To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

Fascists lie.

As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.

Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

Maybe don’t use mental health to attack people you disapprove of? The point of mental health is to help people, not to attack them.

Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.

I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.

If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.

If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.

Originally a Drumpf was a drummer; i.e. one who makes their living off of hitting up skin heads.

Hey, at least the era of “all the world’s an x86-64” eventually ended.

I watched this happen in a research institution in the early 2000s. Scientists who had been heavy SGI, Sun, or HP customers realized that they could get a lot more bang for their buck with beige-box PCs running Linux (or occasionally FreeBSD). Aside from up-front costs, hardware upgrades and replacements were much cheaper and easier to get for PCs.

The big Unix vendors did not help their reputation when they started selling Windows machines — which all of them except Sun did in that era. It became increasingly clear that commercial Unix for scientific computing no longer had a future.

The built-in Proton WINE does pretty darn well for me already. Baldur’s Gate 3 plays fine on my Pop!_OS system.

A hatchback full of SD cards can beat that easily, though.

Goddamn tree jizz!

“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”

Good catch! Typo. Fixed.

Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh logging into each server and running grep over the log files, to look for that weird error.

These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.

But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.

(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)