My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine
@pid_eins hmmm, Hetzner has some auction Xeon with E3-1275v5 that support SGX and trusted execution for <70€/month. EPYC auction servers start at 215€/month and I'm not sure that has the proper extensions but... it's not so far for a small group of users.
I'm mostly curious, but I think there are some interesting use cases around self hosting. (E.g. shared hosting with friends allowing confidential tasks.) But this is mostly "curiosity".
@pid_eins how close is this to being able to provide people a way to run VMs on a box I have root on with some verifiable trust that I wouldn't be able to pull secrets from?
(I've been toying for a while with the idea to provide a tilde were people could run sensitive processes such as email fetching/forwarding or instant messaging. My last information is that this is quite far away yet for regular people.)
Cloudflare just had to buy one of the few slogans I like so I would dislike them more.
@david_chisnall @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote Then I shall share my own evergreen Conway's Law corollary:
There must be software designs we have never conceived because we do not have the social forms of organization that would be able to do so.
@coder (yes, I use compilers and I don't check the compiled output of my programs. Compilers are sufficiently deterministic and predictable in most cases. People following an architect's design tend not to be as deterministic and predictable.)
@coder the article is more about thinking too much about abstractions and not enough about what software is supposed to do for the user than about what I usually think about architecture astronauts, that the farther you are from doing the actual low-level work, the less qualified you are to talk about it.
Guess why I was thinking about architecture astronauts a few minutes ago. I searched and apparently I had missed this article from Joel where he apparently coined the term:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/
I think it's a bit ironic considering what Joel seems to be doing these days, and it is not entirely what I think about architecture astronauts, but it's still worth reading in my opinion.
"Don't take the black pill" is indeed a good talk. Hadn't seen in yet.
Due to $REASONS, this morning I've been exploring Python monorepo setup options. I focused on Hatch as it seemed to tick many of my boxes.
I found some stuff odd. For example, by default it does not generate lock files!
However, I found it reasonable and it allowed me to integrate a Django project reasonably according to my tastes.
@leah I read much less than I used to, so I've been mulling having a book on me at all times to read on public transport and that kind of thing instead of using the Internet.
My main issue is that stuff I'd like to read is not pocketable and that sourcing books for electronic paper devices legally sounds troublesome.
Perhaps I should just focus first on reading public domain books first.
@datarama hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. And if they requested to be removed, I would say they should be removed. But I'm not sure they wouldn't shrug it off, own what they said, or even be proud of being listed there. Many sources in the list are primary!
It makes me uncomfortable too, though. I wouldn't publish that myself. Also I don't like using links from the Wayback Archive- people have a right to change their views (although I doubt that's the case there).
Nice, "nano --modernbindings" uses shortcuts more similar to common editors on Windows and macOS. Even Debian stable has a nano with support for this option!
@datarama maybe the difference lies in whether the person wants to be taken off the list?
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Shocking. I always said "DNS is not so bad, I'm not aware of ICANN doing crazy shit."
If I understand correctly, ICANN in fact now has done insanely crazy shit in a way that breaks my trust significantly.
Luckily the only two "important" domains that I use personally are both .net, and they are much bigger than .name so I doubt they're going to pull something like that, but it's annoying to have to watch your back for ICANN.
Perchance anyone with personal experiences with external USB enclosures for 4-5 drives? My Proliant Microserver might be edging closer to a much needed retirement after perhaps 10 years of service.
But in today's day and age, it seems difficult to get reliable information on noise and heat from those enclosures.
@david_chisnall I have to say that there's always a convenient excuse to jack prices up. This has happened with many natural disasters- maybe some caused supply chain issues, but I'm... suspicious.
@david_chisnall yep, I have 2x4Tb drives in my "NAS" and one of them started giving out NAS errors.
One of the 4tb drives costed me 123€ in 2013. I've spent 223€ in the replacement.
HECK, a 2.5" external USB 4Tb drive in 2019 cost me 112€!
This is insane. I got lucky with RAM and bought a 32gb desktop *and* expanded my other desktop to 32gb before prices started going up, but my NAS situation is pretty dire...
@david_chisnall my pet peeve is name pronunciations. I have a recording that I enter on all systems that allow it. Not because I needed to hear my name correctly (lost cause) but because I want to try to pronounce well others'
For the diet, would stating "I follow a Halal diet" skirt regulations? There's a strong correlation with religion, but AFAIK Muslims would not have an issue with others eating Halal?
This seems (contradictorily) good general advice, but I just added it to my list of basic links:
https://earthly.dev/blog/thought-leaders/
"Don't Feed the Thought Leaders" explains that contingent advice (that depends on the situation) is in general better than generic advice. In my experience, one of the most difficult parts is knowning when you have to deviate from common practices.
I used an answer from softwareengineering.stackexchange when explaining London/Chicago [or Detroit] testing styles, but it started giving me bot countermeasures. I also had a few scattered links about testing, so I decided to write a short article to connect everything and serve as a nice link reference for myself:
I wrote on why we should be skeptical that "how can we scale-up X?" (be that our open knowledge #commons or "how can we get a European Google", …) is a reasonable framing.
As biologist JBS Haldane (and many planners inspired by him) point out, 'being the right size' does not just apply to animals, but also human organizations. You can't just 'scale' it without dramatically altering its shape and dynamics.
On 'scaling up' and being the right size
@datarama @david_chisnall my perception is that around the turn of the century we got usable Linux and Windows XP and macOS X. And then "workstation-class" computers became available to all.
The Amiga was quite close to that and that's why I loved our Amiga, but it was always doomed.
Slightly unrelated, but I love to link:
https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
Which said in 2013 (not 2003) that microcomputers are doomed too :(
@alexhall yeah, that's completely fine. Rust has many niceties that are uncommon in other languages, so Rust fans reach for it even when they don't need low-level features... but it's still a bit painful if you're not very good with it.
Most software I work with is better done in Java/Python/etc.
@alexhall bizarre fact I always love to mention. In C, a[b] is nearly exactly the same as b[a], because indexing into an array is adding the index to the memory address, and addition is conmutative.
C is raw in most regards. Rust adds bounds checks. Which means by default array access is a tad slower in Rust. But what might cause a problem in C will halt a Rust program instead of doing bizarre, possibly harmful stuff.
@alexhall I just tried a quick program with gcc/Linux and reading out of bounds of an array returned a 0 without any error. (I guess that's uninitialized memory or something.)
Rust will panic, which by default will halt the program. The Rust book is comparing with C (many would say because Rust targets programs where traditionally C would be used), so it's quite different in that regard. Although this is the behavior in many other programming languages.