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On the other hand when you have a reasonably complex deployment it's easy to get swamped with dashboards showing CPU, Memory, I/O, application-metrics, signups, active users/sessions, etc.

Instead it's nice to think about how you can express the state of a complete system as a single number. It might be you divide active user sessions by database-connections, and then scale by memory capacity.

But as a single digit you can then get used to normal ranges, and have it always visible somewhere obvious. A single number won't show details, but when it changes you can go look at the specific metrics. It's a cute shorthand, and it can work well as a basic "are we normal" check.


I loved the writing, in particular this line, but the whole piece was strangely endearing:

     I asked if he was Canadian. He wasn't. The end

I loved it too. I audibly laughed at this one:

"Korean girl Short I didn't know how to start a conversation with her, so I just asked if she was Korean and she said yes. Then I made her guess what kind of Asian I am. Then I rambled about being Asian in Syracuse before leaving. I initiated one more conversation but now we don't interact"

So endearing!


That sounds frightening to someone with social anxiety...

Yeah, that would be the last time I show up to that gym. I'd feel it was my fault. and that I was bothering them.

You can easily continue this into a conversation, FYI: "Oh, lol - you did X, and I knew another Canadian who did X, so I thought that might be a Canadian thing. Where are you from then?"

Edinburgh has some confusion of its own too, where streets will have two names. Usually because several smaller streets eventually got joined up and became one.

So walk in a straight line and you pass along Nicolson Street -> St.Patrick Street -> Clerk Street -> Newigton Road.

Sometimes you see these signposted in a fun way too with signs for both the individual components and the "main" street:

https://thescottishpearl.uk/2022/06/28/streets-with-two-name...


We did the same thing, more to avoid throwing away the plastic waste and keeping things reusable than out of any paranoia about chemicals.

But they worked well. We just did laundry every day for the first year and a half. Whether that's a net positive for ecological impact, or a negative is an open question.


I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].

Mee to :D

I still deploy a bunch of simple sites, built around the CGI::Application framework.

I understand how they work, I'm familiar with HTML::Template, and related modules, so I can hack up a quick interactive/dynamic site in a couple of hours.

They're no longer things I'd run on the public internet, but for quick internal things it's very easy to deploy a container with a perl backend.


To be honest I find the use of a separate browser at work a good way of forcing separation - all "work stuff" is done in one browser, and all "personal stuff" is done in a different one.

This time around I'm using Chromium for personal stuff, and Firefox for work-stuff. I do more work-related browsing, so having the vertical tabs in firefox meant that was the better browser to use for official stuff.

(In my previous job I used safari for work, and firefox for personal.)


https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib was is one of several attempts at that, but yes the issue is that different people have very different views of what should be standard.

That doesn't seem like it should be an issue in practice? Rather than a single standard library endorsed by the language stewards if the community at large converges on a small handful of "standard" solutions that seems like it would satisfy the security aspect of things.

Prohibition (of alcohol) wouldn't work, but over time the government has raised alcohol duty rates:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates

That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:

https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...

Whether that works is an open question, but in the UK things like "the sugar tax" have a visible affect on consumer consumption rates of "bad things".


I recently learned that in some cases fines of mispriced goods were very low, leading to companies repeatedly failing tests - and over/undercharging their customers.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...

That seems shocking to me, but I guess I live in a country where the prices on the shelves are "final" (with no need to add taxes) and I think it would be immediately obvious if I'd been charged the wrong price for goods.


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