Detention officer, yes. Other places call them deputies, apparently. Prisons usually call them corrections officers (COs).
4,278 karma · joined November 17, 2013
You don’t have to be racist to survive county. You simply stick with your race. There’s a distinction. Yes, if shit pops off and you’re not sticking up for your race, you can get called out. But nobody is asking the 70-year-old with a limp to roll heavy with the woods/kinfolk/whatever. There’s more an element here of getting marked as a bitch: prison, and to a lesser extent county, is a game of respect. Run store and someone steals from you? Handle it or it will be repeated, because they notice you don’t stick up for yourself. The smart ones watch. But the woods weren’t eyeing me when I played my daily game of spades with a kinfolk partner (and still friend). It’s not like that in county. Prison, maybe.
DO behavior is intentional. County belongs to them. Prison belongs to the inmates. This was explained to me as “this is their house. Prison is ours.” The person explaining, our head wood, was looking forward to prison. Life is way different in prison, with mutual respect — again, I’m told. Jail sucks on purpose. If it didn’t suck nobody would care that they ended up there. This is the American approach to corrections, that of deterrence; in other places there is more of a focus on rehabilitation, and you’ll find a much different jail experience.
Jail is a lot more fun when you make it abundantly clear to the DOs that you see through their psychopathy. It’s a control mechanism for those who don’t. Once they figure out it doesn’t work on you and you’ll play their game anyway, you can actually develop a decent rapport with DOs. Just never, ever, ever trust them. I grieved one and he used to pull tricks like calling me out right after a race meeting to make it look like I was a snitch (don’t even THINK about snitching, or enjoy PC). They know the game better than you do, and they’re paid to do it.
Those dry runs were actually nice, I found, because it was a nice break outside. My cell was way better than transfer cells, though, and breaking routine sucks. Doing time is all about routine. By 30 days in, I had a schedule. The next 100 flew. Just keep to yourself, improve yourself during the downtime, get on a schedule, and play the respect game carefully and you’ll be fine. I got marked quickly as the computer nerd, but that also meant I could help people out with their legal stuff. Find a purpose and become useful, and stand up for yourself when needed. Lead with your shoulder and pivot, if it comes to that — I’ve fought more outside than in, though, and most of the violence I experienced was from DOs (tased once because I couldn’t hear orders in the shower, pepper sprayed twice). Help the right people and you’ll have the right friends, which is a big part of survival.
Some parts of your comment confused me, so maybe you can clarify. Murder trial inmates are almost always confined in maximum. Medium is a larger cross section of crimes and classification, and most places call medium “gladiator school” or “gladiator academy” because there’s a lot more freedom than maximum and still some hard hitters. Minimum is like summer camp that you can’t leave, with everybody sitting for DUI or check fraud. Transfer cells mix this classification up, which is probably where you landed with the heavy hitters in that 11 hour room (that sounds like transfer), but a misdemeanor rap almost guarantees you were in minimum. Am I right? Or did you get classified as a hitter and thrown in school?
I can’t speak to the rest of your comment.
A dozen or less gigabytes a day means: use grep. This is just like throwing Hadoop at that log volume.
This was an opportunity to learn from someone with a different perspective, and I could learn something from yours, but instead, you’ve made me regret even saying anything. I’m sorry, I just can’t engage with you further.
(Edit: I’m genuinely mystified that discussing alternative architectures is somehow arrogant “pissing on” people. Why personalize this so much?)
As an SRE, I’ve built high volume log processing at every employer in multiple verticals, including web. I know what sysadmins do. Not a fan of the condescension and assumptions you’re making. I have an opinion. We differ. That’s fine. Let it be fine.
The overhead per log record, building multiple indexes at log line rate, there’s just so many reasons not to do your use case in ES that I don’t even think about it. I think it’s a poorer fit than reporting, to be honest.
I’ve extracted insight from millions of log records per second on a single node with a similar setup, in real time, with much room to scale. The key to scaling log analysis is to get past textual parsing, which means using something structured, which usually negates the reason you were using ElasticSearch in the first place.
Google’s first Dataflow talk from I/O and the paper should give you an idea of what log analysis can look like when you get past the full text indexing mindset. Note that there’s nothing wrong with ELK, but you will run into scaling difficulty far sooner than you’d expect trying to index every log event as it comes. It’s also bad to discover this when you get slashdotted, and your ES cluster whimpers trying to keep up. One thing streaming often gets you is latency in that situation instead of death, since you’re probably building atop a distributed log (and falling behind is less bad than falling over).
The key here is: are you looking for specific log events or are you counting? You’re almost always counting. Why index individual events, then?
How many times do I have to say in a single thread that this is not, and will never be, my opinion?
No. Both computers did hard work, and earned credit toward proof of work in my example. I’m rather repeatedly saying energy can be used for two purposes (securing a ledger with a difficult computation that also means something), and I have no idea how else to explain this.
I’m not sure why your incentive would drop to zero. Say I swap in a universal simulation from the Big Bang instead of SHA2. A miner simulates a portion it chooses, which involves quintillions upon quintillions of gravitational fields. Eventually it simulates a rare event, like two black holes colliding or something. It somehow notates this as proof that it worked on the problem for a while, hashes that proof combined with the transactions, and boop, mined a block. Meanwhile, all along, we have learned science. I could think of other problems that work: SETI@home and the other BOINC apps come to mind, as does LHC analysis. Large search space, demanding algorithm, rare thing to find (SETI/Higgs candidates), and valuable science along the way. Some issues I could see are unpredictable nature of block time, verifiability being expensive, and problem spaces that move forward in time, like my first example. But I don’t see those as insurmountable.
Why would incentive drop to zero to search the space? I’m not following that claim, nor why you’re scare quoting important.
Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy folding a protein, simulating a gravitational system, or modeling a hurricane. I apply it to another computer and it spends that watt for however long computing a double SHA256 and throwing away the result. If, at the end of both calculations, I have worked toward proof of work on a secure ledger, which energy was better spent for humanity? That’s the difference: while the secure blockchain is a noble goal, what the computer is doing during that time is something we badly need to rethink. “The double-hash of these bytes is <foo>” isn’t even useful if we collected it. It’s meaningless computing. Yes, we ascribe meaning when blocks are made, but it’s a very irresponsible technical decision to waste energy in order to prove that work was done.
This would be fine if it were a low amount of energy, but it isn’t. We are talking gigawatts that are potentially being spent on this, which is part of the point I was trying to make. Electricity isn’t free, and it’s important to consider our planet. Bitcoin essentially puts computers in a busy loop, and it’s a very hamfisted means of achieving its goal. We have already seen alternative concepts, including this one, that illustrate there is potentially another way to achieve what we want without throwing a small star’s worth of energy at the computing infrastructure behind it.
Coming after people and assuming they’re criticizing cryptocurrency as a concept whenever a specific piece is questioned is tough to discuss against. I think cryptocurrency can do better, and there are undoubtedly better ways to come up with to secure a distributed ledger. I’m alarmed that the adoption of bitcoin has exploded our utilization of resources and that people feel that worry about this is an indictment of the whole concept; this polarization makes it difficult for all of us to improve.
So, no, it isn’t obvious what value I should see out of a computer spinning itself through SHA2 for no benefit aside from securing a ledger. In any other domain, we’d consider such a design ridiculous. There has to be another way, one where that same (intensive) calculation can benefit humanity for the power that we are throwing at it, and we still end up with a secure blockchain. I’m not smart enough to invent it. I hope we can support the people who are, and perhaps admit that bitcoin’s proof of work scheme is a mistake in the larger landscape.
I worry that given how deep we are into ASIC development, arguments against what I’m saying are only going to get louder as time goes on. We are probably long past the point of no return with bitcoin already.
Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.
It doesn’t take the entire output of a coal-fired generator to handle trillions in trade volume on traditional exchanges. Minting coins doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant dedicated to it. Even for newfangled cryptocurrency, the human race can handle a hundredish billion dollar market cap without using that much energy. It’s incredibly wasteful and destructive to our planet. How do you think the Chinese are throwing cheap electricity at all that mining gear? Provinces covered in solar panels? (For that matter, how do you think the Americans are?)
Literally the entire concept of mining is brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing (to create the currency of value; nobody is saying bitcoin is worthless). Imagine if, instead, you dumped that energy into storage or even useful computation (again: proof of work, not the currency, is useless computation), and what you could do with it. There needs to be acknowledgment that brute force cryptographic hashing is a pretty serious design flaw. We just happen to be working around it now that bitcoin is a Big Deal.
To drive this home, Bitfury is building out 30+ MW mining facilities that require immersion cooling in 3M Novec, because state-of-the-art datacenter CRACs aren’t capable of rejecting waste heat from that kind of power density. We are talking 150+ kW cabinet-equivalents, where anything over 15-20 kW per cabinet with CRAC is currently considered noteworthy. AIUI, they have to underclock their gear when relying on datacenter air. Two-phase immersion is a cool, efficient technology that will probably reimagine the datacenter and should be developed further, but machine learning and science workloads are barely starting to crack that nut. Bitcoin ran directly to the front of the line of “incredibly power-intensive workloads that we haven’t encountered in datacenter design before.” That’s good and bad.
That sound you just heard was half of HN sighing at how old they feel, including me. :/
To your point, I could probably name most African countries but not place them exactly from memory, particularly in the interior and on the western coast. Niger is hot news in the U.S. right now, and we had a week or so of everyone collectively figuring out not only that it’s distinct from Nigeria but also proper pronunciation, simply because we don’t think about Africa much (which is lame, I agree). Legislators were surprised we had troops in Niger, which should really say a lot.
Geography education is already iffy in a number of places, and I imagine ubiquitous digital maps are going to exacerbate that problem the same way we are already losing the ability to memorize phone numbers. John Oliver has been having fun with this by highlighting the wrong country as a recurring gag on his show.
I can think of a reasonable blockchain-like implementation for logs, actually: chunk up the log, sign, include the hash of the prior sig as the first log message in the new chunk. Boom, blockchain! Throw in Merkle trees somehow and you’ve got yourself a VC-funded startup. You’re welcome.
Regarding longevity, often the predicted lifetime of a drive is close to its warranty. You will sometimes experience no issues exceeding design lifetime, and sometimes drives immediately explode. I’ve seen both, from four-year lifetime drives entering year 13 in continuous service to other drives buying the farm one day after lifetime and SMART wear indicator is fired.
As drives age, mechanical disruption becomes a much bigger deal. That rack of 13-year drives is probably one earthquake or heavy walker away from completely dead in every U. Even power loss, including from regular shutdown, will probably permanently end the drive when they’re far beyond lifetime. That’s the danger in a 24x7 server setting if you’re not monitoring SMART wear indicators (even if you are, really); power cycling your rack can, and does, trigger multiple hardware failures. All the time. If all the drives in it were from the same batch, installed at the same time, and an equal amount past lifetime, it’s very possible for the whole rack to fail when cycled — I have actually heard of this happening, once.
MTBF is unexpected failure. Design lifetime is expected failure.
Having 100 of this model would predict a failure about every three years (but that doesn’t mean it’d take 300 years to fail all of them). I’d be suspicious of a three year calculation, but it very well might turn out to be accurate. Remember that lifetime and failure rate are independent metrics. They’re warranted for five years, which is probably close to their predicted lifetime, and one drive of 100 failing in that time is certainly plausible.
Having 10 basically implies none of them will fail within a five-year lifetime. Again, plausible, but I think less likely.
Failure rate is also independent of lifetime. Drives have other measurements for lifetime.
You or I buy a phone and look for a terminal. They buy a phone and go straight to the App Store to install Facebook. And yes, people know what they want. They are on Facebook because that’s what they want. Look at pictures of my newborn, group of friends. Oh, all my friends are on Facebook and it lets me do that. What’s that, GNU Social? I need to figure out what? I need a server? Mail is decentralized. How many average people don’t use a central service like Gmail? People are choosing the things Free Software doesn’t like because for them it is better. Full stop.
Free Software has no competitive answer for anything the big names are doing for the average user. Not one thing. There’s enough people interested in it that competitive answers could be developed and find a market. The problem is unrealistic ideals (decentralization, often; how much of global SMTP traffic is spam, again?) placing unrealistic requirements upon a project and focusing all of its resources on things the average user doesn’t care about. What if I wrote a Facebook that cared about privacy and, somehow, miraculously got billion MAU traction? You’d be right back banging the same drum making you irrelevant about surveillance state apparatus because it’s centralized. Except the whole point of Facebook is network effect. So.
You’re deluding yourself if you think billions of people are clueless and Free Software has all the answers, if only there were a little more budget. Just look at the worldview evident in your comment. That sort of talk will make most anybody glaze over, and you immediately lose your chance to pull them to a better way of doing things. “Only use things to which you can read source code.” What’s source code? Nobody cares about the ideals. Adapt accordingly if you want to effect meaningful change. That’s my point.
There’s literally decades of proof based on what’s successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random. You and I both know it’s better. Now figure out how to tell them and design systems that are palatable to the average user.
That’s my other point: I don’t think a customizable system with Free Software ideals in mind can sufficiently protect and be useful for the average user. I want to be proven wrong.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-1.pdf
Even using a time-of-use plan like E6 (which they don't allow any more), off-peak is $0.16728/kWh in the summer, and peak summer is $0.35933/kWh. The ETOU-A and ETOU-B plans they're pushing people toward bottom out at $0.17279/kWh winter off-peak, up to $0.36335/kWh. Again, all baseline figures. Electric Vehicles and over-baseline (read: mining) will punish you to death.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-TOU.pdf
In those rate plans, PG&E apparently spends more on transmission alone than Siberian customers entirely pay for service. Also, good luck explaining the plan structure to someone; it took me 20 minutes of edits just to put this comment together coherently.
I think split world is livable if that divergence is embraced. Running a Xeon server as a workstation is something a lot of developers do. As clients get more locked down, it's probably the direction we'll have to go, and really differentiating what makes a "server" from a "client".
We have to accept that those who need rigid, inflexible computing to protect them far outnumber us. People don’t care if they can rewrite Notepad or read its source code, they care that Facebook works and that they don’t get viruses or added to a botnet. The only way to develop a healthy advocacy here is to understand that the hacker ideals and customizability that we expect of a computing system really make us a vanishing minority and acknowledging that for the now-average user, those ideals make less and less sense as time goes on. We had our run, then everybody else found computers. Times change. It’s not bad.
Is there a way to create your computer? For us, probably. For them, I’m increasingly believing it isn’t. This isn’t a knock against anyone, just an acknowledgment that there are almost certainly two answers to this question and Free Software ideals and beliefs aren’t equipped to handle the much, much larger answer. Proprietary operating systems, walled gardens, Internet centralization, it plays toward all of the ideals Free Software has been holding dear for decades. We have to evolve our thinking, I’m afraid. The less we acknowledge that perhaps Free Software is wrong for the average user, the less we will have a voice at the table; eventually, nobody will listen at all.
Hell, many cars don’t even allow you to work on them any more. Look at Teslas, higher-end Audis, etc. I offered to change my neighbor’s oil in his Audi and he got scared about his warranty.