I think this is the key insight: most of the problems are related to management decisions so they’re only DevOps failures to the extent that the movement failed to get political pressure to fix those.
YAML is okay for writing structured prose for humans. It’s terrible for anything consumed by programs because even that single microservice has a high likelihood of some problem caused by YAML’s magic typing, silent data loss due to indentation, etc. unless you pair it with a separate validation tool chain, making the argument for simplicity increasingly dubious.
Why not pick a config language that works with our current config formats, looks like out current config files, and addresses many of the dumb problems that arise only in current config choices?
systemd would be a derail even if you weren’t misrepresenting the situation at several levels. Experienced sysadmins in my experience were the ones pushing adoption because they had to clean up the messes caused by SysV’s design limitations and flaws, whereas in this case it’s a different scenario where the extra functionality is both unneeded and making it worse at the core task.
> Experienced sysadmins in my experience were the ones pushing adoption because they had to clean up the messes caused by SysV’s design limitations and flaws
That's funny. I used to have to clean up the messes caused by systemd's design limitations and flaws, until I built my own distro with a sane init system installed.
Many of the noobs groaning about the indignity of shell scripts don't even realize that they could write init 'scripts' in whatever language they want, including Python (the language these types usually love so much, if they do any programming at all.)
It's entirely possible that both SysV init and systemd suck for different reasons. I'm still partial to systemd since it takes care of daemons and supervision in a way that init does not, but I'll take s6 or process-compose or even supervisord if I have to. Horses for courses.
I want to love s6 but every time I see the existence of s6-rc-compile I get heated. I'm sure there are excellent reasons behind it but I personally don't want services to work that way.
I think you’d have a more fruitful discussion if you stopped trying to call people noobs when they don’t agree with you.
For example, I’ve been dealing with SysV since the early 90s and while it’s gotten better since we no longer have to support the really bizarre Unix variants, my problem with init scripts wasn’t “indignity” but the lack of consistency across distributions and versions, which affects anyone shipping software professionally (“can’t do this easily until $distro upgrades coreutils”), and from an operator’s perspective using Python doesn’t make that better because instead of supporting one consistent thing you’d end up with the subset of features each application team felt like implementing, consistent only to the extent that they care to follow other projects. One virtue of systemd is that having a single common way to specify dependencies, restarts, customization, etc. avoids the ops people having to learn dozens of different variations of the same ideas and especially how to deal with their gaps. A few years back, a data center power outage at one place I worked really highlighted that: the systemd-based servers recovered quickly because they actually had working retries; all of the older stuff using SysV had to be manually reviewed because there were all kinds of problems like races on dependencies like DNS or NFS, retry logic which failed hard after a short period of time, failures because a stale PID file wasn’t removed, or cases where a vendor had simply never implemented retries in their init scripts. While in theory you can handle all of those in SysV most people never did.
After a couple decades of that, a lot of us don’t want to spend time on problems Microsoft solved in Bill Clinton’s first term.
I hate to blather on about systemd in this decade but how in the world does creating something completely different than sysv init help people shipping software? Now they have to support yet another init scheme.
Prior to all of the important distributions consolidating on systemd, you had to support each distribution’s convention for customization, overrides, dependencies, conventions for things like changing users or locations for PID files, not to mention the differences in various shell tools.
Nothing insurmountable but it meant init files were inevitably much longer than the corresponding Upstart or systemd files despite doing less, and anytime we shipped a new version you had more testing since you had to implement a lot of functionality which is built in to other things.
I just created my own OS, with my own init system that does things how I think it should be done--and it does it every time, without the bizarre bugs that come from Linux Puttering's shitware code.
It's the same thing any corporation should be doing if they were smart, instead of outsourcing everything to RedHat, Microsoft, Google, etc.
The reality is unit files are more portable than init scripts, regardless of what anyone says.
Systemd unified and simplified administration across a lot of distributions. Before, it was a hodge podge, and there was a lot of knowledge lost going from rhel to Debian.
Specifying system processes and their dependencies declaratively, rather than in a tangle of arbitrary executable code, is cleaner, more efficient, easier to use, and more auditable. And that's not even getting into the additional process management duties systemd assumes.
You can write arbitrary scripts into systemd... or like one step removed at most? That's not really a difference unless you have some nuance in mind that I don't.
I honestly do not like systemd, either. It is okay for managing processes but I wish it didn't spread into everything else in the machine.
Or if it must, could it actually work cohesively across their concepts? Would be nice to have an obvious and easy way to run Quadlet as its own user to isolate further, would be nice to have systemd-sysusers present in /etc/subuid so they can run containers.
I like what they are doing with atomic distros. It would be great to have a single file declarative setup for something like running a containerized reverse HTTP proxy with an isolated user. Instead of "atomic" but you manually edit files in /etc after install.
> So while “from scratch” is debatable it is still immensely impressive to be that AI was able to produce something that even just “kinda works” at this scale.
“From scratch” is inarguably wrong given how much third-party code it depends on. There’s a reasonable debate about how much original content there is but if I was a principal at a company whose valuation hinges on the ability to actually deliver “from scratch” for real, I would be worried about an investor suing for material misrepresentation of the product if they bought now and the value went down in the future.
I think the problem is that advertising is one of the few areas where you can scale revenue without the user’s permission. Once you start depending on it, there’s always pressure to beat last quarter’s numbers and it’s easy to tell yourself that users don’t care, and the heat if any arrives years later.
If “non experts” aren’t welcome, can you establish your expertise on the topic? In particular, what’s your experience with mining thorough ice or maintaining industrial operations in the Arctic or near-arctic conditions?
This is too hot a take. Regular expressions are used in some cases where they shouldn’t be, yes, but there’s also been a ton of code which used other string operations but had bugs due to the complexity or edge-cases which would have been easier to avoid with a regex. You should know both tools and when they’re appropriate.
From an educational perspective, regular expressions are also a great way to teach about state machines, computational complexity, formal languages, and grammars in a way that has direct applications to tools that are long-lived and ubiquitous in industry.
It's also this context that reveals how much simpler strict regular expressions are than general purpose programming languages like Python or JavaScript. That simplicity is also part of what makes regexes so ubiquitous: due to its lower computational complexity, regex parsing is really fast and doesn't take much memory.
When I say regexes are simple, I'm not really talking about compactness. I mean low complexity in a computational sense! As someone who rather likes regex, I think it would be totally fair for a team to rule out all uses of PCRE2 that go beyond the scope of regular languages. Those uses of regex may be compact, but they're no longer simple.
I'm also someone who is sensitive to readability-centered critiques of terse languages. Awk, sed, and even Bash parameter expansion can efficiently do precise transformations, too. But sometimes they should be avoided in favor of solutions that are more verbose, more explicit, and involve less special syntax. (Note also that Bash, awk, and sed are also all much more complex than regex!)
Regex is not used for parsing HTML or C++ code. So it is not good for complex tasks.
What is the claim? That it is compact for simple cases. Well Brainfuck is a compact programming language but I don't see it in production. Why?
Because the whole point of programming is that multiple eyeballs of different competence are looking at the same code. It has to be as legible as possible.
> Regex is not used for parsing HTML or C++ code. So it is not good for complex tasks.
Again, this is too binary a way if thinking. There are string matching operations which are not parsing source code and regular expressions can be a concise choice there. I’ve had cases where someone wrote multiple pages of convoluted logic trying to validate things where the regular expression was not only much easier to read but also correct because while someone was writing the third else-if block they missed a detail.
It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.
It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This was later added to his post:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:
> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”
> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.
> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious
No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.
> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.
No, they aren't. They're your interpretation of Boston Magazine's spin (and it's really, really obvious purely from the style of the prose that it's a complete hit piece that chose its conclusion ahead of time). The article provides no evidence of any such words. Because there is no such evidence, because he said nothing of the sort.
> They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse
That is, again, objectively not what happened. Any claims WRT Quinn were evidenced, and were also irrelevant to the large majority of what was going on. (What was actually going on, not what sources like the ones you prefer chose to focus on.)
> They’re literally the words he updated his blogpost to add.
I'm looking at it right now and it objectively says nothing of the sort. I genuinely don't understand where you're getting that from. Please quote the part that you think is an admission of the "original claims" being "fictitious". Ctrl-F `fict` gives no results; the two hits for `false` are part of the original account; the one hit for `fake` is part of a nuanced take in the original account; hits for `make up` are either describing Quinn's actions or false positives; similarly for any other wording I can think of.
And the bit at the start is not at all denying the factual accuracy of the account in any way:
> Additionally, as a heads up, it’s worth noting that in providing a concrete story and examples, this blog has apparently had the unintended side effect of helping a number of abuse survivors come to terms with their own relationships (and from what I understand, causing distress to some others who have not yet come to terms). I didn’t really know what emotional abuse was when I wrote this blog, and the comments from therapists and survivors who have since taken the time to inform me have been tremendously helpful to myself and a number of other commenters. I’m grateful to those of you who have reached out, and apologize to those who came expecting a light read and left feeling any significant measure of distress. If you’ve never dealt with emotional abuse before (as I hadn’t up until this point), it can be especially difficult to spot, as one of the most persistent patterns is being made to feel at fault for your partner’s behavior. Each situation is different, so I’m hesitant to offer general advice, but if things get bad enough that you fear for your wellbeing, and you feel safe enough to do so, please consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
In fact, it is not even denying the claim that Gjoni suffered emotional abuse. (Which I think is a reasonable conclusion based on the facts provided.)
Actually, the first sentence before that is:
> There are likely things you have read in various forms of media about what this blog is. You will find those descriptions to be generally incorrect.
which is to say he is explicitly challenging how sources like Boston Magazine presented the post.
> You keep saying every period source is wrong, based on what?
Based on personally seeing it all play out. Based on seeing people I know personally be directly accused of things they objectively had not done. Based on the extensive memory of critically analyzing what period sources were saying, in period.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.
That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.
GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:
That Kotaku piece was a full year after GamerGate, if anything people might question whether it'd have happened if GamerGate hasn't drawn attention to these problems.
GamerGate was still going strong in 2015, and did absolutely nothing to help stories like that. The people attacking journalists don’t get to take credit for their targets’ work.
Sexist attacks and lying about an imaginary sex-for-reviews scandal didn’t put a spotlight on anything. It wouldn’t excuse their actions even if they had been doing some real ethics work, but they weren’t even showing up to do productive work.
One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.
Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.
There was no "sex-for-reviews scandal" and nobody "lying about" it.
> and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
This is a consequence of the fact that very many people were very obviously not acting in good faith.
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