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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • As I said, I’ve dealt with logging where the variable length text was kept as plain text, with external metadata/index as binary. You have best of both worlds here. Plus it’s easier to have very predictable entry alignment, as the messy variable data is kept outside the binary file, and the binary file can have more fixed record sizes. You may have some duplicate data (e.g. the text file has a text version of a timestamp duplicated with the metadata binary timestamp), but overall not too bad.



  • Thing is that they could have preserved the textual nature and had some sort of external metadata to facilitate the ‘fanciness’. I have worked in other logging systems that did that, with the ability to consume the plaintext logs in an ‘old fashioned’ way but a utility being able to do all the nice filtering, search, and special event marking that journalctl provides without compromising the existence of the plain text.


  • Uh… Sounds like it’s not really system’s fault, your setup is just terrible.

    I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.

    Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.

    See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.



  • I’ll say one problem is that for a number of items, there’s a technicality in the supply chain that exempts stuff from the price match. I don’t know about Microcenter, but have seen it in other contexts.

    For example “Oh, Amazon is selling a 120 pack, but we only carry 125 packs, so it’s not equivalent”. Or in the most egregious, “You have the price for model number 762LAZ, but we stock 762LWM”, and you search and find out those two model numbers are absolutely identical, but “AZ” models come in a box with an Amazon logo printed on it.


  • A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I’d say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of “IRC-like” mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people’s worth of “internet” that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.

    One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.



  • Yeah, and the ol’ “slashdot effect” is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn’t grow.

    I’m sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe “slashdotting” that slashdot ever could inflict back then.

    To deal with ‘modern internet scale’, you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the ‘like 90s subset’, little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.


  • To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.

    Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world’s population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.

    For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there’s barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The “old” internet is still there, it’s just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.

    Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today’s standards, but wouldn’t be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.

    Some things are gone and won’t come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to “rent” than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it’s cheaper than streaming).





  • In the WWI scenario, Russia was able to have a reprieve because the central powers had other things to do. So “appeasement” worked at least in the scenario where the opposition has multiple other fronts to contend with, and also when that would-be opponent ultimately lost. WWI was a lot more “gray area” so it’s hard to say what would have happened if the central powers prevailed, whether they would have decided to expand into Russia or not care enough to press that front.

    For the opposite experience for Russia, see WWII where they started off with appeasing Germany and then got invaded two years later.

    But again, the WWI Russian experience of maybe fighting in a conflict where they didn’t actually have a horse in the race doesn’t apply here, where the combatants are Ukranians, who have no option offered of just being left alone for the sake of peace. We don’t have US military being ordered to go in to fight and die in that conflict.


  • Because the US is frequently not justified and has the history of being the warmonger, so they are often unjustified. That says nothing about the Ukrainian situation though, where a well established independent nation was subject to a military invasion. There isn’t significant “gray area” to find in this scenario.

    There are justified US military operations in more recent history but those aren’t useful as an example either. Because the prospect of someone actually “caving” to invasion is a rare situation, and we do have to go back 70 years to cite an example of what happens when major powers try the “let the dictator win without resistance” strategy. The major powers learned something in the 1930s and have not repeated that behavior.