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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.



  • Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month

    That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

    being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

    Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

    Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.




  • people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common

    And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.

    then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically

    At least you turned up to the fight.

    But language is a shared medium

    Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.




  • Incidentally, I really hate that the UK expression for when someone is feeling sick is “poorly”.

    It’s got the “ly” ending which is one of the clear signs of an adverb, and in other contexts it is used as an adverb. But, for some reason the British have turned it into an adjective meaning sick. Sometimes they use it in a way where it can be seen as an adverb: “He’s feeling poorly”, in which case it seems to be modifying “feeling”. In the North American dialect you could substitute the adjective “sick”: “He’s feeling sick”. But, other times they say “She won’t be coming in today, she’s poorly”. What is the adverb modifying there, “is”?


  • What if it isn’t everyone who uses a word “wrong”? What if it’s say 25% of people who use it incorrectly? Should you encourage them to use it correctly?

    If there are two different ways of using the word and they could be mistaken for each-other that’s bad. Once the use of a word has flipped and means something very different from the original (idiot, gay, etc.) then there’s no reason to try to return to the original usage. If the usage is still in dispute and the majority of people use the word in the original meaning, I think it’s good to discourage people from using the word incorrectly so that people are still able to understand each-other.




  • It was originally killing 1 in every 10 by lot. In other words, not in battle, but as a collective punishment of a unit 1 in 10 soldiers would be randomly selected and killed.

    1 in 10 soldiers dying in a battle doesn’t sound all that bad. But, 1 in 10 soldiers being selected to be killed as a form of punishment for the unit sounds a lot worse.






  • I think number 2 is the biggest deal here.

    Right now Steam runs on Linux, and has now reached 3.2% of all Linux users, which is getting too big to just ignore. But that’s 0.3% of all Steam users running Arch, 0.25% running Mint, 0.15% running Ubuntu, and so-on. Say you’re a smallish publisher like Klei. You might want to release your games on Linux, but it would be a pain in the ass to have to do QA for a dozen different distros, each of which is less than 1% of your user base, especially when nearly every box is customized in some way. But, if the Steam Deck and Gabe Cube take off, they’ll have to support at least one Linux distro. That means that if you’re running say Ubuntu, as long as you can get your system to look enough like the Gabe Cube, any game that works well on the Gabe Cube should work for you.

    That could start off a positive feedback loop. More games will support Gabe Cube and Steam Deck, so Linux for gaming PCs becomes more and more viable. With more and more users using Linux, making sure Linux is well supported becomes a priority for publishers. That encourages even more people to move to Linux.

    Also, for the other points, it might also be something good for families where one person (say mom or dad) likes building their own gaming PC, but 8 year old son isn’t yet at the age where he can build his own PC, and mom doesn’t want to have to build a whole gaming PC for him too. Now you can just quickly add another gaming PC to the house but without having to do significantly more upkeep and maintenance.



  • So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.

    What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.

    For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:

    1 2 3 4
    I III IV iv
    I vi ii V7

    So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.

    As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.