sophacles

Directory is a bad metaphor too.

It really is. It's basically chaos monkey for pki.

Code paths and procedures that aren't exercised regularly are broken.

Even better is having a way to reoke keys and big players occasionally include revoked keys in trust chains and blast a warning if the revoked key is considered valid.

Bad comparrison. The less time my computer spends doing things the less battery I use.

An F1 car goes faster but also uses more fuel to do so.

Any one tool being a bit faster doesn't make my batter last noticeably longer, but defaulting to using the efficient tooling gets me results I can see.

Of all the things... i never expected there to be an XKCD for this: https://xkcd.com/221/

In context of time machine backups...

The link will be whatever the fastest network port you can get on an apple machine is. Its not 200Gbps - the apple end will be the limiting factor. A single core can probably fill that just fine.

And being pedantic - 200Gbps links are not a significant percentage of installed network ports in the computers in the world... so "almost any" is pretty accurate.

I live in an area of the US that pre-pandemic, it wasn't the case of "everything scheduled and planned". I'd wake up, wander down to the cafe and chat with people I knew around town... just whoever I'd see. After work I'd go to the downtown area and just stop at pubs and patio cafes and whatever and sit until someone I knew came by or I saw someone doing the same and stop and chat with them.

After the pandemic it's like everyone forgot this. The coffee shops are all students studying or people rushing in and out, the pubs and cafes are all ghost towns or groups of people being very insular. Even at events like the farmer's market there's less socializing and more "go get the things and go move on, don't look around, don't talk to people", the vendors even mention how boring it is these days without anyone just chatting anymore.

"Go out and be in the world" seems to have just died.

Hate to break it to you but that wasn't new in the 50s and 60s. The mechanisms by which it was done were changing away frome the machine politics of earlier eras - but ways to regulate what can and can't be done by neighborhood have been around since the birth of the country. Use of eminent domain for public works private ventures is at least as old as the railroads. Planned suburbs, company towns, bedroom communities and the like are all 19th century "new" things in the US.

Its been a bad habit since 9/11 and the disgusting mess that is the PATRIOT act.

Never underestimate how much most Americans will gladly shit on their freedoms if they're told it will hurt someone slightly different than them.

CGI does allow arbitrary HTTP headers.

The main idea of a database is to support storing data in a structured and queryable way. Concurrency came later.

This is not the first small company with a popular opensource project that was acquired. Its not the first time such an acquisition resulted in the shuttering of the flagship product. Its not even the first time the shuttering was announced at acquisition (vs the acquirer letting the product just slowly atrophy away).

I doubt it will be the last time.

In some circles they are. You think all the fancy RGB stuff and fancy lights to call attention to the gamers' PCs are about functionality? Or maybe are they about status?

Tools or and goods often serve as both status symbols and functionality.

Do you think fancy cars are just about transport? Or maybe they also serve as status symbols?

Do you think the special sword for the king which he uses to knight people is just a tool of war? Seems to me that its all three tbh.

All sorts of things in our lives are both functional and status symbols and/or serve a ritual purpose.

Heck there are all sorts of things that are not really functional any more but were very functional at one point and still serve as status symbols and ritual purpose, for example - the traditional gift of a fancy fountain pen to a recent law school graduate.

I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.

What about it is ragebait? Even at the top they clearly don't give a shit what the law says.

In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.

First: of course it's generalizations. "How to write a program" advice is never about hard rules and is ususally some generalizations and heuristics that when applied well can result in nice programs. When over-applied or treated as hard rules you end up with FacadeFacoryFactories and other such absurdities.

Second: From an SE perspective it has some nice properties too. Obviously every "if" can't be moved up - even the for's that are being pushed down have an implicit "if". But when you try to follow the advice without making the code too crazy, you end up with business logic clustered in a much smaller number of places, and don't have to dig down into a leaf function in an unrelated module to find out why the some transaction was being rejected (aka the accountants said that qty > 100 was not allowed or whatever).

Problems with lead: it's toxic and it accumulates, lead doesn't leave you and builds up over time. It's not just toxic in the sense that too much will kill you, but even small quantities can cause nerve and brain damage, among other things. It is easier for your body to absorb lead than many other elements.

My comment was pointing out that despite lead being known for millennia as a problem in people, it was used for:

* water delivery pipes * plates and cutlery and cups * a paint ingredient in everyone's home * a sealant * a fuel additive that was spewed into the air by every motor vehical * a lubricant in a lot of machinery * a common additive to many additional products all over the place * a common additive in industrial processes leaving lead residue on products that wouldn't otherwise contain lead.

So the phrase: "underpins most of the technology in the world" somewhat realistically applies to lead - in the early 1900s it was everywhere all the time.

And as i pointed out at the start of this - it is kind of a bad choice to be using all the time in everything since it causes so many problems for people. Humanity has been dramatically reducing the use of lead in everything for a long time now (decades) and will continue to do so for a long time. The bad effects of all the lead use during the industrialization of our species will remain for quite a while.

So my whole point was: just because something was used in the creation of great outcomes, it doesn't make it any good in a fundamental way. I'm saying C is like lead in my analogy.

It's because your blog is good. Not all blogs need to be primers targeted at idiot level leeches who abhor thinking for themselves and cry when confronted with facts like "the author is a different human than me".

Yes, but a lot of bone is not cells, but just an extruded substrate of calcium (etc). Like lignin, or coral.

A lot of the wood is used for transporting water - vital to keeping the trees alive high up in the branches. And it is structural - so should we subtract 70% of the bone weight from a mammal since it is non-living structural support?

Some of us have the job "get stuff done correctly" though.

It's useful to know where your software comes from. If something is largely funded by one company, we know it will move in the directions favorable to that company - you can be ready for it to move in a direction that you aren't happy with. If your stance on privacy is "my software should preserve it", perhaps primary developers of that software's association with anti-privacy advocates is worth consideration. This is particularly important in OSS with it's "no guarantees, no warantees, no accountable party" disclaimers - otherwise you might get fucked over when the next release starts doing something you really don't want it to (to extend the example above: e.g. sending all the logs to google or whoever).

It absolutely can. See for example: lead.

I met Mr Draper once. I was staying at the SFO hyatt, or maybe the Mariott, and had a couple hours to kill after breakfast and noticed there was some sort of conference going on, so I crashed it. I walked into a talk room and sat in the front row and introduced myself to my neighbors. On one side was Steven Levy (author of many books in the industry) and the other was Bill Draper. I don't really remember the conversation, nor even the topic of the conference - it was a brief conversation in the 5 or 10 minutes before the talk started. At the time I didn't really know who he was but I was a little star-struck by Mr Levy, and it was Levy who told me I should be more impressed by being next to Draper. Mr Draper thought that was funny and the three of us chatted a bit more about whatever. I found it interesting that Mr. Draper was a surprisingly relatable guy (particularly given what I know about him know) and that he was very insightful of technology for someone who was in his 70 or 80s at the time.

RIP Mr. Draper. I didn't know it when we talked, but you helped make my career possible - thanks!

The floor of most houses for most of history was made of dirt.

If I hear "they" are foreign" I'm capable of any or all of the following as situationally relevant:

* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on the antecedent.

* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on other context.

* deciding if the singular or plural actually meaninfully changes the meaning of the statement within it's context and not worrying about if it doesn't.

* in the vanishingly rare cases where it's meaningful, contextually unclear, and I am still unsure, I can ask.

I may be an imbecile, but fortunately it takes only a minuscule amount of mental power to handle all this. English has a lot of redundancies and deducing from context is built into the language.

So when hear a simple snippet "they are foreign" I assume either it will become clear from further context, or it doesn't matter how many people "they" refers to since someone is having a tantrum about pronoun usage.

Perhaps what's really bothering you isn't that I pointed out the historicity of a common, centuries-old pattern in the English language, but rather that someone missed naptime and is grumpy.

People have been using "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun for 600 years. I doubt you're old enough to find this confusing.

I'm sober, both in the immediate sense and in the sense that I haven't had a drink in 23 years. I know that drinking is not a good thing for me, for many reasons.

If you want to go home and have a beer or whatever - have a good time. If you want to go to the bar later and have a drink - maybe I'll go with you and sip a fancy mocktail or something, we can take turns buying rounds. If you want to get wasted and party all night - have fun, I had a lot of fun nights that way (please don't drive though).

I'm not opposed to anyone else's drinking. I just know I can't.

Teetotal implies an opposition to all alcohol use. A teetotaler is against you drinking. I'm not opposed to that at all, I just choose for myself to be sober, for a myriad of personal reasons.

> You linked to a data center that was a bitcoin mining operation and ...

> I don’t think you understand how people operate.

Hahaha you think people care what the datacenters do.... and you accuse me of not understanding how people operate.

I don't know specifically, I'm not the person who posted about that database. But it happens all the time, even in 2026 at good tech companies.

It tends to come from a couple of common places...

* efficiency - triggers, stored procedures and constraints can often speed up throughput in terms of transactions per second by reducing the number of round trips from the application to the db. I know above i mentioned its not about qps necessarily, but a telephone billing db probably includes records of calls and txts and so on, which across millions of people adds up.

* Older architecture patterns didn't put a single service in front of a database for that service. Instead theres a single database for the company, or for a function within the company, and many programs and services interacted with that database. In such an architecture, stored procedures and triggers are really useful for some business logic, to ensure consistency between various systems... Need to update tax rules for one state? Just donit in the db instead of the sales pos system at the stores and the billing system and the phone operator sales system and the website and the gateway for 3rd party sellers, etc. there's a certain logic to it too... This data is fundamental to the business and has lots of rules associated with it, those make sense to place together - the rules change independently of the systems accessing those rules, and over the life of the company those rules tied to laws and accounting may last far far longer than any given pos system or website rewrite.