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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Mid 90s at work as a project support technician in Sony Broadcast R&D in the UK. Slackware, then red hat mostly. Installed Linux boxes in various digital TV stations in London in 1999/2000, used to insert interactive games into the broadcast stream.

    I was a sysadmin from 99 to about 2018, from then onwards I’m more DevOps. Done a bunch of stuff with CentOS too, including migrating 500k email accounts to our hosted solution. Other cool stuff included a VMware based development environment using Foreman + FreeIPA to auto provision dev VMs with all sorts of puppet code.

    Now at home I run Fedora and work on macOS, writing Terraform and Python. And some nodejs too.

    Been at it a long ass time now lol







  • I have several ways I cope:

    Satisfaction that the rich are going to get fucked by climate catastrophe and ecosystem collapse just as much as everyone else. The climate change deniers will starve just like the rest of us.

    It’s been billions of years before I existed, and potentially trillions of years afterwards. I’m incredibly lucky to be aware and thinking, so why should I complain about stuff happening after my spark of awareness has faded?

    Earth will continue without humans just fine, eventually getting swallowed by the Sun. Nothing humanity has done will survive.

    Celebrate being alive to experience the universe.




  • They don’t have the talented programmers needed to make API changes happen.

    reddit is an old school internet site. In that it was originally hacked together by very motivated people. But once the novelty wore off, and the tech debt started piling up, the motivated people either left or got promoted. It should have been trivial to add things like headline editing, but that never happened because their code and DB is a huge huge mess.

    Overshadowed by the API fuckup was something that really spoke to how badly off they are. They deleted old private messages! Their schema or infrastructure is so utterly fucked up that they couldn’t roll back whatever made that happen. People lost years of communication, just gone. No backups, no “go to this new page to download an archive of your messages”, nothing.

    It should have been easy to incorporate rate limiting into the API. It should have been easy to serve ads to 3rd party clients. It should have been a no brainer to charge heavy/advanced API users a nominal monthly fee. Mod tools should have been implemented over a motherfucking decade ago!

    Utter incompetence. Completely clueless. Fucking useless.

    It really angers me because they had it handed to them on a plate. But instead they fucked around and found out.