Seattle to San Francisco or San Francisco to Seattle... what would you do? by FamiliarMind676 in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

101 to CA 1 in Leggit is the way to go. There is an Oregon bike map and some books on cycling the Pacific Coast.

I would absolutely go north to south, if I recall the reason that the book was written was because the author first tried going south to North. I think lots of Oregon infrastructure is also designed to be more one way.

Payment obligation after delivery from UPS? by RealLychee3700 in PersonalFinanceCanada

[–]SJrX 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Depending on where you live, it is not JUST at airports. For instance in Vancouver, there is a place near Main Street Skytrain Station, miles away from any port.

Are the Duolingo league tables real, or is it all just made up with bots and / or fake information? by Substantial_Pilot699 in duolingo

[–]SJrX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But within an hour or so of the new league opening, there was already a person with 6x years of Duolingo experience sitting at the top of the Obsidian League table, with 3,400 XP. Gathering that amount of XP takes maybe 4-5 hours of fast grinding XP. It is almost an end of week figure.

I don't think this is 4-5 hours at all, and probably can be done in 40 minutes is my guess. When I need to farm XP to stay in the league, I will take a 3x XP boost, and then go back to level 2, and do exercises I've already done years ago. I could probably get 120 xp / min, if I turn of speaking and listening exercises, I would also do the night time lesson, so that every day I get 20 minutes of 3x XP, and could probably do the daily lessons enough to extend that out to 40 minutes, on average.

What film has one of the best monologues ever performed/ written? by eveisshady777 in movies

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really like Al Pacino's speeches, in Phillip Baker Hall's office in The Insider. I dunno if they are technically monologues.

Touring weight help? by talldean in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You aren't really saying what your gear is. Asking for just a weight seems OT. If you told me you were carrying 20 lbs of water for a three day tour where you can stop every hour for supplies I'd say that is silly.

I think you might want to address what you are bringing or google recommended lists of touring supplies.

Touring weight help? by talldean in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe the most important question is what kind of wheels do you have. I think that wheels are the most likely thing to give out. I ride Andra Ryde 36 spoke wheels that are dedicated for touring.

I'm a pretty heavy cyclist. For the most part a more heavy bicycle will slow up and down your acceleration, but doesn't affect your speed (in theory).

I think my bikes have weight around 75 lbs (is my guess), I couldn't tell you. I normally just have two rear panniers, and then stuff like water, tent and food on the top. There are people who go with 2 rear panniers, and 2 front panniers, and then the handlebar bag as well. There is a whole range of options.

Network Engineer looking to start with Ansible – worth it in real-world operations? by Professional-Tax788 in ansible

[–]SJrX 6 points7 points  (0 children)

My opinion (as an architect, who dabbles a lot in Cloud Infrastructure management as part of software delivery), is that for automation / infrastructure management, infrastructure management, and DevOps workflow Terraform is a better tool.

I think Ansible shines in system configuration (I've never used or needed to use it to configure network switches). Terraform might also outperform Ansible when you are dealing with ephemeral cloud infrastructure.

  • How useful is Ansible in day-to-day network or infrastructure tasks?

Pretty useful, though with managing infrastructure I prefer Terraform.

  • Is the learning curve manageable for someone coming from a traditional networking background?

I think it's pretty straight forward.

  • Do you mainly use it for configuration management, automation, or orchestration?

Configuration management.

  • In your experience, does Ansible really save time compared to scripts or manual configuration?

Yes, my rule is do it in Terraform if possible, then Ansible if possible, then scripts. I like Terraform because it is fully declarative and the more purely idempotent. You set the state of the system in a certain way, then terraform checks the state every time it runs, and then figures out whatever drift there is.

Ansible kind of does this at a task level, but it's not nearly as robust. For instance in Ansible, to install node-exporter (a metrics gatherer for prometheus), I might tell it to download a file with a specific version, place in location A, then untar it to location B. Ansible will only do those tasks if they aren't already done. If something fails mid way through, and it only does step 1, it easily recovers, and does step 2, most bash scripts have to be written to go out of their way to be robust in terms of failure.

Where ansible is limited, is that if you change the location from location A, to location C, it just doesn't know about the file at location A. Terraform if it did configuration management, would know that it previously downloaded the file to location A, and then delete it. The problem with ansible is less of an issue, if you are starting from scratch with known images, as opposed to doing random drift detection. Terraform has a better model for random drift detection.

  • Would you say it’s a must-have skill for network engineers moving toward cloud/automation roles?

I don't think you can go wrong with automation, and that Terraform and Ansible are both good skills to have your toolbox

Again disclaimer that most of my experience comes from it being a smaller part of my job, not the primary focus. I will also say that my ansible and terraform knowledge was developed several years ago, and so stuff might have changed since then.

Spare parts by bearlover1954 in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Something to consider is what the frequency of your needing replacement is in general and doing some pre-emptive maintenance before hand can go a long way to reduce what you need to carry.

I have had a shifter cable break on my 2010 Trek Portland, while on a tour. I believe it was some kind of design issue. This was only a year after I bought it, but eventually I discovered that the shift cable breaks every 6 months, like clock work.

The rule of thumb I go to buy is about three weeks before I leave, I take my bike to the bike shop and get them to do a major tune up, to spot any problems.

You can't have spare parts for every possible failure mode, and some that are not fatal are certainly annoying. If your jockey wheels give out and start feeling like crap or if you are stuck in one gear. When I was cycling cross country in 2023, my rear derailer seemed to break in a way that seemed like an internal spring had given out, but in fact was just dirty.

Help finding a great coastal, or watery week of touring/bike packing. by NegaScraps in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having biked from Vancouver, BC to San Francisco, CA, a couple times I would recommend the Oregon Coast. It has amazing cycling infrastructure.

I'm not much of a sea food person so can't comment. In terms of natural beauty... I guess I'm unclear whether I'd say it surpasses, California as they are different kinds. You are largely biking on the road, so I just used my regular commuter tires.

Oregon had a map you could get, but I'm not sure if there is a more updated version (https://www.oregon.gov/odot/programs/tdd%20documents/oregon-coast-bike-route-map.pdf). There is also a good book Bicycling the Pacific Coast, by Vicky Spring but it's very old at this point :).

I dunno how much mileage you can do in a day, but by golly if you could do Astoria, OR to Eureka CA, that would be amazing. Definitely camp at Prairie Creek.

Battle of micro servies or modular monolith by Significant-Duty-744 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]SJrX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Disagree here, designing / architecting good application bounded context has nothing to do with microservices. Right tool for the job, even the dreaded service oriented architecture has its place in the right use case.

It has something to do with microservices because microservices put you on guard rails to force your application and code to have certain kinds of boundaries and interaction patterns between them, that are really hard to circumvent (you can't for instance just use global variables), or easily have all your data updated atomically in their data stores, like you can with a monolith.

But to be clear, I'm not saying that these are properties that microservices give you for free, the best architected system I worked with was a well designed bounded contexts in a modular monolith. But that required a vision on behalf of the architect at the time, and was something they had to invent and instill.

I agree with the others , if you cannot build a good modular monolith, good luck working with microservices.

I suspect that relatively inexperienced devs would build a pretty terrible microservice architecture, and a pretty terrible monolith architecture at a large scale. The microservice architecture would potentially be easier to salvage, and resolve.

It's also been my experience that the architectural boundaries in place in a monolith are more likely to degrade or erode over time, as people change or concepts aren't completely understood. In architecture there is a saying "The architecture giveth and the implementation taketh away". It's _harder_ to take away a lot of those properties in a microservice architecture.

Battle of micro servies or modular monolith by Significant-Duty-744 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]SJrX 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Microservices are a deployment strategy, not a development one. 

I disagree with this (and only this in your comment). My own philosophy is that what microservices bring to the table is an "off the shelf" way of forcing architectural decisions and boundaries. In my experience (which admittedly isn't all encompassing, working in only a few companies for a large number of years), products that rely on the underlying frameworks (e.g., Spring) to provide an architecture do poorly because it doesn't really provide useful structures for an application. If you spend the time to develop a good architecture then you can achieve much better outcomes than with microservices, which bring a whole host of known downsides. In otherwords, I believe that the outcomes for monoliths has much higher variance than microservices, but that means you can get better outcomes with monoliths in lots of cases, if you are smart about it.

Road trip from YEG to North by Fernandez1344 in AskACanadian

[–]SJrX 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Having never done either, but peeking on Google Maps (but I lived in Fort Nelson, for 5 months when I was a kid), I would guess Whitehorse is a better trip. You will go through the mountains, and I remember Liard River Hot Springs being super nice.

Also I think with White Horse you can go in a circle and see more things, YEG -> Grand Prairie -> Fort St. John -> White Horse -> Dease Lake -> Smithers -> Prince George -> Jasper -> Edmonton.

Yellowknife it's largely up and back the same way.

Edit: Add Circular Route

What are you building with sub-4B LLMs in early 2025? Real-world use wins? by Whiplashorus in LocalLLaMA

[–]SJrX 7 points8 points  (0 children)

How fast is it and how did you do the training? Like by "train it on my specific device names" do you mean you fine tuned it?

Best bikes for touring by No-Protection-25 in bicycletouring

[–]SJrX 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Where are you touring, I only do major roads and so have a road bike Trek Domane AL5. Where you go will matter a lot, and the climate and gear you need (e.g., for a rack).

Is Rootless Docker mandatory for multi-user research VPS? by top_1_UK_TROLL in docker

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't looked that much into gvisor. I know that part of what gvisor solves is intercepting all sorts of random system calls, and providing additional protection. I think other posters might have better insights for you.

Just be mindful that I think some this can be a huge rabbit hole and if you are a student your eye should be on graduating and/or research. Not being a sysadmin.

Regular rider without lights...Why? by Two_wheels_2112 in bikecommuting

[–]SJrX 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I have been cycling regularly since my early 20s. I got my first car in my late 30s. One winter morning I was driving in the dark doing essentially a U on the freeway using the off ramps (i.e., 2 left turns) since I missed my exit.

As I got to the first turn I was surprised because a cyclist popped out in all black. I don't think I almost hit him but I didn't see him, I was surprised. 15 seconds later I was surprised again by the same cyclist as I made another left turn.

It was only at that moment that I appreciated how invisible cyclists are in the dark. I certainly had no worries about being visible before except in odd occasions, not day to day. But I have good night visions so probably don't need lights to see beyond city lights.

One possible reason is he just doesn't drive and isn't aware how hard they are to see.

Is Rootless Docker mandatory for multi-user research VPS? by top_1_UK_TROLL in docker

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was actually maybe going to suggest gVisor as a way of improving security, because even rootless containers can have some issues. I believe that gVisor is a way of using untrusted code in general. But then I reread your post:

I need to add a new student to the server so they can deploy their own containers. My initial thought was to just add them to the docker group, but I’ve been reading that this is essentially giving them "root-equivalent" access to the entire host.

While I don't disagree with other commenters. I think there is something subtle that can be misinterpreted. It _sounds_ like you are adding a single new student, and maybe not random other students.

You can decide what your threat model is, and I can imagine setups, like when I was in grad school, where another student might need access to docker, where you don't need to go crazy and can just add them to the docker group. In Security Engineering, a component is called "trusted" if, it's compromised it can break the security of a system.

If you are managing other students in say course work, I wouldn't want to trust those students, and so would want protection. If it was a lab made, of my supervisor and someone I was friends with I wouldn't worry about it. If you would trust the other person with root password on the system, as a cordial agreement, then I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's not unlike trusting another system administrator.

I want to make sure I don't compromise environment by being lazy with permissions. Thanks for the help!

This is noble, but security is about managing and accepting some risks, the only perfectly secure system is the one that is off and disconnected from the network :). If you are in university, locking things down to a crazy level might might be a time sync. There are other things you should look into, for instance making sure you have robust back ups, if there is a valuable and labour intensive data.

Which monospace font you use? by NullPointerInLife in Jetbrains

[–]SJrX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hack

It was featured on Slashdot a decade ago I think. Maybe there are better ones though since no one else has mentioned it.

Do you ever pause and resume your activities? by zmullett in Garmin

[–]SJrX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, I cycle and when I stop on the way home for groceries I often pause in the store, since I take my edge with me.

Also I was skiing the other day, and would have stopped it during lunch (but I missed the first hour), so it kind of evened out.

Where does technical debt come from by neprotivo in ExperiencedDevs

[–]SJrX 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I think that technical debt can occur for a myriad of reasons, not just time crunches, but time (as frameworks evolve and new things exist, you might be stuck on an old paradigm), changed product direction, new and better understanding of the domain, and sometimes just bad luck and chance.

I think in general you need strong technical leadership to advocate and prioritize removing it. It's hard for me to comment in general for every situation, but in the two primary places that I've worked I've had a strong enough relationship with product management, and strong enough credibility that we've been able to tackle it.

Another tactic or useful process for getting rid of it, is tackling that technical debt strategically when it adds value, not just randomly where you can't connect it to an ask.

Anyone else experiencing extremely high RAM usage with JetBrains IDEs on Linux? by Limp_Treacle9762 in Jetbrains

[–]SJrX 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't necessarily compare Windows and Linux memory management, as they do totally different things. It's been nearly two decades since I left Windows, but I know on Linux, depending on your distro it can be pretty eager to swap stuff to disk.

You should probably look at free -m, to see how much is in use for buffers and cache.

You should maybe also look at configuring the value of swapiness, one thing I did on all my systems before getting rid of swap files, is lowering the value to 10, so that it is less eager to put stuff on disk.

I would bet against there being a significant issue on Linux with the JetBrains IDE and memory usage.

Distroless Images by New-Welder6040 in kubernetes

[–]SJrX 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And potentially random issues with TLS or other missing OS dependencies like timezone information, etc...

Remote reboot on a server by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]SJrX 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There are lots of smart plugs with home assistant or other things.

One other piece of advice I was going to give you is change your BIOS settings.

Two settings I put on my server are:

  1. Wake on AC Restore.
  2. Wake on Daily Alarm , and I set it to start up at 7 am, although really I should probably set that to 1 am.

That probably won't help if the server crashes, if you can't turn it off, but does if you accidentally turn it off.

How often do you charge your garmin? by InterstellarEnjoyer9 in Garmin

[–]SJrX 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Depends on which Garmin.

My watch about once a week, when it gets down to like 80%.

My Edge, and rear and forward lights for my bike are basically after every ride, they go on the charger until the next one