Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
Yeah, I 100% respect Python for standing up to this nonsense. DEI should mean teaching people about their biases so we can do a better job of goving opportunities to those best able to do the job, instead of whoever is liked by the hiring team.
Grants like this shouldn’t have stipulations about how the project is run, only about the priorities, if any.
My point is merely that DEI programs can be discriminatory, not that they are.
I don’t believe it will work in practice in a lot of areas
Perhaps, and ideally we can iterate on ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. I don’t like any big policy change, regardless of how it aligns with my priorities, I instead want a gradual change so it’s less disruptive to the market and we get cleaner feedback.
Did those “libertarians” vote for Trump last election? What’s their take on Jan 6? I have a sneaking suspicion they’re conservatives who like weed, not libertarians.
You’re right that libertarians don’t want government involved in as many parts of daily life as possible. That’s where the support comes from for things like drug legalization/decriminalization, gay marriage, gun rights, etc. Wikipedia is part of that, it was created and is maintained independently, and whether it’s funded by donations, ads, or subscriptions is irrelevant. As long as government isn’t involved, libertarians are happy.
Here’s a quote I love from Penn Jillette (from memory, may have mistakes):
Government should only use violence for things I am willing to use violence for. I would use violence to stop a rape or a murder. I would not use violence to build a library.
He goes on say he supports libraries and would fund one if someone came around asking for donations.
That’s pretty much exactly what Wikipedia is, it’s a privately created, publicly available library that runs on donations, which is a libertarian wet dream. If everything good could be funded that way (charities for a social safety net, police for law enforcement, military for national defense, etc), that would be a libertarian utopia. Since that’s not feasible, libertarians want as many functions as possible to exist outside of government and carefully audit the rest.
I personally believe a social safety net cannot be independent, so I support something like UBI to replace our coercive and often subjective welfare programs and ensure everyone is above the poverty line. I also believe small companies should have legal protections (e.g. limited liability structures we have today), and large companies shouldn’t (they can buy insurance if they want), so a lawsuit or bankruptcy could go after shareholder and executive team assets.
Many libertarians disagree with me on specifics (a libertarian’s most bitter rival is another libertarian), but we agree on the foundational idea that less is more when it comes to government.
I sure hope not, it’s hard enough to find nonsucking TVs, I really don’t want to have to find an “industrial” fridge just to get a regular one.
It shouldn’t be that hard to take apart the fridge door and cut a few cables…
Hmm, my fridge is in my kitchen, which is in the middle of the house. I’ve never been in a situation where the fridge door has been open more than a couple minutes without me noticing, and I have three kids.
I’ve had two fridges die (well, the same one twice), and that sucked, but there’s not much I could do about it even if I knew a few hours earlier, and I use the fridge enough I’ll notice within a few hours. Refrigerator deliveries often happen after a few days, and I’m not going to keep stocking ice during that period, I’ll just consume what I can and move the important stuff to the mini fridge or chest freezer.
It would be cool, sure, but it’s not worth having it connected to the internet.
I also want it dispense cold water. That’s not a requirement, just nice to have.
We did too… Like 10 years ago. I haven’t seen that nonsense in a while. The closest thing is a coupon calendar.
If they gave me the fridge for free, I’d use it, and spend a bunch of time figuring out how to remove the ads. If it’s not possible, I’d just unplug the screen.
Cool, they’re giving me a free $2,000 fridge? Because there’s no way I’d have that fridge otherwise.
I consider myself libertarian and absolutely love Wikipedia! In fact, if I didn’t have to work, I’d work on FOSS full time.
Libertarians have no issues with collectivism, they only have issues with forced collectivism. Libertarians love private unions, co-ops, non-profits, etc.
Eh, some DEI programs were discriminatory by having quotas, most were not. The one at my company was great, which was basically minorities giving talks about difficulties getting hired, promotions, etc. We didn’t have quotas, just reports.
Multi-region redundancy costs an arm and a leg
Yes, if you buy an off the shelf solution, it’ll be expensive.
I’m suggesting treating VPS instances like you would a colo setup. Let cloud providers manage the hardware, and keep the load balancing in house. For Signal, this can be as simple as client-side latency/load checks. You can still colo in locations with heavier load; that’s how some Linux distros handle repo mirrors, and it works well. Signal’s data needs should be so low that simple DB replicas should be sufficient.
the Signal infra on AWS was evidently in exactly one part of the world.
We don’t necessarily know that. All I know is that AWS’s load balancers had issues in one region. It could be that they use that region for a critical load balancer, but they have local instances in other parts of the world to reduce latency.
I’m not talking about how Signal is currently set up (maybe it is that fragile), I’m talking about how it could be set up. If their issue is merely w/ the load balancer, they could have a bit of redundancy in the load balancer w/o making their config that much more complex.
You mean like the hours it took for Signal to recover on AWS, meanwhile it would have been minutes if it was their own infrastructure?
No, I mean if they had a proper distributed network of servers across the globe and were able to reroute traffic to other regions when one has issues, there could be minimal disruption to the service overall, with mostly local latency spikes for the impacted region.
My company uses AWS, and we had a disaster recovery mechanism almost trigger that would move our workload to a different region. The only reason we didn’t trigger it is because we only need the app to be responsive during specific work hours, and AWS recovered by the time we needed our production services available. A normal disaster recovery takes well under an hour.
With a self-hosted datacenter/server room, if there’s a disruption, there is usually no backup, so you’re out until the outage is resolved. I don’t know if Signal has disaster recovery or if they used it, I didn’t follow their end of things very closely, but it’s not difficult to do when you’re using cloud services, whereas it is difficult to do when you’re self-hosting. Colo is a bit easier since you can have hot spares in different regions/overbuild your infra so any node can go down.
But far less reliable. If your data center has a power outrage or internet disruption, you’re screwed. Signal isn’t big enough to have several data centers for geographic diversity and redundancy, they’re maybe a few racks total.
Colo is more feasible, but who is going to travel to the various parts of the world to swap drives or whatever? If there’s an outage, you’re talking hours to days to get another server up, vs minutes for rented hosting.
For the scale that signal operates at and the relatively small processing needs, I think you’d want lots of small instances. To route messages, you need very little info, and messages don’t need to be stored. I’d rather have 50 small replicas than 5 big instances for that workload.
For something like Lemmy, colo makes a ton of sense though.
It is, compared to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Here’s 2024 revenue to give an idea of scale:
The smallest on this this list has 10x the revenue of Akamai.
Here are a few other providers for reference:
I’m arguing they could put together a solution with these smaller providers. That takes more work, but you’re rewarded with more resilience and probably lower hosting costs. Once you have two providers in your infra, it’s easier to add another. Maybe start with using them for disaster recovery, then slowly diversify the hosting portfolio.
Why is it that only the larger cloud providers are acceptable? What’s wrong with one of the smaller providers like Linode/Akamai? There are a lot of crappy options, but also plenty of decent ones. If you build your infrastructure over a few different providers, you’ll pay more upfront in engineering time, but you’ll get a lot more flexibility.
For something like Signal, it should be pretty easy to build this type of redundancy since data storage is minimal and sending messages probably doesn’t need to use that data storage.
Ah, ok. I’m mostly going based on personal experience from the time.
Yeah, I can definitely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, but the difference isn’t so large as to make me use it everywhere, so I default to 720p unless I need a bit more definition (usually for text).
My TV is 4k but I can’t remember the last time I actually displayed 4k content, almost everything we have is old DVDs (so 480p?) and 1080p Blurays. I don’t see the point in paying extra for Ultra HD when the picture isn’t that much better at our viewing distance.
When building an application, consider all options. Serverless is great for background tasks that can be broken up into smaller pieces that you would otherwise need to scale up for main instances to handle, or scale up/down additional instances. It’s great for running background reports that you do t want to build a bunch of routes for.
I would never choose serverless for the whole app architecture, but I might choose one host over another of the distinguishing feature was serverless. It’s really nice to have the option.