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stevecrox

@ stevecrox @kbin.run

Posts
10
Comments
59
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Nvidia is “the GPU cartel” according to former head of AMD Radeon

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  • See its the opposite in Linux land.

    AMD open sourced their drivers so everything just works, while Nvidia drivers have to be built against your system and Nvidia refused to supply proper desktop drivers for years (EGLStreams vs GBM).

    The downside of AMD's approach is it has to trickle down which depending on what distribution you use can take weeks to a year and it normally takes a couple iterations to get everything working nicely. Which basically expect the 6800 XT to work brilliantly but the 7300 to be flakey for a bit.

    My favourite bit is I owned a few Athlon 5300 APU and 5 years after they were released AMD were still adding performance improvements to them.

  • Quite surprised by the negativity towards Java in this thread about Sublinks, a Java-based Lemmy alternative. Is it that bad?

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  • Java's niche is middleware and 'big data', so choosing it for a Lemmy drop in replacement an excellent choice.

    Programming goes through various fads where a particular language is everyones favourite for a while (see the plethora of this is X tool .. rewritten in Rust!).

    You've had Scala, Node.JS, Go, Python and now Rust try to supplant Java in its middleware role. Each one has tried to highlight reasons why Java is bad to justify the switch.

  • Meta: How can we grow this community?

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  • I believe this post would be better if it was rewritten in Rust it would allow more efficent. memory usage compared to; the dynamically typed English language which doesn't have the borrower checker. while allows you to detect when resources are no longer used unlike English's poorly performing 'grammar checking' tools

    But seriously there has to be content to engage with and people who respond to the content. I've noticed this community has someone posting really high quality updates but the community appears to be that person.

    Posting blogs, or asking questions, etc.. would be a good way to engage.

  • Removed

    I dislike wayland

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  • Immutable distributions won't solve the problem.

    You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

    Debian's change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely 'free play' testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

    Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

    The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven't stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you've just given yourself a means to back out of it. It's a band aid to the actual problem.

    The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel's on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn't the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

    Similarly website's are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc.. for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc.. for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

    All this is kinda boring while 'containers!' is exciting new technology

  • Italian town in turmoil after far-right mayor bans Muslim prayers

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  • You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate..

    You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

    The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

    Ideally everyone would be naked in the shower, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

    It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless

  • Italian town in turmoil after far-right mayor bans Muslim prayers

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  • The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren't entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc..).

    The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

    There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

    Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

    Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

    That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

    This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

    Hopefully this also explains why it doesn't matter people enter the sea fully clothed

  • It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

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  • Uhh how?

    The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

    Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

  • What's going on with kbin.social?

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  • MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn't. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

    You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

  • What's going on with kbin.social?

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  • The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

    If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

    That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

    To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn't want to encourage contributions that is his decision but...

    KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn't have.

    The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

    Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

    Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

  • It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

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  • It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

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  • Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory...

    Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

    I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

    Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

  • It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

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  • The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

    Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

    I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious..

    I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc.. Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

    I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

    I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

    I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

  • Why do so few Industrial product come with Linux support ?

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  • It does but for the 90's/00's a computer typically meant Windows.

    The ops staff would all be 'Microsoft Certified Engineers', the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.

    Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an 'embedded' platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.

    Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.

    The only accredited OS's were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.

  • What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?

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  • The team/organisations knowledge is a huge factor but its easy to fall into a trap where no matter what the problem is the solution is X language.

    If I have an organisation that knows C# and we need to build a Web Application. I would suggest we need to learn Node.js and Typescript and not invest in a solution that turns C# into web pages.

  • What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?

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  • Technical Leads are not rational beings and lots of software is developed from an emotional stand point.

    Engineering is trade offs, every technical decision you make has a pro/con.

    What you should do is write out the core requirements/constraints.Then you weigh the choices to select the option that best meets it.

    What actually happens is someone really likes X framework, Y programming language or Z methodology and so decides the solution and then looks for reasons to justify it.

    Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust. I am not saying Rust is bad, but you'll notice they will extoll the memory safety or performance and forget about the actual requirements of the project.

  • How do you refer to the lgbtq+ "community" least excludingly?

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  • Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster?

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  • Docker swarm was an idea worse than kubernetes, that came out after kubernetes, that isn't really supported by anyone.

    Kubernetes has the concept of a storage layer, you create a volume and can then mount the volume into the docker image. The volume is then accessible to the docker image regardless of where it is running.

    There is also a difference between a volume for a deployment and a statefulset, since one is supposed to hold the application state and one is supposed to be transient.

  • I have encountered some negativity on Lemmy recently, so I just wanted to start a laid back thread to see what are people's plans for the week-end

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  • DevSecOps is all about process, I simplified my answer.

    At a high level in software there will always be a review phase, where code needs to be built and pass tests (as a minimum). With Git being used by every organisation I have been involved in you will find the organisation/team will claim to follow a variation of 'Feature branch Workflow' with review happening at a specific point (Pull Request).

    For the last ~10 years every organisation/team I've worked in/with has claimed to use a CI to verify the source code as part of that review phase.

    In most dysfunctional teams that review phase will be broken, the fastest win is to bring in the CI. Static analysis tools are also impartial in how they review and useful in teaching people how to review.

    I don't say your project must build with no warnings, I say you project must build and I'll have the CI point out where you have added warnings as part of review. When people complain I'll point to their teams Ways of Working or an organisations Software Development Plan (or in one case a System Engineering Management Plan).

    The sort of team that then chooses to disable this will do so because the leadership are undermining it (normally a team lead turns it off or tells them to just ignore it). There seem to be a few common reasons as to why team leads will do this but it isn't something you can rationally debate with. The only solution I've found is to sideline the problem, change team culture and identify a leader within the team and hand it over to them.

    Your talking about teams which are failing due to the environment, those normally understand what is wrong and the best approach is to be a good scrum master (e.g. run retro sessions, identify issues and work to resolve the environment problems with them).

  • I have encountered some negativity on Lemmy recently, so I just wanted to start a laid back thread to see what are people's plans for the week-end

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  • You can't fix a people problem with process.

    For example I've worked in DevSecOps for 10+ years, whenever consulting my first step is to implement a CI that picks up Pull Requests, builds them and runs a code analysis tools (e.g. pep8, spotbugs, eslint, etc..) and have the CI comment the Pull Request. The idea is to get an understanding of the projects technical debt and stop things getting worse and ensure the solution 'just works'.

    Teams with huge amounts of technical debt will find a way to disable it when your not looking. They will develop all kinds of reasons and in reality the technical debt was created because of cultural issues in the team.

    So I've learnt its important if you spot a team doing that, the solution isn't locking it down the solution so they can't disable it or more process. But forcing out the technical leader and sitting with the team and working out why each one is fighting the tool and not seeing them as an asset and teaching them to be better.