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

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

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

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

I was confused seeing the release date on the YouTube trailer saying 3 July, then after a few beats it hit: US back-to-front date [sigh]

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

…which are all layers on Debian.

I remember having a bit of fun playing things like Stunt Car Racer on MS-DOS back in the early 90s for a few days. Yeah, that’s about it. That’s the best I can do even when I’m trying to be charitable. As soon as I owned my first computer (late 90s) I bought a Linux magazine, installed a distro from a cover CD-ROM, and never looked back.

…and you just gzipped it.

So where does the PFJ fit in this timeline? :-D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4