zbentley

33 ms·

601.
by zbentley 10mo ago
Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads. YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are b
602.
by zbentley 10mo ago
Ah, gotcha. Yep! Not constant-calculated at all!
603.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops. (Edited to remove glib and vague rejoinder, sorry) Then hibernate/reboot it instead of stopping it? Alternatively, that’s what backup-to S3, periodic snapshot-to-EBS,
604.
by zbentley 10mo ago
That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own thei
605.
by zbentley 10mo ago
I’ve worked for banks, multiple large and small US healthcare-related companies, and businesses that didn’t use their software when they were closed for the night. All of those places needed their backend systems to be up 24/7. The ban
606.
by zbentley 10mo ago
My point is that just because those problems can be solved with better telemetry doesn’t mean that is actually done in practice. Most organizations do are much more aware of/sensitive to failures upstream/at the edge than they a
607.
by zbentley 10mo ago
Yep! I was mostly replying to TFA’s claim that AWS RDS is > Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks … and other operational tools deployed alongside it. That’s not always true: RDS classic may be those things,
608.
by zbentley 10mo ago
…in which case, you should probably use a hosted offering that takes care of those things for you. RDS Aurora (Serverless or not), Neon, and many other services offer those properties without any additional setup. They charge a premium for
609.
by zbentley 10mo ago
And rental/SaaS models often provide an extremely cost effective alternative to needing to have a lot of slack. Corollary: rental/SaaS models provide that property in large part because their providers have lots of slack.
610.
by zbentley 10mo ago
There is plenty of provider markup, to be sure. But it is also very much not a given that the hosted version of a database is running software/configs that are equivalent to what you could do yourself. Many hosted databases are extre
611.
by zbentley 10mo ago
For a fascinating counterpoint (gist: cloud hosted Postgres on RDS aurora is not anything like the system you would host yourself, and other cloud deployments of databases should also not be done like our field is used to doing it when se
612.
by zbentley 10mo ago
I wish I lived in a world where that worked. Instead, I live in a world where most downstream service issues (including database failures, network routing misconfigurations, giant cloud provider downtime, and more ordinary internal service
613.
by zbentley 10mo ago
Really? That might be an anecdote sampled from unusually small businesses, then. Between myself and most peers I’ve ever talked to about availability, I heard an overwhelming majority of folks describe systems that really did need to be up
614.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> alerts LE to just ... "check in on you". This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, loo
615.
by zbentley 10mo ago
That’s your choice, though please consider that many people who worked for those places may have done so before the behavior you disagree with started. Also consider that there are reasons to work for an organization other than “paycheck” a
616.
by zbentley 10mo ago
It’s not that. It’s a several-years-old (and still very good) book by one of the original leaders of the USDS, a group which put many of the proposals described therein into practice.
617.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best Yes, and a big part of this involves changing the way agencies rely on contractors for specialty work (including tec
618.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee It’s worth being specific about what is meant by “political appointee” here. That term has specific legal meaning in the context of federal staffing, and (as I understand it, not
619.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> extensive experience in both tech and government. The USDS (group that was renamed to a part of DOGE) has previously hired with an emphasis on non government experience: http://govciomedia.com/usds-developing-innovati
620.
by zbentley 10mo ago
> Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you GS grade does not correspond directly to manager/managee relationships at plenty of federal agencies. Some
621.
by zbentley 11mo ago
> some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable. That correctly identifies the problem. Now why is that, and how can we fix it? It seems fixable; native GUI apps have COM bindings th
622.
by zbentley 11mo ago
Because the instant I want a dependency, I’m screwed. Half of what I want isn’t on CPAN, and the other half is ten years out of date and requires a compiler toolchain, fifty undocumented build dependencies at nonstandard paths, and five obs
623.
by zbentley 11mo ago
I think a lot is riding on that “generally”. You’re right that the default approach/majority of cases should avoid shelling out wherever possible, but there are a large minority of situations where doing that does make sense, including
624.
by zbentley 11mo ago
Perhaps it’s a marketing problem, then. Signal is marketed as a secure and full-featured alternative to things like WhatsApp and iMessage. Most people start reading that sentence after the word “secure”, and then are surprised and disappoin
625.
by zbentley 11mo ago
Yes. And malicious egress traffic (bad actors or malware exfiltrating data) typically routes to deliberately-unpredictable and constantly changing IPs. Like, I don't love TLS MITM-ing. It's not a good thing. But it's the lea
626.
by zbentley 11mo ago
Types with inner pointers add difficulty to be sure, but it’s still possible to use them with this pattern. You have to make sure of three things to do so: 1) no pointers outside of the backing memory; 2) an explicit “clear()” function that
627.
by zbentley 11mo ago
The upcoming lazy import system may help with startup time…but if the underlying issue wasn’t “Python startup is slow” but rather “a specific program imports modules that take a long time to low”, it’ll only shift the time consumption to ru
628.
by zbentley 11mo ago
I think GP was talking about optimizing away the O(N) call on the last line. The GC will take care of removing the reference to the old (mutable) dict, but constructing a new frozendict from a mutable dict would, in the current proposal, be
629.
by zbentley 11mo ago
Eh, I'm not so sure. Most companies are only somewhat serious about infosec, so they run some light endpoint protection or BYOD, but don't do much network-level restriction on end user devices. For companies in that position, it&#
630.
by zbentley 11mo ago
That’s vastly more failure prone (crowdstrike crashes workstations) and abuse prone (kernel code has the highest privilege level) than processing network traffic at the network/TLS level.

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