3
points
hiAndrewQuinn
Joined 5,118 karma
An American in Finland. аոdrеw [ät] ЅііLіkսіո [°] соm
https://andrew-quinn.me/
https://til.andrew-quinn.me/
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https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn
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- Merry Christmas to you too! I'm fixing an issue in /etc/networking caused by a non atomic write process. Friends don't let friends copy unguarded!
- So my understanding is, what Mullvad is to VPNs, and what Tarsnap is to S3 (kinda), Servury is to entire VMs. It's a prepaid model, you get an account identifier, and that's basically it.
This is very cool. I have wondered for a very long time why such a site does not exist. What pops to mind is that you could get better unit economics reselling really small VMs to the privacy obsessed. I know some netizens who would pay a dollar a month for, say, a tiny NetBSD VM and 64 MB of RAM to serve their tiny static demoscene website of yore. There are some real wizards of there.
Not sure if that's in your roadmap but definitely something to consider in this space.
- I'm moving into a cybersecurity-focused role, and I for one would be very interested in this. A vetting process makes total sense, but complete lack of access seems like a market inefficiency in the making that the one area where we can't reliably get the frontier models to assist us in pentesting our own stuff without a lot of hedging.
- I have lived in Finland for the past four years, having emigrated from the US like the other poster here, and the WHR is a common punching bag topic amongst locals here.
The odd thing however is that when I ask them whether they think the average Finn is happy, they say absolutely not, but when I ask them whether they themselves are happy, most of the time I get a "oh this place is actually pretty great for weirdos like me, I just mean like, normal people would hate it here". But that's the thing: No one normal chooses to live in Finland!
- Loistavaa, what a perfectly tailored comment for me, I have like 80% the thing for you at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/ . Unfortunately I'm all in on Anki but maybe these will sway you nonetheless.
Every 6 months I create around 5000 Anki cards out of the last 6 months for reading practice of the YLE Selkouutiset news, on a sentence by sentence basis: https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti
For raw isolated vocabulary my finfreq10k Anki deck can't be beat! https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470
But in your case, and for writing practice, you may also like https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finyap , which is self-hosted in the sense that a new deck is just a CSV file in "scenarios".
Tsemppiä vaimollesi!
- > I do not know how to respond to such situations.
>I am a professional problem solver.
As it so happens, you can probably apply the latter to solve your knowledge gap re/ the former.
Unless you don't actually consider it a problem, but a facet of your personality or something. Valid. But, if you are capable of applying that thinking to yourself, why are you not able to extend the same grace to others, and wait until you're asked for a solution?
- You don't need CGO for SQLite in most cases; I did a deep dive into it here.
https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/you-don-t-need-cgo-to-use-...
- Thank you! The flat cable was a necessary conceit for my apartment. I can't cut a notch out of the doorframe and expect to get my deposit back...
- This is really cool!!!
- Same here in Finland, and it just makes no sense to me at all. So often I will talk with someone who lives in a city here, and hear them complain about how brutally expensive it is, how nobody makes enough money to save anything, and a few sentences later they're telling me about how annoyed they are that they have to drive 6 hours every weekend to their $30,000 hut in the middle of nowhere to patch up the leaking roof or stuff more dried moss between the logs, and that they should have sprung for the $50,000 one that's only 90 minutes away. By car. In a country where gas is regularly over $10 a gallon. When they could get to work just fine on the bus.
We'll stick with our quiet little apartment and our free time and our growing savings accounts, thank you very much.
- PowerShell does provide a ConvertTo-Json [0] for those who need it.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
Contrary to how it sounds I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language in itself. A lot of its ideas are pretty clever.
I treat my dormant familiarity with it as a resume hedge. Ideally things in my life continue to go well, and I can keep climbing the ranks of doing more and more impressive things powered by the Unix systems I've been daily driving since I was 14. If, however, things in my life ever go truly sideways, I could probably dial it way back and eke out an existence at some low pay, low stress, fully remote Windows admin job at some dinosaur of a company somewhere. There I could use PS and its deep, deep integration with all things Windows to automate 90-99% of it away, so that I could spend my time e.g. tending to my young children instead. (Even if Copy-Item is 27% slower than drag and drop. My time is still more expensive than the machine's.)
I truly never hope that has to happen, of course.
- OP here, I looked into it. For legal reasons I will neither confirm nor deny any marketing claims here and let the experts decide. I will merely list the equipment I bought. [0] [1] [2] [3]
[0]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01EXDG2MO - "TP-Link TL-SG108 V3 8-ports Gigabit Network Switch"
[1]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07WG8TNDL - "CSL Cat 7 Network Cable, Gigabit, Ethernet, LAN Cable, PiMF Shielding With RJ 45 Connector, Switch, Router, Modem Access Point, White"
[2]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06XCYC4K7 - "deleyCON 5 x 0.5 m Cat7 Network Cables, Short, 10 Gigabit, RJ45 Patch Ethernet Cable, Copper, SFTP PiMF Shielding, LAN, DSL for Switches, Modems, Router, Patch Panels, Cat6, Cat5 Compatible, Black"
[3]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B089MF1LZN - "Amazon Basics 30.5m White Flat RJ45 CAT7 Gigabit Ethernet Patch Internet Cable"
One copy of each would run you around 75-85 euros in total by my napkin math. Sticking with standard CAT 6A would have probably been 10-15 euros cheaper, and since I'm only aiming for 1 Gbps, not 10, I might have been able to get away with CAT 5e, even.
I suspect that the additional hours of time I would have had to spend actually doing my research here to make a fully informed purchase would have made this a slightly net negative decision financially. But that's mostly because of the small size and modest needs of the network I was wiring up. If I were wiring up anything that scaled beyond my own apartment it would have been valuable to know this, so thank you, my career will go better as a result of this correction.
- I actually considered NetBSD for an old 32 bit box yesterday, so I'm somewhat wise to this world. My first experience with ramdisk operating systems was Puppy Linux back in the early 2010s. Ultimately I'm probably going with OpenBSD for that box.
But, NetBSD ISOs are much heavier than TCL ISOs, and so while I'm sure there's a way to get just what I want working in diskless mode, I'm not confident I will have any RAM to run what I actually want to run on top of it.
- To my understanding TCL expects the RAM-only / diskless case unless you put in a lot of extra work not to do that. In your situation the only thing you would have to really be worried about is whether 4 GB of RAM or whatever you have is enough to fit TCL and the files for your node server and the actual programs you are trying to run with all that. It doesn't get pretty once you exceed your available RAM, be forewarned - but that's true of all programs in a sense.
- The strange thing is, I did have /MT:32 on (added in a comment at the bottom of the page because I had to go to bed). I like to stick with defaults but I'm not that inept. /J probably shouldn't matter for my use case because 125 MBps just isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.
- I didn't think of this one, will try it out, thank you.
I'm under the impression that using COM objects here in 2025 is generally discouraged, however. My Outlook mass email sysadmin scripts will have to be pried from my cold dead hands either way.
- For robocopy I realized only after pushing the article up that I let out I was using /MT:32. I put this in a comment at the bottom of the page since I was short on time and energy.
- Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to.
Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much about wear on the SD card itself rendering the whole installation moot.
This is actually how I have powered the backend data collection and processing for [2], as I wrote about in [3]. The end result is a static site built in Hugo but I was careful to pick parts I could safely leave to wheedle on their own for a long time.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/consider-the-cronslave/
[2]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/
[3]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/lessons-learned-from-2-yea...
- 72 points
- Here in the EU cybersecurity is actually being regulated, with heavy fines to come (15 million euros or 2.5% of global turnover!), if it wasn't already. Look up the CRA and the NIS2.
Things may well reach a point elsewhere in the world finding out that some software is for sale in the European Union is itself a marker of quality, and therefore justifies some premium.
- I'm not so sure about that. I've written some nontrivial TUIs in my time, the largest one being [1], and as the project got more complicated I did find myself often thinking "It sure would be nice if I could somehow just write this stuff with CSS instead of tiny state machines and control codes for coloration". There's no reason these languages couldn't compile down to a TUI as lean as hand-coloring everything yourself.
- People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational people skills are especially important; in most things that matter, the old guard are the ones keeping their eye on the younger hires, pattern matching what they see over months of observation to who they've seen succeed before.
- Luckily a certain American to Finland HN:er has been making it slightly easier ... :^)
https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/
... But, no, it's still a very forbidding language.
- They're all pretty good to be honest, the market has really matured from the turn of the century. You'd have to be more specific about what you actually want to do before someone could give you a more informed take than that. I've built out at least one nontrivial thing on all of the major names and many of the lesser known ones by this point and I'm likely to continue to just because infra is fun :)
From a position of zero knowledge otherwise, I would probably default to Azure just because I have a lot of faith in it being able to drive enterprise workloads while staying compliant with whatever regulations exist under the sun. If I find out that more or less we don't care about that I then pass the torch to AWS because they tend to have a slight pride advantage. If I find out yet more information, like e.g. the client prefers running everything on VMs they themselves control, I might look into Hetzner, etc. Cloudflare for very specific egress or serverless needs... But you can see it really all depends on the project, and if you don't know any better you might as well just pick one of the big three at random and go for it.
- 2 points
- This is why you've gotta actually think about what you believe morally speaking at an early age and then stick to it. I don't vote, drink, or drive myself, and never will, but I hope I will always defend the rights of the youth to.
- I suspect this is going in the wrong direction. Telling a sandboxed AI to have a long conversation with a student to ensure they actually know what they're talking about, while giving minimal hints away, seems like the scalable solution. Let students tackle the material however they will, knowing that they will walk into class the next day and be automatically grilled on it, unaided. There's no reason a similar student couldn't have their essay fed into the AI and then asked questions about what they meant on it.
Once this becomes routine the class can become e.g. 10 minutes conversation on yesterday's topic, 40 minutes lecturing and live exercises again. Which is really just reinventing the "daily quiz" approach, but again the thing we are trying to optimize for is compliance.
The next sleep interval would be calculated probably as as t = -\lambda \ln(U) (where U is a uniform random variable). This way you ensure that the probability of the job firing in the next 10 seconds is the same whether the last job finished an hour ago or just five seconds ago. But \lambda remains the average amount of time between jobs.
It’s compelling to me because it solves thundering herd problems at the architectural level, and also because it simply seems like a lot of fun to have to code very defensively against such chaos. Switching back to a deterministic schedule after surviving such chaos probably leads to a much more robust system overall.