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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I frequently amaze new colleagues when I show them that deploying an update for our backend application is a sub-second affair. Our pipeline keeps track of what git tag was deployed last, diffs between that tag and the new release, and uploads the files to each of the deployment targets. It takes longer for the pipeline agent to spin up from Cold on a Monday morning, than it does to actually deploy.

    The core of the application is just php scripts, and those are either immediately up to date whenever the next call is, or swapped out the next time that component finishes a processing cycle.

    Docker containers are nice, but nothing beats the cause of a stack trace being fixed, tested and deployed to the acceptance environment within minutes of it arriving.


  • I read a bit of fan fiction ages ago that extrapolated on what would have happened if Anakin had, at the pivotal confrontation with Mace and Palpatine, made the choice to support Mace instead.

    I liked the interpretation that it would have still resulted in Luke and Leia, since Padma would still have had the twins, but not in secret, and without force fuckery, would’ve survived childbirth.

    In this timeline, it results in a new high republic era, Anakin as a master, raising his children and them being his anchor to the light side. The friction in the story came from the politics of the Council disapproving of his attachment to his family, but it is also politically difficult to kick out the person who just saved their hides.

    While the story didn’t touch upon Ahsoka’s fate much, I would have loved to see a timeline where Ahsoka raised a family and her kids hanging out with the Skywalker’s.

    That alone has so much potential for storylines; there would still be remnant forces of separatists, rogue troopers, the death star plans being out there, and potentially Maul as well.


  • I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I’m not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.

    I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.

    Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.



  • The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

    On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn’t curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

    I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

    But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.


  • The effect you are describing is “viral load”; the degree to which a virus is present in the body. This is an indicator of how infectious you are. It is especially important for people with HIV to see if they are “safe” or need their medication adjusted.

    However, an at-home test will not be a good indicator of this. These have too many variables such as the site that was swabbed, time delays from the various biological functions, how well you used the kit and even variability in the kit itself.

    To properly test for viral load, a blood test should be used. I worked with a company that tested for viral load via expelled breath, and while this was a good indicator of infectiousness y/n, and was faster than a PCR, it was not more accurate.


  • It honestly wasn’t so bad. I played about 80 hours of it, right after launch. In typical Bethesda fashion, I used a few ini tweaks and such to tailor it to my tastes. Mostly fixing the Stealth (which was horribly broken at launch) and balance changes like reducing the bullet spongyness of enemies.

    Both are now patched and configurable through the built-in difficulty settings.

    I enjoyed my time with it. I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got.


  • I switched to using Moonlight to stream rather than Steam’s built-in RemotelyPlay months ago. It was just absolutely unusable; not a bandwidth issue, had that in spades. The problem was that it would either not connect, connect to a blank/green screen or the audio/video would randomly cut out. It would work maybe a fifth of the time, and if I had to reconnect for whatever reason, it would absolutely always fail.

    Moonlight? It worked out of the gate, and has never failed despite running on some beefy encoding settings since I have very good WiFi with next to no interference from neighbors.

    I desperately want Steam’s own offering to be better though. Not having to install a second tool, and to just connect from Steam directly would be a much more polished experience.



  • I’m mildly autistic, to the point I do have to put on a “face” and try to act “normal” in social situations. I am generally quite sociable and outgoing, so I don’t feel it’s held me back. It’s just different.

    Both socially and through work I interact with a diverse range of people, and I don’t think I am any more different than a British person is from an Italian. I’ve taken the mindset that if someone has a problem with that difference, it’s merely an excuse for their bigotry that would’ve surfaced for a different reason either way.

    On the flip side, it’s been incredibly helpful in my career. I have an affinity for processes and an analytical brain, as well as the ability to disconnect from any discussion emotionally. I have always felt that this stems from my autism and it’s allowed me to have business discussions about difficult topics while leaving Ego at the proverbial door.

    So I would say that for me in particular, it’s been a positive. Someone having a problem with me being different is just that; their problem, not mine.


  • Hey Op, since you appear to be somewhere in the EU based on your mention of Euro pricing, would you be willing to name and shame the wheelchair manufacturer and/or model?

    Without giving too much of my own personal information away, I might be in a position to cause a bit of ruckus for this particular company in terms of bad PR, possibly legislatively. I work for a company that profiles itself on doing this stuff “the right way” (secure practises, not screwing users this way, etc) and we are working on building a list of practises we are hoping to root out EU-Wide with some examples that are clearly exploitative.

    I need nothing personally identifiable, just the brand and model, and I can pass it along to the team that can investigate further.


  • Everyone else is just telling you to do things in a way that is different, and while they are correct (you should use a unit.d/systems script for this depending on your distro), I’m going to actually answer your question since I know sometimes you just need a quick and simple way.

    Depending on your version of cron, it may support special statements instead of the * * * * * notation for time.

    The one you want is @reboot. Replace all entries of the schedule syntax with that, including the @, and the command will be executed only once when the system boots up.

    Use that to start a script that checks for network connectivity on a loop with a sleep statement. Break the loop when you have connectivity, then execute your command, and exit the script.

    Don’t ignore the correct way though. You’re better off executing this as a systemd (or equivalent) script. It’s barely more effort, and has the benefit of some nice built in logging and integrations.



  • My tried-and-tested method has saved my (company’s clients) ass a few times.

    Every Mysql/MariaDB server has at least one replication target. This replicant is not used for access by the infra, and can be paused, restarted, etc with no issue and is configured with this in mind.

    We run a mysqldump on the replicant. Depending on the resiliency required, we store the dump on the replicant and/or a third location.

    The tools differ, but the practice applies to pretty much every database system and the database has the benefit of not being interrupted during the backup (replication is paused during the backup, and resumed after completion). This also has the benefit of already having replication configured, and adding a secondary redundant instance you can swap out for the master (or using the backup replicant in a pinch) means disaster recovery is much faster.

    Also, I dislike many things about Azure’s offerings, but their Flexible Database for MySQL does the above for you as one nicely packaged solution for a reasonable-but-not-cheap price.



  • Well, I suspect they will get their chance. The remake was incredible, and if they can pull it off a second time with DS2, I suspect 3 will follow too.

    The third game had some decent ideas. The weapon crafting was conceptually interesting and thematically appropriate with Isaac being an engineer. The co-op could have been done better, but I had a blast with it.

    Nuke the MTX shit from orbit and redo large swathes of the story though. What they did to Ellie was a disgrace.