The Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, and therefore the Earth speeds up or slows down depending on where on its orbit it is at the time. In turn this means that the duration of the solar day fluctuates from day to day, from a bit under 24h to a bit over 24h and back.

So if you take a picture every 24h precisely the sun will appear to move horizontally a little bit on top of the expected vertical movement.

The default actually works pretty well these days.

Messing with the EFI partition, for instance by attempting to have two of those on separate disks, will probably cause you more pain than Windows will. As far as I understand, only one EFI partition can be configured in BIOS as the boot partition, so you will have to change the configuration in BIOS whenever you want to boot to the other OS.

Windows does have a history of changing the default EFI bootloader once in a while; however your chosen bootloader is still there, just not marked as the default anymore. A Windows app like EasyUEFI will let you change the default back.

Windows 98 really sucked and running Unix at home became an option.

Was this a mistake?

Clarifying: are you asking if downloading the Proton Mail app through the Google Play Store gives Google access to your Proton account? If so, the answer is no.

Firefox’s stance on privacy, like Apple’s, is to some extent branding. Arguably it always was. You should still use Firefox (or any other third party browser) if it works for you. Ecosystem diversity matters.

They didn’t drop the don’t be evil thing. It’s still right there in the code of conduct where it always was, they just moved it to the conclusion of the document so it’s the last thing that remains with you. See for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

The supposed removal is a perfect example of the outrage-bait headlines I’m discussing in another comment.

It’s not the company it once was, but there are also a lot of outrage-bait headlines about it that don’t hold up well to scrutiny.

For instance, there have been a lot of Lemmy posts about Chrome supposedly removing the APIs used by adblockers. I figured I’d validate that on my own by switching to the version of uBlock that is based on the new API. Well… As it turns out, it works fine. It’s also faster.

Mind you, figuring out the actual facts behind each post gets exhausting, and people just shutting down and avoiding the problem space entirely makes some sort of sense. That, and it is healthy for an ecosystem to have alternatives, so I’d keep encouraging usage of Firefox and such if only on that basis alone.

This is actually an excellent question.

And for all the discussions on the topic in the last 24h, the answer is: until a postmortem is published, we don’t actually know.

There are a lot of possible explanations for the observed events. Of course, one simple and very easy to believe explanation would be that the software quality processes and reliability engineering at CrowdStrike are simply below industry standards – if we’re going to be speculating for entertainment purposes, you can in fact imagine them to be as comically bad as you please, no one can stop you.

But as a general rule of thumb, I’d be leery of simple and easy to believe explanations. Of all the (non-CrowdStrike!) headline-making Internet infrastructure outages I’ve been personally privy to, and that were speculated about on such places as Reddit or Lemmy, not one of the commenter speculations came close to the actual, and often fantastically complex chain of events involved in the outage. (Which, for mysterious reasons, did not seem to keep the commenters from speaking with unwavering confidence.)

Regarding testing: testing buys you a certain necessary degree of confidence in the robustness of the software. But this degree of confidence will never be 100%, because in all sufficiently complex systems there will be unknown unknowns. Even if your test coverage is 100% – every single instruction of the code is exercised by at least one test – you can’t be certain that every test accurately models the production environments that the software will be encountering. Furthermore, even exercising every single instruction is not sufficient protection on its own: the code might for instance fail in rare circumstances not covered by the test’s inputs.

For these reasons, one common best practice is to assume that the software will sooner or later ship with an undetected fault, and to therefore only deploy updates – both of software and of configuration data – in a staggered manner. The process looks something like this: a small subset of endpoints are selected for the update, the update is left to run in these endpoints for a certain amount of time, and the selected endpoints’ metrics are then assessed for unexpected behavior. Then you repeat this process for a larger subset of endpoints, and so on until the update has been deployed globally. The early subsets are sometimes called “canary”, as in the expression “canary in a coal mine”.

Why such a staggered deployment did not appear to occur in the CrowdStrike outage is the unanswered question I’m most curious about. But, to give you an idea of the sort of stuff that may happen in general, here is a selection of plausible scenarios, some of which have been known to occur in the wild in some shape or form:

• The update is considered low-risk (for instance, it’s a minor configuration change without any code change) and there’s an imperious reason to expedite the deployment, for instance if it addresses a zero-day vulnerability under active exploitation by adversaries.
• The update activates a feature that an important customer wants now, the customer phoned a VP to express such, and the VP then asks the engineers, arbitrarily loudly, to expedite the deployment.
• The staggered deployment did in fact occur, but the issue takes the form of what is colloquially called a time bomb, where it is only triggered later on by a change in the state of production environments, such as, typically, the passage of time. Time bomb issues are the nightmare of reliability engineers, and difficult to defend against. They are also, thankfully, fairly rare.
• A chain of events resulting in a misconfiguration where all the endpoints, instead of only those selected as canaries, pull the update.
• Reliabilty engineering not being up to industry standards.

Of course, not all of the above fit the currently known (or, really, believed-known) details of the CrowdStrike outage. It is, in fact, unlikely that the chain of events that resulted in the CrowdStrike outage will be found in a random comment on Reddit or Lemmy. But hopefully this sheds a small amount of light on your excellent question.

I know right? Some countries are much better about it though. In Ireland, Varadkar and Martin recently shared the Taoiseach (prime minister) role when neither of their parties won enough seats to form a government. There wasn’t much fuss about it; it was just a reasonable compromise, so they went and did it.

(Sorry, posted in the wrong location.)

Mélenchon is… frustrating.

He’s the main contender on the limited field of the actual left in France. He’s got a lot of proposals that are actually good and desirable.

He’s also a narcissist and a populist whose stated approach to achieving his proposals is to denounce treaties he doesn’t like and somehow force other countries to replace clauses with whatever it is he wants.

He’s also incapable of compromises, and right now busily torpedoeing the left wing alliance that won the election because his own party didn’t win enough seats to take charge of the alliance.

What I don’t know is, how much of the populist/anti-system talk is just talk for political reasons, and whether he would in fact be capable of the nuance required to govern. He might. He might not. He’s clearly smart and charismatic. But he’s also the type to huff his own farts hard enough to mistake the visions for the truth of the world. So… In that respect, pretty much just like Macron.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

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On évite le pire ce coup-ci. Pour le coup, on a le droit de prendre 5 minutes pour célébrer.

Ensuite il sera temps de se remettre au travail. On a pas le fion sorti de l’ornière, et il y a du chemin à faire.

Great article, thanks for posting! Worth noting that swap is also used for tmpfs partitions. Meaning that if you don’t have any swap, temporary files in /tmp will use your actual physical RAM. That’s probably not what you want.

No one can tell for certain, but it does seem like he’s been huffing his own farts so hard he figured he could win this.

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Yeah, what a loss. Now it will only be able to suggest glue on burgers. /s

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

When investors shut off the AI money faucet. No sooner, no later.

By god, may that happen soon.

You can manually start the apps configured as .desktop entries in your autostart directory using dex. For instance:

dex --autostart --environment sway

Invoke the above from your Sway config and you’re good to go.