notabot

@notabot@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Understanding your target audience when marketing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a particularly good one…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This whole thread has been a hoot, but your comment properly sent me into fits of giggling. I can picture the nice old lady perfectly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone knows what first aid is, but what is second aid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First aid is what keeps the casualty alive long enough for second aid. Second aid is trained medical profesionals working in a medical setting, so a hospital or even the ambulace crew that take over after you stopped the casualty leaking too much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What the law says, and what gets enforced are, unfirtunately, sometimes very different things. Sometimes that works in your favor, sometimes it doesn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Signs Executive Orders to Militarize Police, Punish Sanctuary Cities and Refugees⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is that they’re doing what they can to make those orders legal. They’re not there yet, they’ll hopefully hit plenty of resistance before they get there, and they’re not exactly renowned for being competent, but they’re working on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s nothing on that page that says the speed limit is the 85% percentile of the traffic flow. It states quite clearly that ‘Statutory speed limits are established by State legislatures for specific types of roads (e.g., Interstates, rural highways, urban streets) and can vary from State to State. They are enforceable by law and are applicable even if the speed limit sign is not posted’ and ‘Posted speed limits (sometimes called regulatory speed limits) are those that are sign-posted along the road and are enforceable by law.’

  Those speed limits are initially set based on the design speed of the road, then later they can be assessed and possibly modified based on a number of factors including the 85% percentile you referenced, however’ ‘The 85th percentile speed is not the only factor practitioners evaluate when determining an appropriate speed limit; they complete engineering speed studies and often utilize supporting tools like USLIMITS2.’

  Critically though, none of this means you can just drive at the prevailing speed of the traffic if it’s above the statutory or posted limit and not be considered to be speeding. The 85% percentile may be used to set the speed limit, but when it’s set, it’s the law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So true⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh God, is everyone looking at me weird when I drink soda wrong?

  If you’re not holding it in the crook of your elbow, lifting your arm, and pouring it onto your outstretched tongue, then at least one of us is doing it wrong, and I think it’s you, and everyone is silently judging you for your weird way of drinking. They don’t drink with their elbows probably because they don’t want to embarass you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not going to say that sort of thing doesn’t happen, they undoubtedly do, but in places where the rules don’t permit speeding, just because everyone else is, the problem self corrects. If too many motorists exceed the limit, the police have a field day ticketing as many as they can, and the situation reverts to people driving at the limit.

  That does take setting the limits appropriately, constant enforecement that can be scaled up, a certain margin of error being accepted so everyone doesn’t have their eyes glued to the speedo, and the understanding and acceptance from motorists that the rules are fair and there for a reason. Absent any one or more of those, and things will inevitably turn into a racetrack again. Fortunately, much of the management and enforcement is usually local, so political pressure applied locally can often help correct issues.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you run a society?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an interesting prompt. Critically it seems like you definitely aren’t omnipotent, so whilst you can try to influence and teach the new inhabitants, there’s nothing stopping them simply ignoring you and doing something else.

  Rather than some wanting to just not contribute, I’d be more concerned by a group deciding to focus their efforts on building weapons and simply taking what they want from others.

  Fully automated luxury gay space communism is certainly an ideal, but it is extremely vulnerable to hostile forces until it gets large enough and willing enough to excert eqivalent force in return. Hostile forces can be military, ideological, or resource limit based. Responding to all of those, is a massive challenge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ball for a ball⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I knew there was such a thing as slicing your shot in golf, I didn’t know it meant that!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They wouldn’t be driving slowly, they’d be driving at the posted limit. If the limit for the road is wrong, and other people are ignoring it, that is a separate issue that needs dealing with.

  It really grinds my gears when people complain about others driving at the posted limit (and, to be fair, I do it too sometimes, but I try to catch myself). You either think the limit is reasonable, in which case there isn’t actually a problem, or you think it’s wrong, in which case the driver isn’t the problem, the limit is. In that case rather than grousing about other drivers actually take action to have the limit changed. That goes just as much in areas where the limit is too high.

  Anyway, rant over, I shall take a couple of deep breaths.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Brits had an anthem ready for when Margaret Thatcher died. Americans should also be prepared.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not for him, it’s for everyone who had to survive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Steady on Satan, they’re only a credit card company! They’re bad, but not that bad!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Rather than a platform, I’ve been wondering if you could rig it so opening the box opens some holes on the bottom, so they think they dodged the worst of it, pick it up to dispose of it and get a desk full from underneath.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a fair observation, but I assume they’re trained to deal with suspicious packages safely, and that stuff will get transfered throughout the whole building and make everyone’s lives that bit more ‘special’. It’ll still hit the bottom line too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t use a rock, use 10lb of glitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possession⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Possesive spirit, 5 minutes later: “Let me out! Let me go back to hell!”

  Me: “Nope, you pushed in, now you gotta drive.”

  Spirit: “Please? At least it’s warm there.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3081: PhD Timeline⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I did the same, pressed on it for the text, got sent straight to the video, and swore under my breath in admiration. In the current climate what he’s done isn’t risk free, despite the fact it a) should be, and b) shouldn’t be needed in the first place.

  Nothing but respect for people calling out the crimes of thus administration, and when it’s someone with an unrelated platform and an audience, so much the better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨are there bots that downvote every comment users have?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, this is a really handy tool. Kniwing the information was being withheld ‘just because’ was really rankling me. Now, could you just add a quick feature to read their minds and tell me why they down voted me? ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hardware recommendations⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Raspberry PIs are great little machines, but they’re ARM based rather than x86, which can potentially limit your software choices. Once you’ve bought the PI, a decent PSU, some storage, and maybe a case the cost can also start to go up quite quickly. Another option you might want to look at is something like a refurbishd EliteDesk. You can get a decent spec for a similar price to a PI and those extras, it’s x86, they run quietly, and they’re upgradable if you need more horsepower in future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's not time for your point release yet.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  DUCK FOR COVER DUCK FOR COVER

  Quack! *BOOM*

  You can securely run IIS on Vista, you just have to unplug the network and power cables.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China scientists develop flash memory 10,000× faster than current tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You… you don’t? Surely there’s some mistake, have you checked down the back of your cupboard? Sometimes they fall down there. Where else do you keep your internet?

  Appologies, I’m tired and that made more sense in my head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to self-host a distributed git server cluster?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before you can decide on how to do this, you’re going to have to make a few choices:

  Authentication and Access

  Theres two main ways to expose a git repo, HTTPS or SSH, and they both have pros and cons here:

  • HTTPS A standard sort of protocol to proxy, but you’ll need to make sure you set up authentication on the proxy properly so that only only thise who should have access can get it. The git client will need to store a username and password to talk to the server or you’ll have to enter them on every request. gitweb is a CGI that provides a basic, but useful, web interface.

  • SSH Simpler to set up, and authentication is a solved problem. Proxying it isn’t hard, just forward the port to any of the backend servers, which avoids decrypting on the proxy. You will want to use the same hostkey on all the servers though, or SSH will refuse to connect. Doesn’t require any special setup.

  Replication

  Git is a distributed version control system, so you could replicate it at that level, alternatively you could use a replicated file system, or a simple file based replication. Each has it’s own trade-offs.

  • Git replication Using git pull to replicate between repositories is probably going to be your most reliable option, as it’s the job git was built for, and doesn’t rely on messing with it’s underlying files directly. The one caveat is that, if you push to different servers in quick suscession you may cause a merge confict, which would break your replication. The cleanest way to deal with that is to have the load balancer send all requests to server1 if it’s up, and only switch to the next server if all the prior ones are down. That way writes will alk be going to the same place. Then set up replication in loop, with server2 pulling from server1, server3 pulling from server2, and so on up to server1 pulling from server5. With frequent pulls changes that are commited to server1 will quickly replicate to all the other servers. This would effectively be a shared nothing solution as none of the servers are sharing resources, which would make it easier to geigraphically separate them. The load balancer could be replaced by a CNAME record in DNS, with a daemon that updates it to point to the correct server.

  • Replicated filesystem Git stores its data in a fairly simple file structure, so placing that on a replicated filesystem such as GlusterFS or Ceph would mean multiple servers could use the same data. From experience, this sort of thing is great when it’s working, but can be fragile and break in unexpected ways. You don’t want to be up at 2am trying to fix a file replication issue if you can avoid it.

  • File replication. This is similar to the git replication option, in that you have to be very aware of the risk of conflicts. A similar strategy would probably work, but I’m not sure it brings you any advantages.

  I think my prefered solution would be to have SSH access to the git servers and to set up pull based replication on a fairly fast schedule (where fast is relative to how frequently you push changes). You mention having a VPS as obe of the servers, so you might want to push changes to that rather than have be able to connect to your internal network.

  A useful property of git is that, if the server is missing changesets you can just push them again. So if a server goes down before your last push gets replicated, you can just push again once the system has switched to the new server. Once the first server comes back online it’ll naturally get any changesets it’s missing and effectively ‘heal’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Parks are great, but unless they’re directly outside the houses where I can keep an eye on what’s happening they’re not as safe or convenient. Being able to send the kids into the garden to run off some energy whilst I’m in the house doing something, and being reasonably confident that they’re safe is a huge benefit.

  That’s certainly not impossible with a bit of sensible planning around how housing is laid out, putting clusters of housing directly around a shared green space, but it is rather challenging to retrofit in existing conurbations, and impossible in more spread out communities. The American style of huge featureless lawns surrounding the house right up to the property boundary are pretty awful, but the more European style of a bit of lawn surrounded by flower beds and maybe trees is rather better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have kids It’s helpful to have an open, flat area for them to run around on. It doesn’t need to be (just) grass, but that’s probably the most robust, and least likely to have sharp surprises, option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨One day, a woman had 100 children⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You get a full eye roll and groan for that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Testing vs Prod⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I manage all my homelab infra stuff via ansible and run services via kubenetes. All the ansible playbooks are in git, so I can roll back if I screw something up, and I test it on a sacrificial VM first when I can. Running services in kubenetes means I can spin up new instances and test them before putting them live.

  Working like that makes it all a lot more relaxing as I can be confident in my changes, and back them out if I still get it wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some say they own or have bought something that they technically haven't (e.g. domain names, expensive things, etc.)?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure where you are, but typically even if you rent rather than owning you pay the normal taxes, either directy or via your landlord, so they have little to do with owning a property, and more to do with occupying one, as a proxy for the demands you put on communal services. In most places you would also not lose your home for not paying them, you’d get dragged through the courts, possibly jailed for some period, and the tax authority in question would just end up with a lien on the property, entutling them to recompense when you sold or refinanced it.

  I’m not discounting the possibility you live sonewhere with different property tax laws, but you’ve been making extremely broad and general statements that don’t match reality in many places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China bans compulsory facial recognition and its use in private spaces like hotel rooms⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets.

  Why was there facial recognition, or any other sort of camera, in those places in the first place? Has something been mangled in the translation, is it a fuss about nothing, or were organisations genuinely going “hmm, we need to check your face before you can use the restrooms”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I tried THIS and it actually works all the time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  According to the book, there’s no need for them to eat it, you just have to give it to them, although I think they may have mixed up ‘fascinate’ and ‘confuse’.