Middle-aged SRE, he/him. Brexit-afflicted resident of Austria. Once defeated a Beholder with nothing but a sharpened gourd. Profile picture is reasonably accurate.
@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.
@sailor_sega_saturn And given enough time and enough scale even the most improbably weird things will eventually happen. Update file corrupted by a storage controller that flips a couple of bits at random after every 720 hours of uptime but only if it’s 23.682 seconds after the hour? Weirder shit has happened.
@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.
@froztbyte @AcausalRobotGod “So the tablecloth is the Internet routing mesh, right? Now imagine that this squeezy bottle of ketchup is a provider in Pakistan who just got ordered to block access to Twitter in the country but isn’t quite sure of the right syntax to blackhole traffic from a particular AS…”
@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of “people who can DJ competently” and “people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public” do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.
@dgerard @froztbyte I always tell people that the reason so many systems nerds (I don’t use BOFH any more as that’s… not really an attitude I like identifying with, it hasn’t aged well) use Macs. It’s because once you get back from work, frankly, the LAST thing you want to do is system administration on your home machine and OS X is just *nix enough.
@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They’d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let’s have a read, see what all the fuss is ab… (turns green, excuses self)
@fasterandworse Published a book about hypertext two years before the Web… but two years after Hypercard.
@fasterandworse @dgerard sorry, too busy dealing with my brain short-circuiting at the idea that anyone would think any of this was intended to benefit the poors.
@dgerard He’s such an amazing engineering genius he can’t even build a racist chatbot?
@self There’s a definite “Sir, this is an Arby’s” air to his posts.
@self This was the point where I started wanting to punch things:
“At one company where I worked, someone got in trouble for using HipChat, a predecessor to Slack, to ask one of my colleagues a question. “Never HipChat an engineer directly,” he was told. We were too important for that.”
Bless his heart. That, dearie, isn’t “engineers are so special”, it’s managers wanting to preserve old-fashioned lines of communication and hierarchy because they fear becoming irrelevant. Gatekeeping access to other people’s knowledge to make yourself important goes back millennia.
@froztbyte Ah, the mighty Big Clive has spoken on the subject. https://youtu.be/6DlfLthx89E?feature=shared
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.