ecosystem if I can avoid it.

> IMHO Docusaurus is more flexible and customizable that MkDocs.

Presumably only if you're comfortable working in JS?

NVIDIA seem to have done pretty well out of it.

Smartphones are also generally a lot larger, so they don't fit in my pocket very well while cycling or running.

I need my smartphone to do a whole bunch of things outside playing music, and restricting myself to specific models with physical audio control buttons and small screens makes the market a lot smaller and would probably leave me with a poorer phone than picking one without needing to think about its ability to play music while exercising. I did this for my previous phone and the result wasn't very pleasant, so went with the separate players this time around.

Different headphones might be an option, but again a lot of the better phones are ditching headphone jacks, so it would be restricting my phone options.

I have a similar device and use it daily.

I don't have to worry about my music being removed because the licensing changed at the streaming provider. I tried various streaming services and all of them removed music from me at some point. This isn't something that's particularly negotiable for me.

I can trivially add songs that aren't on a streaming service using youtube-dl or similar.

I can change songs by pressing a physical button on the side of the player, meaning it doesn't have to leave my pocket and I don't have to look at it. This is particularly useful while exercising.

> Regardless of how good you are at MTG, and even how good your deck is, you're going to lose a lot of games due to mana flood / mana screw / etc.

What makes this different from blind build order choices in Starcraft? The greed > safe > rush > greed interactions often set one player ahead pretty arbitrarily in the very early game.

By an absolute bucketload. Valley of the Ancients was a 100GB project that went down to 25GB packaged if I remember correctly.

And that's assuming their "GPU" is actually performant in those scenarios. All the examples they post are for GPGPU, but how does something like Unreal perform?