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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

    Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

    The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

    Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

    Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

    It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.




  • Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

    With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

    Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

    Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

    Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

    AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

    The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.


  • This advice isn’t grounded in reality.

    Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.

    KPI’s are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc…

    So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI’s and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won’t care.

    This is because the boss might have set the KPI’s or the boss might also be judged on them. In either situation its to the bosses advantage to ignore you.

    The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.

    Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.


  • A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can’t directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.

    Most PM’s cope with the stress of this position poorly.

    This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.

    The solution isn’t to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.


  • During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.

    Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc…).

    I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn’t find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).

    SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.

    2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.

    The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc…) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.

    I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.

    Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.

    I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP’s)

    Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.




  • Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

    Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

    KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

    The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.


  • Github stars is not a good metric, firstly because KBin is hosted on codeberg but mainly because a healthy project has lots of unique contributors and regular updates/enhancements.

    KBin has 79 open Pull Requests, while Lemmy has 29. From a visual check PR’s seem to be older than 2 weeks. Its hard to say one is “healthier” than the other, without scraping information into a spreadsheet.

    Secondly Rust is new and has a lot of hype surrounding it, as a result you get a lot of people using it on random projects.

    Languages have strengths and weaknesses and developer ecosystems build on the strengths.

    For example if I was writing a web application with a database backend I would choose C#, Java or Node.js because there are loads of libraries, tools and frameworks to make it really easy.

    Rust is gaining a lot of adoption by embedded system users (replacing C mostly). Lemmy is the only Rust based web server project I am aware of. Which means the level of work to do anything and to keep it updated falls on the Lemmy devs rather than spread out amongst a larger community.

    Everyone loves to insult PHP but it has a niche in webservers and won’t disappear anytime soon. KBin effort will thus be spent on KBin.


  • There is a standard for sharing tweet style information and for threaded type information between websites.

    You have software which implements the tweet standard (Mastodon), the threaded standard (lemmy) and both (KBin).

    You’ll notice some communities will be community@kbin.social or community@kbin.cafe, etc… this indicates they are not local to the website your using and those addresses are KBin instances, its just your website has a copy of the information.

    KBin is newer than Lemmy, it has a fairly simple responsive design that works well on mobile. Lemmy has a REST api so its easier to build mobile applications, a lot of people seem to expect/need to access websites via mobile applications.

    The key difference is Lemmy is developed by Tankies, they think China’s genocide of Ughurs is justified and they administer lemmy.ml.


  • Engineering is tradeoffs.

    A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.

    You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.

    This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.

    If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .





  • KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

    The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

    Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

    Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

    Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

    The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

    The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

    I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

    This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.


  • The big argument for mono repos is checking out multiple repositories is “hard” while checking out one repository is “easy” but…

    Service Oriented Architecture became a thing because monolithic code bases were often becoming spaghetti. I worked on a project where removing an option from a preference window (max map zoom), broke a message table (because the number of visible rows in a table (not its size in the UI) was linked to the max zoom you supplied to a map library, for no reason).

    Thus the idea you should wrap everything you do as a self contained service, with a known interface. The idea being you could write an entirely new implementation of a service, implement the interface and everything would work. Microservices are a continuation of this idea.

    Yet every node/python based mono repo I have seen will have python files directly imported filed from inside anouther component/service. Not simply common aretfacts but all sorts of random parts. Subverting the concept of micro service (and recreating the problem).

    Separate repositories block this because each repository will be built in isolation on a CI, flagging the link. This forces you to release each repository and pull things in as a dependency. Which encourages you to design code to support that.

    A common monorepo problem is to shove everything in a docker image and call it a day. Then if you need a class from one monorepo in anouther one, you don’t have an artefacts so lazy devs just copy/paste files between monorepos.

    Monorepos aren’t bad practice by themselves, they encourage bad practice. Separate repositories encourage good practice (literally the need to manage them separately drives it).