dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
19d ago
Usually when I run into someone who pooh-poohs those tools, they're the sort of person who wants to write their own epic genius 1337 codegolf in-house tool that has zero documentation, is full of idiosyncracies, and will become someone else's pain in the ass when they leave the company in a year.
To use a toy example, discussing one aspect: lets say you have an app that needs to be up all of the time. A simple solution is to set up the app on one box and a standby on the next box. If it goes down, you simply respond and assess and confirm yes, the primary is down. Lets start the standby.
People absolutely cannot resist looking at this and saying well why do that when you can have the standby take over automatically. And yes I get it that's a reasonable desire. And yes, you can do that, but that model is so much more complicated and difficult to get right. There are frameworks now that help with this, but the cost of setting up an app now is still an order of magnitude higher if you want this kind of automation.
Unfortunately, the modern distributed computing environment is organized around the idea that everything needs to be as high availability as Google search or YouTube. This is the default way of standing up an app.
Maybe your business has one big bread and butter app that needs this, and by all means go ahead, but businesses also have like 100x as many apps that are just support or bean counting tools that absolutely don't need this that you kind of get pulled into setting up the same way. It becomes so difficult to set up an app that teams lose the vocabulary of even proposing that as a solution to small problems.
At the end of the day it's usually easier for a random organizations to spend money on a cloud bill that keeps getting bigger than it is to spend money on sys admins to set up a cheaper, more DIY solution. Hiring the sys admin takes expertise a lot of orgs don't have, and often the search takes time, and you're kind of at the mercy of sys admins who have ornery and persnickety temperaments (not unlike me!)
If you're a tech company yourself you often have the talent to DIY it, though you may or may not consider this the highest ROI investment.
It's not unlike commercial real estate. You can probably save money by buying an office instead of renting, but it's not like you just write a check and you're done. You need to now bring on a facilities maintenance crew, and concern yourself with additional financing and accounting issues, and maybe also directly work with contractors and the regulatory state. Is it natural for your org to pivot into commercial real estate? Or are your resources better invested in your primary business?
I'm in my 40s and believe I'm finally hitting my stride as a young cranky old man. What did it?
Working at a company full of Python developers using Google Cloud.
OMFG I do not care about
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- cloud triggers
- Celery jobs
- Python in general
- anything that ends with .yaml
- Docker
It's not because I don't know these technologies and can't handle it. It's because they're stupid. They seem like they were some half-baked approach done by someone barely competent at the task they were given and bam they're now the industry standard and we all need to use it and everyone frowns at you like you're an idiot if you think people shouldn't be forced to huff that original barely competent developer's farts all day every day.
Well, fuck that and fuck you if you agree with them. We should not tolerate the simplest things taking 100ms (or 5 seconds) or taking 100MB (or gigabytes) or 10 approved PRs.
I'm going knee-jerk write everything I possibly can in C++ from now on. I'm pushing straight to main prod. I don't care if it's not memory safe or difficult to reason about or not "best practice". I will use indomitable volition to solve the problem and when I do it'll be so much faster and I get to really dig in and be cranky and old and superior. Behold, this actually takes only 50 micros and uses 5MB of RAM and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th and the overall cost is 1/100th and this is right and good and just. While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.
I am elite and I know how computers work and this is how you do it. Sorry if you can't keep up, young whipper snapper :sunglasses: :muscle_arm: :smug_smirking_face:
Get. Off. My. Lawn.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I burned a whole rack of GPUs for about a minute having it explain to me why this was funny and it failed
enjoy your inside joke, chums!
atrocities only started once the Europeans dropped by, with their fancy systems of written language, and wrote things down
kind of did the native peoples a favor, enshrining them forever as the "first" nations rather than the "second to most recent nation"
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Why is my urge to troll so overwhelming sometimes?
I live in an extremely leftist town and though I consider myself politically moderate, I want nothing more than to research conversation topics that would destroy the lefties with facts and logic.
Example: leftists love land acknowledgements and talk of giving land back is immediate applause lights in any get together. While researching burn facts about the native peoples of this area, I learned that they practiced chattel slavery!!!!!!
The amount of glee this filled me with was ridiculous. I cannot wait for the next time I'm at a party and can let the local lefties whip themselves up nice and puffy over their reverence for the native peoples and then drop this bomb.
I don't believe this is leftism per se driving me crazy. I would also almost certainly feel this urge if I lived in the Deep South and was surrounded by Christians.
My waifu thinks this is cute and not too unattractive, so that's fine, but she still cautions me about burning my social standing in a place that's lefty out the wazoo and having our family relegated to being one of those low class Trump people.
It's so tempting though. Argh!
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Have you had a calcium score done? My LDL was lower than yours but father had a heart attack at 51. My calcium score came back 95%ile for my age so onto statins I went.
The calcium score is relatively inexpensive though. I paid it out of pocket. Not that much reason not to do it.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Prohibition is the reason most men don’t spend every evening standing around a a little stool with a bottle of liquor getting blasted, like in Russia.
sorry, paint the picture for me? is the stool a makeshift table for a bottle of gin? and there may or may not be glasses?
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I was not aware pre-prohibition era Italians were notorious for drunken wife beating
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I can't find the article at the moment but I believe overdose deaths in Oregon exceeded the rest of the country during the measure 110 period.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
can we find any signal in dry counties in the US? or is the data hopelessly confounded?
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I'm always amused by this argument because my parents, who became legal via the 1986 amnesty, have voted red down the line in every election
my father still insists Nixon was the best president in history
it's true there were more people in the US fleeing communism during that time, so they would be more inclined to vote Republican
what about today? Venezuelan immigrants are in the news, guessing the ones who ever feel inclined to vote won't be so impressed by the way Democrats sound
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Sure, though they only don't want to have a union in their eco-system because it will make labor too expensive and reduce profitability. The fact that it's a step removed doesn't make it less of a valid business reason.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Are you saying if the police were competent they could have caught this guy without needing him to confess unprompted to randos? Or just that it's awfully unnerving how easily it would be for non idiots to get away with random acts of murder?
An NYPD friend told me once that if you just drive to some neighborhood you never go to and shoot somebody on that street the odds that they'll ever catch you are slim to none. But that was in the early 2000s...
since we supposedly wish to let ten guilty men go free rather than let one innocent man go to the gallows, 1 in 20 is pretty good! is my math wrong?
Why does this happen? Some of it is actual dishonest and corrupt prosecutors. A lot of it is that the typical tough-on-crime conservative voter (thanks for being the existence proof, @Hoffmeister25) and the politicians they elect doesn't care if a career violent criminal like Marcellus Williams is actually guilty of the specific crime they are condemned for - he was already in jail for a crime he was uncontroversially guilty of that would be capital in a "tough" system at the time.
as stated here https://www.themotte.org/post/1181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/253893?context=8#context by https://www.themotte.org/@hydroacetylene
There is no one on death row in America today who was wrongly accused because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time due to stopping to change an old lady’s tire on his way home from volunteering at the orphanage. Anti-death penalty campaigners simply don’t have cases of innocent upstanding citizens to take on as a cause célèbre, and, well, the death penalty has literally never been abolished by popular vote, anywhere in the world, countries which abolished it would bring it back in a heartbeat if there were a referendum. The innocence project and CURE and for whom the bell tolls know full well they’ll lose a principled argument. So they’re going to blatantly lie about this guy being a scumbag.
Indeed, "1 in 20 people on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is mildly unsettling.
"1 in 20 scumbags who end up on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is significantly less unsettling and feels like an acceptable error rate.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Yeah this. Confirmation bias. Everyone "learned" this guy they had never heard of before was wrongfully convicted and then nobody could update with contradicting information afterwards.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
While we're on the topic, what's the counter-claim exactly? That this crackhead just randomly decided to frame her ex-boyfriend for a murder that some other guy who was cellmates with him had also decided to frame by complete coincidence for a financial reward?
I suppose if we are maximally conspiratorial, the explanation is the (obviously racist) police were embarrassed with an unsolved murder of a white woman, marked some black dirtbag in prison for it, and fed testimony to two people and then planted the evidence. But if we're that conspiratorial about the police why do we believe any evidence one way or another about DNA? Everything is manufactured. Conflict theorists unite!
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Discomfiting because... ?
The face value implication that he was too stupid / psycho to resist blabbing to people about this brutal murder he did against a totally innocent woman after breaking into her home? Or something else?
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
You are wrong that there was a financial motive. The girlfriend never requested reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder. (Don’t make top level posts explaining the “main points” if your main points are wrong, this isn’t Reddit).
"The Innocence Project" makes this claim.
https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-project-statement-on-the-execution-of-marcellus-williams/
His conviction was based on the testimony of two eyewitnesses who were paid for their testimony.
They don't appear to be arguing in good faith and they are paltering but I don't think anyone expects them to outright lie.
A business is allowed to shut down for any business reason. It cannot shut down because the workers there voted to unionize, that would be unlawful retaliation.
Unless they're allowed to hire non-union workers, I consider it a valid business reason to withdraw from the market.
Being forced by law to negotiate with some group to access labor is unacceptable.
I'm aware on surface reading that this is retaliatory but fuck that.
This is essentially leading to a government enforced cartel that decides all baristas now must be paid X.
I'm in the fat shaming as a form of public health camp but I do sympathize with the morbidly obese. I think we need to adopt Japanese habits if we want to save people from becoming obese in the first place.
But if someone is already obese I believe they're likely irreversibly damaged wrt regulating their own weight.
At my heaviest I hit 260 pounds. Through a moderate amount of discipline I can keep it parked between 210 and 220. Through extreme dieting I can get down to 190 but then I can't stop thinking about food and lose my shit and relapse.
My doctor suggested I would ideally be between 170-180 and that seems impossible tbh.
I have to imagine those set points scale linearly; if I ever hit as much as 400 pounds for whatever reason, my moderate effort would only ever get me down to 320 at most and falling below that would be unsustainable effort.
This is probably the best one can hope for as not ignorant, not entitled and not stupid and it's not great.
What does the NLRB do? I thought unions were like some kind of trade association where all workers join and they collectively bargain with employers if they want access to their skilled labor pool.
That sounds fine, but then I learned that the NLRB exists and it actually makes it illegal for employers to refuse to negotiate with the trade association? And that their labor pool can actually be very unskilled? I'm reminded, recently, that Starbucks was ordered to re-open stores that they shut down because they were union shops?
If a business isn't allowed to shut down without NLRB approval and it must only employ some designated union, I'm going to say they're bad and should have this power revoked.
a bulk of my experience is in quant trading where every minute we were down cost tens of thousands. we actually did engineer a lot of systems the way I described just because they were so much easier to reason about and took much less effort to stand up and maintain
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