jon-wood · HackerLangs

Are you really saying that in 2026, a year when only the nuts are still trying to claim climate change isn’t a thing, the most intelligent approach to the problem of powering data centres that are mostly being built for the purpose of juicing share prices is gas turbines at an industrial scale? The most intelligent approach is to not build the things. The next most intelligent approach is solar and batteries nearby. Way down the bottom of the list is burning gas to power them.

jon-wood

5 giorni fadiscuss

There is absolutely a reason for propagation to wait an hour or a day, and you've set that value in the TTL field for the record in question. It stands for Time To Live and specifies how long downstream resolvers should cache the last value they saw before querying the authoritative server again, if you set that value to a few seconds then almost every DNS resolver in the world will get updated values within a few seconds as they expire the cached value.

jon-wood

5 giorni fadiscuss

> Delays are hopefully minimal on modern systems

The delays are almost always self inflicted by people who've blindly put 36400 in the TTL field like some sort of magic charm rather than considering how long they want the cache expiry to be. Long ago I was one of them and then I had the company greybeard point out that DNS record updates are a thing we had control over - just drop the TTL to 30 seconds or whatever a day before a planned change of servers and (barring the odd stubborn resolver which thinks it knows better than you do) the time it takes for those caches to refresh goes from 24 hours to 30 seconds.

jon-wood

8 giorni fadiscuss

No. No you can't. The specific example of preparing a playlist sure, but Carplay goes way beyond that. You can preload the navigation route, tweak it a bit, then when you sit down and plug your phone into the car its on the navigation screen. You can make phone calls using the microphones in the car. In a sufficiently integrated car you can have turn by turn directions pop up on the dashboard or a heads up display rather than having to look down into the center console while trying to work out which lane you should be in.

jon-wood

10 giorni fadiscuss

At least half the people firing off LLM generated PRs will have left the "Coauthored-by: Claude" line on it allowing automated rejections.

jon-wood

10 giorni fadiscuss

Why are you optimising for token use rather than getting whatever tasks you're trying to do done? Max effort Opus will happily sit there talking to itself for five minutes fixating on every tiny detail while Sonnet or even Haiku will just blast through the problem and be ready for the next one in seconds.

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

Oh this was in 2000, when virtualisation was only just becoming accessible so I can get of get the justification. It still made the entire exercise in writing some software feel pointless when I knew it would never get executed by anyone but myself.

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

If the focus of this is truly on one-per-person personal domains then you don't need to allow transfers and reselling. (Although you'll probably get a grey market of people just repointing DNS to someone else anyway, because if there's money to be had someone will take it)

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

I dropped out of college (the UK version, I guess equivalent to senior high school in the US) shortly after discovering that the final assessment of my Computing project would be performed by the examiner reading a printed version of the source code, without ever executing it, because the exam board were so scared of examiners computers being destroyed.

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

Its web development software from the 90s/00s, a period when websites were built by first having a designer meticulously mock everything up in Photoshop on a 640x480 canvas (maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 in later days), that mockup would then be handed over to a web developer (hi, that was me) who would take that mockup, slice it up into a billion little images, and then put them in a wildly complex set of nested HTML tables. The designer would then have a look over it and provide critique on the fact some element was 3px misaligned, or the font size was incorrect.

During this period I was berated by our studio lead for using new fangled technologies like CSS layout that could adapt to different sized screens instead of sticking to the trusty HTML soup Dreamweaver would spit out.

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

At the risk of being considered a snob I don’t want someone who can’t deal with SSH or RDP configuring servers within my company. If you can’t work out how to SSH into the server you sure as hell aren’t going to work out how to safely expose network services on it.

jon-wood

11 giorni fadiscuss

Because I’m actually not going to lose much sleep if Apple revoke my license for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and given I’ve had digital purchases from them since [checks notes] literally two decades ago and not one of them has to my knowledge been revoked I’m reasonably comfortable that they’ll probably stick around for as long as I do, after which I’m going to rapidly cease caring about my collection of films and TV.

jon-wood

12 giorni fadiscuss

I love the slightly weird learning curve on NixOS where initially it seems incredibly complex writing this weird functional programming language for every change you want to apply to your system, then over time it clicks and you end up in a place where any operating system that doesn't define everything in a weird functional programming language seems incredibly complex. I read blog posts about doing things on other distros now and I'm left thinking that an 800 word set of instructions would be 25 lines of Nix expressions.

jon-wood

13 giorni fadiscuss

Bash is the wrong choice for truly complex software but I still find it really hard to pick anything else for the sort of tasks where I'm mostly manipulating text files and shelling out to other tools. My general instinct for when its time to reimplement a script in Python or similar is when I've got a ton of conditionals or function calls, at that point its also time to start writing unit tests.

shellcheck is a huge help in the middle sized shell script space and will regularly shout at me about missing all the random gotchas like not quoting file paths.

jon-wood

13 giorni fadiscuss

Despite rumours to the contrary the world does need things that aren't useful for modern AI codebases still, I'd really appreciate it right now if China could get some fabs going that just manufactured RAM, storage, and maybe a selection of chips that the big ones have given up on because its more profitable to endlessly churn out GPUs and NPUs.

jon-wood

14 giorni fadiscuss

Imagine if the end of humanity is caused by everybody assuming somebody else told the captains about this.

jon-wood

15 giorni fadiscuss

I have some terrible NixOS hacks on my desktop machine which bridges Home Assistant via MQTT to some configuration around which video and audio outputs should be used, and whether my login manager should automatically log in as my user account running Steam Big Picture or wait for auth before starting Niri. Its certainly not anywhere near as smooth as having a Steam Machine under the TV, and I don't love that I have to run a machine that makes the room several degrees warmer while running, but it does have the advantage of being free apart from the time spent making it work.

jon-wood

15 giorni fadiscuss

It varies, culturally and based on what the group is. In the UK if I'm out for a meal with family or close friends then one of us will probably pay the bill and then people will offer to transfer their share to the person who did (which may or may not be refused depending on circumstances), if I'm out with colleagues or a group of looser acquaintances then its more likely we'll each pay our share separately, which the server is generally happy to accommodate.

jon-wood

18 giorni fadiscuss

Oh he's hard into the world of Java edition mods, my point was more that they're adding combat options to the core game because there's a huge audience demanding more combat options.

jon-wood

19 giorni fadiscuss

I think the problem is that Minecraft caters to a huge range of tastes. I fully agree with you, I’d much rather have more options for automation and building fun machinery but my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing, and lead to new ways of playing the game. That’s barely scratching the surface, you’ve also got the speed runners, the boat racers, the people using it as a place to shoot weird films, the drop map obsessives, and the speed bridgers competing to bridge from one point to another as fast as possible. It’s almost impossible to accommodate everyone all the time.

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