Posts by HalfManHalfBrisket 28 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2025
Another old /week devotee here: quick scan of titles at odd moments during the day for new articles that tickled my fancy. Images on new archive page make this slower, so yes this ^^^ please.
OTOH thanks for retaining something analogous to /week. Many sites just drop support for established usage patterns completely when doing a redesign.
Agreed. Just don't think we in Europe get to sit on our moral high horse about such things, that's all. Using a somewhat blinkered version of history to serve contemporary political and nationalistic ends is something found everywhere and in all ages. While I can hear myself sounding pompous and pious, there's a longer historical and geographical context here than the US and Now. Outrage at what the current US administration is doing here I can safely outsource to other commenters, no shortage of those, though I don't disagree,
Unfortunately for the simple narrative, as other's have noted here, it's also partially a cultural thing that's not exclusively down to Trump and his cronies, however we might want to see it that way: with it's ubiquitous flags, anthem singing and oaths of allegiance, Nation Building has always been a more active project in the US than we're used to in the UK, and under a president of any stripe, the republic's 250th foundation anniversary was always going be celebrated with more patriotic huzzah than some of us right-pondians might be comfortable with. Not so egregiously jingoistic, but still.
One would hope (against hope perhaps), there'd be room in that 'American Journey' and 'American history' to acknowledge a somewhat longer timeline for human history in the US landmass than 250 years. Several million people lived there prior to 1492, and had done so for thousands of years. Include post-glacial Alaska and you're nearing 25,000 BP for evidence of humans activity.
Trying to avoid slinging mud here: nothing inherently sinister in a state celebrating an anniversary, most do in some form or other, e.g. Diamond Jubilee in the UK, Bastille day in France. It's when it becomes an opportunity and licence for jingoism that I get the ick. It helps to remember that the dominant national story usally celebrated in such things is just that, a simplified story, one among many that might be told.
Yes, I too caught the sound of 'pot calling kettle ' wrt creating a social structure where only some thoughts are allowed to be expressed. Too harsh perhaps for the current post-inquisition Catholic Church, but still hands not entirely clean.
Critical thinking, but maybe not too much eh? If you're the head of a faith based community, particularly given all the recent scandals.
Yes, not an exclusive shout out. Adding Private Eye to the list. Computer Weekly of course garners most plaudits for surfacing the problems into the public domain in the first place. Others doing proper reporting for all the years it took before it was generally recognised for the scandal it was. Shameful that there is still so much foot dragging over compensation. ANnd, as PE recently reported, Fujitsu has quietly resumed its place in government procurement while slow-walking on their compensation promises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Triebfl%C3%BCgel
This concept has brainfarted it's way into the ether regularly over the years: VTOL from muddy field! Pop up point defense! Exotic untried tech.
Leaving aside we already have trailer mounted missile launchers that do much of this mission, and that motorways as austere runways have been part of Swedish aviation doctrine for decades, it conveniently forgets that there's a lot more to flying military planes than the flying. Delete the runway by all means, but you still need to fuel it, arm it, store it, repair it, move it about. The personnel, equipment and logistics for all that still requires a sizeable and bombable ground footprint. Temporary dispersal to muddy fields would be possible in extremis but logic and efficiency dictate that you're gonna want to concentrate resources in peacetime, so you've still got a largish airbase with crew quarters, hangers, maintenance shops, fuel and weapon storage etc, everything but the runway.
Want to cut that ? Integrate the fuel and armament in the package and make it single use ... and you've got a missile again.
South Park does seem to be struggling to get episodes out at the moment doesn't it ? Missing schedules, and just now cutting S27 short, turning episode s27e6 into s28e1. The official line seems to be that "its all too difficult keeping up with the madness so we need a bit longer" and "we always intended just 5 episodes per season, just forgot to tell anyone". Take that as you will. I'm trying to avoid drawing conclusions of conspiracy, but it does invite speculation about hard meetings at Paramount.
Yep, that fits us - we're not too big and lambda suits our modest use cases just fine, cold starts latency and all. As you say, quick to setup and good for unchallenging needs like ours.
I meant /their/ use case at the point where they embarked on this. Irrespective of how good a fit initially, if you're now incurring lambda usage costs significant enough to seek this sort of drastic engineering work-around, maybe you're at the point to step back and reconsider your tech stack, as other commentators have said.
Re engineering lambda into a container management plane and implementing your own replacement invocation stack isn't where I'd have gone next. I do understand though, sometimes you just keep digging.
Agreed on the horrible hack to reimplement a capability best done properly elsewhere.
As someone who suffers in the day job from the lambda instance inflation under load and the associated cold starts I can kinda see where they started from, if not support where they ended up. Sometimes when in a hole, you keep digging.
I see the undoubted timesharing element in the narrow terms of getting the lambda to service multiple requests concurrently, something aws disallows natively. In terms of cost, pay aws once for the long dummy request keeping the lambda 'alive', and use it more efficiently by servicing other requests where otherwise the single task model would be stuck in an await on a dB request or whatever. Fewer cold starts when things get spicy as well for the win. It's a clever subversion of aws lambda's processing model, if unwise as a production architecture.
Can see how this would come up in a dev meeting as a cool idea, without stepping back and rethinking whether the whole lambda thing was a good fit in the first place.
Yep, bypassing the lambda invocation mechanism and replacing the aws request dispatch loop in the lambda with their own does seem like reinventing the wheel. Add in the rest of the invocation stack, load balancers, client apis etc and you've got a beast of a hack that just seems like it's been done - better - before. I.e. using an established set of VM tools like k8.
Really it comes down to the aws lambda architecture decision to disallow concurrent requests. Only upside I can see is that if this gains traction aws might possibly revisit that decision. Though not holding my breath as all that paid for idle time serves their revenue stream well and allows them to pack more vms onto their bare metal
What we have is flawed and inefficient to the point of barely functioning at times I'm (un)happy to admit, but it is *something* and for that I'm personally grateful. YMMV I understand. Democratically healthy that probably at least half of folks would agree with you. I mentioned it largely as an e.g. of politicians following conscience and showing political courage in the context of the earlier response that today's lot need to step up against the monopolistic price gouging of Google et al. Someone else might just as pertinently have chosen Thatcher vs the Unions, although, you might have guessed, I'm not on that team.
Personally been lucky enough to enjoy reasonable education, health and employment, but much of that, certainly the starting conditions and external factors, are down to chance. A throw of the dice and outcomes could have been different. They may yet be as the old knees and eyes are looking dodgy these days and retirement beckons. Purely for myself then, and not wishing to proselytise too much, I've never really minded paying for that communal umbrella while the sun shines, nor that there's room for others who maybe haven't paid as much. Different dice throws and that could be me or any of us really. But that's just me and I don't expect everyone to agree.
Courage does seem lacking doesn't it. And then 'which way to the revolving door to the non-exec / consultancy / defence contractor ?' says the retiring govnt minister. Looking at you Clegg, Blair, Mandelson, Osbourne, etc etc.
But on it's 80th anniversary, let's at least raise a glass to the 1945 Attlee government. Good change, not the Trump kind, can happen
Not saying it's moral or I approve, see icon, just it's a plausible if Machiavellian corporate defence strategy.
Unfortunately if you're a government on the defensive economically like most in the West, you aren't going to go up against the robber barons, even if you want to, which they don't. You need to be China to do that, but that governmental model isn't for everyone ...
I would have thought the smart move by quasi monopolists potentially facing anti trust lawsuits like this would be to fund the small fry like f-droid just to be able to claim 'flourishing competition, nothing to see here'. Nothing crass, do it by an arms-length charitable foundation if need be. Not too much, just enough to keep the illusion of choice and a functioning market. iirc google continue to be one of the main backers of the Mozilla foundation for instance, long after it has served it's original purpose of breaking into the search market, but it has served to obscure the dominance of chrome and it's critical data slurping
Trump ballroom: for me the throne room arch at Ctesiphon was always the perfect real world osymandias 'Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away', but give it a few years and the ruins of mar-a-largo will do as well. Or the us economy
Historically, how the commons were successfully worked for centuries in agriculture was a combination of community self regulation and legal sanction. It never was an unfettered individualistic free-for-all. That's how you build a sustainable common good.
This latest pure capitalist incarnation laughs off the former and lobbies hard against the latter; thus fulfilling the conditions for the 'over-grazing' of the commons tragedy that seldom happened historically.
Ironic really as capitalist organisation was meant to solve this problem that was nothing more than a theoretical straw-man, but it is now actively bringing into existence as only it fulfills the pure selfish interest precondition that underpins the 'tragedy of the commons' thesis.
These calls to weaken IP protections in the name of progress echo the early modern enclosure movement. Get rid of those untidy, unefficient commons with their messy web of individual small scale rights held by far too many, using them poorly. It's holding us back from maximising profits. That was an actual land grab but the motivations and analysis seem similar
