xolox

The conceptual relationship to PlanetScale seems somewhat dubious to me (as mentioned in other comments) but the idea of implementing snapshots and branching below the database server level, in the storage layer using Ceph, is neat and potentially quite elegant! Kudos for that idea :-). I hope implementing it works out to the same elegant API envisioned in the initial concept. I could see this being very useful in a development workflow like the example (dev-db/feature-login).

I have to say that my experiences with running virtualized relational database servers on top of Ceph centralized storage have shown somewhat disappointing performance, so I think that could become a real challenge if performance is or becomes a goal. However, I've encountered multiple mentions that Ceph performance is supposed to increase significantly as the number of storage nodes increases (from a handful to a dozen to much larger clusters) and while I cannot corroborate this from personal experience, it stands to reason that "throwing more (hardware) resources at the problem" can make a big difference.

Make sure those mushrooms are prepared well though because as I understand it, the human digestive system has a hard time breaking down chitin cell walls, so without proper preparation, the mushrooms may pass through mostly undigested.

The point about letting the mushrooms soak up sunlight to boost their vitamin D content is totally true and absolutely fascinating though!

When commonly consumed mushroom species are exposed to a source of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, such as sunlight or a UV lamp, they can generate nutritionally relevant amounts of vitamin D. The most common form of vitamin D in mushrooms is D2, with lesser amounts of vitamins D3 and D4, while vitamin D3 is the most common form in animal foods. Although the levels of vitamin D2 in UV-exposed mushrooms may decrease with storage and cooking, if they are consumed before the ‘best-before’ date, vitamin D2 level is likely to remain above 10 μg/100 g fresh weight, which is higher than the level in most vitamin D-containing foods and similar to the daily requirement of vitamin D recommended internationally.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6213178/

I've recently run into and explored research explaining that natural sunlight stimulates energy production in mitochondria, resulting in an energizing and healing effect completely separate from vitamin D production.

I feel bad for posting this without references so here's one reference I could find right now:

This study shows that longer wavelengths in sunlight are transmitted through the body. When these are presented via NIR LEDs in a laboratory-controlled environment at much lower energies, they again have the ability to be transmitted through the body and also are associated with improved visual function independent of ocular exposure. Hence, body penetration by longer wavelengths impacts systemically. Longer wavelengths improve mitochondrial membrane potential and ATP production and improve function in a species conserved pattern that can impact on mobility, visual function and cognition, particularly in ageing. In short lived animals they can extend average life span.

Taken together, these data provide evidence of the importance of the full spectrum of sunlight for human health. They also highlight the potential dangers of the restricted spectra found in white LED lighting in the modern built environment that lacks longer wavelengths and whose output is generally restricted to around 400–650 nm. The absence of longer wavelengths from LED light sources may have implications for public health that should be addressed.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09785-3#Sec5

Funny that I should run into this now... Just this past weekend I tried the Home Assistant backup/restore mechanism for the first time, and it failed miserably for me :-(.

First it took over an hour to create the backup, then I got a 4.42 GiB tar file, that of course failed to upload to the new Home Assistant install.

I investigated and found that the tarball was just a compressed copy of the complete installation directory of my Home Assistant setup, and that included multi gigabyte `.cache/pip` and `.cache/uv` directories :-s (my old Home Assistant install operates from a Python virtual environment that I created, and Home Assistant keeps nagging me that this installation method is deprecated, so I decided to migrate to HAOS in a VM).

When I deleted those directories the tarball was less than 200 MiB but the new HAOS VM still would not accept the upload. All I got was "500 Internal Server Error - Server got itself in trouble". And of course because HAOS is an "appliance" its kind of a black box so I couldn't find out how to get access to error logs with details :-(.

In the end I decided that the path of least resistance was to simply start from scratch based on the HAOS virtual machine and take some days/weeks to build up the new Home Assistant setup before it's mature enough to take over from the old Home Assistant setup (which is running on hardware that is close to failure).

If you are at all comfortable with Linux system administration, manually setting up one or a handful of KVM/qemu powered virtual machines is not actually that hard at all (in my experience). If you like a GUI to guide your initial steps, "virt-manager" is pretty okay. I've been running 3-5 virtual machines for several years now based on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu Linux install (Debian would work just fine as well).

Now I do like a challenge every now and then, so I'm currently setting up Proxmox to gain live migrations and high availability for virtual machines, because I've become quite dependent on all of these services in virtual machines actually running successfully :-) even in the face of eventual hardware failure (like what happened to me in the past months).

It sure can make a difference.

Sickness caused by bacteria doesn't happen as soon as one bad bacteria (bacterium?) enters your body, a certain critical mass is usually required. This is very similar to the concept of "viral load" where a certain amount of viral genetic material needs to be exchanged before the viral infection can take hold.

The "beneficial bacteria" on your skin and in your gut make it harder for bad bacteria to take root in many different ways, one of them simply being they provide competition, "crowding out the bad guys".

Another way is that many, many, many types of antibiotics were originally discovered as metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi (examples include penicillin, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline).

And for completeness sake, milk kefir contains many Lactobacillus species that are also a natural part of the mammal microbiome (which makes sense when you think about it; Lactobacillus are named for consuming lactose, an ingredient of mammal milk).

American independent journalism seems to be dying (unfortunately) but I think in Europe there are several large news organizations reporting on things that matter in a relatively independent fashion, at least a lot more independent than what we see happening in the US (I'm thinking of e.g. The Guardian, Le Monde, I could also name a couple of Dutch news sources, but they would mean nothing to 95% of the readers here).

I'm really glad to read that the wrecking ball that is Trump & Musk's "reducing government costs" initiative in the US government didn't take out this very important foundation of _worldwide_ IT security. I'm thankful the CVE Board seems to have adequately prepared for this eventuality, hats off to them.

In some places in the US the use of sewage sludge to fertilize farm land is turning into a shit show of epic proportions (sorry couldn't resist ;-) due to severe PFAS contamination:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/climate/epa-pfas-fertiliz...

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/pfas-in-fertilisers-blam...

I have to say I'm kind of happy were not doing this in the Netherlands, because PFAS are a horrible class of chemicals that are causing all sorts of issues in nature as well as human health (obviously the two are intricately linked). I'm kind of ashamed to hear that the Netherlands are trying to get rid of their sewage in the UK though...

Edit: Upon reading the investigatemidwest.org article I see that it's about the exact same subject, apologies if my reply is perceived as noise.

Might it not be possible to "harvest" carbon from sources on e.g. the moon [1], thereby requiring less effort to launch those resources into orbit? Feel free to point out if I'm talking (thinking) nonsense here...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources#Carbon_and_nit...

That's a really nice way to visualize how modern human knowledge is extended through scientific efforts. Thanks for sharing! (thanks also to the GP who introduced the concept)

But surely this process you outline implies that the PFAS already there was deposited in the (distant) past and is no longer being deposited in any substantial quantity, otherwise the problem will just reoccur (build up over time)?

Meanwhile most indicators I've seen imply that PFAS contamination is -in some ways- getting worse, and is not only from historical sources.

Also, earthworms will mix up deeper and more shallow layers of earth and plant roots will extract PFAS from deeper layers and deposit them on or near the surface when the plants leaf matter dies off (in fact I know of several types of plants including hemp being successfully used for this exact purpose).

I'd love to find definitive proof that PFAS can be remediated on a hobby garden scale (in one's own backyard) but I'm skeptical of the success rate and longevity of the endeavor...

Well certainly antibiotics resistance (MRSA [1]) is a problem exacerbated by intense farming practices [2]. To the best of my knowledge there are two big sources of MRSA: Hospitals and livestock farming (the latter of which actually got its own acronym LA-MRSA as in livestock associated MRSA).

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to directly compare the development of bacterial antibiotics resistance with the adaptation of viruses to be able to infect other kinds of hosts. Surely these disease vectors follow different developments.

It wouldn't surprise me though if intensive animal farming [3] has the capacity to exacerbate these problems, if only based on the high concentration of animals kept together and the generally poor health of these animals (poorly functioning immune systems, which is the whole reason for the overuse of antibiotics).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_animal_farming

Fairly recent research claims that hobby (backyard) chickens tend to have higher PFAS contamination than factory farmed chickens because hobby chickens get the chance to eat (a lot of) rain worms whereas the factory farmed chickens only get commercial food, no live worms. I do agree that location is almost undoubtedly key to PFAS contamination rates.

Dutch source for the thing about rain worms: https://nos.nl/artikel/2539934-hoge-concentraties-pfas-via-r...

I was going to suggest tempeh as well. It takes some practice and creativity to turn tempeh into interesting meals [1], but it makes the beans much easier to digest, and the tempeh adds extra dietary fiber, significantly increasing satiety (in my experience).

[1] I especially like grinding up the tempeh to turn it into a plant based burger substitute, and making "Perkedel Tempeh" (tempeh fritters)

Fruit, seeds, grains, legumes, one can find quite a lot to eat without "killing" a plant. Admittedly though most (if not all) vegetables do involve killing a whole plant.

The particles affected by the ionizer are already floating in the air that is being inhaled into the lungs. For the sake of this discussion (i.e. disregarding accidental generation of ozone), wouldn't it be better if those particles are taken out of the air, stuck to surfaces, so they're no longer being inhaled?

I would be interested in that as well! I've been kind of obsessed with fermentation for a couple of years now, but it's all based on research driven by my own interests (I learn best when I immerse myself in a subject, in Dutch we call this "autodidact"). It would be nice to read along with what others are doing!

it's ridiculous that Google is also forcing this onto the rest of the world.

Yeah I was surprised (and frankly annoyed) by this as well, I don't see the value of showing this to everyone in the world when all of this relates to a "drama" played out in one country over the course of one presidential term with close to zero chance of extending that to another term (the guy is already 78 years old and it's showing in his ever more erratic behavior). I sure hope we can forget about this nonsense 4+ years from now...

Related:

A 'Second Tree of Life' Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn (nytimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886

The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)

Related:

Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394

I've read multiple times (over the years) that swifts are known for sleeping while in flight during their migrations between Africa and Europe. The best reference I could find right now is https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/three-swi... which doesn't confirm but strongly implies (presuming a bird cannot go for 200 days without sleeping, and it was apparently up in the air all that time, it must have been taking "power naps" in mid-air).

I use the same heuristic for when I should switch from shell to Python :-). Arrays (especially associative ones, at least for me) are a good indication that a more advanced language like Python might be more appropriate than shell.

malloc/free are for heap based allocations. The grand parent explicitly mentioned he was referring to stack based allocations, which are kind of automatic (implicit).

Compliments to the author for clearly explaining all of the steps involved. I've never gone this deep, although I have previously converted remote headless Linux servers to full disk encryption using similar techniques. Thanks for sharing!

I think toxicity is a relative concept, not absolute. I mean you can die from drinking too much water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication) yet at the same time you need to drink plenty of water to survive. People have been making this point better than I ever could for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

If you make a bookmarklet to look up the current page on archive.is you'll never have this problem again :-). Here's the link for this article: https://archive.is/9QF2j

I got into fermented foods to improve my health, and quite a few of these are acquired tastes for me (and surely also for lots of other people). Milk kefir, water kefir, kombucha, tempeh, koji, natto, these things challenge the taste palate of someone who grew up in the Western world without exposure to fermented foods (e.g. a strong sourness to foods and drinks). I grew to appreciate and in some cases love them because I know what they do for my health. Nowadays I regularly crave fermented foods, but when I started taking them I had to force myself to get accustomed to them.

I don't mean to come off as ignorant (so please correct me if I am wrong) but could it be that the so-called "two-party system" in the US is to blame for some of the polarization implied in your message?

As someone living in the Netherlands and being used to dozens of political parties with various ideologies and convictions, the two-party system of the US has always surprised me as being extremely limiting (e.g. if you don't naturally identify with Democratic ideologies you vote Republican or vice versa).

Edit: None of this is to imply that Western Europe or the Netherlands doesn't have major political issues, for example I'm quite disillusioned about the uptick in popularity of populist political parties (throughout Western Europe but also specifically in the Netherlands).

That is not the TLDR I intended. If you store your OTP secrets in the same password store that also stores your regular passwords, you've just completely undermined the second factor of security.