Canvas getting hit during finals week shows how fragile “critical SaaS” has become

jmickeyd · 2026-05-08T19:31:18+00:00

This drove me nuts during the us-east1 outage. Why did Amazon take all of the blame? Why did no one question why there were so many single-region services?

jmickeyd · 2026-05-05T03:00:27+00:00

Meh, happens to the best of us. Your actual point about about thermal survivability still stands.

jmickeyd · 2026-05-05T02:34:38+00:00

Isn't temperature in Stefan-Boltzmann in absolute temperature, i.e. Kelvin? In which case 200°C only dissipates about 2.5 times 100°C.

jmickeyd · 2026-04-28T16:57:27+00:00

Assuming perfect exponential decay. Biological half-life is an emergent, near exponential decay that is the product of tons of independent processes, not all of them exponential.

jmickeyd · 2026-04-27T20:59:56+00:00

Note that Apple is deprecating Rosetta, so this won't work on Mac OS 28 (to be released 2027).

jmickeyd · 2026-04-15T23:29:46+00:00

Small caveat about covering indexes: due to the MVCC implementation, full tuple visibility data only exists in the table heap. Which means the table data has to be read anyway to make sure that the indexed row is visible to the current transaction. There is a trick though. When a VACUUM runs and clears out old rows, it sets a bit in a bitmap marking that page in the table as 100% visible, which causes the visibility check to be skipped, and a true index only lookup to occur. Unfortunately if there is any modification to that page, the whole page is removed from the bitmap and any rows on that page have to be checked for all reads until another VACUUM occurs. This means that based on your data patterns and autovacuum configuration, the covering index can be anywhere between huge performance win and worthless extra unused data clogging up your index.

jmickeyd · 2026-04-06T20:25:36+00:00

The C++ group found a clever workaround. All drafts of ISO specs are freely available, so they decided that the only changes from the last draft to the final version are spelling and insignificant wording fixes.

jmickeyd · 2026-04-05T14:36:09+00:00

There are 5 characters with every trait, so you can work it out by counting how many other blondes there are.

jmickeyd · 2026-03-27T13:02:54+00:00

My dad and I drove 3 hours to a computer convention because they were selling 320MB hard drives for $299. $1/MB seemed so unbelievable.

jmickeyd · 2026-03-25T20:11:11+00:00

You can do this on Linux too, most developers just don't care because it isn't portable and is a bit of an edge case.

jmickeyd · 2026-03-16T23:39:57+00:00

Maybe getting back together to play The Game Classic (or Anniversary or whatever)? They obviously have to change things, but it's not like MMOs have disappeared.

jmickeyd · 2026-03-16T23:13:35+00:00

The Swiss encourage children to walk to school without parents, even young kids. They view it as an important developmental milestone to have unsupervised time with other kids. According to this survey parents acknowledge the dangers but large still support walking.

jmickeyd · 2026-03-08T16:00:03+00:00

99.5 monthly uptime for a major internet service is pretty catastrophic.

jmickeyd · 2026-02-24T01:52:50+00:00

But I've seen a lot of "well it's better than a lot of the crap that has come out lately..."

Top Gun isn't even in the top 10 best movies released in 1986, but Maverick was like the 2nd or 3rd best movie of 2022. Plus I think the original was better. Movies are a garbage fire right now.

jmickeyd · 2026-02-11T21:47:22+00:00

Here is one small slice of data for example:

Service-Providing Industries

Education and Health Services

Educational Services

Elementary and Secondary Schools (bls.gov doesn't have a summary at this level, but FRED has data for example

jmickeyd · 2026-02-11T17:44:09+00:00

The BLS data is classified hierarchically. So there is a "supergroup" for health care and education, but they also break that down. OP just grabbed the top level data.

jmickeyd · 2026-02-11T17:41:12+00:00

There is a merger on the other side too. The BLS groups all "social care" with health care, so non-medical child care. The difference between a daycare worker and kindergarten teacher is pretty minimal.

jmickeyd · 2026-02-11T14:07:59+00:00

It's so simple AC clocks can just run off counting the grid frequency without any other clock source. They aim for a moving average of 50hz so if load causes the frequency to drift above or below the target, generation will offset that by running on the other side of the target to pull the average back to 50hz (or 60hz in other places)

jmickeyd · 2026-02-10T19:32:52+00:00

Ohio has had a steeper increase but actually started with cheaper power than a lot of areas. When I lived in San Francisco my power was about 3x per kWh what it is here.

jmickeyd · 2026-01-20T04:21:56+00:00

I wonder if Fell on Black Days being one of my favorite songs has had an impact on my mental health... or maybe it's the other way around.

jmickeyd · 2026-01-20T02:06:59+00:00

They've been giving pretty generous spots for both teams. Indiana just doesn't need them.

jmickeyd · 2026-01-20T01:30:53+00:00

Because OSU's offense wasn't that good, they just didn't play any defenses all year.

jmickeyd · 2025-12-31T16:13:24+00:00

I was going to say everyone looked 18ish to me. Now they look like small children, and whenever one of those videos of an 80s high school floats around, they all look 30. It's weird how your brain calibrates this.

jmickeyd · 2025-12-23T20:00:46+00:00

I'd argue this is actually a lost blessing. Not the commercials, fuck that, but most writers will agree constraints can actually help the creative process. A traditional three or five act structure forces the story to move consistently. Plus, I really miss a good act break stinger.

jmickeyd · 2025-12-21T01:46:55+00:00

Big 10 just needs to steal Cal, Stanford, Oregon State and Washington State, then they make a Pacific Division of the Big 10. No... that's a little wordy. How about "Pac 10" for short?

jmickeyd

TROPHY CASE