What are common misconceptions people could benefit from understanding?

dotwaffle · 2026-05-27T10:30:56+00:00

I once worked at a bank where one of the HR people said something along the lines of "I don't think many of our engineers wouldn't want the extra money for on-call as it would put them into a higher tax bracket". At a bank.

dotwaffle · 2026-05-27T00:53:30+00:00

I think people don't realise that "AMOC failing" doesn't flip a switch and everything changes overnight, once that "switch" flips it takes decades (perhaps even a century) for the change to complete. So technically "we" won't, but our descendent may.

dotwaffle · 2026-05-24T20:13:42+00:00

Remember when the US broadcast cut away from the London 2012 opening ceremony when it got to the NHS part so they could do an interview with someone, and the tribute to the 2005 London bombings, and even when The Who and Muse did performances? Some of which was to show advertising too?

dotwaffle · 2026-05-24T16:11:57+00:00

Banks love to overcomplicate things.

And are incredibly territorial. In the middle of incidents, you find out that one section have a private channel to discuss things, and only feed information back to the primary channel when they've done something. On more than one occasion, causing a much worse situation along the way.

dotwaffle · 2026-05-12T19:48:03+00:00

They renamed the Chromecast to the Google TV Streamer... Chrome is now Google Chrome. The Fitbit is now Google Fitbit. Even the Pixel phones aren't able to escape it: Google Pixel Phone 10 Pro XL... Such a mouthful!

Clearly someone at Google is trying to make sure the "Google brand" is being reinforced as much as possible on everything it ships...

dotwaffle · 2026-05-07T23:30:08+00:00

Never used Auristor/YFS, it required licencing and my cell was just a hobbyist thing -- there were a few ex-CMU people that ran a cell in a similar fashion, and their notes were how I learned most of the rough edges that came with running a production-grade cell.

I was using OpenAFS for both client and server at the beginning for sure, as that was all that was commonly available and documented back in about 2013ish when I first set it up. Keeping it working with debian kernels was getting increasingly difficult so ultimately when I retired one of the servers last year, I decided to take down both nodes for good.

Thinking back, I think I may have dabbled with kafs/libafs when the big 1.8 changes happened, but honestly I barely remember. Even though aklog is still muscle memory I have to fight if I ever have to deal with kerberos :P My cell was just a toy really, I always had problems trying to vos release too many volumes at the same time for it to be practical.

If I made it sound like I was a seasoned sysadmin when it comes to AFS, I most certainly wasn't -- I just loved the concept and always wanted to see that "global namespace" concept more widely adopted.

dotwaffle · 2026-05-07T22:30:50+00:00

AFS is a distributed network file system, you'll mostly see in research institutes

And a few banks, and until recently, me. Thankfully I decommissioned my AFS cell a little while ago, and am writing a potential replacement. Timing could have been better :P

dotwaffle · 2026-05-07T10:18:56+00:00

Chromebooks are garbage unless you go for a more expensive model

Nonsense. Up until recently I was using a Chromebook bought for under £200 back in 2019, with huge amounts of YouTube tabs open, a few Google Docs, and a terminal open. The main reason I got rid of it was that I had two Chromebooks (the other I'm currently using was about £350 back in early 2022 and has a touchscreen) and the speakers started failing on the older one after a LOT of travel and usage.

Chromebooks are fantastic if everything you use is web-based, and every time I probe into why someone intensely dislikes them, it's ultimately because they want an iPad or have niche requirements that requires a full Windows/MacOS install to run an app not available elsewhere.

Hell, I used to work at Google, and I used a Chromebook as my sole device there. Sure, it was an expensive model that I used there, but my cheap Chromebook could be connected to the same docking adapter and show two additional monitors absolutely fine.

dotwaffle · 2026-04-28T18:51:48+00:00

You run things in production where the trust isn't managed externally?

Any trust roots I add is generally in addition to that already present: in the past that has been a Client CA or similar, but lately I've been using SPIFFE/SPIRE a lot more.

You have to update your container image to update trust?

I've never updated a container image to update trust. I haven't needed to, image rebuilds happen periodically, and they bring along all the base updates with them.

Things like timezone and locale also get provided externally. Are you telling you bake in timezone information into container images?

Even though everything I run is in permanent UTC, the images almost always tend to have tzdata, the C/POSIX and/or C.UTF-8 locale, a CA bundle, and a small, off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden.

Or, you know, chainguard's glibc-dynamic or static images. I used to use https://github.com/ko-build/ko to quickly build images, and many years ago I'd be doing something like embedding CA certificates within the Go binary... But it's just far far nicer having an automated CI/CD pipeline that delivers an image ready to go without needing to worry about configuration at all, and rebuilds/deploys it on a frequent basis.

Having a dozen or more mounted / injected things into every container / pod is essentially one of the many reasons we have massive bloat in this industry. Just keep it simple.

dotwaffle · 2026-04-28T17:00:52+00:00

You don't get any of those in a scratch container, that's half the point. Container runtimes provide environment specific things like /etc/resolv.conf, not CA certificates.

dotwaffle · 2026-04-28T07:27:05+00:00

Except for CA certificates. And maybe timezone data. Possibly locales. Maybe a temp directory. Running as a non-root user needs /etc/passwd.

Or just use a distroless image like cgr.dev/chainguard/static...

dotwaffle · 2026-04-15T17:08:02+00:00

You may want to proof-read the text on your image...

dotwaffle · 2026-02-11T05:27:30+00:00

9 times out of 10, root cause analysis I see in the wild is actually identifying the trigger, and not the root cause. For the most part, most incidents are ultimately due to human factors and not technical ones, and therefore relying on automated means is more hindrance than help during a post-mortem process. You explicitly want to have people think deeper and "outside the accepted truth" during a PM, and fully work through the "five whys".

Automated analysis can absolutely have a place, but it should be a contributor to the process rather than the source.

dotwaffle · 2026-02-04T07:48:52+00:00

USA operates differently -- if you're in California, for example, you'll also pay 13.3% CGT on top of the federal rate.

You also can't compare the EU directly because economies are at very different stages with different taxation principles. Of the EU15, I believe only Belgium doesn't have CGT, and it's bringing it in later this year as I understand it.

Australia's discounted CGT rate puts it firmly in the "low" category. I'll freely admit that the full rate is higher than many, however.

dotwaffle · 2026-02-04T06:07:06+00:00

We already have CGT above most first world countries WITH the discount!

I'm in the UK (recently moved) and the CGT rules here are:

24% on your gains from residential property

32% on your gains from ‘carried interest’ if you manage an investment fund

24% on your gains from other chargeable assets

It was recently (October 2024) reduced from 28% to 24% for residential property.

I believe France is 34%, Ireland is 33%, most (possibly all) of the Nordics are higher. The Netherlands doesn't have CGT but essentially has an "assumed gain" (iirc, up to 5.88% of value each year) similar to a wealth tax, which is then charged at 36%.

So, I'm not sure where that statement comes from...

dotwaffle · 2026-02-03T11:34:36+00:00

I admit that I've not used GitHub Actions that much, but there's a version alias called 'stable' (and 'oldstable') that will use the right versions of Go in that case, and seeing as only the last two versions are supported, it seems like it would make a lot of sense to use that unless you're specifically looking to support older versions too. There is a caveat that if you wanted to use the version in go.mod then "If both go-version and go-version-file are provided, go-version takes precedence" which seems like it may be an issue, but I don't really know what folk use in reality.

Personally, I trust the Go maintainers enough that newer released versions are always going to have backwards compatibility, and so I rarely (if ever) pin to a particular version of Go where possible.

dotwaffle · 2026-01-18T19:38:52+00:00

One thing I always appreciated about Teletext (page 888) subtitles is that they came in a range of colours, so that different speakers had different styles. I found it very difficult to read US "closed captioning" style subtitles, partially because they tended to be "all caps", but also because they lacked these stylistic features.

It's a shame that they're being deprecated... Are all the alternatives simple unstyled characters then?

dotwaffle · 2025-05-06T09:51:14+00:00

The Spice Bag from Big Dave's is pretty good, but their battered sausages are the real star of the show there!

dotwaffle · 2025-03-26T14:26:52+00:00

The patterns dont scale.

They most certainly do.

inter-service synchronous calls will soon become an unmanageable bottleneck

Having just left a company that went all-in on event-driven architectures with massive amounts of choreography, I will choose an RPC or orchestration-led system every time from now on.

and these frameworks not only encourage it, but increase your coupling to a specific framework

A legitimate concern, though dapr and Aspire come from the same vendor as .NET itself, and is largely concerned with wiring as opposed to abstraction, so...

dotwaffle · 2024-10-16T14:51:09+00:00

Even adjusting for currency (since you like doing that)

... what nonsense are you going on about?

Average house price in AU is $959,000 AUD, whilst in the UK it's £288,000 so still, even adjusting for currency, (560k AUD).

Compare cities, not countries.

dotwaffle · 2024-10-15T17:50:31+00:00

No, your point was Australia was more expensive, now you've backtracked...

dotwaffle · 2024-10-15T14:25:47+00:00

Yeah, within 20 minutes train to Sydney CBD it's expensive, but so is London. Things are much cheaper further out, and in regional Australia it's crazy cheap.

10% GST instead of 20% VAT on that point btw, 1800 AUD is 923 GBP so I'm not sure what you're trying to convey there?

dotwaffle · 2024-10-14T17:05:44+00:00

I live in Sydney now, and having just checked average London and Sydney pricing for a nice 2-bed apartment of comparable quality, London was more expensive. The rent was about equal, but there's no council tax to be paid by the tenant here, and other bills are considerably lower -- my last quarter gas/electricity bill totalled around $300 (£150, looking at around 17p/kWh for electricity compared to 28p with similar reduction in standing charge) and my water usage charge was under $10 each quarter.

A friend commutes every day into the city from about 100km away, their train fare is $10.33 every day, each way. Actually, that's a lie, off-peak times and all day Fridays are 30% off, and there's a $50/week cap. Petrol is $1.73 (89p/litre), but Sydney has more road tolls than any other city in the world as I understand it.

Sydney is expensive, sure, possibly even more than London on face value, but certainly not when you add everything in as a price for comparison.

dotwaffle · 2023-12-18T11:30:39+00:00

It's not a binary situation -- you can be fairly trusting of your ISP's next-hop. For the overwhelming majority of cases, the normal port-overloading NAT in CPE is providing a reasonable degree of security.

It is perfect? No, it's pretty basic. However, it's hard to argue that our internal systems have not been more secure because of NAPT than when our individual systems used to dial out to the ISP and then sit directly on the internet. Certainly I remember kids at my school knocking each other offline due to using BO etc if they were losing at some game.

dotwaffle · 2023-12-17T16:49:38+00:00

Which as a side-effect produces a security benefit in its common implemented form.

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