trog

There is also the question of whether the actions required to cut the waste are themselves expensive. If you spend a huge amount of time and effort to cut waste, there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to just accept that some waste is inevitable and to not worry about it.

Literally every organisation I've been in has had "waste", but most of them have been smart enough to realise that you don't want to spend thousands of person-hours measuring every tiny little thing and doing wildly complex RoI analyses (especially on stuff where it's almost impossible to figure out anyway because there are too many variables), and instead focus on having metrics around the outcomes that they do care about.

Heh I read Atlas Shrugged and had the exact same response as you reading Fountainhead. I recall quite enjoying the writing style, but just found the whole thing silly and the idea that anyone could come out of reading it thinking they'd just stumbled across a great life philosophy funny and depressing.

> it's impossible to bill at scale and exactly cut off service usage globally when a target is hit,

How much does the problem change if you remove the word 'exactly' from here, though?

Like, I don't mind if I end up paying a couple of extra bucks. Or even tens of bucks! Some people might not mind hundreds or thousands, or even more depending on their scale.

But blowing out several orders of magnitude past my usual monthly spend is the problem I'd like to avoid.

Isn't the room saying H1Bs are going to be protected from the very top regardless what a few malcontents have to say?

Not sure what you mean about either of those two things? Never had any issues with instance state in our primary production environments, which were several instances of load balanced web servers. No idea what you're referring to as "slow"?

That makes a lot of sense to me!

I avoid Docker for precisely that reason! I have one system running on Docker across our whole org - Stirling-PDF providing some basic PDF services for internal use. Each time I update it I have to watch it download 700mb of Docker stuff, instead of just doing an in-place upgrade of a few files.

I get that there are advantages in shipping stuff like this. But having seen PHP stuff work for decades with in-place deploys and no build process I am just continually disappointed with how much worse the experience has become.

An old monolithic PHP application I worked on for over a decade wasn't set up with independent modules and the average deploy probably took a couple seconds, because it was an svn up which only updated changed files.

I frequently think about this when I watch my current workplace's node application go through a huge build process, spitting out a 70mb artifact which is then copied multiple times around the entire universe as a whole chonk before finally ending up where it needs to be several tens of minutes later.

Do you mean wetness as in the juices in the steak gravitate to the bottom? Or do you mean literally the bottom of the steak is wet? Either way neither of those issues seem to be a problem for me.

When I first started cooking in the air fryer I did flip it at half way though. I just forgot once and found it didn't make any perceptible difference, so gave up on it and it's just that one less task to do. My partner and I both agree it comes out awesome pretty much every time, and I'd say we are reasonably fussy steak eaters.

I don't worry about crust I guess? I don't think I even try to do that when I'm cooking them in a pan. I'm more interested in trying to get the fat right - it tends to crust over pretty nicely in the air fryer. It works better on thicker bits so it has longer in the heat.

I cook steak in the air fryer alone. I don't even bother flipping. 14-16 mins depending on thickness and it comes out awesomely every time.

> No. You are just dealing with bad code. There are highly performant web apps written in React.

cool maybe I'll see one one day

> React gives you many tools to skip unnecessary work and reduce latency, such as shouldComponentUpdate, and assigning keys to elements in a collection

but do people use these outside of demos

I have an high end CPU with 32GB of RAM and almost every single website I use gives me a worse experience than I got 20 years ago

> if one writes bad frontend code, well the cost is diffuse and many don't notice it.

exactly, and that's why we are where we are today - surrounded on all sides by websites covered in glue, because bad experience has been completely normalised, all for what? Some abstract notion of developer convenience that results in almost every case in a significantly worse experience by almost any metric.

I might not be able to tell if it's using React specifically, but I can tell it's using a React-like framework trivially because it feels like the entire website is covered in glue

> In a distributed setting where a me may wish to join the party late and receive a non-forged copy, it’s important. The crypto is there to stand in for an authority.

Yeh, but that's kinda my point: if your primary use case is not "needs to be distributed" then there's almost never a benefit, because there is always a trusted authority and the benefits of centralisation outweigh (massively, IMO) any benefit you get from a blockchain approach.

Is a Merkle tree needed or is good old basic double ledger accounting in a central database sufficient? If a key requirement is not a distributed ledger then it seems like a waste of time.

How is the software that decides the first thing most people see or do when they turn on their computers to go online worth a lot of money, you're asking?

Someone on Mastodon pointed out that not all Model Ys even have the manual release. I didn't believe this could be true - how could regulators allow this?

But it's actually listed on the Model Y page (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...): "Note Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors."

Not sure what the distribution is or whether it's just an "old version" problem?

It's totally normal for countries to screen for this stuff both at border entry and as part of the immigration process. In Australia we check at the border if you're coming from a country where they have certain diseases (e.g. yellow fever). If you're applying for some immigration status you need medical checks if you're from certain countries to screen you for certain conditions (e.g. tuberculosis).

It is absolutely the host country's responsibility to do this to keep their own citizens safe.

You said "paid any taxes or contributed anything". I'm just pointing out that you're wrong, right out of the gate.

And even if you were right, which you're not, you'd be wrong about 10 minutes after the average immigrant turns up when they first have to buy something and pay sales tax.

The "sense of entitlement" exists in your head. I'm noting that if you want to have a healthy society, a plan to look after sick people is a necessity. Your sort of thinking is exactly why almost one in three hundred Americans died in the first year of the pandemic.

FWIW I left the US for the UK in 2016. Before arriving there I had to pay into their national health insurance scheme. If you object to immigrants coming and not paying their way you could agitate for such a scheme. But I assume that's not the point.

Anyway, looks like you're going to get what you want and nobody is going to come to the US any more. You'll get to see what it's like when it works like that.

> No immigrant who turns up at the US border has paid any taxes or contributed anything to US society. It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point is that if you enter a foreign country it's your responsibility not to bring any diseases with you.

This is so laughably silly I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, I was a temporary immigrant to the US and I immediately was on the hook for a bunch of money as part of my visa application process. So immediately I'd argue your first point is incorrect on that technicality anyway, not to mention I was basically moving to the US to start a business so then spent the next two years dumping money into the economy.

What is your expectation of responsibility here? You can be sick and not know you're sick. You can be sick and asymptomatic. You can be sick and think you're sick with something basic like a cold but it's actually the flu or COVID or something else more sinister.

Pretending that anyone is going to adhere to an undefined system of responsibility at the best of times, let alone when it comes to moving overseas into a different country, seems ludicrous to me - I'm supposed to cancel might flight and re-arrange my immigration plans because I have a runny nose?

If you want to have a healthy country you need publicly accessible healthcare for everyone. We literally just had an object lesson in this with the COVID pandemic - indeed, we're still in the middle of the object lesson, where people's sense of "responsibility" towards others when it comes to communicable diseases is visible everywhere you look.

Oh right sorry I did forget about that aspect. I haven't done that for a while with a big codebase with, say, VS Code, and not on anything that wasn't very low latency (sub 10ms, so local LAN). I am mostly editing directly on the server when I do it these days but that wouldn't fly for anything other than the light hacking I do.

Is there a simple small claims court approach to this that would serve as a more convoluted way to actually access support from Google and other large companies?

I feel like if this happened to me I wouldn't even try getting in touch with Google support, having had enough experience myself and read enough of these stories to know it would be a frustrating waste of time.

But if there was a legal hack to do it that forced them to reply and cost them more money, even if it cost me some, it might be worth it in cases where the downsides (like losing your phone number of 15 years!!) are so high.

Heh this stood out to me as well for the same reason. It's wild to me that phone companies still get away with this trick.

What tools don't run on Linux? Modern tooling almost assumes Linux in most cases now. As a Windows user I feel like I hit this wall way more often than any other.

If you're doing this, there are many cases where you might as well just spin up a decent Linux server and give your developers accounts on that? With some pretty basic setup everyone can just run their own stuff within their own user account.

You'll run into occasional issues (e.g. if everyone is trying to run default node.js on default port) but with some basic guardrails it feels like it should be OK?

I'm remembering back to when my old company ran a lot of PHP projects. Each user just had their own development environment and their own Apache vhost. They wrote their code and tested it in their own vhost. Then we'd merge to a single separate vhost for further testing.

I am trying to remember anything about what was painful about it but it all basically Just Worked. Everyone had remote access via VPN; the worst case scenario for them was they'd have to work from home with a bit of extra latency.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, "This Is Everybody's Fault But Mine"

I agree for ssh - but I use it on a couple servers that have WordPress for the sole purpose of blocking IPs that engage in brute force attempts.

It has a real and dramatic impact on a few things - I got CPU warnings from one server a couple weeks back because I'd inadvertently broken logging and fail2ban stopped working and someone was doing a persistent brute force at high volume for 8 hours.

After I fixed fail2ban it dropped off immediately. I know some WordPress plugins will do this but I've not had much success with them compared to fail2ban so it's still my default for this purpose.

Are there better system-level approaches than fail2ban in this case? Or is your comment mostly directed towards those using it for ssh blocking?

> I know who he is, what are you going on about? Why don't you give me some examples of why you think he's a bad person?

at this point there has to be some assumption that the confusion on your side lies in that all the rest of us think demonstrate that he is a "bad person" are things that you think makes him a "good person", so there is probably no point in supplying them

after reading the actual words he writes himself and publishes them for the world to see I came to the same conclusion

I didn't bother acknowledging your bet because a) it feels like a bad faith proposition and b) it's a goalpost shift from my first comment which was about batteries getting cheaper, not more efficient.

I'd also argue we're seeing battery improvements in cars pretty consistently, which is one of the reasons I can now buy an EV with 350km range for AUD$30k.

Ars debunked this weird idea that batteries aren't improving a few years back: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...