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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Are you looking for an editor that can format YAML out-of-the-box or with plugins? In my experience, most editors only support a small number of formats out of the box and extend that functionality with plugins. I have yet to find a solid, production editor without a decent YAML formatter. If you’re using one of the common commercial ones, Red Hat maintains many that work explicitly for Ansible.


  • This is why you can’t use The Independent for shit especially during election season.

    “I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, maybe it’s not,” Vance said.

    “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just I’m so over it.”

    If you send this article to someone who wants to vote for Trump, they are going to correctly excoriate you. I know this because the last time I used The Independent this was was 2016 when Trump first and The Independent couldn’t back up its headlines then. In the last eight years it still can’t. If we take Vance at face value, which we know we can’t but we have to since that’s the quote The Independent chose to use to create their headline, it’s fake news.

    In general, The Independent generates clickbait headlines that pull in a specific group of people that want to agree with the article and won’t verify who then send it to another group of people who will engage with the content to try and verify. This increases their engagement while spreading a mix of blatant lies and loose misinformation. Your life will be better if you filter out The Independent (something I haven’t yet bothered to do on Lemmy but did immediately on a new Reddit account; election season might finally change this) especially if you’re the audience for the headlines.



  • If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment. If I say, “that was a shitty fucking outage” I am using some filler for emphasis so my mouth can catch up to my brain. If I say “you’re a fucking asshole” or “don’t be such a bitch” or “that’s fucking sexy” I am not being professional and I deserve some training on how to not be an ignorant walnut. Even with swearing around, I do think it’s smart to limit yourself to damnation, defecation, and simple fornication rather than gendered swears. There are also some places it’s not wise to swear around, such as client-facing roles because many of the people you will see don’t understand that swearing around is not swearing at.

    I once lost a job after the onsite interview. I wait to swear until I I hear them swear. Apparently my use of “fuck” meant I was going to blow up and be a terrible person to my peers. Two years later I started running a department doing the thing I was interviewing for and my staff tends to be fiercely loyal. I’d argue my swearing speaks for itself and have shaped my professional attitude toward swearing around around this experience.

    I work in tech and I’m quick to police my language if necessary. I’m also concerned about relative comfort (eg I try really hard not to blaspheme around some Christian peers). I do not swear at people. I do not work in a super corporate environment. YMMV.

    I like study (you can find the full article online) and I think there’s been more research down this path in the years since.





  • While I’m all for opening up codebases after release and seeking contributions from constituents, the landing page has some terrible ideas.

    Similar applications don’t have to be programmed from scratch every time.

    Unless there are very solid guidelines that offer a lot of flexibility to do the opposite and code things from scratch every now and then, you get very pervasive legacy antipatterns. I have struggled to effect positive software change as an SRE at massive enterprises because of this idea. Conway’s Law does a good job describing how this stratifies code. I have also spent more than year trying to get disparate acquisitions on the same tech stack with ballooning requirements as everyone tries to get their interests in. I left that one without any real movement.

    Major projects can share expertise and costs.

    This goes against lean principles that see the best outcomes and exponentially increases the waterfall slog most government projects are. The more stakeholders the more scope creep. Your platform team can be shared; you don’t want your stream-aligned teams to get stuck in this mire. They need to be delivering the minimum viable solution for their project.

    Assuming the software is just released with an open license and the public can contribute, hell yeah. I have contributed to so many projects that I actively use in my day job and there’s plenty of shitty government software I’d love to poke at. The two things I called out require a serious amount of executive buy-in for developer tools and experience which turns into a project itself. In the private world most companies chicken out when they realize they’ve got serious cost centers just making development easier, even if their product is serious software development. I worked for a major US consultancy that talked this big game and dropped everyone the second they were on the bench. In the public sector? Fuck. It’s hard enough to get people to understand attack surfaces much less the improvements a smooth DevX with a great pipeline can provide.








  • Give me concrete examples. You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about so I want to discuss something specific; the agency you’re talking about is actually there and is centered around the core of the script.

    In your hypothetical where you’ve now decided everyone is just following orders, I can still say the worker did a bad job. You gonna tell me the worker is gonna get fired for not following dumb instructions? Okay. Still did a bad job, orders or not.

    I do not understand why you’re so dead set on telling people critical analysis is bad. Is it morally wrong to like something more than something else? Kinda seems like that way if I can’t ever judge anything because there are constraints outside the control of the thing. I’m not going to attack a straw man here. You should expand on what we can and can’t analyze.


  • There’s a difference between a bad script and bad rewrites. Ending of GoT? Bad script, rewrites don’t matter. 2016 Suicide Squad? Arguably a good script with shitty rewrites. Galaxy of Terror? No comment on the scripts but the rewrites fucked it. Justice League? Horrible script and horrible rewrites. I don’t blame the writers of Galaxy of Terror for Corman’s worm rape scene; I do excoriate Whedon for the pile of shit Snyder used to make a worse pile of shit.

    You’re conflating moral standards with film standards. There are standards that people agree on that loosely dictate what we consider good and bad. They can change based on the viewer. The core of a script is what has the opportunity to be butchered and if it’s bad that’s not on the studio, that’s on the writer. Studios don’t hire someone and say “write us a piece of shit” they take something that exists and modify it (unless you’re Neil Breen in which case that’s your goal).

    In your example, I can get frustrated with a grocery worker pushing all of the things to back of the shelf where I can’t reach. That is a fair criticism of their contribution to the inane reshuffling. I’m not saying they’re a bad person because they’re doing the thing they need to do to survive poorly; I’m saying they’re doing a thing poorly. It has no bearing on them as a person. It’s not morally wrong of them to make it impossible for me to get the item I need; it is a shit job though.


  • You’re talking about two different things. In general, you should never be disrespectful of anyone because there’s no need to be mean. However, I can definitely criticize a writer for working on something terrible because they wrote it. I can also criticize a studio for releasing it. “Just following orders” doesn’t remove culpability especially when the writing is really fucking bad.

    Please note I’m not talking about this movie because it hasn’t been released yet. I’ve watched a plethora of movies over the last month that had really bad writing.



  • Speaking from 10+ YoE developing metrics, dashboards, uptime, all that shit and another 5+ on top of that at an exec level managing all that, this is bullshit. There is a disconnect between the automated systems that tell us something is down and the people that want to tell the outside world something is down. If you are a small company, there’s a decent chance you’ve launched your product without proper alerting and monitoring so you have to manually manage outages. If you are GitHub or AWS size, you know exactly when shit hits the fan because you have contracts that depend on that and you’re going to need some justification for downtime. Assuming a healthy environment, you’re doing a blameless postmortem but you’ve done millions of those at that scale and part of resolving them is ensuring you know before it happens again. Internally you know when there is an outage; exposing that externally is always about making yourself look good not customer experience.

    What you’re describing is the incident management process. That also doesn’t require management input because you’re not going to wait for some fucking suit to respond to a Slack message. Your alarms have severities that give you agency. Again, small businesses sure you might not, but at large scale, especially with anyone holding anything like a SOC2, you have procedures in place and you’re stopping the bleeding. You will have some level of leadership that steps in and translates what the individual contributors are doing to business speak; that doesn’t prevent you from telling your customers shit is fucked up.

    The only time a company actually needs to properly evaluate what’s going on before announcing is a security incident. There’s a huge difference between “my honeypot blew up” and “the database in this region is fucked so customers can’t write anything to it; they probably can’t use our product.” My honeypot blowing up might be an indication I’m fucked or that the attackers blew up the honeypot instead of anything else. Can’t send traffic to a region? Literally no reason the customer would be able to so why am I not telling them?

    I read your response as either someone who knows nothing about the field or someone on the business side who doesn’t actually understand how single panes of glass work. If that’s not the case, I apologize. This is a huge pet peeve for basically anyone in the SRE/DevOps space who consumes these shitty status pages.


  • This is a common problem. Same thing happens with AWS outages too. Business people get to manually flip the switches here. It’s completely divorced from proper monitoring. An internal alert triggers, engineers start looking at it, and only when someone approves publishing the outage does it actually appear on the status page. Outages for places like GitHub and AWS are tied to SLAs that are tied to payouts or discounts for huge customers so there’s an immense incentive to not declare an outage even though everything is on fire. I have yelled at AWS, GitHub, Azure, and a few smaller vendors for this exact bullshit. One time we had a Textract outage for over six hours before AWS finally decided to declare one. We were fucking screaming at our TAM by the end because no one in our collective networks could use it but they refused to declare an outage.