bolson

None of them are old enough to remember USENET, but maybe someone remembers Google Reader

xkcd from 2013 still feels relevant to the nonsense of a lot of the startups out there
xkcd.com/1293/

Job Interview

don't forget the soup port
xkcd.com/1293/

Some cluster db clients talk to one cluster node that won a leader-election system. HA postgres is almost converging towards leader-election?

I think HA postgres has a slower fail-over time than methods that always talk to a cluster. Cluster db clients I see wind up getting routed to talk directly to N nodes of the cluster so that the client knows exactly when quorum happens. No one broken server slows down the client.

But I don't think there's a clear winner for easy-good cluster db. They are all a little hard and a little bad

"Postgres is good enough for 90% of projects" has been my rule a long time, but I'm seeing more desire for higher availability, and running 3+ servers is getting cheaper, so maybe more cluster database in our future

"experiments (derogatory)"

a graph of sunrise/solar-noon/sunset times over 2026. sunrise varies from 5:05am to 7:16am; sunset from 4:11pm to 8:25pm

I don't want millions of people to change their clocks, I want businesses and institutions that care about sunrise to change their start times.
This is what sunrise/sunset does in my timezone, with time change
bolson.org/sungraph/

... and we should just Get Over It and stop moving times, admit that sunrise/sunset move through the year, and things that care should move their times to follow
😉

I am grumpy about social constructs around time, and this is a wonderful whimsical catalog of the conflicting pressures in social constructs around time and date

* ha ha, it's Bronner Soap, it's all fine print

My liquid soap doesn't work right in liquid soap dispensers and I finally I read the fine print on it* and found the bit where it says it is pure hippy soap and lacks the additives to work in liquid soap dispensers

Impeach trump for acts of war without a declaration of war from Congress

I'm getting the suspicion a lot of people in tech don't understand what's going on inside the various technologies they're working with. Too much of that and what's the basis for choosing a new tech? One opaque box is as good as another?

any tool that logs text should have a json-per-line mode.

the tool I'm currently frustrated with often has long multi-line log entries as plain text and I can't really do the search on it that I want to
( message =~ /^foo/ )

I think this fits into Isabel Wilkerson "Caste"; I think the model there is that there must be absolute deference between castes and anything else is unthinkable

The Rock: Diane, 11:30 am, February 24th, I'm entering the town of Twin Peaks Passenger with worried look: I'm not Diane The Rock: [wtf face]

ops production tools have done a lot for 'five nines' deployments; but sometimes I still want something down the hall from prod that's kinda like 'one nine' of reliability because it's still in development; and the full ops tools make that hard and slow to achieve 😞

An Iranian giant conventional bomb with a Strontium emission chaser to make the IAEA worry for a few days until they were sure it was a fake nuke would be some epic trolling

RAM is still king, but fast SSD is a close second. Fast SSD makes so many things better, and my professional day job keeps needing to point this out to people every month for the last 10 years. I haven't been a CPU maxxer in 10 years, a couple steps down from the best is fine, cheap CPU is okay too!

and I could make it, but have terribly little hobby time, and a backlog of other projects, but maybe I still have the sneaking suspicion I could trick myself into it and bang out a rough draft. I will say no more and three weeks from now it will exist or not.

atproto/app.bsky.feed.post needs a thread-reader long-thread-alt-presentation service

Delta should pay me $bignum to fix their shit. Apparently they can't handle a few thousand users accessing their website.

iirc YouTube used to have 1-5 star and decided it was too noisy so switched to like/dislike. This feels a little related, but also feels like Netflix business goals, where super fans are worth much much more to them (and YouTube 'subscribe' is now their favorite signal)

(awkward laugh)
Yeah, I *know* my HS Spanish that I never applied accounts for approximately nada and my pronunciation isn't even good

But really some scrappy competitor should add PDS hosting to their email package and lure me away from Gmail, which RAISED THEIR RATES TO ADD AI FEATURES I HATE

I pay Google for storage space for email, photos, and videos; they should add PDS to the bundle

Tron: The Dude Uploads

I still want to believe good of Obama, so I hear this as "we could just fix stuff, and it's an ethical imperative, but some people don't want to and politics is hard and complicated (and I am so so tired)". To unhoused people we could offer them housing. We have the money to do that, but... [sigh]