throwaway787544

What about the harm done by allowing publication from a group of humans killing other humans? Russian research institutions were given carte blanche while the state murdered innocent Ukrainians (and still does). Yet all the high and mighty science institutions keep insisting we should keep supporting Russian research. The ethical thing to do would be to use the influence of the scientific community to hinder, impede, and block any group that so horrifyingly and blatantly violates human rights. But apparently we're all okay with oppression as long as we're not the ones being oppressed.

Ethics make us sound noble, but nobody will stand up to China, or the USA, or Russia. We all care about getting ours much more than we care about protecting people. The hypocrisy is so obvious nobody mentions it, like a turd on the sidewalk. Step over it and move on.

Go fly a kite.

Programmers who only do programming, suck at programming. You can't get perspective by sitting still. You have to expose yourself to new things.

Learn how to sail. Take up stamp collecting. Grow exotic flowers in teacups. Earn a black belt. Become a baker. Go to a lindy hop dance night on the weekend. Take apart and put together an engine. Learn a new language. Travel the world.

After all that, programming will seem like a walk in the park. You'll probably get bored with it, honestly. Computer science is a pretty limited field and has had minor incremental improvements over the past two decades. Hardware stuff gets more advanced but the software is mostly the same as 30 years ago. Still, outside experiences will help inform your perspective on what works and what doesn't, where the sides of the box are. Aside from that, just practice a lot, in a lot of different fields.

Also, please don't make the mistake of trying to prove yourself through achievements. We would all much rather work with the best person in the world than the best programmer.

If someone would pay for it I'd write that book. There are lots of different methods for different scenarios. There are some books on it but they're either very dry and technical or have very few examples.

Here's the cliffs notes version for your situation:

1. Build a server. Make an image/snapshot of it.

2. Build a second server from the snapshot.

3. Use rsync to copy files your PHP app writes from one machine ('primary') to another ('secondary').

4. To make a "safe" change, change the secondary server, test it.

5. To "deploy" the change, snapshot the secondary, build a new third server, stop writes on the primary, sync over the files to the third server one last time, point the primary hostname at the third server IP, test this new primary server, destroy the old primary server.

6. If you ever need to "roll back" a change, you can do that while there's still three servers up (blue/green), or deploy a new server with the last working snapshot.

7. Set up PagerDuty to wake you up if the primary dies. When it does, change the hostname of the first box to point to the IP of the second box.

That's just one way that is very simple. It is a redundant active/passive distributed system with redundant storage and immutable blue/green deployments. It can be considered high-availability although that term is somewhat loaded; ideally you'd make as much of the system HA as possible, such as independent network connections to the backbone, independent power drops, UPC, etc (both for bare-metal and VMs).

You can get much more complicated but that's good enough for what they want (redundancy) and it buys you a lot of other benefits.

The main purpose of K8s is just to run microservices. It makes things convenient by automatically restarting services, running multiple copies across servers, routing from one load-balancing port to many ephemerally-allocated ports, collecting logs, providing a consistent control API, limit system resources, networking, secrets...

...All things Systemd does. Some bored admin just needs to make a patch to make systemd processes talk together, and half the point of Kubernetes will be gone.

All the extra shit like CNI and Operators are there because K8s' own abstraction is too complicated so they had to add more abstractions to deal with it. Managed Distributions of K8s go away if every Linux distro can do the same things out of the box. "Managing fleets" just becomes running more Linux VMs or not. You wouldn't need "clusters", you'd just run a bunch of boxes and run replicas of whatever service you wanted, and all resources would be managed using normal Linux system permissions and Systemd configs. No volume mounts or persistent storage setup, it's just regular filesystem mounts and disks. Containers would be optional, eliminating a huge class of complexity (static apps make a lot of containerization moot).

And most importantly to admins - no more bullshit 15 month upgrade death march. Imagine just sticking to a stable Debian for 3 years but still having all the power of a distributed orchestrator. Imagine not having 50 components with APIs listening on the internet to be hacked. Imagine just using IPTables rather than custom plugins that change based on the Cloud provider just to filter network traffic, and not letting everything on the network access everything else by default.

K8s is just too expensive, complicated, and time consuming to survive. As soon as Systemd can network as a cluster, the writing's on the wall. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is the Systemd developers are basically desktop-oriented Linux fogies rather than Cloud-focused modern devs.

I also predict RedHat will block patches to make this happen, since their money comes from K8s. But someone just needs to make a Systemd fork using Systemd's own API and we can finally fix all the crap Systemd devs like to pretend is somebody else's bug.

> This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.

It's really not. This is some pretty sad FUD.

Unsafe to swim in waters. Trash not taken out. Crop failure. Inflation. Low heating fuel reserves (in a country that doesn't even get snow). Strikes. Absent politicians.

This is basically an average week in many countries.

There's a lot of limitations within those protocols that just make things unnecessarily difficult and limit functionality. Port numbers and the lack of logical service names, lack of routing across disparate unroutable routes, lack of carrying forward/back diagnosis of network segments, etc. HTTP as an additional transport protocol is a shitty hack that people use to work around some of those issues but more remain.

We will have to abandon TCP eventually. We can't keep using the same protocol for 100 years. We should think about the next generation stack, what we would ideally like to solve, and not just tiny little incremental changes that preserve legacy design quirks. But sadly it's in the hands of industry rather than researchers and practitioners.

Off topic, but I noticed today that all the major US carriers now charge a premium for their SIM cards. They all want me to pay $10 just to walk out of their store with a SIM and no plan. AT&T was nice enough to discount it with an in-store coupon. But MVNOs don't seem to do this; their sims are $1 or free.

No company I have worked for in the past 10 years has used Make at all, other than when I'm using it, and that's because I'm just old and used to it. Developers use build tools designed for their language, Syseng use ci/cd and shell scripts, very large teams standardize on some "modern" overcomplicated monstrosity.

Please don't tell people "you are wrong / don't do X", especially if it's not objectively true. It's negative, rude, judgemental, and bossy. Find a kinder way to make your point and people might listen to you. (If you don't care if people listen to you, why are you speaking?)

The teacher in that example had 13 years of service and worked in one of the better paying public schools in New Jersey. She said she was paid pretty highly at around $60K (iirc). I do remember there was a kind of pecking order where more entry level teachers would make lesson plans, but the senior teachers still had to help the younger teachers learn how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves when nobody else could (teachers might trade between each other what extra work they needed).

Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.

Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.

Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.

If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.

The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.

Benefits and pension are wildly overblown. Half of teachers don't even qualify for pension and benefits vary greatly. https://www.teacherpensions.org/blog/what-average-teacher-pe...

It's not enough money.

That's interesting actually, because it seems written by a contractor. Each role in each industry probably has its own warped methodology, which means a "better" methodology will need to be tailored to the role & industry. So we might need 40 methodologies, not one.

I stopped going to stand-up and simply posted a Slack thread for status. The people who didn't like it are the people who would ramble on at stand-up, uncomfortable being curt or ending a meeting early. They'd ask "anyone have anything else to talk about?" just to fill up extra time. No preparation ahead of time, so a lot of "oh yeah and also..."

Yes, we know this. We've known this for a long time actually. Nobody has yet proposed a better method.

- The agile manifesto is a smattering of nice-sounding principles with no suggestion of how to achieve/implement them.

- Scrum is an over-prescribed, subtly-complex theoretical workflow from the 1980s that was carried forward in the absence of any alternative other than Waterfall, in the same wake that created TDD, XP, and other now-ancient methods that we pay lip service to.

- DevOps came and went like a fart in the night. Was supposed to result in better outcomes for developing and running software projects. It's now literally a cargo cult. People who have no idea what it is, saying that they "do" it.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to work, by all means, someone please blog about it, I will read it. But please no more blog posts about how Agile or Scrum don't work. We have a decade of those posts already.

Not a bad idea... Round it out with some leap-frog for plyo, animal crawls. You could turn burpees into a fun game. (Where is the parent-kid playtime-workout video that we all need? Tire the kids out and give the parents a couple sets)

We all know Pavel's "Grease the Groove" works from experience; this is just scientific back-up.

If you want to be in marginally better shape, set between 4 and 10 timers every day, and do one set of push-ups, or squat jumps, or both, when the timer goes off. If you're not used to this, do half push-ups or lower-down push-ups. For the squat jumps add some weight (i.e. dumbbells) over time. You can play around a lot with push-ups and squat jumps, both to make them more interesting and work different muscle groups.

Most meetings I go to are superfluous and can be replaced with a slack thread; I think the noise would encourage fewer (and shorter) meetings. Stack them all up at either the beginning or ending of the day and then go to a coffee shop for a few hours.

I would almost go back to an office, if the company would stop being so lazy and incompetent. Every company is insanely disorganized and inefficient.

You can never find other teams, projects, code, docs, company policies, vendor agreements, onboarding guides, meeting notes. "Agile" became an excuse to not give a shit what anyone did and let everything devolve into the lowest common denominator: tribal silos. Business units are fiefdoms.

Getting access to anything is a scavenger hunt and still takes a week after opening a ticket. There is no useful self-service automation. Desktop support for developers is pathetic while it's top-notch for paper pushers. Nobody has a baseline of training even though we all really need to know certain processes to do our jobs correctly.

Security is a complete joke. They harp on us for falling a phishing test when they have terrible UX to identify real emails, like that's the single thing other than rotating passwords that makes the company secure. Meanwhile the intranet doesn't have an SSL cert.

We can't get 10 grand for some critical SaaS we need for our jobs, but they'll plunk down that much per year on junk food we don't need. But also please work overtime for free because you're salaried and it's expected.

Get your shit together, companies. Do that and maybe I'll drag my ass all the way to your annoying open floor plan I-forgot-my-badge-can-someone-buzz-me-in germ-spreading hot-desking offices and ignore the lies you tell about this being for productivity.

Starbucks should just open co-working spaces. It's literally just a Starbucks but with monitors, keyboards and mice.

Coffee shops are so much better than offices. The only time I get interrupted is to ask me if the seat next to me is taken. I can go to any one I want to at any time. I am not required to stay there for any length of time. The cute barista remembers my order. (Ok, that last one's a lie, but we can't have everything)

How are they gonna go to college? Nobody in their family went. Their friends didn't go. They have family they need to stay home and take care of (no child care, elderly care, limited food assistance) and work for, in whatever way that means. Even if they went, it's not like every millennial with a degree gets a job, even with record low unemployment. Transportation is also problematic, just to get to a school, or a job. Rap sheets keep people from applying or being accepted. There's usually no jobs program to help older people transition from obsolete industries.

It takes a lot of outreach to get anyone to trust the system, if they have a flexible enough situation to go. Most people just don't see education being a solution, so they aren't going to jump out on a shaky limb in the hopes it might catch them. Better the devil you know.

I don't care if someone sells my data, I care if some company gets compromised and doesn't tell me. And it makes it harder for bots to crack the same account at multiple places.

Central.

There are 10 regions of NY State. According to NYCers, literally the entire state outside of the Hudson Valley is "upstate" - you could live an hour from Cleveland,OH or an hour from Montreal,BC , and both are "upstate". So it helps to be more specific when suggesting a place in NY.

Local residents do feel that way. They have no money, no education, no job prospects, and don't feel they get respect. The fact that their cultural values are also at odds with the "haves" (in their view) further cements the view. But in a very real policy and economic sense, they literally were abandoned when industry left. Wall Street and Tech zoomed on while their factories and mines closed with no recourse to be able to recover from the economic vacuum.

It's called poverty. Welcome to rural America. Went down the shitter when industry left and the rest of the country ignored it for decades, so now we have MAGA, drugs and crime, and a whole lotta cheap land.

Philly has 4+ hospitals in center city (Jefferson, Penn), 7+ in university city (Drexel, Penn, CHOP), and a smattering more all over. Baltimore had 3+ hospitals near downtown but I think most got absorbed into UMMS, so it's Hopkins and UMMS, but lots of different facilities around.

Stripped a bolt. Luckily our town also has an auto parts store (we have a lot of stuff!!) and they had those giant stripped bolt extracting sockets, but no replacement bolt.

Have you ever tried to find the rear brake caliper housing assembly bolt for a 2nd gen Scion xB? Not the slide pins or bracket bolts, the housing assembly that holds the whole caliper onto the wheel. Nobody sells it, you have to get it from a dealership, who's 2 hours away and ships via USPS (there is no way to get there without a car). They then screw up which part it is because nobody ever orders this bolt and the parts diagrams don't label it well. So you wait for a different part to be shipped again. All after getting the normal brake parts shipped and trying to install them which took a week on its own. So about 3+ weeks.

(If you have a second car you could maybe go around hardware stores looking for an identical bolt, but even then the steel and threads may be different, as different bolts have different torque specs due to whether that bolt's threads are supposed to stretch or not in order to bind. These bolts are very low torque even though they are for a caliper assembly)

"It depends."

My town actually has an E.R. and urgent care. We have a CVS in town too (my town has a lot of stuff!!). There are also medical taxis (there are no regular taxis here) and private hire ambulances that'll take you if you need a different hospital.

Typically you get the number of the closest general doc to you, and make good friends with your neighbors, so somebody can drive you to a hospital right away if you cut your leg off in the middle of the night. Could be a long way off or right around the corner, it depends.

The biggest thing I never anticipated? Car parts. My brakes went and rather than bring it to the local mechanics I tried to fix it myself. Walk into town takes about 40 minutes, getting the right parts took weeks.

Power also went in the spring due to freezing rain bringing down trees. Cell signal went, along with power and internet, and my water well's pump is electric; heat is propane but the damn heater's thermostat went, probably electric too. So being prepared to be off-grid once a year is useful.

I live in the outskirts of a poor rural town in NY. We have 2 bars, some restaurants, a coffee shop, a fast food chain, some dollar stores, a grocery store, hardware store, antiques, gas stations, etc, Library and a little theater, farmers market on weekends. River runs nearby with a put-in for kayaks and fishing. Biggest town/city nearby with big box stores is about 45 minutes. They have fiber internet here but it's very expensive and the 300/20 Mbps is fine for me. 5G varies by region & provider.

Honestly... It's kind of great. The people are nice, the scenery is gorgeous, it's pretty quiet, and most everything you need is right in town. Since the community is so poor, all the housing is cheap. Nearby towns are all bought up as second homes for expats. Everything outside town is an old farm.

The worst thing about the place is it's a minimum 2 hour drive to anywhere, and having a car is mandatory to get here. But if you have everything you need, there's no need to leave. There is no Uber/Lyft/Instacart/GrubHub, don't expect any startups here. Cell service outside of towns is mostly nonexistent. Also know that none of your old friends will ever visit because it's way too inconvenient.

The only things I miss are "big city" things and more people around into the same things I'm into. And an international airport would be nice, but it's not like I was flying around the world every weekend before.