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.

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.

On windows maybe. Never ran into that on Linux. I understand it’s inconvenient but that’s not the format’s fault, it’s windows developers’.

Induction is objectively better than every other option for anyone connected to the grid looking to buy a new kitchen stove.

Unfortunately it’s one of these things that takes five minutes to explain because everyone has tried the Slumlord Special resistive stove and the general public can’t tell the difference. Those five minutes are why induction uptake is pathetically low compared to how superior it is in literally every way.

Same deal with people who would still buy incandescent lightbulbs if they could just because they don’t understand that technology has moved on from CFLs and to them it’s all “newfangled economic bulbs that can’t light for shit”.

Easier job to do when you’re actually getting reports.

• Reporting = this breaks the rules please moderate
• Blocking = Fuck them, even if they rechnicly abide by the rules I don’t want them near me
• Muting = I don’t want to see what this person does but don’t want to hurt them beyond that

It’s not even about predictions or estimations - everything’s so many years late everyone stopped counting. They just… don’t seem to understand “scoping”? The pitch is “ultra-realistic life-size universe sandbox simulation” and they keep hitting walls because they’re using tech that’s completely inadequate for the task at hand but they won’t let that deter them. They’ve probably reimplemented every subsystem of the Crysis 3 engine a dozen times by now, and it’s still not anywhere near capable of achieving even a tenth of their ambitions. Fuck, they just very recently got their server meshing thing barely working after like a decade of development (at the cost of rewriting everything again of course).

It’s like watching a team raising billions to build the Burj Khalifa but all they have is a bunch of dry sand and some spoons. Deadlines aren’t really the issue.

That’s treading dangerously close to a specific kind of conspiracy theory there.

The EBU has pretty strong financial ties to Israel, not least of which their main sponsor Moroccan Oil. But at the end of the day you can count on the ghouls in charge to always find the coward’s way out and follow the money. It’s the exact same pattern of behavior they had with Russia in 2022, which they initially allowed to compete before backpedalling.

Pretending that this is an issue solely because of some conspiracy is not only baseless, but it also unfairly lets most European broadcasters off the hook for refusing to uphold the set the same hard lines with Israel that they set with Russia. Israel competed because European broadcasters were happy enough to include Israel. Simple as.

It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.

Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.

It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.

There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

Like Trump needs distraction. He could breathe slightly funny or his hands could turn a different shade of purple and the news circus would move on from the birthday book tomorrow, which doesn’t even confirm anything we didn’t already know.

Killer was well-prepared and a good shot, unlike the weirdo who tried to take out Trump. The only unusual thing is that people who have the mental acumen to actually pull something like this off and not get caught immediately tend to be mentally stable enough not to attempt something like that.

But times are a-changing and political violence in the US is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. People forgot that the Rule of Law and Social Contract were meant not just as ways to prevent conservatives from implementing ethnic/religious fundamentalism, but also to prevent this exact kind of thing happening. Trump is at the helm of a government he seemingly distrusts, whose own rules he constantly breaks or ignores, whose institutions he actively sabotages, whose fundamental principles he spits on. As a consequence trust in all three branches of government is crumbling, which inevitably legitimizes political violence as a last resort vector of change.