Rowan Thorpe

If you haven’t already seen the talk recently given at the Chaos Computer Club’s “Hacker Hotel” named “How Thermonuclear fusion works, free energy without waste”, I highly recommend it. https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-ff152736-e38872dd7aed088e

At least on that day he was.

It would probably be configured using YAML and require health checks and quorum monitoring. I’m not sure I would want that job, especially on-call shifts. The consequences of downtime would be on a whole other level.

That’s definitely one of Randall’s more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

This is utterly heartbreaking. Only 11 years old.

they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.

Ooh, this is very pithy. I like it. I will use it.

I did a similar but more generalised thing since long ago, when I got my first pager (pre-mobile) in '95. I made myself a solemn promise that I would gratuitously and unapologetically use silent-mode, DnD, etc (including more recently auto-DnD every late-afternoon-to-mid-morning, even on weekends, when it became a thing) to live an almost exclusively asynchronous life. I almost never answer direct phone-calls too, often even for many of the recognised numbers. My modus operandi is this:

If it’s a real emergency a call might be unavoidable, but if it’s just typical-urgent it could be an SMS (key part of that acronym is Short) which I would see relatively soon. Alternatively a sensitive/private urgent requirement could be fulfilled via Signal. Otherwise email (pgp-encrypted if it has to be private) which I usually catch up with every day or two. Also I disable all non-critical realtime app-notifications entirely. Additionally whenever someone calls/emails me with an “opportunity” requiring “immediate response because they need a confirmation by yesterday!!!1” I know that means the work is going to be like that too (absent time-management or time-discipline, bouncing between crises in parallel) so my go-to response is along the lines of “Thanks, but such a shame it’s so last-minute - it would be impossible for me to properly consider this against the rest of my schedule and decide responsibly whether I could do it. I hope you find someone.”

I didn’t choose that for the sake of being antisocial, I chose it because I felt that “flow state” and “focus-retention while tackling complex problems” are extremely precious resources, and also increasingly rare. Most (not all) of the time if you don’t push back to protect that then others won’t voluntarily protect yours for you, because a lot of people only respect their own time, mental-bandwidth and priorities, and not those of others. I found that batching tasks together to grind through them in bulk without interruption is not only useful at work, but in most of the mundane/administrative parts of life too, because it minimizes the destructive effect of context-switching.

I discovered a very astute validation of this in an essay by Paul Graham “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

“I’ve been sleeping on decaf, now I sleep, on decaf”.

But seriously, in case you haven’t heard of the 10-3-2-1-0 rule, I swear by it: https://centr.com/blog/show/30545/is-10-3-2-1-0-the-formula-for-better-sleep

In terms of the “default instance” suggestion, I have an interesting hybrid suggestion. What about having an “easy on-ramp” instance where you get registered for one month with a hard-exit (auto-migrate to other instance, perhaps using some kind of federated-auth/token system for the migration, and forced password-setup on first use of the new instance). At any point during on-ramp the user could configure destination-instance from a list in the settings (or configure auto-export for manual import to any other “auto-migrate-unsupported” instance), with optional early-migration if the user has decided before the end of the month. Optionally a recommendation engine could iteratively curate a list of suggested instances based on usage during on-ramp (admins of those instances could provide - limited number of - tags of their choosing for the engine to use for matching). That part could be opt-in because probably a lot of users would find it creepy. The UX would need to be very user-friendly “pointy clicky” because that would be the overwhelming target demographic of such an instance. I think “on-boarding and educating” is better than “gatekeeping” (which feels like the “if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it” shopping trope). A nice side-effect is it already painlessly introduces users to the killer-feature “easy migration” between instances due to data-portability.

Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).

EDIT: This turns out to just be a folklore factoid after all, see the comment replying to this one

Forgive the tangential side-note: Although I get that “news” vs. “olds” was justified punning, I still want to mention what I think is interesting about the term “news”, and seems to be in danger of being forgotten. I remember learning in school (pre-internet so I couldn’t easily verify) that the origin of the word “news” was “North, East, West, South”.