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keypusher

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Website DevOps, currently working on a gov contract.

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There are some clear parallels to me here from task scheduling algorithms, which I suppose businesses have been reinventing and tweaking for many years. For instance, emergency rooms often use something like priority scheduling, where high priority tasks get scheduled first, but can classically lead to starvation of low-priority tasks such as sitting in the waiting room for a long time with a minor injury. Starbucks wants to maximize throughput while minimizing wait time, but up until now they were just placing all orders into the same FIFO queue and popping them off one at a time? With occasional Shortest-Job-First exceptions (ex. just a black coffee). That seems fairly naive. Something that feels like a slight improvement to me would be having 2 queues (in-person and online, no reason to separate walk-up and drive-through), and alternate popping off from each of them. Or a priority queue? Maybe there is more you could do to maximize throughput, such as batching together food that needs to be heated, or surfacing to the barista how many pending shots need to be pulled for the entire queue so they can just crank out espresso during busy times. Curious if anyone with more experience in the domain has better ideas.

The most surprising thing to me here is that it took 3 hours to root cause, and points to a glaring hole in the platform observability. Even taking into account the fact that the service was failing intermittently at first, it still took 1.5 hours after it started failing consistently to root cause. But the service was crashing on startup. If a core service is throwing a panic at startup like that, it should be raising alerts or at least easily findable via log aggregation. It seems like maybe there was some significant time lost in assuming it was an attack, but it also seems strange to me that nobody was asking "what just changed?", which is usually the first question I ask during an incident.

You might want to check out Old World. It was created by Soren Johnson, lead designer on Civ4, and shares many similarities to that era of Civ while bringing in some new ideas as well.

If I'm clear on the requirements & everyone else is clear on what I'm delivering.

That's a big 'if', and usually isn't possible without prototyping in my experience. What you're describing seems like something that would be written after a prototype is already done. Presenting a prototype (or iterating on multiple prototypes) is a better way to tease out unknowns than any document.

I kept reading expecting to eventually get to some data, but there never was any. Just the same opinion restated over and over.

My guess is that someone at MS was testing Windows Updates or other changes from a local source. They also had some other DNS updates in their config they were testing. They took all of their config and pushed it out, when they should only have taken the other changes.

Sequoia also backed Apple, Cisco, Google, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Zoom and many more. They are just one of the largest VCs out there.

From OGL 1.0: 4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive License with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.

9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/OGL%20License

From Gizmodo: One of the biggest changes to the document is that it updates the previously available OGL 1.0 to state it is “no longer an authorized license”

Some more background on the terms: https://www.larsenlawoffices.com/can-terminate-perpetual-lic...

So if I walk into an arcade, and the owner stops and says “hey, we’ve had some incidents recently and you need to write down your name and phone number on this sheet of paper before you can play anything”, all the arcade cabinets suddenly stop being video games? That doesn’t really make any sense.

Strange that the section on password managers doesn't mention LastPass, and the 2FA section doesn't mention Google Auth. If they have criticisms of those tools, it would be better to share them. Don't just ignore them, they are two of the most popular tools in personal security.

This is the true role of a great drummer. To play what is needed and nothing more or less. Sometimes to be quiet and stay in the background, sometimes to be loud and take up space, sometimes just to crack a joke and break the tension when things start to get off track.

An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it’s typically not a problem

This just seems like a bad decision from a business perspective. You are willing to endure a significant outage that will cost a lot of money but not pay to prevent it? Machines can and will fail.

Why would is_computer_on_fire() return a double and not true/false? Even for a joke function, this seems like bad practice. If the function is named is_state(), I expect a boolean return.

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. Smoldering doesn't count. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.