This is desirable for some parts of a school curriculum. Take high school math: we ask students to solve arbitrary problems with a limited set of tools (geometry, algebra, calculus). We don't ask them to solve problems that require tools they don't have (matrix math, differential equations, set theory). The point of high school math is not to perform DSP (another tool) or invent theorems (a research project).
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
I'm wondering if the CVE in question is not mentioned because it was embargoed so they did not want to accidentally leak things while the kernel went through the (public?) QA workflow. Perhaps the Changelog will be amended at some point to have the CVE?
My read is that a lot of content - specifically of the infinite-scroll variety - is very intentionally not designed to be printed.
There are a number of Slack and Discord conversations I'd have liked to export off to PDF, for instance (where a solid 90% of my "prints" go). I'm reminded that one of Slack's boot messages used to be, "Consider the environment before printing this Slack."
I self-host e-mail, because I am stubborn - I have done it for 20 years. I would not recommend anyone do it if they aren't already, or if they well-and-truly want to be on call for their homelab.
In the last 20 years, I've also run into problems like:
* My brand-new ISP wouldn't allow TCP port 25 inbound, and wouldn't relent. I had to go back to the old ISP.
* SPF became mandatory at Gmail, but I didn't get the memo, and Google started bouncing my mail one random day.
* My residential IP ended up on a "policy blacklist", one it could never get off because it's blacklisted by virtue of being a residential IP, not that it did something bad.
I host my email, my isp blocked mail ports too, my simple and reliant solution is to use 2 quite cheap VPS on different zones as front email servers, with haproxy and postfix forwarding, took some time to setup but works great and not dependent on isp rules.
There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
I mean yeah but you can always go one step back for root cause.
Why did they pick that insane option? Why was it available to them?
One of my co-workers in security always seems to think that just saying "No." is the job. If someone is asking to do something stupid you say No, and then you talk to them to figure out what the goal is and the n you help them to get to that place.
Clearly they had other options here and working on tmp is fine as long as you know it is, well temporary.
It makes sense to use it. As long as you don't expect what you put there, stays there.
Indeed! If they'd reached out and said "I need 128GB of RAM to do this work" (which, for reasons I won't get into, was the case), we'd have figured out a more tenable solution.
Obviously experiences will vary, but I have now had three organizations express concern (though not to the point of telling me I must stop) that I use third-party Firefox derivatives. This started with Pale Moon and then continued with LibreWolf.
The concern is that they "aren't authorized apps". As I've read it, this is a proxy for "we aren't certain these apps can be trusted, but nobody ever got fired for pointing the finger at Mozilla or Google when something goes wrong, but would be fired if they pointed it at this one random guy in the Netherlands".
As a NoScript user, I see a lot of similar content served via websites as well.
The ideal case is that a website gracefully degrades with JS disabled. That's largely a pipe dream with React usage being what it is, but some sites manage it. Github is one who still does this well.
The nonideal case is that I'm presented with a misrendered site, but I can still see some semantic information that may, or may not, be what I was looking for. Gitlab's an example of this.
The worst case comes where the site white-screens and doesn't load _anything_ of use. Reddit is an example where it loads nothing but a loading image. My worst pet peeve is the Stack Overflow-style failure mode, though, which explicit says: "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue.", rather than making any attempt to show any content at all, which is most similar to what the author here is describing.
I skip these websites too.
And also skipping websites that ask for cookie permissions in a malicious way.
It is just not the kind of people/content I want to be around and therefore not worth my time.
I am wondering myself, if I am the only one doing this.
Out of curiosity is that just "modern" reddit or old reddit too? (However long old reddit sticks around, anyway, it's clearly not long for this world after they began requiring a login to use it so if the login page requires JS then it's kind of moot)
Sorry, but the ideal case is that a website gracefully upgrades with JS enabled.
But sadly every one site on the net should both:
render in less than 50ms - to be in the top chart in AdSense, even if there is no such need
download everything and load everything so it would render the right way instantly - even if there are a literal hundred of the requests[0], again to improve the ranking in the AdSense
actually should load a full content of the page (hit F12 on [0]) on the first or second request but delay the display with an utterly stupid CSS animation what would spin until the last tidbit is downloaded and loaded - because fuck you visitor, especially if your connection is anything but absolutely perfect.[1]
and it's need to dynamically load the parts of the page even if all the content fits in less than 8kBytes - because dynamic! progressive! fuck you, user!
Like you can replace that bullshit at [0] with a tiny page content, tiny CSS file and do the shenanigans with JS shit later - but hey! that means somebody would for 5ms actually see the actual content before it would be mangled to a stupid dynamic shit with a pseudo mobile mode on a 4k landscape monitor!
[1] yes it's actually four points there - because even so called 'web programmers' nowadays don't know what the actual stack they use. And yes, the first and second point and even third - they are all contradicts themselves.
I was briefly involved with WITR during my undergrad. Loved what they were doing, but at that time the station definitely bought into the hipster attitude, music you've never heard of and will never hear again.
The only band I can remember hearing on WITR, then hearing anywhere else, is Neon Indian. They also sponsored a concert with Viva Brother, which briefly got some airplay on other stations, in spite of never (to my knowledge) having played them.
Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
Counterpoint: I always found WERS to be a slightly broader interpretation of adult contemporary programming than the commercial stations.
My goto was WUMB, which is out of UMass Boston, and played a consistent format (folk and Americana, I guess?) throughout the day. Blues Hangover on WHRB (Harvard) was always worthwhile when I caught it.
I worked at a startup that had _money_ - a lot of it - flowing in. Stakeholders wanted to see growth, which meant features. They did not want to see us making platform improvements; those didn't show well to clients. Best throw money at the problem, rather than sacrifice the all-important features.
We had a number of architectural quirks that reflected this. One was that we ran our databases in AWS on ephemeral instance store. Yes, the kind that doesn't persist when you stop or lose the instance. The kind that you should never run a database on. We did it so that we could join them eight of them together in RAID 0 on the biggest instance types, and pull 400,000 IOPS to the disk that way. We paired this with hot spares of each shard, as well as hourly backups.
We did this to support a Rails / ActiveRecord data model, for data that should never have been part of a Rails data model. We had exactly one person working part-time on query optimization.
The maintenance burden was immense. The AWS bill, even more so. But again, we are hypothesizing that we could host all of this data on a laptop.
To an extent, maybe up until our thousandth customer or so, I actually think we could have. But we wouldn't have spent most of our time working on _features_ - we'd have instead spent most of our time trying to performance optimize. That would've meant the investors wouldn't have seen growth, which in turn would've highly impacted our success. We had a well defined domain, and optimizing the queries for performance was not it.
What if there was someone involved who had built web applications than run on laptops before and made different architectural decisions than the path your company went down.
And what if they cost more than your entire AWS bill?
You seem to have misunderstanding on what scales some things run at, and expense curves of getting them to run at those levels.
A poorly built app running on hundreds of servers can be massively expensive. A well built app running on a single server can also be massively expensive because people that can build apps like that tend to command whatever price they want under the banner of server cost savings.
Can you build software this efficiently? If you can't, then being an armchair expert about it helps noone. If you can, you're undercharging your clients.
If my grandma had wheels she would have been a bike. Most of these decisions are made by someone very early on in the process, either a cofounder or an underpaid junior engineer, when the company has zero revenue and no PMF.
It's unrealistic to expect a startup to build a product (or at least it was prior to LLMs generating a lot of boilerplate) with best practices in place.
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
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