Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.




  • Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.

    I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there’s an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It’s better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.

    Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.

    However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.


  • I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.

    However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.

    With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.

    With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.

    With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.

    I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.

    Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.

    And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.




  • I remember this story from about twenty years back hitting the news:

    https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

    Missing Novell server discovered after four years

    In the kind of tale any aspiring BOFH would be able to dine out on for months, the University of North Carolina has finally located one of its most reliable servers - which nobody had seen for FOUR years.

    One of the university’s Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue.

    According to a report by Techweb it was only then that those campus techies realised they couldn’t find the server. Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall.