A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.

No, I think that’s pretty messed up as well. The schools I went to had a lot of problems.

A school fining students for swearing is the most believable part of this story to me. I don’t think I ever saw fines for swearing but we had fines for chewing gum, dress code violations etc. I 100% believe a school would implement this exact policy. And I agree it’s pretty fucked up and classist to fine children.

Pretty easy to tell if they use a selfie for their pfp though 🧠

Very cool paper and I don’t want to be the Internet Armchair Astrophysicist, but doesn’t the fact that we’ve already observed a merger show that second-generation black holes are a thing? Or is this evidence that BH mergers (and therefore second-gen BHs) might be more common than we previously thought?

I remember “Covid was a Chinese bioweapon” being popular, alongside “Covid is fake and just an excuse for the government to inject us with 5G microchips”

The first trillion is the hardest I guess.

Sure have. LLMs aren’t intrinsically bad, they’re just overhyped and used to scam people who don’t understand the technology. Not unlike blockchains. But they are quite useful for doing natural language querying of large bodies of text. I’ve been playing around with RAG trying to get a model tuned to a specific corpus (e.g. the complete works of William Shakespeare, or the US Code of Laws) to see if it can answer conceptual questions like “where are all the instances where a character dies offstage?” or “can you list all the times where someone is implicitly or explicitly called a cuckold?” And sure they get stuff wrong but it’s pretty cool that they work as well as they do.

Alternatively: vampires who still don’t know how to use any slang that evolved after their own youth.

“I’m carrying this team like the beast with two backs”

“Never look a Trojan horse in the mouth”

“She was so mad her face launched a thousand ships”

“If circuses had bread, then the clowns wouldn’t eat lost children”

I’m with him. Sometimes I like to sit and watch the bubbles go

I started smoking to have an excuse to hang out with the theatre kids. It worked.

I really liked nicotine when I first started. I think it affects my ADHD in a way similar to other stimulants, and the effect is very nice. I understand why people say nicotine helps them think; I don’t know if it’s actually helpful for any kind of thinking but it certainly felt like I was thinking more quickly and clearly. After using it for a while though, I stopped feeling it.

You are correct, I guess “Permanent Ubuntu Live USB” isn’t really accurate as I tend to distro hop. I picked Purple because I was using Ubuntu at the time, then I came to associate that one with “current linux image” and the others were more situational. This was about the same time I came to realize that for 99% of file transfers it was easier to just scp things across the network rather than dig a USB drive out of the drawer, so pretty soon after I bought them the only thing I used them for was bootable images, and for whatever reason Purple has been the first choice for that task, so I’m pretty sure it has had more writes than the other four put together.

It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.

No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Something about the circle of life

Fun dinosaur fact: Chickens (and all birds) are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs, where crocodiles are descended from a distinct branch of Archosaurs (the group that also includes dinosaurs and by extension, birds). So of the two, the chicken is evolutionarily closer to dinosaurs. In fact, technically speaking, chickens are dinosaurs.

To make matters worse, Jurassic Park spliced together dino DNA fragments with frog DNA to make their “dinosaurs”, so your dino meat might taste froggier depending on where you get it from. Non-GMO dino nuggets probably taste indistinguishable from chicken.

No. I’m asking if you are endorsing rape as an acceptable punishment in cases where you are highly confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone is a fascist.

So… you’re endorsing rape as a punishment, but only if we’re like, super duper sure they’re fascists? Is that what you mean by “extra harshly”?