Our system wasn’t quite as critical, thankfully, but the app owners failing to respond to “Hey, by the way, your service account for your data base is gonna be closed” is just gross negligence. My condolences that you had to take the brunt of their scrambling to cover their asses.

For all the complaints I may have about certain processes and keeping certain stakeholders in the loop about changing the SQL Views they depend on, at least I acknowledge that plenty of people did heed the announcement and make the switch. It’s just that the “Oops, that mail must have drowned in my pile of IDGAF what our sysadmins are writing about again. Can’t you just give me the new password again, pretty please?” are far more visible.

We had that some time ago with a service account for a specific system where individual personal accounts weren’t (yet) feasible. The credentials were supposed to be treated with confidence and not shared without the admins’ approval. Yeah, you can guess how that went.

When the time came to migrate access to the system to a different solution using personal accounts, it was announced that the service account password would be changed and henceforth kept under strict control by the sysadmin, who would remotely enter it where it was needed but never hand it out in clear text. That announcement was sent to all the authorised credential holders with the instruction to pass it on if anyone else had been given access, and repeated shortly before the change.

The change was even delayed for some sensitive reasons, but eventually went through. Naturally, everyone was prepared, had gone through the steps to request the new access and all was well. Nobody called to complain about things breaking, no error tickets were submitted to entirely unrelated units that had to dig around to find out who was actually responsible, and all lived happily ever after. In particular, the writer of this post was blissfully left alone and not involuntarily crowned the main point of contact by any upset users passing their name on to other people the writer had never even seen the name of.

You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.

I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn’t make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I’m still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

Absolute big brain move

Wolfman dies, kills some monkeys, does some rope stuff, performs eye surgery and kills himself (depending on what ending you go for).

Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server’s backend access named db.js

Suppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file db.test.js

Suppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named db.test.js.tar.gz

Suppose I sign that file with PGP, now named db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it .db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I’m sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.

but but but but you’d get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it? Come on, I’m sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don’t actually need is good!

(That was sarcasm, if it wasn’t clear enough.)

The whole point of making a federated network of independent instances is to avoid the issues arising with one central instance, right? Putting the content out to multiple instances plays into that: If it’s important content, no single authority can easily censor it, and the loss of a single instance won’t erase it.

If it’s trash, of course, every community in every instance you post it to will have to clean it up separately. Arguably, that puts more strain on the respective moderation teams, but if (ideally) those are disjunct people (again, to avoid the issues of a single authority), the strain should be distributed.

And on the plus side, it would enable each community (in the lemmy sense) to enforce their own nuanced rules, additionally leading to slightly more choice between the types of moderation you favour (as opposed to “There’s one big sub, take it or leave it”).

Individual communities may be smaller, but maybe some more form of coordination of similar communities across instances could amend that (like linking to the other communities in your sidebar etc.).

I could also imagine a super-community solution that would allow you to aggregate several communities across instances similar to multireddits. I’m new here, so I’m not sure if that exists, nor have I given the implementation any thought, but I suppose that could be convenient.