Ed S @EdS@mastodon.sdf.org

Inferences I'm taking from what I can see about the Discord/GCP outage:

1.) Discord's database and storage is effectively single homed. If they had a hot failover it woulda failed over. If they had a cold failover its cost to fail over is probably high or else they would have.

2.) Discord's DB is intolerant of single-region networking issues. Google reports 8% packet loss in one cluster in one DC, and that knocked Discord offline.

3.) Discord may or may not have backups (they better) but the restoration time for a dataset of their size would be days since it's single-homed.

4.) Discord is reliant on Google Cloud. If they had their infrastructure striped across multiple providers, see point 1.

5.) Discord has no response process for if Google Cloud just completely soils the bed, as noted by their updates saying "All we can do is wait for GCP to fix itself"

6.) Discord has no way to gracefully handle a failure between API service nodes and their monolith DB/cache. Granted the nature of the app limits what could be done, but "Wait and hope the message doesn't redline" isn't good and just increases load in a fragile situation.

Synthesis.) A major incident could knock Discord offline for days, or permanently, depending on the reliability of their backups. Absolutely have backup methods for reaching your important contacts.

An example of a hyper-specific niche in a once widely popular platform: Loop cassettes

There are all kinds of convoluted internal pathways, but they do the same thing: Add length to seamlessly continuous playback

There's a large number of tiny houses (especially the kind on wheels) where there's not much of an overhang on the roof. That's probably for aerodynamic reasons for the towed variety, but it's also a thing on stationary ones (probably for style)

Overhangs are overlooked, but very important to protect the walls. The walls of a house are *not* meant to withstand direct water impact. That's the roof's job and it needs to have an over hang to do it properly

Ideally, at least 1 foot or more

So to recap: Build your tiny house as you like, but remember:

- Have adequate overhangs to shed water and snow, and any wind-driven rain *away* from the exterior walls

- Flat roofs only for temperate climates and with adequate drainage, and with good supports

- Sensibly sized windows to have even temperature

- Ladders and steep stairs are only good if you're young and able

Thanks to @EdS, I now know about this very cool website dedicated to identifying computers in film and tv!

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/

You MUST play AI Dungeon 2, a text adventure game run by a neural net.

@nickwalton00 built it using @OpenAI's huge GPT-2-1.5B model, and it will respond reasonably to just about anything you try. Such as eating the moon.

https://aiweirdness.com/post/189511103367/play-ai-dungeon-2-become-a-dragon-eat-the-moon

#matériel #ssd

Oups.

Certaines SSD HP cessent brutalement de fonctionner au bout de 32768 heures de fonctionnement. Et les données ne sont pas récupérables.

J'imagine la panique chez les sysadmins quand des machines en production meurent toutes brutalement quasiment au même moment. 😱

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that-some-ssd-drives-will-fail-at-32-768-hours-of-use/

Just a friendly reminder:

We are closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.

One line of computer programming, whichever language you were using. Up to 80 characters wide, same as the card's width.

I remember. And we loved it. No home computers, no cellphones, no internet. Mid 70's in my case.

@Full_marx

New article: The State of (SNES) Emulation, Part V.

I write a new entry in this series every three or so years. This article serves as a recap of 2016-2019. This most recent entry has been one of the most eventful yet! Here's to three more years~

https://articles.byuu.org/state-of-emulation-v

This is one of the best photo examples of planetshine that I've found!

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12600