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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.

    We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.




  • 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.