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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.

    Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.

    I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.

    Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.

    If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.


  • Do we have to bring this up again? It’s just boring.

    systemd is here and it isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

    Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

    Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?


  • The WiFi card is probably a Realtek 8852AE, which has become very common in laptops since 2021. Unfortunately Realtek driver support tends to lag quite a bit.

    If you want to run Ubuntu Desktop 22.04, then you’re probably best off waiting a few weeks for the Ubuntu Desktop 22.04.4 point release. It’s due sometime this month. It will boot and install an “HWE” (Hardware Enablement) kernel and drivers, that are based on the kernel from Ubuntu 23.04, and therefore should work out of the box with your WiFi card.

    While it’s possible to upgrade an existing Ubuntu 22.04 installation with the latest HWE kernel, doing it by downloading the relevant packages on another machine and moving them across using a USB stick is going to be somewhat frustrating if you’ve not done it before. You’ll certainly learn a few things, but it may not be an enjoyable experience. I’m a grizzled Linux veteran, and I’m pretty sure I’d end up forgetting to download one or more packages and having to swap back and forth between machines.

    In the meantime, I would just continue to use Ubuntu 23.04. In fact, if it was me, I would probably just stick with 23.04, upgrade to 23.10 and then subsequently 24.04 when they become available. What you do once you’re on the 24.04 LTS release is up to you. By that time, other distros will probably also work out of the box too.


  • Russians in positions of power have frequently said that Ukraine is an aberration, and doesn’t actually exist at all as a national identity. So any Ukrainian symbol is an act of resistance to that.

    Why use that particular flag? Well, why does anyone do any trolling? Because it feels good getting an emotional reaction out of other people. Because it feels good sticking it to those people who want you dead, or assimilated.

    But also because it helps to figure out who isn’t a fan of the concept of Ukrainian statehood. If the initial reaction towards a Ukrainian nationalist flag is that it’s “Nazi” then that’s a pretty strong signal.



  • I’m a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.

    Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.

    Ansible also has a place, particularly if you’re deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn’t use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.



  • Sure. I’m sure Trinidad and Tobago, and Albania, are definitely Nazis. And those anarchists with their black and red flags, they’re definitely Nazis too, right?

    Seriously though, in this case, it’s the unofficial war flag of Ukraine.

    It was originally associated with the WWII nationalist Banderite movement, which has some dubious history but is important in the 20th century story of Ukrainian nationalism. However its usage has evolved and is used widely, albeit unofficially, in modern Ukraine, by lots of military-associated groups who have nothing to do with Nazis or fascism.

    One of the main selling points of it is that it trolls people who uncritically believe that Ukraine is run by Nazis.