squeed

I, too, built almost the same thing for my kids. It plays music, using Spotify, Chromecast, and a whole lot of virtual duct-tape via HomeAssistant.

There is also an NFC tag that will turn off all the lights and turn on a disco ball :-).

Yeah, we had a lot of construction debris once, and rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster (one of the big ones). After we tossed what we had, we told the neighbors to bring all they wanted. It was really helpful, especially since there were definitely a few that were down on their luck.

It was an awesome way to build good-will, since the price difference between a 10 and 30 cu.yd dumpster was ~10%. Obviously most of the cost is in the truck roll.

We also did the opposite once: we were demolishing a small vacation home, so we told some of the locals to pick through and take what they wanted. It was funny seeing our kitchen.. but in a different house.

I agree completely. Just look at io_uring and PowerShell, to name some examples.

io_uring totally rethinks the notion of a "syscall". It is going to eat the world, and most of us are not even going to realize that it happened.

PowerShell is a really cool example of re-imagining input and output. Namely, it is record-oriented ("Object") rather than byte-oriented. No more stringing together chains of fragile "awk" commands to make pipelines do what you want. (I know there is prior art here)

If you think OS's are moving still, then you're the one stuck.

I think you're basically right. I know some people that looked in to building a flow battery (it didn't pan out for other reasons). The utility wanted it for frequency regulation - in other words, extremely short timescale response times.

Hah, I remember a pallet or the now-empty IA enclosures showing up at Noisebridge. They were super useful - a USB3-SATA adapter. I still have mine for occasional data spelunking.

I know you mention the San Francisco DMV, but you cannot get a commercial building connected to the water system in the city without a $10,000 bribe.

Its cloaked with "agents" and "consultants" but it's still cash changing hands, at the end of the day.

Yeah, my dad had a tank like that. I dove with it exactly once - never again, yikes. It was coated inside and out so, despite being a steel tank, it was in excellent shape.

Argh, that's been my experience too. (I've just rented electric cars). None of the charging stations take credit cards; they all have some byzantine payment method.

There are weird resellers abound - some have apps that work, some have crashy pieces of crap. Some have clear pricing models, others have weird "memberships" and surprise bills. The same charging station can cost wildly different amounts to different people.

It reminds me of the bad old days of American long-distance service. Really difficult to actually pick the right provider.

There are a lot of EV chargers in Germany but they're such a bizarre experience. And they're not cheap! It costs ~15eur to fully charge a car here in Berlin.

For sure. Part of being a successful writer is communicating in a way that is most effective for your audience.

Rarely is a wall-of-text the right answer. Bullet points, flow diagrams, and examples are all helpful techniques when writing for engineers.

Yeah, same here. It turns out I could focus, but it took a lot of brain power to actually and understand text.

Getting new glasses lowered the cognitive load.

You have to learn to write, and get comfortable doing it.

When I was the (de-facto and later de-jure) architect, I was too reliant on in-person synchronous discussions. I neglected my e-mail and design-document skills.

The result: everything had to be synchronous. Chat was a wasteland. Decisions where one just had to Sit Down and Think wasted multiple people's time. I realized I was subconsciously avoiding writing long documents.

Part of the problem was - no kidding - I needed a new glasses prescription. But mostly I just needed to get used to the act of sitting down, drafting, and writing a design document. I also needed to encourage the team to have a bit of discipline and design before coding.

Later, as I transitioned out of a "move-fast-and-break-things" place to a large open-source project, my learned avoidance of writing definitely hurt me. I was not practiced at asynchronous design and development.

Systemd reflects the underlying system it is meant to support: the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel is neither easy nor complex.

That Systemd can make the mania of Linux knobs usable is, IMHO, a huge achievement.

They're phasing much of the go and replacing it with rust.

Agreed! "Hammock driven development" definitely has stuck with me over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

The phrase "white-collar neo-feudalism" is probably the best characterization I've heard - thanks for that.

The metaphor makes me wonder: who is the church - those who convince the masses that there's a bigger meaning to sitting around an obeying orders?

Hmm. I'm not exactly sure if it's what you mean, but in the networking world, we use the term "Goodput" as a shorthand for "actual user-observed bandwidth".

Enjoy it! I've had this book for years. It's one of my treasured possessions.

For a similar tale of vDSO getting someone in trouble, check out this fun talk "Really crazy container troubleshooting stories": https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2017-115-really_crazy_container_tr...

I was one of the spectators on the Prometheus thread. It took him 2 days. It was insane.

Agreed, just seems like marketing vaporspeak. Not exactly a trustworthy source, too.

For example, containerd has been moved to the CNCF and made a broader project. Fine, but Docker runs a separate fork of containerd anyways. A neat marketing sleight-of-hand, but to what end?

The real problem is that you can no longer look at a fixed offset for your parameters, which complicates filtering silicon.

In other words, if you want to have a firewall rule of "drop tcp 135", in ipv4 you can just look at bytes 0x24-25 (for Ethernet). IPv6's extension-header mechanism means that the header has a non-fixed length, so you need to do work for the same effect. Given that firewalls are critical in a world without NAT, this can be a scary prospect.

Part of the blame falls on vendors who go "well, IPv6 is fringe so we'll just do all firewalling in software." The protocol is 20 years old, it's time to design the silicon.

Indeed, especially as a company that has a reputation for producing unstable APIs that break between minor versions.

This is a team that seems to think it is acceptable to return ASCII art and backspaces in their container management APIs: https://github.com/docker/swarm/issues/1214

So, you're right, but they have a tainted reputation. I wish them all the best, but I don't have high hopes.

Oh, I totally agree with you; flexibility in design is not intrinsic to Brutalist or non-Brutalist buildings.

I don't have direct experience in construction, but in a past life I worked in two academic IT departments; it always pays to be good friends with the facilities people in that world. Plus, my more direct co-workers were the ones who needed to run conduit from point A to B. So I have some direct second-hand experience and plenty of bar-stories. American Universities almost always have one or two Brutalist piles lying around, and my experience was no exception.

I was really surprised to learn how much maintenance concrete needs; it cost at least half as much as wood averaged over the life of the building. Acid rain is nasty, rebar rusts and causes spalling, penetrations such as conduit quickly leak. When I said painting concrete, I really meant treating and coating to preserve the material. So, now you have to pay almost as much to maintain this structure - then you get a request to install a new exterior security camera, or run some cat5 to the ceiling for an AP, or add a door between labs, and what would be a one-day job in a wood- or steel-framed building is a week-long torture session of drilling.

Of course concrete isn't evil - it clearly makes the modern world possible! And there are some successful Brutalist buildings. But the Brutalist fetishization of it certainly has not stood the test of time.

Another specific Brutalist feature - particularly espoused by Louis Kahn (not exactly a Brutalist but close enough) - was that the building services, e.g. HVAC ducts and the like, should just be exposed. In his mind, it was awkward and sort of dishonest to try and hide them, so don't bother. As a nerd, I appreciate this sort of transparency, but the poor conduit jockeys were tortured by this. The consequences are subtle: instead of risers and service ducts, each individual conduit is visible and has its own penetration when crossing a wall. Which means: more drilling when you need a new EMT run.

Anyways, this is just a series of war stories. People like to joke that software "engineers" are not real engineers, and this is absolutely true. However, I think experienced software developers have a good sense of just how hard it can be to predict future use and tend to design with that in mind. It has been my personal experience that even experienced architects have not gotten the same feedback cycle, so the facilities department has to bust out the Boschhammer again and again.

I don't disagree with you, but I think there's a further criticism of Brutalist architecture that's worth mentioning. Brutalism does indeed try to value functionality over decoration, but I feel it misses the mark in that regard, giving up too much in exchange for too little.

Reinforced concrete is not the wonder-material it was initially thought to be. It needs plenty of maintenance; it needs to be painted and guarded against water; and it is very very hard to make watertight window junctions.

A critical part of a building that is "functional" is that it's able to change and be altered as needed. No matter how brilliant your programming and research, needs will change. And then you're looking at years of noisy jackhammering and drilling to put a door, conduit, etc.

So if concrete is no everlasting maintenance-free wood, is the physical inflexibility worth it?

And yet, three of the four most valuable companies in the world are cloud providers, and none of them have more than rudimentary support for IPv6.

This is a disaster. Half the world is not yet online. If we're going to change that, then we need to move to ipv6, and soon.

Is it Akamai? Or is it a single site on Akamai? CDN customers can configure their sites in a million ways.

My guess is a single site that was getting DDoS'd added this as an attack signature and forgot about it.

Funny that the only serialization format that beat MessagePack in their benchmark was FlatBuffs.

I happen to know the maintainer of the Golang FlatBuff project, and he is an absolute master at tuning Golang. It's good to see that vindicated.

Wow, what an amazing article.

I wish I'd read this a decade ago.

This is the link to the full email: https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...

I was there when it happened. It's funny now, but it goes to show that "radical inclusivity" has its own costs. Put another way, including everyone actually means excluding some. This wasn't initially obvious, though, in retrospect, it should have been.

I'd like to thank the Geek Feminism movement for really evolving the discussion around that. We all had a lot of growing up to do.

Noisebridge has, in the past half-decade, learned from its mistakes and begun a more structured program of welcoming and introduction. Also, we lock the door at night now (that helps a lot).