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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I’d say the way they handled the “wokeness” was generally rough.

    A good contrast is that both discovery and strange new worlds features a non binary character. In discovery, a big deal is made, some insecurity and nervousness about coming out and then a supportive reaction when they reluctantly declare it. This implies that this a Is a “big deal” when it really should be boring, this is supposed to be a super progressive society, no reason the person should have been nervous. In strange new worlds, they just are. This seems consistent with the optimistic progressive universe, that contentious facets of personal identity today are boringly accepted in this future.


  • Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.


  • Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.



  • In this case, I’d say it’s less about how the registry works, and more about how deliberately obnoxious Microsoft makes the experience for the sake of their agenda.

    Sure if you have to deal with the registry at all, it’s “hard” but that’s casting stones from a glass house as dconf can be just as hard, and then you have the odd occasion where someone suggests dbus-send, which certainly doesn’t have room to mock registry handling as hard. The point is that most people never have to touch dconf/dbus directly to do what they want, and in Microsoft some things are deliberately obscure due to user hostile intentions.


  • Embargoes do get a bit of backlash sometimes, but not nearly enough.

    Why should a full embargo get backlash? They are trying to get input for an understanding, controlled population before unleashing it on a wider public. The whole idea is that the preview is not representative enough to start setting expectations for everyone. But it is far enough along to get the general idea and get feedback to address.

    I am constantly testing pretty well known products in advance of their release and they are frequently crap. Like one thing I’m working on hasn’t been able to work at all for a week due to some bugs that something I did triggered and they haven’t provided an update yet. However when they actually are available to the general customers, they are pretty much always solid and get good reviews. If I publicly reviewed it, it could tank this product even though no one could possibly hit most of the stuff that I hit.

    A full embargo seems fair. The selective embargo seems like an unfair idea, but also is a bad idea. If everyone knows they are allowed to talk about it, but only the good parts, then people will be speculating on what is not said. One product I tested had someone fanboying so hard about it they were begging the product team to lift the embargo so they could share their enthusiasm. They said no, they didn’t want partially informed internet speculation running until they could address all aspects of the product publicly, and frankly there was too much crappy parts even if he was over the moon over the product and didn’t really use the bad parts.

    I suppose I could see being uncomfortable with the “testers” also being the likely “reviewers”, because your are developing to the tastes of specific reviewers and tailoring for a good review in the end even if those reviewers aren’t fully representative of the general population. It’s easier to get a few dozen key influencers happy by catering to them/making them feel special, than releasing a product and hoping you hit their sensibilities.



  • Yeah, ansible is just full of these scenarios. Even in the best of times it demands an awful amount of verbosity.

    Half the time I see people land with no more idempotency than they had before, which is supposed to be one of the big draws. A lot of the things they are frontending are inherently idempotent, and a lot of other times the modules themselves fail to be safe to run multiple times for the admins input. I’ve been shocked how fragile some modules have been given its regard in the industry.







  • I feel like Red hat has pulled off a remarkable marketing feat with Ansible.

    I’m my work I consult with a lot of different sysadmins and have to be conversant in whatever they are using and that includes Ansible for a big chunk of the industry.

    I’d say for about 90% of people I’ve worked with using ansible heavily after getting the hang of it, when they are being honest they don’t see what it is getting them (generally it’s a lot more tedious but not better than alternatives), but are afraid to admit it because “not getting Ansible” might be seen as being inadequate in the industry. And this is only counting the folks that I consider to have gotten far enough to be competent in Ansible, reflecting experiences of people who know how to use it, but still don’t understand why they should see it as “helpful”. Lots of people don’t make it that far (and those folks are even more shy because they think themselves “dumb” for not getting it ).