One of our customers decided to go for off site backups with us - they had been a customer for 15 odd years for other services. Backups are not our core business, its one of the services and I got around to setting them up sooner rather than later.
Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.
Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).
They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.
That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)
Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)
We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.
Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.
It is true that very few people proactively care about backups. It’s like flossing. People know they’re supposed to do it, but in the moment it feels like a waste of time and energy, when there are more important things to do.
When data is lost, or decay takes over, the value can skyrocket. Depending on what is lost, someone may be willing to pay 100x when they would have spent on backup in order to get their data back, this is why data recovery services can basically charge whatever they want.
My assumption is the Venn diagram between people who pass the marshmallow test, and those who proactively backup their systems, has a lot of overlap.
Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"
I suspect it was done old school: Written by Stephen and passed to a LLM to fill in all those links and other garnish and then passed back for final polish by Stephen. That's how I do my write ups (but generally without the LLM bit for shorter efforts).
This is a long write up, and I'm sure it will have been assisted, but in the right way, and not a sloppy way.
I've dropped several commas before conjunctions, soz!
FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.
I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?
I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.
A jack is a flag flown from a jackstaff, wot is found at the back of a ship or boat.
The UK flag is called the Union Flag (it's a flag and it is a union of various flags and possibly nations too!) but let's face it, given how many people think its called the Union Jack, it doesn't really matter.
If your flag pole at home is somewhat canted then I think you can call it a jackstaff, with a similar justification to the Royal Navy managing to designate their shore bases as ships. For example just up the road is HMS Heron (His Majesty's Ship: Heron).
The Union Flag/Jack is only the flag of the UK by convention and not law. It's a bit wooley, just like our Constitution but it still all works.
My point is that whilst I do enjoy this encoding scheme and it is jolly clever, reality is way more complicated. The UK's flag is pretty complicated but not alone. I'm pretty sure several flags have tassels, which I suppose strays into the coat of arms territory.
I enjoyed that the Union Flag just gets its own 'preset' - the fact that it's still presiding over a large handful of others makes it a very efficient decision compared to trying to tease out all the necessary shapes to reconstruct it.
I'll admit, I was hoping for some geometric approximations for countries like Brazil, though.
This scheme is OK but not OK. You note the Brazil flag and that's a great example along with the likes of the UK and the US too.
The Brazilian flag is nominally "quite" simple: Green with a yellow/gold parallelogram/rhombus with a blue circle ... then there is the white band and stars. Absolute nightmare to classify.
I thought the UK flag was a bit of a challenge and I remember an art class 50 odd years ago, trying to paint the bloody thing. Little did I know at the time about how Aussies and Kiwi worriers and co would fare! Won't someone think of Hawaiians: their state flag is not something you depict for a quick laugh!
I suppose the US flag is arguably the hardest to depict: Those stars would take ages to draw/paint/dribble. I imagine kids get a box of stars to stick on their depictions in art classes in the US.
What's really hard, together with the quantity of them is that they're white! I haven't actually seen many star stickers used, but agree that's a great idea.
Often, when the Flag's depicted in kids' art, paints or paint pens are used, since 'negative space' stars would take forever to do with a blue marker or pencil but is quicker to paint on top of blue. And there's a great deal of artistic license used in terms of their size and color. Or on a small flag, just a lot of tiny white dots!
The Union flag is a bit of a pain! Notice how there are thick and thin white stripes. When I was a lad, it was a given that in an emergency you would fly your flag upside down.
50 odd years later, I note that hardly any Brit owns or has ever owned a Union flag. Not only that but how many people would know if it is upside down!
The right way up is thick white stripe on the top edge, nearest to the pole.
My Union Jack (in SVG) is coded to reflect the union of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I live in Scotland where it is commonly known that the English flag is plastered over the Scottish Saltire, and they don't even get the same colour blue in each.
There are different aspect ratios too, plus there is the 'jack'. I don't care for AI but I do like SVG to be human readable to some extent, although I do like oklch colours, which are not something I consider 'human readable'.
Here I have the Scottish flag, the English one, a 'GB' flag which slaps one on top of the other with those Irish extras, to make a UK 'Jack' that waves badly because SVG filters are not something I am good at.
Here is the Union Jack from the article. Concise and surprisingly human readable (I could draw this with felt tip pens on graph paper).
One problem though. The Union Jack is not symmetrical. This is tantamount to spelling someone's name incorrectly, and could be taken the wrong way, much like how some Americans would be offended if there weren't all the stars or stripes depicted.
There are some optimisations to be made, if concision rather than human readable is the ultimate goal. For example, x1="0" y1="0" is not needed, the use of a 1 x 1 viewBox means not using integers, even a 2 x 1 viewBox remedies that.
For 'human readable', if something is mirrored, the code should reflect that, with 'use' and transform 'scale(-1, 1)'. More groups could be used to contain elements that share the same colour or stroke.
In my 'hand coded' GB flag the weird offset-symmetry of the Northern Ireland 'red diagonals' is explained in SVG.
I am not that keen on CSS in SVG, however, for colours, I could be using CSS variables.
I suppose the obvious question is: Are you actively profiting from Adsense?
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
Ah shit, that one word does change the whole meaning of the sentence. Well, at least we brought attention to it over the course of four comments instead of this just being the first response lol
Classic example of victim blaming. Not the company generating the ad, not the company approving it, but the person who is trying to block it, and then ACTUALLY did stop using Adsense.
I lived through roughly the latter half of the cold war and both of my parents were soldiers. I lived in West Germany etc.
No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.
I doubt many here know what perestroika and glasnost mean or why those Russian words were so important back in the day.
I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!
I do fear numpties with a red button and a tenuous grip on reality.
>No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.
Understood. This is a dire situation. But it's not hopeless. Same for AI.
>I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The idea that we're almost certainly doomed is an extraordinary claim. I haven't seen extraordinary evidence for it.
That was never the claim, firstly, so successful straw man there, and secondly, even if it was, would it really be that shocking? Population bottlenecks have happened for less. All habitat eventually shrinks. All species go extinct.
>I think we can assume that apples and cherries are OK to eat. Apple pips are fine and why on earth would you want to crunch through a cherry stone.
Black cherries (prunus serotina) I ate a whole bunch of during late summer. Much smaller than the Prunus avium (sweet cherry) which ripens around early June here. Allegedly the fruit does contain the cyanide producing compounds but without the enzymes. The catch is if you chew the pits (or eat the leaves/stems) it is poisonous. Poisons a lot of horses and other livestock: https://horsedvm.com/poisonous/black-cherry-trees
There's a long history of cherry stone consumption for some cherry species, they are very nutritious and the cyandide is removed by processing/drying/cooking.
Delicious almond like flavor, have experimented with wild chokecherries (Prunus virginiana).
LG TVs boot Linux and have plenty of capabilities. Why would they not ... take a look around at the environment ... to best enhance ... your errr experience.
LG are amongst equals here. I've seen devices (TVs/cameras) do ping sweeps and then port scans.
I have two VLANs at home: THINGS for IoT and SEWER for things that look really dodgy.
I drive a (Seic) MG4 EV. I use the Home Assistant integration for that and put up with the rest. To be fair I live in the UK and we are quite efficiently ... observed.
Any chance someone one day will make a spyware-free OS I can run on my LG TV? It was pretty expensive and hardware wise is quite nice. Would love to be able to keep using it
If that's the current burden of proof required in your world for maths then that's fine! 't'ain't in my world: I want to see peer reviewed and published. Surely that's not too much to ask. Its not perfect but generally works rather well for maths.
I'm not a sodding programmer so please don't assume everyone here is one. I'm not a mathematician either but I do have standards: Your counter argument is a poorly constructed and inappropriately deployed example of "proof by whataboutism".
In what world is peer review a higher standard than formal verification in Lean?
Not in the world mathematicians have been living in for the past decades at least. Nearly all big theorems that have been formalized so far had been published beforehand, and it was usually regarded as a step up in rigor. Wrong results get published in peer reviewed journals all the time.
I find it really strange the way “peer-reviewed” is used by the general public as some gold standard of truth. As a former academic who has been there, the process is extremely arbitrary and variable. Are people aware that the “peer” refers not to a community or a committee, but literally to one random guy or maybe a couple with zero accreditation? And that the journal editor can do whatever they want with this peer’s “review” including completely ignoring it?
Admittedly, peer review originally referred to the fact that the journal being published was read ("reviewed") by your peers, and thus there would be the opportunity for them to provide rebuttals after publication. The process the term now refers to in academia only emerged in the 50's and 60's (Nature for example wasn't "peer reviewed" until 1967). It was literally a marketing ploy to make journals sound more prestigious which got legitimized when certain grant agencies and regulatory bodies started including it in their requirements. All the best science is published in journals that describe themselves as peer reviewed, the government says science not published in such journals isn't up to snuff, and taken literally it seems useful. It's no wonder the public thinks it's an important and long established part of the scientific process.
"I find it really strange the way “peer-reviewed” is used by the general public as some gold standard of truth."
OK but this member of the general public has at least subscribed to New Scientist since 1987, nine O levels, two A levels, two AS levels and a HND in Civ Eng. All pretty mediocre but I have a fair idea on how sciencing is supposed to work and how it ... actually works. Obviously, I ended up in IT.
I should also point out that maths "peer reviewed" is a bit special. For example Mr Wiles went through quite a maelstrom before his proof of some dodgy marginalia was accepted as "true".
Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.
Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).
They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.
That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)
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