BackBlast

It's... complicated...

I rode a bike to school when my limited money would buy a very bad car or a nice bike. So I opted for the bike and had to ride it because that's all I had. I did that for a couple of years - even in the cold and ice. My commute distance varied in my biking days, from 6 to 20 miles.

I always obeyed all the traffic laws, though occasionally in the early AM I'd find lights that would not turn green for a bike no matter what I did.

I had people scream at me to get off the road, and otherwise be exceptionally rude. I occasionally had bike lanes and appreciated them, sought them out because it provided better spacing. But the busses on those routes were frequently in the bike lane and were, frankly, slower than I was. But navigating them was always a pain until I got well past them.

On slower roads (20-25 mph) with no bike lane I would take a lane to myself and keep up with traffic but only when I could reasonably keep up.

In the end, safety won out, and I abandoned the practice.

Now, as a driver, I am appalled at the behavior of cyclists. With my experience I take interest in and carefully watch their behavior.

Running red lights and not stopping for stop signs is the worst. And it's pretty universal.

Bad spacing in the lane, little to no accommodation for drivers when they could provide a bit more space for a comfortable pass. Sometimes they can't help it, and I get it, but when they can and don't... I always tried to be crystal clear about my messaging to the cars around me. I'm taking the lane here for my safety because there are parked cars in the bike lane or otherwise on the shoulder. I'm done now and look, I'm providing lots of space for everyone to safely pass me.

So the rude behavior I encountered was finally somewhat understood.

I really appreciated having good bike lanes. But cyclists do themselves no favors in how they conduct themselves, which will hurt them when pining for better road accommodations.

Even the cost factor is complicated. Everyone factors in the cost per mile of the bike, which is excellent, but the input calories are non-trivial and if you're not running the numbers on just ramen noodles it turns into quite a significant financial cost.

There are definitely health benefits.

Raising children is different from anything you do in the workplace. "Professional" abilities aren't the key metrics for this responsibility. The best "boost" I'm aware of for being good at the job is being raised by good loving parents and thus having a good model to then emulate when it becomes your turn. Sometimes people can find good models elsewhere, but the number of places one can do that today is pretty small — media and movies certainly don't.

From my research, the sociological numbers bear this out, good homes make better well-adjusted successful and able children who generally go on to make another generation of well-adjusted and successful children.

Broken families, single parents homes, have lower success rates.

If you want to create an environment where our most valuable resource is given the best shot, then we should be teaching about marriage, man+woman partnership, fidelity and faithfulness. We don't have any known better models for raising them — and it isn't even close.

I run arm servers in production. M1 performance core performance is about 3x graviton 2 and 2.5x ampere ultra in our stack. The efficiency core is about 0.6 graviton and a bit less than half ampere.

Would love to have reasonably costed m1 instances but the value play for us is ampere.

Aws bandwidth costs would be the primary reason to potentially switch.

If you're stuff is low bandwidth there is probably little reason to move. You might compare the cost tiers of the size of system you use. Might also be reasonable to run personal stuff on spot pricing on AWS for cost savings.

Really depends on your use case. If that's the user's data anyway, no need to put it in an inner database.

Glad to hear a new release is coming. I run CouchDB in production. I have actually checked the couchdb repo to see if it was being maintained.

Some of the things that trouble me. The ubuntu upstream package manager dropped off the radar for a while, not sure if it's currently running or not. Also, the last release was a looong time ago. I understand it's pretty stable, but there are rough spots that could use some shoring up as noted.

These issues aren't enough for me drop its active use in production, but I'm eyeing reworking how I use if these kinds of issues continue. This kind of dropping the ball doesn't instill confidence. I don't want to have to maintain my own installer so I can predictably perform new installations.

Also, no Linux ARM package. I gave a go at compiling it myself for ARM, but that failed due to being unable to find/use a compatible SpiderMonkey.

It's great tech, and I'd love to carry it with me into bigger and better projects. Here hoping :)

I've used AWS, Digital Ocean, and Vultr each for multiple years. I've had one major outage on AWS and another on Vultr. I'm currently feeling out Oracle cloud.

I wouldn't hesitate to run significant sites on any of these providers. Problems and outages happen, I don't think anyone is really providing five 9s whatever they say.

You probably need to define your actual requirements rather than this nebulous term.

The "DO offering" is a basic VPS and you host/manage the couchdb process yourself. DO does not offer a managed couchdb service. I've found couchdb to be reasonably stable and worry free.

The nature of pouchdb/couchdb and the design philosophy behind it makes it relatively easy to scale to additional servers. Couchdb is master-master, which is a good eventually consistent model that should help in any horizontal scaling. The base process is erlang/elixir which should scale vertically well.

I've been using it a couple of years, but not on any sites that have significant traffic.

As someone who has changed the kind of work I do in my career I've had two very different experiences.

There is a web development culture. There was a pace of advancement for many years that helped shape this desire for newest shiniest stuff. Other ingredients such as chasing FAANG, VC money, and the general youth of the average web dev. Salaries chasing talent due to the online boom and corporate policies not adjusting to keep talent, thus needing to do resume building for the next job hop because it's going to happen in less than 2 years.

You would think so, only this is a bit opaque when dealing with a local school and a district bureaucracy with various computer labs, internet and phone systems. As a student, you may think that the right person to ask is the local teacher who has control of the asset. Especially if that teacher has been assigned IT duties.

But to many school administrators consent of teachers is meaningless. Those assets aren't owned by the teachers but by the district, even if they are the apparent authority figures and stewards in the eyes of the students.

I don't find it to be a workaround. The remote development stuff loads a bunch of projects and processes onto the remote host. I have some pretty small VMs that I run some older production servers in. Which is my principal use case for remote development.

Connecting to them this way brings them to their knees. That and seeing a host of new high memory processes doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the security risks on important remote systems.

That's a timely response and I too have to noticed that CouchDB may not have the best/compatible future. I have an existing product that depends on PouchDB in the client and the replication.

I'm not really into the managed db service offerings, I like to have control over it that they rarely offer.

My tentative solution for the application is to go with PouchDB on node.js on the backend too.

PouchDB works well as the primary client store and can sync to CouchDB in the cloud. IMHO this is one of the more mature combinations that gives you a ready client side document database that takes care of data replication for you.

CRDT is really a multi-master model with eventual consistency. It's not merely a cache but also operates as a master and source of truth. With a well-built CRDT you can also skip the server and sync client-to-client where both have master copies.

The tricky part is conflict resolution.

I, too, would expect a "do no harm" approach to be overly cautious in recording potential side effects or symptoms post vaccine. To error on over reporting rather than this really odd refusal to consider even the possibility.

I'm not surprised that they're not afraid to look too hard about COVID-19 though. In the current climate, that road leads to loss of job and income.

It's far too varied to give you a small list. You can easily find story after story online if you look — though they're being purged as fast as the automated systems can manage it as this story demonstrates.

This is pretty standard operating procedure for vaccines since I started paying attention. I have children that suffered reactions from various vaccines — I also have been personally vaccine damaged. I try not to just repeat random stories online, so I will just keep this to my family and my immediate acquaintance. I've seen lots of things from a bout of severe allergies centered around the injection point to being severely ill following a shot to lasting new symptoms including new autoimmune disorders, or odd things like unusual hair growth. I had a friend who had a child die, that was previously perfectly healthy, from the disease (autopsy report) they were being vaccinated for the previous week.

Presenting a question about the vaccine being responsible, even for minor stuff, generally results in being gas lit. "Impossible", "You don't know what you're talking about", "Didn't happen", "Just a Coincidence" even when all rational reason indicates that the vaccine should at least be considered. These anecdotes are consistently shot down online for various reasons, but nobody seems to connect the dots that when you systemically ignore evidence there is no mathematical model that will somehow find what is really happening. The data is just lost because those who are supposed to be trusted to collect it are ignoring so much of it.

You look at all the comments here about the irrationality of those who don't accept the data, etc. This is not about data. This is about a loss of trust. You can show all the data in the world, but if the trust bridge has been burned then it's for naught. You can't cross the bridge again with a mountain of data because it's irrelevant. That bridge is being burned at the ground level every day, one by one, by a medical system that really doesn't care much about individuality or parental perspectives when they don't match their own.

This story itself continues to burn the trust bridge. We don't want your stories, your personal experiences, you cannot be heard. There is no discussion. Be silent. That's not how to build trust. It's purely an attempt to cull the information base in favor of the chosen outcome.

Or they are tools for a medical totalitarian dystopia. 2 years ago there were effectively zero exception free vaccine mandates, and only a very few places where they were actually hard to get.

Obtaining the long term data depends on reliable uptake of dependable data. When nurses and doctors refuse to acknowledge that a new symptom for the individual that happens within the hour/day/week of receiving the vaccine isn't even a possible side effect of the vaccine, then we don't have a reliable uptake of data. This is a common and largely unaddressed systemic complaint that destroys trust.

The chorus of "it's safe" becomes a self-reenforcing position regardless of actual outcome because it taints the view of those collecting the actuals in the field.

I tried spaces about 2 years ago. I had serious performance issues with it. I abandoned it.

As a society we do a poor job helping children mature. We put them in environments where their models for behavior are peers instead of well-adjusted and behaved adults. So we end up with Lord of the Flys writ large. Many of the children-peer-models come from broken families, with significantly reduced ability to learn from stable well-adjusted adults. Worse, often their basic needs aren't being fully met, and they act out (bully, etc).

We need fewer systems that put children (especially younger children) in situations where they are primarily interacting with and modeling the behavior of other children. This includes both our education and digital social systems.

Some children have active and involved home and family lives. This helps. Some get more favorable interactions and time with teachers, this can help. Some find positive models in media (books and movies) and can help, but media is often negative.

Maybe I'm just optimistic, but I believe that good and honest companies will generally prosper over those actively employing dark patterns in the long run.

Any exclusive niche employing dark patterns makes an opportunity for an honest broker to come in and clean house.

Good eye.

A severe enough bill can cause an organization to be instantly bankrupt. No opportunity to try to do something like caps.

Regardless, turning on spending caps isn't a final solution to this particular attack. With caps the site/resources will hit the cap and go offline. Accomplishing what a DDoS generally tries to accomplish anyway.

The only real solution is that you have to have a cheap way to filter out the attacking requests.

I've been there. I shut down a bunch of what looked like idle instances doing nothing to reduce spend. 80% of which were, in fact, doing nothing. I did drop off two vms that were supporting critical infrastructure.

Everyone who had done any work on them was long gone. I had done my due diligence to identify what they could possibly be.

Still, the day of reckoning came, and we got calls of services down a week after I turned them off. I spun them back up, and they were going again without any real impact to the business.

This turned out to be a blessing as the very next week the cert these same services depended on expired and if I hadn't learned about the system by turning them off we never would have known which boxes held up those services.

Also a lesson in what happens when people leave without any documentation on where the work they did lives and how it works.

We use memory safe languages, type safe languages. AWS is not fundamentally billing safe.

Just to give you nightmares. There's been DDoS in the news lately, I'm surprised nobody has yet leveraged those bot nets to bankrupt orgs they don't like who use cloud autoscaling services.

I don't know how you monitor it, part of the issue is the sheer complexity. How do you know what to monitor? The billing page is probably the place to start - but it is too slow for many of these events.

I guess you could start with the common problems. Keep watchdogs on the number of lambdas being evoked, or any resource you spin up or that has autoscaling utilization. Egress bandwidth is definitely another I'd watch.

Dunno, just seems to me you'd need to watch every metric and report any spikes to someone who can eyeball the system.

For me? I limit my exposure to AWS as much as I reasonably can. The possibilities combined with the known nightmare scenarios, with a "recourse" that isn't always effective doesn't make for good sleep at night.

You can use ses without moving your digital ocean server.

> This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing.

It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.

Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?

Trying to hang onto systems where your customers resent paying you is not where you want to be. You bring up an interesting proposal, fundamentally Apple needs to create a system where developers WANT to pay the fees because of the value they get in using the system and services. And all those connected credit cards and customer identities definitely have value.

Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?

At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.

It's just an example. There are lots more doctors who will give exemptions just to make parents happy. There is clearly friction between parents/doctors/state over this policy.