• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Wonder what the engineering solution to this could look like…

    Thinking something like a zero trust model being required for all web requests… Like the target address would need to receive a validated identity token from some third party but that token couldn’t contain identifying info about the requester. Likewise, the validating third party would need to verify the identity of the requester without having knowledge of the target address.

    Then that raises more questions like who would we all be comfortable trusting as a verifier and what data would we use for that validation? The validation system and the data used to validate would need to be provided for free too to account for low income people so no subscription services or hardware MFA keys. Also who counts as an identity to be validated?

    What do enforcement mechanisms look like if this does get built? Are the validators entirely passive or do they actively participate in the process? Like do we have rate limits imposed by the validation engine or do we just leave that to the target address/organization to impose themselves? What happens if someone is banned from a site? Does the site notify the validators to drop requests earlier in the lifetime of a request? Do individuals get a lower request quota than corporations? Would you have to form a company just to prototype a new tool/product?

    If someone seriously wanted to work on this I’d jump on the opportunity to work with them. It sounds like a fascinating project.


  • It’s a big, stupid truck but so is every other truck it’s competing against. It’s got poor visibility but so does every other truck/suv being sold in America. The cheapest option doesn’t have the longest range but it’s still longer than the average person would realistically drive in a day. It can’t haul much but the overwhelming majority of people driving trucks in America aren’t towing or hauling things on a day to day basis… The people doing real work buy vans or have special purpose trucks.

    The steering geometry seems nice and the rear wheel steering is interesting. Those seem like the only major positives though.

    It’s not as bad as everyone seems to be making it out to be but it’s obviously still a dumb car that shouldn’t exist. That’s all cars though really.

    EDIT: Since the front windshield is flat, I assume its cheaper to replace than typical curved windshields? No idea though… Might be talking out of my ass.


  • The FEIE is only concerned about your relationship with America. It doesn’t matter what country/countries you decide to live in.

    As far as the transition, I didn’t know it was happening until much later. When I left America it was to travel full time. I wasn’t specifically going to one place so saying goodbye to friends and family was like, “I’ll be around. Catch you guys later.” 2-3 years later I was thinking to myself, “Oh shit… You’re like… really gone.”

    For work, I hold myself pretty strictly to working on US east coast hours so there is as little friction as possible with the employers. I moved my phone to a virtual provider and updated all banking and W4 paperwork to use a mailbox service in Florida (no state level income tax in FL).

    You do get very bored with tourist stuff though. I think I would rather die than set foot in another museum or see some old building or religious site or whatever… Now 100% of the travel I still do is to see people I care about.

    Good luck.







  • Certs are a waste of time tbh. If you have 8 years of experience, you should have more than enough to fill out a resume already.

    An AWS cert is almost certainly even more useless for you specifically unless you wanted to get into devops/sre and do systems design. I have been in sre for a very long time and have never even heard of anyone writing tooling in Java. That section of the industry is entirely dominated by go, python, and (more often than anything else) bash for really quick automation.


  • I think most of the answers here are kinda lame. It’s not easier to deal with networking rules or backups or flakey consumer grade Internet or power outages or redundancy or a lot of other things.

    The only things I find value in self hosting are functional things for the home… A bittorrent client with web front end, plex server, file server for the plex server, a home automation stack, or as a cheap sandbox for testing new software…

    You’d save a lot of time and energy just using web or mobile based apps where appropriate. The day to day reliability of those kind of apps will be better as well.

    If someone is doing this for a hobby, great. Enjoy. It’s not practical for the overwhelming majority of people though. I say this as someone who’s literal job is ensuring reliability of web services… I am more than capable of doing all this but I’m also practical about seeing when it’s a net benefit vs a time/energy suck.






  • Hated Windows. TechTV had a download of day that “works on both Windows and Linux!”

    “I don’t know what Linux is but it can’t be worse that Windows.”

    I’ve been on it ever since. That was 20+ years ago.

    I honestly don’t know how windows works… I only ever used it for about a year and some change when I was a teenager in the 90s.


  • It’s easier to think about Linux on the context of what an individual application needs to run. Pretty much everything you do will have these components.

    • configuration
    • an executable
    • a communication mechanism (dbus, networking, web server, etc)
    • something that decides if the application runs or not (systemd, monit, docker/docker compose, kubernetes scheduler, or you as the user)
    • a way of accepting input (keyboard and mouse, web requests, database queries, etc)
    • a way of delivering an output (logging to unique log files, through syslog, or to stdout/stderr, showing something on a screen, playing a sound, returning a message to the client, etc)
    • storage (optional)
    • some cpu and memory capacity

    That’s really it. If something isn’t working, it’s pretty much exclusively going to fall into one of those categories. What that means is going to vary significantly from app to app but understanding this is how literally everything works makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier.



  • Decouple!

    CI should just build container images and do testing. CircleCI, Github Actions, Gitlab, Travis… Jenkins if you don’t have any other choice…

    CD should manage the deployment of that compiled code into a working environment… Renovate Bot, Argo CD/Rollouts, Flux… Ansible if you’re still doing things the old way…

    If you are still stuck doing stuff the old ways (bare metal, VMs, ansible, etc), packer is great for building immutable images so you can hopefully dump config management entirely.