Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)A

azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
210
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Microsoft getting nervous about Europe's tech independence

    Jump

  • That's a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It's a matter of tradeoffs.

    The key indicators I'd look at are, in no particular order:

    • Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
    • Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
    • Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It's a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their "IT person" doesn't know what a firewall is.
    • Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
    • Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you'll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I'd recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
    • Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut...

    Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don't (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.

  • Removed

    Jews Have Religious Right to Genocide, Says Israeli Supreme Court

    Jump

  • I can't help but notice that your comment is highly upvoted, with one down vote at the time of writing. I also notice that whenever someone comments something like "Americans deserve Trump and everything that is happening to them" their comment is usually around 50 % downvoted.

    Regardless of your opinion on whether a people can collectively be held responsible for the actions of the majority, it looks like a lot of Americans on this website need to reevaluate their own cognitive dissonance.

    (Also what the fuck is up with the comment at the top of the chain. That is literally hate speech and could get you fined in my country).

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Belgium has some of (if not the) lowest income inequality in the OECD due to our very harsh income tax (highest median tax wedge of the OECD, yes even including the nordics). With quite a few asterisks attached to that statement of course because our fiscal system is a complete mess so if you're special kinds of well off (e.g. you make your income on capital gains) you'll be taxed very little.How low income inequality doesn't correlate to very high standards of living like it does in the Nordics... Well I'll leave it to historians and economists to hash it out. The answer you get will almost certainly reflect that person's personal politics. Harsh industrial decline is worth mentioning though.

    Wallonia is measurably poorer than Flanders, but both regions are developed western economies. The US has a murder rate 535 % of Belgium's, and I don't see anyone warning students away from studying there (or well, not until the past few months).That judge should be investigated and the prosecutor should definitely appeal, and besides there is a lot of work to do safety-wise, especially for women to be able to feel safe, but that's hardly a problem specific to Leuven or Belgium.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
    1. He's dumber than you give him credit for
    2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He's literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

    The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it's more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we're all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

    Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago

  • Removed

    truex

    Jump

  • The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

    So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs ("ils mangent") is silent because the "ent" sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn't for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

    Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it's all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can't spell "nénuphar" properly. Children's purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

  • France and Germany, in joint collaboration, have developed a Google Docs alternative - and its awesome! (Netherlands are currently onboarded)

    Jump

  • I mean yeah it's all very complex for sure. Managing a cluster is very involved and k8s administration is typically a completely separate role from dev/devops. I am comfortable with the idea and I still run my selfhosted setup on docker because it's easier and I have no personal use for multi-node setups.

    However when you get down to it pretty much everything in k8s solves a real problem that in a "traditional" infra would require lots of ad-hoc bullshit. The ingress system of k8s is, at a high level, a standardized recreation of the typical "haproxy+nginx+ad-hoc provisioning" setup you'd find in a "classical" private cloud deployment. TLS in, send to nginx, nginx chooses a relevant healthy back-end and reverse proxies the request. K8s doesn't really do anything crazy complex, the complexity is just inherent to having a many-to-many mapping of HTTP requests while optionally supporting multi-zone setups with local affinity and lifecycle management/awareness.

    But unlike with a traditional deployment there's not a greybeard guru in the back who deployed it all and knows the ins-and-outs so it's quite common that the complexity is not understood and underappreciated by the "admins". That complexity is a blessing when you need to leverage it but a curse when you lack the expertise to understand what is happening holistically.

    Kind of like a linux distro... It's amazing when it works but when libpam throws an error and you don't even know what that library is or does, well you're in for a fun evening.

  • France and Germany, in joint collaboration, have developed a Google Docs alternative - and its awesome! (Netherlands are currently onboarded)

    Jump

  • The "problem" with k8s is not that it's abstract-y (it's not inherently any more abstract than docker), it's that it's very complex and enterprise-y.

    The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you've worked on a complex infra setup that wasn't deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you've seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.

    A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn't have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you've got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.

    Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else's problem. But if you're doing that then you're not comparing against "installing things the old-fashioned way".

  • What do you put in first: Teabag or hot water?

    Jump

  • Lol at everyone in the replies inventing crazy conspiracy theories.

    As someone who has microwaved tea a bunch of times because my workplace didn't have a kettle, let me bestow upon you the truth:

    Microwaved water is slow to boil (especially compared to a 2500 W kettle for us chad 230V enjoyers), about 2:30 for one cup IIRC and the cup will be uniformly heated including the handle which is annoyingly hot to the touch (and I'm not particularly squeamish with hot things).

    Tastes the same though.

  • Freedom software

    Jump

  • Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

    I bet you aren't even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?

  • Development Methods

    Jump
    • Eventually Company decides "agile will fix things"
    • Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
    • PM&Sales don't want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
    • A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
    • Management says "how could this have happened!" and does it all over again.
  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power

    I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it's a cultural divide and I'm not American so I don't view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.

    If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn't obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.

    Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What's next, we can't make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin's feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • There's plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I'm not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That's newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.

    The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it's satire of public figures and – I can't believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.

    Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn't belong in moderation decisions, but that's a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.

  • Leaving when Vault pops up

    Jump

  • I've mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you're getting repeatedly killed by "campers" you're playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

    Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from "camping spots". The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

    Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn't generate any benefit for either team. I don't care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and "you would have gotten more if it wasn't for the campers", you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I'm concerned you're dead weight.

    ... Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

  • Trump reveals 'big, big surprise' for ailing Democrats as he warns Blue states will 'totally disappear off the map'

    Jump

  • MAGA against who exactly? There don't seem to be many high ranking Democrats willing to call out Trump on his bullshit, and none willing or capable of leading an actual separatist movement or insurrection. They're actually even more subdued and helpless than they were in 2017.

    I'd love to be wrong but I'm calling it now; when (blue) "states' rights" get de facto dissolved and/or their midterm elections are obviously rigged, they will buckle silently and proceed with a Peaceful Transition Of Power™. Maybe their attorneys will send a Strongly Worded Letter to the Trump-appointed federal judges in charge of their case, but that's about all the political violence the American Left has an appetite for.

    States being stripped of their independence is exactly what happened to Germany in the '30s and I don't see why the U.S. would suddenly deviate from the script. Your country is way too morally bankrupt to even entertain the idea of a popular uprising.

  • Linus responds to Hellwig - "the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL... if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG."

    Jump

  • Last time around Asahi Lina (major contributor to the Apple Silicon GPU driver) made a very nice writeup on mastodon about her attempts to mainline her work.

    Part of the problem was that the C interface was straight-up broken; not only were a bunch of lifetimes undocumented, but freeing the kernel objects properly was impossible, but GCC doesn't care and neither did anyone because GPU drivers are expected to just... never exit (IIRC). So she refactored it to be saner.

    Anyway apparently it was rejected for much the same reasons, aka Rust bashing thinly disguised as concerns over maintainability.

    Technically the R4L project did have an impact. But what's the worst case? Spending some time on improving the C interface for an edge case? The ignominy! NAK.

  • France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

    Jump

  • The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

    Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren't existential tragedies for our species, I'm just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn't require ever-increasing power to do so.

    Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn't matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

  • I want a programming language that supports German style composite words

    Jump

  • Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you're only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don't give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

    OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.

  • ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off

    Jump

  • Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That's why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

    Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

    Electricity isn't like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is "better" is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not "net zero", disconnected) then it's not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it's actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

    Now this would all be a "you" problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is "dumb". It's either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don't have the necessary infrastructure to "dump" that extra solar somewhere else.

    The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It's more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).

  • Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by maintainer

    Jump

  • Don't force me to deal with your shiny language of the day,

    WE HavE LegItImaTe COnCeRNs

    Exact same shit as last time, some cranky old dude with the territorial instinct of a bulldog sabotages anything to do with rust under a very thin layer of so-called technical concerns, yet refuses to partake in constructive discussion. Like, literally, the changeset is just bindings in rust/kernel? What even is there to complain about regarding maintainability of kernel/dma, given that as far as I can tell the rust devs will deal with any future incompatibilities?

    Very shameful for the kernel community that this kind of aggressive sabotage is regular and seemingly accepted. The incessant toxicity is not a good look and very discouraging to anyone thinking of contributing.