salmo (u/salmo) - Readit News

salmo commented on Forget CDK and AWS's insane costs. Pulumi and DigitalOcean to the rescue github.com/stoix-dev/stoi... · Posted by u/mavdi

hinkley · a year ago

We had so much conflict with the ops team over their choice of Terraform. The three colors of variable thing is just fucking bonkers. Getting tests wrapped around it that actually did what we thought they meant was a giant pain in the ass.

I won't go as far as to say we burned bridges arguing back and forth about it but they were definitely significantly singed.

Config files simply don't work until they do. And if it's your job to stare at them for hours and hours a day then maybe that's okay with you, but if you expect other people to 'just learn' it you're an idiot or an asshole. Or both. Ain't nobody got time for magic incantations.

I also think it should tell you you're on the wrong path when your app is named after a verb and the data it deals with is all declarative.

salmo · a year ago

Honestly, the culture/org structure is a way bigger problem in this story than any proper noun tool.

If you’re ignoring guidance and patterns and getting mad reinventing the wheel, that’s on dev. If “ops” mandates tooling and doesn’t have any skin in the game, that’s on them. And both problems are on your leadership.

If y’all just hate each other and don’t listen or participate, then you can’t be successful. It is ironic that this is the pattern that the devops movement landed us in.

salmo commented on Show HN: Container Desktop – Podman Desktop Companion container-desktop.com/... · Posted by u/istoica

knowitnone · a year ago

Sorry for being pandentic but you don't learn much by looking at the inside of a radio because it's mostly electronic components except for the knobs, antenna, dial. Without understanding how the the electronics work, you're just looking at parts. Mechanical parts like a bicycle, much easier to reason. Not knowing your background, can you build a radio if giving a box of parts? I certainly can't.

salmo · a year ago

I don’t think you’re being pedantic. You’re just making a weird assumption that the radio itself is the only resource. I learned a ton from this as a kid. And I learned from Radio Shack. You stare at it, you go research, you try to fix it, you fail. Talk to someone who knows stuff. Repeat until it works or you work on a new one.

It’s really no different than how I taught myself to fix a chain or replace a spoke. Or know to use WD-40 to clean, but then apply an oil to keep stuff lubricated and protected.

With the internet, it’s a lot easier. I can look up spec sheets just googling component markings and see the sample circuits.

I’ve stared at the Linux kernel a ton. I messed with some stuff. I couldn’t write a kernel myself, but I program better from doing it and I can troubleshoot things easier knowing the components and topology.

Off the top of my head, I can fumble around and make a crappy amplifier from parts in my closet, or write a crappy FAT-like file system. I’d probably struggle a bit with a nice new bike. I think gear shifters and stuff are a lot fancier than an old 10 speed.

salmo commented on Apple's new macOS Sequoia update is breaking some cybersecurity tools techcrunch.com/2024/09/19... · Posted by u/zspitzer

RockRobotRock · a year ago

Is there even an equivalent to WSUS on macOS that lets admins block an update until it's tested?

salmo · a year ago

Yeah. There’s Jamf and similar tools. Companies often block major updates until their 100 agents all officially support it. Oh, and do cool things like not letting you change your background or whatever random settings some admin decides are good.

salmo commented on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazo... · Posted by u/jbredeche

NoMoreNicksLeft · a year ago

> There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that t

That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.

Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.

salmo · a year ago

The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.

But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.

salmo commented on DuckDB as the New jq pgrs.net/2024/03/21/duckd... · Posted by u/pgr0ss

pcthrowaway · 2 years ago

I wasn't aware of the bait and switch at the time I read it, but I did really enjoy the history of how the Unix/Linux ethic came together and evolved over time. Had I heard of The Unix Programming Environment when I read it in 2014 I may have gone with that instead, as I was looking for something more along the lines of a technical handbook rather than a code of ethics.

salmo · 2 years ago

Yeah and ESR can be revisionist in his history, projecting intention on something organic. He alienated a lot of people over time with this… and other behavior.

The book I recommended is both a handbook and a “how to think.” It applies forward to things introduced well after the book. But it also helped me understand why the Byzantine behavior of a tty is what it is.

If you are interested in the history from a first person perspective, I do recommend Kernighan’s “Unix: A History and a Memoir”. He went from originally trying to write something objective to realizing it was necessarily his personal experience. Even the culture aspect of his story has influenced how I try to foster teamwork. It was an engaging read for me.

salmo commented on DuckDB as the New jq pgrs.net/2024/03/21/duckd... · Posted by u/pgr0ss

pcthrowaway · 2 years ago

> The Unix Programming Environment

How does this compare to The Art of Unix Programming, if you've read both?

salmo · 2 years ago

I don’t find that book to be very useful at all.

I’m kind of annoyed by the bait and switch of the title. It’s a play on Knuth’s classic but then turns into showing why Unix/Linux is better than Windows, etc.

As a disclaimer: I really don’t respect ESR and his work, and admire Brian Kernighan immensely. Very odd to be in a situation where those names are put side by side. Just want to call out that I do have bias on the people here. Don’t want to get into why as that’s not constructive.

salmo commented on DuckDB as the New jq pgrs.net/2024/03/21/duckd... · Posted by u/pgr0ss

digdugdirk · 2 years ago

Your comment made me go look up jq (even more than the article did) and the first paragraph of the repo [0] feels like a secret club's secret language.

I'm very interested, but not a Linux person, do you know of any good resources for learning the Linux shell as a programming language?

[0] https://jqlang.github.io/jq/

salmo · 2 years ago

I’ll say, I did shell scripting for years from copy/paste, cribbing smarter people, and reading online guides. But I didn’t really understand until I read The Unix Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.

It’s a very old book and the audience was using dumb terminals. But it made me understand why and how. I think I’ve read every Kernighan book at this point and most he was involved in because he is just so amazing and not just conveying facts, but teaching how to think idiomatically in the topic.

I also used awk for 2 decades, kind of like how I use jq now. But when I read his memoir I suddenly “got it.” What I make with it now is intentional and not just me banging on the keyboard until it works. A great middle ground for something a little sophisticated, but not worth writing a full program for.

Something else that helped me was to install a minimal distro… actually a base FreeBSD install would be great… and read the man pages for all the commands. I don’t remember the details, but I learned that things existed. I have many man pages that I look at the same options on every few months because I’m not positive I remember right. Heck, I ‘man test’ all the time still. (‘test’ and ‘[‘ are the same thing)

I also had an advantage of 2 great coworkers. They’d been working on Unix since the 80s and their feedback helped me be more efficient, clean, and avoid “useless use of cat” problems.

I also highly recommend using shellcheck. I sometimes disagree with it when I’m intentionally abusing shell behavior, but it’s a great way to train good habits and prevent bugs that only crop up with bad input, scale, etc. I get new devs to use it and it’s helped them “ramp up” quickly, with me explaining the “why” from time to time.

But yeah. The biggest problem I see is that people think there is more syntax than there really is (like my test and [ comment). And remember it’s all text, processes, and files. Except when we pretend it’s not ;).

salmo commented on Redis adopts dual source-available licensing redis.com/blog/redis-adop... · Posted by u/pauldix

api · 2 years ago

That may be true, but a lot of the creators of open source do in fact do it for the "hippie philosophy." That disconnect will eventually kill it. Why work hard to just be free labor for SaaS companies and people who don't care about you?

salmo · 2 years ago

The problem I’ve seen historically is when a company is founded around one project or ecosystem.

Someone like Microsoft or Google could take software like this, pay the original developer, and still see tons of ROI offering it as a canned cloud service. And to a certain degree they don’t care about the profitability of that 1 thing if it helps sell the rest of their system. Quite honestly, they won’t care about competition using it if it’s already common. People want X, they’re using it, you can offer it. You’re paying a handful of people for street cred, a guarantee it will continue to work well with your stuff, and input into direction.

Folks like RedisLabs, MongoDB, Hashicorp, etc. think they can do the same with a marketplace offering. But they’re reliant that the particular product is profitable on its own. They’re also reliant on the cloud customer being willing to establish another relationship with another vendor, even when they can automatically deploy and bill through their existing provider.

We’ve seen folks behind OSS projects hop from company to company over time and the project continues to thrive. I haven’t seen a company restrict a license and the project do so… at least that I can think of. I might be wrong.

salmo commented on DuckDB as the New jq pgrs.net/2024/03/21/duckd... · Posted by u/pgr0ss

xg15 · 2 years ago

The most effective combination I've found so far is jq + basic shell tools.

I still think jq's syntax and data model is unbelievably elegant and powerful once you get the hang of it - but its "standard library" is unfortunately sorely lacking in many places and has some awkward design choices in others, which means that a lot of practical everyday tasks - such as aggregations or even just set membership - are a lot more complicated than they ought to be.

Luckily, what jq can do really well is bringing data of interest into a line-based text representation, which is ideal for all kinds of standard unix shell tools - so you can just use those to take over the parts of your pipeline that would be hard to do in "pure" jq.

So I think my solution to the OP's task - get all distinct OSS licenses from the project list and count usages for each one - would be:

curl ... | jq '.[].license.key' | sort | uniq -c

That's it.

salmo · 2 years ago

As an old Unix guy this is exactly how I see jq: a gateway to a fantastic library of text processing tools. I see a lot of complicated things done inside the language, which is a valid approach. But I don’t need it to be a programming language itself, just a transform to meet my next command after the pipe.

If I want logic beyond that, then I skip the shell and write “real” software.

I personally find those both to be more readable and easier to fit in my head than long complex jq expressions. But that’s completely subjective and others may find the jq expression language easier to read than shell or (choose your programming language).

salmo commented on The Shen Programming Language shenlanguage.org/... · Posted by u/tmalsburg2

aredox · 2 years ago

And even that, in woodworking there's been three "new" methods of sharpening in the last decade or so which all became trends (and counter-trends); and new tools, new jigs, new tricks pop up all the time, so...

salmo · 2 years ago

I do almost all hand tool woodworking, but not purist. My main smoothing plane is from 1910ish. My most new fangled hand tool is a Japanese Shinto rasp.

And you’re 100% right. I’ve changed my chisel and plane iron sharpening method twice in the last 12 months.

There’s oil stones, wet stones, diamond stones, and sandpaper. Plus a leather strop with pick-your-compound. I’ve used 2 different jigs on stones to get a more consistent bevel than by hand. There’s high speed grinders with a lot of pauses and cooling to not lose the temper. There’s expensive water cooled low speed grinders. Then there’s debate on the angle, microbeveling, and how much of the back you should flatten.

I’m now using a new jig from TayTools that uses a 3M Cubitron II sandpaper disk on a drill press when they get bad. I freehand on diamond and a strop after and between resetting the bevel. It’s the laziest way I’ve found so far.

Claiming any choice is best is likely to result in fisticuffs. And don’t start a conversation on workbench design or vice choices.