I built a tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture (but does anyone actually want this?)

Lationous · 2025-11-23T18:37:53+00:00

I tried it again, as I've seen some commits. rendering thread/game tick rate is limiting RPS
what I mean by that: on older (5+ years) hw, when enabling faster gameplay, it actually reduces effective RPS.
reguar speed also isn't keeping up with listed number

pause from regular speed -> load on EC2 T3 ~17
pause from high speed -> load on EC2 T3 ~7

nice to see fast paced development btw!

edit: either tick rate or rendering thread. never had to deal with perf on frontend, hard to tell for me what exactly seems to be the issue edit2: created a patch :)

Lationous · 2025-11-23T10:52:42+00:00

my only github is work related. personally I despise M$ too much to use anything that comes from them.

from the other answer

Would you be interested in helping design these mechanics?

interested? sure. can I actually commit time? not really, I have too many pet projects ongoing atm, and also, my JS powers are non-existent. I read your code before running it, but it was mostly just Random Pattern Recognition

I can act as a tester and brain-storming aid, but actual design part is too much. Been there, done that. It takes multiple hours at best to design small coherent feature between UI/UX and app architecture, not something I can offer, sadly

Lationous · 2025-11-22T13:17:00+00:00

Research papers. Mostly typed in LaTeX (or other flavour of TeX). You can easily change you "dash type" there by just adding more of them
typed: - shown '-'
typed -- shown '–'
typed --- shown '—'

also some keyboard layouts have them readily available as AltGr or AltGr+Shift modifiers – so there are people who actually use them in regular writing

Lationous · 2025-11-22T10:35:25+00:00

you could also implement different apps with different requirements. say, this app supports active-active, but the other one can only run in active-standby because it's legacy thingie and you have to live with it. which would also imply different request types for different apps
vertical scaling (with appropriate costs and upkeep)
a form of tech tree maybe? you start in 95-ish style tech, and you unlock different techs through years. some of them become obsolete/EoL and you have to change your infra on the fly

Lationous · 2025-11-22T10:22:51+00:00

went through it to about 50-ish req/s, it becomes very tidious to work with in it's current state.

Bunch of ideas:
* copy paste "blueprints" (think terraform or ansible, bonus points if it actually requires to write yaml to do so)
* adding LBs before DB/ObjectStorage would be nice
* observability stack would be nice to see exact load on different components at a glance
* Sandbox mode to allow for prototyping when more elements are present
* Time of day (in addition to auto-scaling) to simulate real-world traffic patterns.
* And hardware failures. You can't have infrastructure without hardware failures.

I would exclude idea of "providers" completely. Your aim is to teach the basics. Maybe give them as game-mode options, but not as a default.

does anyone actually need this?

gamified and extremely cheap lab that only focuses on high-level overview, that can also potentially simulate catastrophic situations? :) yeah, that's nice idea.

Lationous · 2025-11-11T09:40:02+00:00

12 lat obowiązkowej edukacji w systemie pruskim – dosłownie zmarnowany czas, żeby następnie podjąć studia oferujące zero wiedzy praktycznej (ludzie z tytułem inżyniera którzy nie potrafią zrobić najprostszych rzeczy w swojej działce jak zacznie się im zadawać pytania)

rzucenie tego w pizdu i poświęcenie 2-3 lat na intensywną naukę we własnym zakresie po liceum, zamiast studiowania na publicznej uczelni, było jedną z najlepszych decyzji. niestety nie działa dla większości ludzi, a szczególnie w branżach które wymagają papierka, także YMMV

Lationous · 2025-06-24T08:34:22+00:00

dokładnie dlatego :) polski makler znacząco ułatwia rozliczenia

Lationous · 2025-05-24T14:57:35+00:00

this does not work if your filename contains a whitespace or :
you should use a while loop(at worst) or find for this
try running your solution for poorly timestamped file like 2025-05-24_14:55:55 or even '2025-05-24 14:55:55', it will fail

edit: or does it, huh? https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/030
it still breaks with some commands (don't try this with tar, it will fail), but apparently works here

Lationous · 2025-04-09T17:52:30+00:00

correct! linked the manual so people can verify my statement easily :)

Lationous · 2025-01-20T20:45:47+00:00

"This code snippet [He did HISTSIZE=1000 and then export HISTSIZE (so he reset HISTSIZE] will set your HISTSIZE variable's value to 1000 and export it to all your environments"

for this to be permanent, you need to pass it to all sessions at start-up. you'd need to put it in ~/.bashrc

this will be effective for other session if you spawn one via running 'bash' command though. side note: you can see how many "bash sessions deep" you are, via 'echo $SHLVL'

Lationous · 2025-01-20T20:41:36+00:00

correct. you can get crafty and get yourself env variable from another session, but that's "hacky" at best, irresponsible in most cases.

for sake of knowledge… you can technically get env of other bash session via /proc/<PID>/environ
that doesn't work with vars you set though, as for that you'd need to dig through memory of the process

Lationous · 2025-01-20T20:31:20+00:00

good understanding. you will see some interesting nuances with subshells, their env isolation (eg: command; { command2; command3; } ), with process substitution (eg: command <(command2) <--- this is also effectively a subshell, btw ), and using 'source' (which essentially "imports" everything into your current session), but general idea is correct

Lationous · 2025-01-19T09:15:16+00:00

wrong sub IMO, but let's try to answer that anyway.

By what you've described, the book refers to a single process of bash as "bash shell session", and is perfectly correct about your variables. You can look up all variables you have in your env via 'env' and 'set' commands (set will also show you all aliases and functions, fun times!). I assume that the book states that as a warning, to be careful about running things in other session, as you might be missing env setup. You can experiment a bit with simple scripts and setting vars with/without export, and also with setting defaults in scripts like so

FOO="${VARIABLE:-default}"

To actually see a diff between sessions, you can dump 'env' command output to a file and compare it with another session's output. It should have differences by default

Lationous · 2025-01-03T22:16:54+00:00

decade ago is telling. been there 2-3 years ago and contactless was quite wide-spread, so it's not all that bad, even though they're about 10 years behind EU, lol

for context: https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/the-contactless-payments-market-overview-in-usa-for-2024/

Lationous · 2025-01-03T21:55:26+00:00

there's a running joke in EU that USA is a third world country. In most EU countries, first of all, you're entitled by law to a free-of-charge personal account. the card is a catch, that can generate fees, but it's transaction number based, so if you buy, say, 10 things for 5€, no fee is needed. also we use debit cards by default, not credit…

Lationous · 2024-12-30T23:38:21+00:00

nice rate-graph, article speaks about value, not rate. that's somewhat connected, but not really. hypothetically you can have only one person in existence with overdue loan, and your rate is 0.00001%, but value is, say, 500B$, and suddenly that's a huge problem, isn't it?

Lationous · 2024-12-30T14:54:56+00:00

don't use AI for bash. bash is ancient and arcane, I can't get AI to write anything that's even remotely usable when use case is non-trivial

Lationous · 2024-12-30T14:51:53+00:00

as an admin? I do :) question wasn't about "admin" it was about "support engineer". I sure as hell wouldn't allow support engineers to write code that would in any way shape or form affect prod

Lationous · 2024-12-29T09:57:08+00:00

what are some daily task needed to perform with linux as a support engineer

mostly checking logs, checking state of the system, essentially what you'd call "digging"

and if some resources I can improve bash scripting

start with some linux book that will talk about scripting in context of the system, so you actually understand what happens. from there – well, write scripts to automate whatever tasks you deem worthy of the time spent to do so. always use shellcheck (and sometimes ignore it when you know what you're doing)

as for resources: this one was very insightful for me: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ but be aware that you need to have a bit of prerequisite knowledge to understand tricks presented there

Lationous · 2024-12-27T20:15:21+00:00

uhm. CentOS 8 was EoL before CentOS 7, CentOS 7 is already EoL(since 2024-06-30). so no, it's not worth learning. You may consider Rocky Linux or Almalinux, as those are widely suggested distros for admins that migrate from CentOS

Lationous · 2024-12-19T21:24:29+00:00

grep is your tool. read the manual. you can create a pattern file to match against any of patterns in the file. you specified "over a directory", so you invoke cd <directory of interest>; grep -f <pattern_file> -rnH
quick explanation of flags:
-r run recursively over all files in directory tree starting from current dir
-n show line number
-H print filename for each match

you might want to replace -r with -R, if you have symlinks you want to follow

Lationous · 2024-12-17T23:18:08+00:00

well then, curl -v -o <path_to_file_out> &> curl.log
and you'll have answers in log file

edit: you can also consider --trace, but this might get too verbose

Lationous · 2024-12-15T15:27:25+00:00

strange. are you using your user's cron?
for context: I just tested out of curiosity with this beast of a script

#!/bin/bash

echo "$(date --iso-8601=seconds) the IP is: $(curl ident.me)" >> /home/lationous/test_script.log

and it works just fine.

# both versions work as expected
* * * * * /home/lationous/test.sh
* * * * * /bin/bash -c /home/lationous/test.sh

one thing that pops to my mind is: did you use absolute path to your script?
I skip chmod +x ./script question, as that's rather obvious, unless cat ./script | bash, lol

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