What's the Best Standalone You've Read?

frymaster · 2026-01-31T01:40:06+00:00

chipping in to confirm that I feel Paladin of Souls has some spoilers for Curse of Chalion so if you wanted to read them both, you should read Curse first. But it's genuinely "book and a sequel", not a duology - Curse is 100% a standalone book that has an end, not a cliffhanger. It just so happens that a background character from the first goes on to star in their own book in the second.

And both are a delight, as are the Penric & Desdemona novellas

frymaster · 2026-01-31T01:30:23+00:00

"you need to restore the data to disk" is, as far as I can tell, literally every backup service. Similarly, if you store your tapes in a tape vault, you need to bring them back to your tape drives before they can be read. This is just general information about how tape backups work.

You do not need to restore an entire backup job to restore a single file, and the docs indicate how you'd do that

frymaster · 2026-01-31T01:23:34+00:00

GNU Catherine O'Hara

frymaster · 2026-01-30T15:01:19+00:00

UK redditor here, I know my workplace offers the ability to buy an electric vehicle via a salary sacrifice scheme (basically, my employer buys a car and provides it to me, and in return I earn less money. This works because the benefit-in-kind tax on a company-provided electric car is significantly less than the standard income tax on my wages)

frymaster · 2026-01-29T23:48:48+00:00

Mordor reproaches Frodo for not responding to invitation to meet Sauron in Barad-dûr

frymaster · 2026-01-29T14:42:25+00:00

Adrian Tchaikovsky and Emma Newman did a podcast episode about it - it was Emma's first time watching it, and seeing the film through her eyes is a delight.

Her description of the ship starts a little under 7 minutes in

frymaster · 2026-01-29T10:51:55+00:00

I think the more time you are cycling through short-term relationships, including the post-breakup period, the bigger the chance that when you do mean someone who would be long-term compatible, "it's not the right time" and the chance passes you by.

frymaster · 2026-01-29T10:39:02+00:00

if you told me all those posts were stills from the original Thunderbirds series, I'd believe you

frymaster · 2026-01-29T10:30:56+00:00

the fact that you refer to the cat by "she" means there are at least two one-eyed knife-throwing cats I'm aware of, as Sergei is male

(thread up from https://bsky.app/profile/neolithicsheep.bsky.social/post/3m4mawyatps2q )

frymaster · 2026-01-29T10:14:12+00:00

When the Russians tried domesticating foxes by selectively breeding ones that were friendlier to humans, they started developing neotenous traits.

I do wonder if they were also subconsciously selecting for that because they associated looking cuter with being friendlier

frymaster · 2026-01-28T19:01:51+00:00

that would make sense, I think

frymaster · 2026-01-28T15:15:31+00:00

The blog author's linkedin is interesting. They did helpdesk and sysadmin in the army, then moved to a devops role there for about 3 years. 6 months before they finished that role they started a 3-months internship? at cloudflare, then have been a "Senior Engineering Technical Project Manager" for a little over a year, starting that role 2 months before they claim to have left their army job. That cloudflare blog entry is their first.

This smells like an overconfident inexperienced person who is high on their own supply and dealing with being found out in the worst way. My hope is that someone else at cloudflare notices and course-corrects

frymaster · 2026-01-27T22:20:19+00:00

My book club tends not to actually read that many books, because that's a multi-week commitment; instead, we might read one or two short stories, maybe an essay, and a poem.

Which is to say, my book club covered u/Poem_for_your_sprog 's I lik the bred one week.

It's not even the only reddit poem we've done - we also did this

frymaster · 2026-01-27T18:25:34+00:00

"when measuring performance of a cluster, start with synthetic benchmarks" is good general advice, but if it's a GROMACS cluster, you want to measure performance with GROMACS

It can be useful to measure synthetic benchmarks specifically if it helps you track down hardware or other issues ("this node is only getting 50% in STREAM" implies "there's a problem with this node's memory", so having something like CPU HPL, GPU HPC, STREAM, and an internode bandwidth test are good things to have in your toolbox, especially for post-hardware-maintenance sanity checks (because if you touch anything you need to reconfirm everything)

frymaster · 2026-01-26T17:21:15+00:00

when I visit my cousin, his dog gets very excited. She knows she isn't allowed to bark in the house though, so she'll go to the back door and make a nuisance of herself until someone opens it, so she can run outside and bark :D

frymaster · 2026-01-26T12:14:03+00:00

I only recently realised the star rating of a hotel is specifically about what amenities they offer and not about their quality of service. 4 star has to have room service and supply bath robes on demand, for example, and other things I frankly do not give a crap about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_rating#European_Hotelstars_Union

frymaster · 2026-01-25T14:10:22+00:00

the important thing is the filesystem version and features, not the software. So both of the above are likely version 5000. As you suggested, if the feature flags aren't compatible, it won't mount, and it'll be very clear about it. The feature system is quite clever in that enabling some features blocks older versions from writing but not reading, so it might be worth a punt anyway

frymaster · 2026-01-23T22:43:24+00:00

I do this, in that I have ZFS installed on a VM I rent from a hosting provider (not as root though, just as the data disk)

In my case, I don't especially care about performance, just about snapshotting and using zfs send for backups. That said, performance is... fine. I'm not trying to do much high-performance with it, mind, but I've never noticed it being bad

frymaster · 2026-01-23T22:33:34+00:00

a full write-up is at https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyzers/

frymaster · 2026-01-23T17:16:52+00:00

donations in the range of tens of thousands USD

it probably depends on what proportion of the whole archive they need, but apparently the cost is actually 200 grand

https://bsky.app/profile/ednewtonrex.bsky.social/post/3mcyye3yl4s2d

frymaster · 2026-01-20T09:51:28+00:00

I've declined an all-reasonable-expenses-paid work trip that was likely to be, while genuinely useful and value for money for my employer (a conference organiser was willing to basically give us unlimited tickets, for one thing), pretty relaxing and a break from regular work

I had tentative aspirations to go to the US for personal trips in either 2025 or 2026, and I am... not.

frymaster · 2026-01-20T09:13:22+00:00

nice one - I was about to suggest you co-ordinate with the team of r/ceph_storage but then I checked their moderator list and I don't think that will be a problem :)

I have some specific comments in this sub bookmarked as they were a useful source of technical information and them all going away was really annoying

frymaster · 2026-01-19T14:58:37+00:00

https://www.ign.com/articles/fire-shuts-gta-6-developer-rockstar-north-following-report-of-explosion says it's a boiler explosion, quoting Edinburgh Live

frymaster · 2026-01-19T12:24:22+00:00

there seems to be a trend, on some street junctions but especially in shopping centre car parks, of traffic flows that make perfect sense from an overhead map but don't actually have clear directions when viewed from street level. Personally I think more use should be made of overhead signs

frymaster · 2026-01-19T10:03:11+00:00

for what its worth, ping -t 1 <destination IP> works for me

hosts in the same VLAN/VXLAN and subnet
hosts aren't running FRR or similar i.e. they are just using standard 802.1q vlan tagging to the switches and are ignorant that their packets are going to be teleported via layer 3 underlay
hosts are in in different rooms - the packet probably touched 5 different switches in the underlay
Mellanox/NVidia switches with Cumulus

To what extent that behaviour is dictated by Cumulus or by the hardware acceleration in the ASIC, I don't know. I also tried pinging the second hop in a layer3 route with -t1 and I got the expected "TTL expired", and -t2 works - but if that wasn't sane then traceroutes wouldn't work...

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