Strongly disagreed. A lot of removable storage benefits very strongly from async writes. The performance benefits are night-and-day and worth the hassle of explicitly unmounting.

I think a better compromise would be to mount non-journaled + removable storage (e.g. vfat USB keys) as sync.

On maybe the third day of my first programming job, a colleague pulled me aside and said “don’t give me ‘shoulds’ and ‘probablys’. You need to sound confident so I can know to trust what you’re saying”.

That guy was a bit of a dickhead in general but there’s a lot of truth there. To the question “what’s the expected impact of this change?”, “None.” is a good answer. “Well it should work…” is not useful feedback and a good Operations Manager will rightfully reject the change.

Of course it is better to be hesitant than falsely confident, but far too many (software) engineers hide behind indecisive language to dodge the necessary hard work of validating their hunches. If you didn’t test your shit fully, just say so. If you’re right, say it. Personal ego doesn’t belong in an engineering discussion.

Real answer: it depends.

• Deleting a file in use: no problemo. File is removed from the directory immediately, but exists on disk until last program who had the file open closes. Everyone wins! (Unless you’re trying to free up space by deleting a huge file that’s being held open by a program and not understanding why the filesystem usage didn’t go down)
• Unmounting a hard drive in use: Will error out similarly to Windows. lsof can tell you which process has which files open. There’s nuance with lazy unmounts and whatnot but that should not be used in most cases.

Now in practice you should be wary of one very important thing that changes compared to Windows: Writes are asynchronous on Linux. First the kernel writes to RAM, then it flushes to disk at a later time for performance reasons (this is one of the reasons why writing a bunch of small files is many times faster on Linux than Windows). The upshot is that just because your file copy is “done” doesn’t mean you can just yank the USB cable. Always safely unmount before unplugging a storage device on Linux.

And Hytale got shitcanned!

It’s actually amazing that in an industry so hell-bent on copying successful formulas ad-nauseam (e.g. Quake&Doom spawning the whole genre of First Person Shooters), Minecraft has not seen anything reach the status of spiritual successor in over 15 years of charts-topping sales performance. Not from its own studio, not from its former creator, not with the Late Hypixel Studios.

There are survival games and base-building games and exploration games, but none of them are “Minecraft-likes” in the way that early FPS were “Quake-likes”. CS has Valorant. LoL has Dota. Tekken has Street Fighter. PUBG has Fortnite has Roblox. Minecraft somehow remains truly one-of-a-kind, a gaming UFO that eludes suits looking for a replicable formula. I actually believe Mojang themselves don’t understand why Minecraft works in the first place either, which is why every update seemingly either underwhelms or angers everyone. That game is lightning in a bottle and no-one knows what to do with it.

If Nadella had a stroke so bad he decided to make Minecraft FOSS, I’d be really interested to see what would happen. If any for-profit company was allowed to make direct Minecraft derivatives, I do think we would see a level of creativity and innovation that would dwarf even the already extremely prolific current modding scene.

I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.

Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.

Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.

If we’re going to be pedantic, let’s do it correctly.

Even with the blinds shut, a space heater will emit a surprisingly large amount of radio waves (mine actually disrupts USB devices with a small EMP when it turns on, and anyone with an RTL-SDR can tell you those 50 Hz harmonics are rough). Some of those radio waves will penetrate the walls/blinds and a tiny fraction might escape the atmosphere and head off into space. From there some will find their way to interstellar space and potentially drift “forever” (well, until the heat death of the universe or whichever theory you subscribe to; I think at that point saying “the photon never got converted into heat energy” is a good enough approximation).

If only.

Should America one day go back to something resembling a functioning democracy, his legacy will be “who could have seen it coming” “no-one I know voted for him” “voter fraud” “we were too afraid” “at least the trains ran on time” “it was China/Russia’s fault”. I’ve heard most of those already.

Variations on all these lies and more were peddled by the Germans after the war and believed by the world. Even by American judges right after WWII who acquitted the overwhelming majority of Nazi War Criminals tried at Nuremberg despite mountains of evidence.

Anything but a society, culture, and individuals holding themselves accountable for easily predictable and predicted failures to govern.

Speed limits are trickier than structural safety margins because of several factors:

• In some areas, particularly remote areas, the process isn’t very well defined. Sometimes the speed limit will be set by one guy who just felt like that was fine. Doesn’t even have to be an engineer really.
• Standards evolve over time (trending towards lower speed limits) but speed limits only change when a tragedy or major road renovation happens. Where I live there’s sometimes a 40 km/h spread on posted speed limits for similar roads depending on whether they were rebuilt last year or 50 years ago.
• Car culture means drivers hold a ton of political power. There are a myriad of traffic devices that cannot be built not because of practical or financial constraints, only because they would “inconvenience drivers”. Lower speed limits are often one of those. People complain so the government backs down despite engineering recommendations.
• A driver is always liable if they drive too fast for the conditions, not the traffic engineer. That goes to the previous point, with zero penalty for not sticking to the sensible engineering choice, political pressure easily wins out. Hard to argue against a work order when the person signing off on it cannot be sued for negligence.

The upshot is speed limits in my local experience have a lot more to do with the municipality/region’s political climate than engineering standards and safety factors. Sometimes I feel like I could safely go 2x, sometimes the limit is 90 km/h on a two-way one lane road with 30 m of visibility where 30 km/h feels like I’m pushing it.

Oh, fun! The debate over the culinary vs botanical meaning of fruit intersecting with the debate of culinary vs topological meaning of soup.

Breakfast cereal is soup[topological] but not soup[culinary]. It is therefore not a contradiction for it to be fruit[culinary].

Water is debatable, everything else why not. If a recipe is generic enough to call for “vegetables”, you wouldn’t be wrong to include any of those things.

Assuming you like eating chicken, when is it wrong to pair chicken with vegetables? I made a vegetable-mushroom-chicken soup last week and it was delish. Whether chicken is or isn’t a vegetable is an academic concern, not a culinary one.

Try putting mushrooms or chicken in the sangria however and you’ll be rightfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

If it goes in soup, it’s a vegetable. If it goes in Sangria, it’s a fruit.

Next question please.

GIMP apologists are what Adobe users think FOSS apologists are like. The principled refusal to even consider fundamental UX principles is astounding.

THANK YOU.

I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.

Being able to assign a nameserver per interface with a domain wildcard is a fucking godsend. I use it every day with a hook script because my job uses some private domains but I don’t want to send my entire DNS history through the VPN. Now ~job.com goes to tun0 and that’s the end of it.

systemd-resolved is not perfect but with libnss’s overly rigid nature the only alternative for my use-case would be to recreate similar functionality to resolved with dnsmasq – which is just objectively worse especially when you want to use DHCP sometimes but not always. Why reinvent the wheel? resolved does its job and does it well. I had some issues with it a few years ago but have been using it for the past couple years without complaint.

There can’t be a war when one of the sides is not fighting nor willing to fight.

I’m not calling for anyone to do anything, just pointing it out: None of the people in charge of any institution nominally opposed to Trump are willing to even come close to that line. Do you really think there is a world in which any blue state governor would authorize any use of force against the feds? And if you can make up a contrived scenario where this does happen, can you imagine it escalating to the sanctioned use of lethal force?

There are factions within MAGA who have drank their own kool-aid so hard they actually think that there are Antifa militias out there and that they can gaud them into giving them a Reichstag Fire. That is lunacy, typical fascistic paranoid violent fantasy.

If they can’t speed up their authoritarian takeover that way, they will simply keep going with their current strategy of slowly overturning all jurisprudence until eventually blue state leaders will politely roll over, invite ICE political officers to oversee their operations, smile, and forward the order to send their children to Trump&Ghislaine’s Fun Family Camp.

Just checked a local factory, 50x50cm is 100 € for a regular window and 200 € to open both ways (entry level PVC, not including installation).

All in all it’s not unheard of for bigger jobs to be south of 1000 €/window for professional installation, though you can get them for half that if you know the right contractors.

??? Of course you do. Investors don’t just buy their way into hypothetical future profits, they buy control over the company. The specifics depend, whether it’s voting shares or the looming threat of debt collection, but the courts will 100 % enforce investors’ right to demand things from companies.

Furthermore the idea that publicly traded companies have some kind of obligation to make as much money as quickly as possible is a reddit-born myth. Shareholders will bring in a CEO, who will be tasked to do whatever and can be fired from the shareholders at any time. Grievous mismanagement and intentional damage can expose a CEO to legal action, just like intentionally destroying tools can expose a worker to legal action. But a CEO acting in good faith has no other obligation than to fulfill the tasks asked of them by shareholders. The problem is that goes wrong when large shareholders plan to sell their shares and need the numbers to look a little better to sell a little higher. But this phenomenon absolutely happens with PE as well – in fact it’s arguably way worse because publicly traded companies at least have legal obligations of financial transparency. Private shareholders can do whatever the fuck they want, including secretly selling their shares to Evil Inc. for them to strip the company for parts and not a single employee has the right to even know who the majority shareholder even is, nervermind what their plan is.

Did Marvel really have a lot of those? I think the main issue is they had too many villains, period. Most of which aren’t misunderstood, merely forgettable. Hero’s Journey + Scary Villainous Antagonist is not the only story template out there.

The problem is most marvel movies aren’t trying to tell a meaningful story with (inter)personal conflict and character growth, but to move their characters along from hijink to hijink using rote storytelling techniques.

There’s nothing wrong with having a BBEG, or a nuanced villain, or even a morally correct antagonist that is only pitted against the protagonist through happenstance. There are Great stories that use all of those tropes. The only relevant question is what story is being told and which antagonist best helps move it forward.