dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the USA. https://d.sb/
- Comment on Replaced my electric resistance water heater with heat pump, dramatic reduction in energy usage 2 days ago:
In my area there’s barely any upfront cost, as there’s something like $5k in rebates plus the 30% federal tax credit.
- Comment on Yeah 5 days ago:
Usually, feature branches mean that all the work to implement a particular feature is done on that branch. That could be weeks of work from several developers. The code isn’t merged until the feature is complete. It’s more common in the industry compared to trunk-based development.
My previous employer had:
- Feature branches for each new feature.
- A dev branch, where new features were merged once they were done.
- A beta branch, branched from dev once per week.
- A live/prod branch, branched from beta four times per year.
This structure is very common in enterprise apps. Customers that need stability (don’t want things to change a lot, for example if they have their own training material for their staff) use the live branch, while customers that want the newest features use the beta branch.
Bug fixes were annoying since you’d have to first do them in the live branch then port them to the beta and dev branches (or vice versa).
- Comment on Yeah 1 week ago:
modern large teams won’t find joy with SVN
For what it’s worth, I work at a FAANG company and (at least in the repo I work in) we don’t use branches at all. Instead, we use feature flags.
All code changes have to go though code review before they can be committed to the main repo. Pull requests are usually not too large (we aim for ~300-400 lines max), aren’t long-lived, can be stacked to handle dependencies between them (“stacked diffs”), and a whole stack can be landed together. When merged, everything is committed directly to the main branch, which all developers are working off of.
I know that both Google and Meta take this approach, and probably other companies too.
- Comment on Yeah 1 week ago:
The bottom picture should be SVN. I miss incremental revision numbers.
- Comment on Bad vibes: How an AI agent coded its way to disaster 1 week ago:
And probably 90% of them are just building on top of OpenAI’s API, and OpenAI still don’t know how to become profitable. It feels like the dot com bubble all over again.
- Comment on PSA on privuhcy 1 week ago:
Generally, if it’s just a plain word or something you can read easily, then it’s safe to keep it. If it’s a jumble of seemingly random letters, it’s probably a tracking code of some sort.
- Comment on PSA on privuhcy 1 week ago:
This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from, and don’t contain anything about you personally.
- Comment on Upgrading Paperless-ngx several revisions behind 1 week ago:
This is how I handle it for most software: Read (or at least skim) the changelogs for all minor and major versions between your current version and the latest version.
If you’re using Docker, diff your current docker-compose to the latest one for the project. See if any third-party dependencies (like PostgreSQL, Redis, etc) have breaking changes.
If there’s any versions with major breaking changes, upgrade to each one separately (eg. 1.0 to 2.0, then 2.0 to 3.0, etc) rather than jumping immediately to the latest one, as a lot of developers don’t sufficiently test upgrading across multiple versions.
Take a snapshot before each upgrade (or if your file system doesn’t support snapshots, manually take a backup before each upgrade).
…or just don’t read anything, YOLO it, and restore a snapshot if that fails. A lot of software is simple enough that all you need to do is change the version number in docker-compose (if you’re using Docker).
- Comment on Upgrading Paperless-ngx several revisions behind 1 week ago:
I addition to backups, consider using snapshots if your file system supports it (ZFS, Btrfs, or LVM). I use ZFS and have each of my Docker volumes in a separate dataset. I take a snapshot before an upgrade. If the upgrade goes badly, I can instantly revert back to the point before I performed the upgrade.
- Comment on Bad vibes: How an AI agent coded its way to disaster 1 week ago:
The funny part is that Replit has billboard ads along the 101 in Silicon Valley that say “vibe code, safely”
I didn’t realise repl.it has pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be similar to CodeSandbox or jsfiddle - a sandbox for writing and running code.
- Comment on Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steam's new censorship rules in victory against 'porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists', and things only get weirder from there 1 week ago:
There’s a few groups like this in Australia, unfortunately.
Australia didn’t even have an R18+ rating for games until 2013 (R18+ is similar to AO or NC-17 in the USA). Before then, all games with a higher rating than MA15+ were illegal in Australia. Many games had an Australia-specific version with gore reduced, some things edited out, etc. to reduce the rating. The original release of GTA4 in Australia was heavily censored.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 1 week ago:
The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I’m not sure why the article says it’s a petition directed at Steam, because it’s not.
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 2 weeks ago:
That’s what I meant by hiring a self-employed freelancer. I don’t know a lot about contracting so maybe I used the wrong phrase.
- Comment on Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds 2 weeks ago:
This is amusing because practically every backend is fiber. You need it for speeds above 10Gbps, and all ISPs will have at least 40Gbps or 100Gbps connections in their data centers, sometimes even faster (QSFP can do up to 400Gbps).
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 2 weeks ago:
There’s a lot of other expenses with an employee (like payroll taxes, benefits, retirement plans, health plan if they’re in the USA, etc), but you could find a self-employed freelancer for example.
Or just get an employee anyways because you’ll still likely have a positive ROI. A good developer will take your abstract list of vague requirements and produce something useful and maintainable.
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 2 weeks ago:
At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 month,” he added. “And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in.”
For that price, why not just hire a developer full-time? For nearly $100k/year, you could find a very good intermediate or even senior developer (depending on region).
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 2 weeks ago:
I didnt realise that repl.it pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be kinda like jsfiddle or CodePen, where you had a sandbox to write and run web code (HTML, JS/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, and CSS/LESS/Sass).
- Comment on Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds 2 weeks ago:
One of my friends was part of the original NBN trial in Brunswick. I also lived in Brunswick but unfortunately I was a few blocks outside the test area. That was back in 2009 or 2010, and if I remember correctly it was 100Mbps down and 40Mbps up via FTTP.
15 years later, there’s still a lot of people with connections slower than that. My mum’s on a 12Mbps plan. Meanwhile the slowest speed I can get in the USA is 300Mbps.
- Comment on Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds 2 weeks ago:
It sure does, but AFAIK it was only available to houses that use fiber (FTTP) until recently. My mum could only get 250Mbps max over the coax network before (Aussies refer to it as “HFC” - hybrid fiber and coax).
They do have a 1000/250 plan but it’s ridiculously expensive compared to the “standard” 1000/25
- Comment on Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds 2 weeks ago:
I’m actually paying $40/month because I’m on a legacy plan that’s $10/month cheaper in exchange for no phone or email support (SMS only) and no free addons like email, web hosting space, eFax, or VPN.
- Comment on Securely Expose your Homelab Services with Mutual TLS - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah that’s a great point I didn’t consider. Thanks.
- Comment on Securely Expose your Homelab Services with Mutual TLS - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
I get that, but a lot of people are already using a VPN to access their home server or VPS.
- Comment on Just a little server 2 weeks ago:
Passmark isn’t that useful for measuring transcode performance, as it doesn’t benchmark iGPU performance. Transcoding is done nearly entirely on the iGPU.
- Comment on Just a little server 2 weeks ago:
I recently watched a video about Beelink’s factory and was surprised as how high-quality their production process is. youtu.be/ohwI3V207Ts
- Comment on Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds 2 weeks ago:
Yeah Australia still hasn’t quite caught up to the internet speeds other countries had 15 years ago. It’s kinda sad. I’m still sad the original (good) NBN got replaced by the janky NBN that’s taken years to fix.
The other weird thing in Australia is that even the expensive fibre plans are asymmetric. Most countries that have fibre have a 1Gbps symmetric plan (meaning upload and download are both 1Gbps) whereas the 1Gbps NBN plan has a ridiculously low ~50Mbps upload speed.
I moved from Australia to the USA in 2013. Back then, I had ~9Mbps ADSL2+ in Australia, compared to 600Mbps in the USA. Huge difference. Now I’ve got 10Gbps symmetric in the USA for $50/month through a local ISP.
- Comment on Securely Expose your Homelab Services with Mutual TLS - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t watched the video yet, but it’s generally not worth using mutual TLS if you’re already using a peer-to-peer VPN like Tailscale, as the VPN software is already doing mutual authentication.
- Comment on If you turn the Chicago Bulls logo upside down, it looks like a robot is doing a crab. 2 weeks ago:
The colours make it look like he’s sitting on Stitch lol
- Comment on The Unfortunate Truth 3 weeks ago:
a lot of tubes
Not a big truck?
- Comment on Anubis is awesome! Stopping (AI)crawlbots 3 weeks ago:
They’re likely not intentionally crawling Lemmy. They’re probably just crawling all sites they can find.
- Comment on Anubis is awesome! Stopping (AI)crawlbots 3 weeks ago:
Won’t the bots just switch to using that instead of the heavier JS challenge?