init crashed because it couldn’t load a shared library, but init isn’t allowed to be killed so the kernel panicked

Nah, that’s still engagement. Ignore it, and let it rot away

Take a look for yourself:

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/ https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/

He says, forgetting what community he is in.

Bring your existing gear, remembering that we use 240v here. Getting used server bits is pretty difficult and expensive because we don’t have anywhere near the density of data centers selling off old stuff. Enterprise switches in particular seem to be hard to get, I’ve previously had to buy on eBay and pay absurd shipping

• https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter?tab=readme-ov-file#textfile-collector - which makes node exporter watch a specific directory for files that contain metrics, then re-export them back to the central Prometheus server
• Some systems have their own metrics endpoints - instead of getting Prometheus to scrape these directly I set up a Cron job to curl these into files for node exporter - this means I don’t need extra config in Prometheus to find the endpoints, and don’t need to mess with firewall rules
• Other systems don’t directly expose metrics in a format Prometheus can use - in this case I will write/find a script that can do the conversation, then either set it up to write the metrics file directly and run it on a Cron, or run it as a service and another Cron job to do the scrape

• Base ansible role installs Prometheus node exporter, configured with the text file collector
• VM automations push DNS records so that the Prometheus dns-sd automatically discovers them
• Ansible roles for add Cron jobs that generate metrics for specific systems and dump them for the text file collector
• Grafana for dashboards
• Karma as a UI in front of Prometheus alert manager

Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.

So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren’t too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you’d want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.

Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing “looked around and couldn’t find anything off the shelf that was suitable” (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.

They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was “good with computers” by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.

Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it’s essentially a “no code required” drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.

On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:

• It lacks real version control - you can “undo” a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
• Because you can’t effectively manage changes to the system, you can’t do pre-production releases
• Its native database system doesn’t do referential integrity
• There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it’s really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
• There is no way to do automated testing
• The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn’t, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of “is this a bug or bad design?”

Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn’t isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.

Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don’t manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer

Are there people left who will lend him money after seeing what happened to twitter?

Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but isn’t this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?

Jellyfin has explicitly asked that people find other places to donate to: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriously

data retention

It’s the opposite - most regulatory frameworks require that you only retain data if you have a “legitimate purpose” for holding on to it; providing app features absolutely is a legitimate purpose, so by having a “wrapped” you can justify holding on to everything a user does - after all, you need it to provide features.

“Well is there anything dangerous in there?”

“That’s classified, also, take a good look round at the building you are in and think about that question some more”

“Shit.”

I’m imagining a somewhat boring looking office/lab with a bunch of locked rooms.

“What’s in there?”

“Oh, it was Dr Simpsons lab in the 90s”

“Well what were they working on?”

“Don’t know, its classified”

“Well can we get rid of it?”

“I don’t know, it’s classified”

“Well who does know?”

“I don’t know, its classified”

Plus a bunch of old equipment and documents that are definitely secret and too valuable to just destroy, but no-one is entirely clear exactly how secret and valuable so it’s safer to leave it guarded in place than to try and move it

Oh hey, something from my home town.

The main things they have going for them is nostalgia and a funky aesthetic (and clever marketing designed to attract tourists); there are plenty of places in Christchurch that do better food and there are certainly better places if all you want is good coffee. They are a 7.5/10 in a city full of 9/10 cafes - I won’t shoot you down if this is where you want to go, but it probably isn’t going to be my first pick

What’s stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?

LLMs are a muse, not a fucking oracle you absolute strawberry plant

Being on the hill must have been rough. Have a friend who moved to the city a few years ago and was super excited to find a bit of bare land up on the hill with a great view into the estuary to build a house on - explained why it was bare, didn’t seem to deter him.

It’s interesting how the geography affected things - another friend had a batch in Akaroa on the other side of the peninsula that barely felt the quakes - theory being the peninsula is a dead volcano, so it’s mostly really spongy basalt that effectively acted as a dampener and absorbed most of the energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_earthquake_(disambiguation)

One in 2010 that did a bunch of damage but only killed 2 people, but then triggered a significant aftershock in February 2011 that was much more destructive - partly because it was shallower and closer to the city, but also because lots of buildings had been damaged but not fully repaired.

I was in Christchurch for the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that killed 185 people and critically damaged essentially every building within the city centre.

The whole thing was pretty surreal. My family were pretty lucky, our house was lightly damaged (old timber frame, moved ~2cm off its piles but was livable while that was fixed) and we had a few things break (including a 60L fishtank that nearly landed on me as I tried to get to a doorway), I know a few people who were without electricity and clean water for a week, or whose houses were damaged beyond repair then had to spend years fighting insurance companies to get what they were due.

I still live in the city, and it’s pretty much unrecognisable as to how it was before. Basically every major building in the central city had to either be torn down or significantly renovated to repair it. Basically every brick building built before the 1950s was damaged beyond repair. Huge chunks of residential land in the east of the city was so badly damaged that there is no way it could be safely built on again - the government brought all the houses, tore them down and fenced the area off.