> Ansible is a wonderful tool though, if you can excuse these idiosyncrasies.
The only advantage Ansible has is how easy it is to start with it - you don't need to deploy agents or even understand a lot about how it works.
Trouble is, it doesn't really scale. It's pretty slow when running against a bunch of machines, and large configurations get unwieldily quickly (be it because of YAML when in large documents its impossible to orient/know what is where/at what level, or because of the structure of playbooks vs roles vs whatever, or because templating a whitespace-as-logic-"language" is just hell). It's also fun to debug "missing X at line A, but the error can be somewhere else". Cool, thanks for the tip.
So it's pretty great to get started with, or at a home lab. Big organisations struggling with it is a bit weird.
I've had the opposite experience. A bit hard to setup, with ssh-agent, inventories and understanding what each module does, and creating specialized roles. So for quick jobs, plain bash with ssh wins most of the time.
But once ansible is set, it's easy to achieve parallelism when provisioning multiple instances.
Problem is that it requires lots of back and forth over ssh, so the more latency you have between the control plane and the target hosts the slower it'll be.
And yeah... Debugging is a pain. I wish I could write ansible in an actual language instead of having to fight multiple layers of indirection with ansible, jinja2 and yaml.
Chef is easy to run in solo mode too, but too many people just religiously hate Ruby and the flexibility of imperative configuration. CINC is the debranded libre version.
I found job slicing speeds up jobs dramatically. In a test I did recently it dropped the time from nearly 4 hours, down to 17 minutes, for an inventory of about 4500 hosts.
> For one, even in typical modern democracies, the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population via a first-pass-the-post system or a close analog of it
"typical modern democracies" don't use the extremely terrible first past the post. It's mostly used in the UK and a few former colonies, but most of the world's democracies (even the flawed ones) have realised its shortcomings and have evolved past it.
This list includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc...
Not that only FPTP is terrible either - it is just what people evoke when they say "well xy people voted for this, right?". In more fair systems, the voted person or party may not even have been their first or second choice, so that on its own violates this notion again too, just differently.
> You all say this, and yet at the same time you levy economic sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, with the justification that by making their citizens lives horrific, you encourage them to rise against their government.
That's (usually) a secondary goal of sanctions, if even that. The primary is to restrict the regime's ability to fund its growth, stability and military operations.
Russia can no longer (that easily) sell its oil and gas? Great, that's less money to invest into rockets and drones and tanks against Ukraine. It's also less money in the pockets of the oligarchs.
Realistically, you can't really push the civilians of a country to revolt with sanctions, or bombing. As Carl Spaatz said:
> Morale in a totalitarian society is irrelevant so long as the control patterns function effectively.
> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries
Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.
And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).
Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.
But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.
Oh the horror, you might have to walk a couple of minutes (probably less time wasted than circling around to find a parking spot, and then walking from it to your destination).
> at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive
Yeah, no. Trains in properly developed networks are extremely frequent. At the off-peakest of off-peak (Sunday late evening), the RER near me is every 15 minutes. During peak hours it's every 5 mins.
> Sometimes that tradeoff is worth the cost but other times (particularly in the era of Swift and SwiftUI having replaced Objective C and UIKit) you’ll be better off just biting the bullet and learning a little native code. As a JS developer I found Swift to be a delight.
But then you have double the work, in double the languages/frameworks for the two platforms.
For a real world datapoint - my team at a FAANG invested heavily into RN over the course of years, the promoters kept touting the "only write code once!" line, and after years and years of effort in the end we managed to share only ~10% of code for any given new feature. For any given RN feature we also had to write so many APIs/hooks/setup in native code to support it that the 10% code share didn't even save us any time.
In fact, we were prevented from doing a lot of stuff that we wanted to do, because RN either A) didn't support it (because iOS didn't have a similar concept), or B) we were gated on upgrading / using something because it depended on doing a massive RN version upgrade, which nobody wanted to schedule the time for. So I'd argue it was a net negative to productivity overall.
I could continue ranting and raving about this for many paragraphs but I'll limit it there. Not a fan.
We're looking at moving to Expo from RN precisely to reduce the pain & risk of RN+dependency upgrades just to stay compatible.
Google (and Apple) have been keeping us on the upgrade treadmill, so I'm hoping Expo can be responsible for handling that and maintain a stable API for our apps and dependencies.
At my company we have been using react-native for years without Expo, and aside from some performance issues here or there it has mostly been great (we also use Android auto so that's my reference to "native-ish mobile").
Recently we've been trialling Expo again, and I think it has much approved from where it was a few years ago (when we went in the opposite direction). It mostly saves you time on the build side and gives you some known to work 'good' libraries to depend on, and if you want it, a file based router (we just kept using react-navigation directly, on which the router is built).
The biggest pain in react-native are the major version updates which are regularly breaking (and the lack of css grid , you'll have to make do with flex)
With Expo, that's not necessarily gone, but the updates are usually smaller compared to respective Android updates (but you still need to comply with new rules for app stores), and usually less painful because with Expo (unlike react-native directly) there's less to manually update within the platform native files which is error prone, even when you use Microsoft's upgrade tool. When you are some versions behind it was sometimes easier to bootstrap from scratch and copy over your own code.
One thing to say about Expo is that, here too, it's easier to start with a newly created app than to add expo later on, partly because Expo's docs assumed you did that.
Have had our apps on expo for a while. Highly recommend, much easier upgrades and you can turn off any platform vendor stuff like their OTA updates and do local builds also. Expo + RN has saved us a ton of time on our apps and no way a small team like us could support both platforms otherwise.
It’s not really double, something closer to 1.25x. The bulk of the work is on whatever platform you first implemented the UI on, because that’s where rubber hits the road and you run into things like assumptions the designer made breaking. On the second platform all that’s already done and you just need to replicate.
Besides that, in your typical CRUD app the UI really shouldn’t be the hard part anyway.
Additionally, you’re going to have to deal with per-platform bugs which require you to dig in to the native side to fix even if you go all in on RN or Flutter or whatever the cool thing is this month, and that’s in addition to the bugs with the framework. Finally, major system updates tend to be much more of an ordeal with these frameworks where (for example) mature iOS apps can easily go years without major changes.
There’s also things like https://skip.tools/ which translates your iOS SwiftUI app into native Android Jetpack Compose on the fly.
Double the code, but not necessarily double the work. And look at this blog post: these "write once" solutions often have the surprise of a bunch of extra work you weren't expecting.
Yes, especially lots of people with children are terrified that their little darlings will be able to access the best German BDSM content in 4K at an early age.
I was exaggerating a bit for comedic effect. I can completely sympathise with the sentiment.
If there was a way to prove one's identity/age online, double anonymously (so both the website doesn't know who you are, and the identity service doesn't know what website is asking) I'd be a 100% for it. It would prevent minors from accessing stuff they're not ready for (on average), and it would limit the amount of bots and foreign interference.
The dispute here is balancing people's human right to wank anonymously against the right of parents (and society's?) to limit access to (absurdly) age inappropriate material.
What does "ready for" even mean, when is anyone ready for 4k German BDSM.
There's also this slippery slope argument that preserving the former right is absolutely necessary to prevent creeping fascism. Which is absurd. Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the wankers to create some palatable solution to the conflict of interests, rather than demand the parents figure out how such wankers can preserve their anonymity?
Parenting is necessary for continuation and health of society. 4k German stuff is not.
Privacy is absolutely necessary for the continuation of western liberal society as we know it, and for society’s constant fight against authoritarianism
> Privacy is absolutely necessary for the continuation of western liberal society as we know it
IMO, so is the fight against active hostile foreign or local actors bot flaming on the internet to stoke tensions. These kinds of acts aren't only online (cf. Russia paying Moldovans and Serbs to commit anti-semitic and anti-muslim acts in France to stoke tensions between Jews, Muslims and everyone else), but they are drastically more effective online with the help of social media algorithms. To preserve healthy democracies, something has to be done.
> and for society’s constant fight against authoritarianism
And it pipes into this one. The people profiting the most from those tensions, which they stoke too, are wannabe authoritarians (cf. Trump).
How to fight against them and their tactics without giving them the tools they will abuse once they're into power to shut down dissent?
I’m not a parent, so it might be I completely do not understands some important aspects of this due to lack of expirience, but I hope I’ll be more smart than my parents. It was quite easy to google things my parents were silent about, but I still remeber that feeling of guiltiness. It affected me much more than knowing what the bdsm is
> UK is a monarchy based on a religious aristocracy
Not really. The Monarch has no real power, only "influence", but they don't step in even in the face of disaster (Brexit).
It's pretty weird to have a developed country with a state religion, but in reality, it has no bearing on anything.
But the US has shown us that "tradition" and principles aren't enough to stop a hostile takeover of power. A Trump-like future monarch could do a lot of damage if they decided; so indeed the UK could do with lots of reforms to enforce proper separations and encode the purely ceremonial role of the monarch.
British tradition does have more teeth though. For example whilst the Monarch may not use that power normally they still have it. With support of the Privy council the King absolutely could remove a malicious but democratic government. They are perfectly placed to unify the people, politicians, civic society, judiciary, police and military. And they can do so legally. And this position is defended by the perfectly reasonable response that they would never do that or have any real power. But then who does? The PM can be replaced in an afternoon by a vote. Parliament would need substantial changes of law to do anything.
> With support of the Privy council the King absolutely could remove a malicious but democratic government.
The power of the Privy Council lies in it's executive committee, known as the "The Cabinet" that thing chaired by the Prime Minister we call the democratic government. The rest of the privy council membership is mostly a bauble for past cabinet ministers with some royal flunkies and bishops and the like. It's mostly vestigial, like knightly orders, but with weird exceptions like it includes the supreme court for overseas territories.
This isn't to say such things can't happen but it would not be through a recognised legitimate procedure "with teeth" but as a constitutional crisis where precedence, tradition and law has gone out of the window and whatever side wins is through primitive power/confidence dynamics. There might be rulings of lawfulness in one direction or another but as a postfacto figleaf downstream of victory rather than as a real judgement.
Sure but it's far from the exercise of an accepted power the OP refers to.
In a constitutional crisis, titles of the elected and inherited ultimately become a matter of opinion... but opinion is the path to victory up to the point it descends to military force. Any form of legitimacy becomes currency.
Back in the day we had constitutional crises that deposed the "rightful" monarch despite somewhat believing in the divine right of kings, the magic oils of coronation and weird blood theories around patrilinial descent. These days they have none of that magic and they are just some weirdos that appear in the papers now and again but still, in a moment of crisis, that whiff of history is a poker chip.
Parliament is ultimately where the power is. If there's a struggle for power, it would be between parliament and the monarch. I think the only situation where the monarch wins that is if parliament has clearly lost their democratic mandate somehow (like truly massive widespread protests from the population).
That constitutional debate is long settled. The king rules by the consent of parliament and they are ultimately the highest authority in the land. In parliament, the commons has far more authority then the lords. While parliament delegates almost all their authority to the government and civil service it would take a lot to fundamentally change that. They still excercise their authority on occasion as several recent prime ministers found out. Their power also doesn't necessarily stem from the fact that they are voted in, but it's a key reason why they have all the power. I don't see any situation where the king wins. The only pathway to a constitutional crisis is between the government and parliament.
Ultimate power lies with people who can use violence. Its the military and police. Without continued compliance from those groups the status of politicians or royalty could become very tenuous.
And we are specifically talking about an emergency here.
Eh, Trump is able to do what he does because he’s a populist and a bully in a society that hopes it can either get rich, or not be destroyed, if they just go along.
The odds of a monarch pushing those buttons is quite low - monarchs by definition don’t need to be populists, and are rarely able to pretend to make the rest of the population rich either.
Much more likely to the UK would end up with a PM doing it, and they’d nuke the last vestiges of the Monarchy in the process. The UK monarchy long ago lost the balls to survive a fight like that.
Good time to buy. While the cult might take this to heart and stop using Tylenol alltogether, there will be lawsuits to protect the brand and the company, and considering the lack of proof, in the end they will suceed.
They are molesting the money again, but the company can just pivot to drinkable bleech beverages marketed on joe rogan, in the end an evidence-free health care system might be way more profitable in the short term.
The only advantage Ansible has is how easy it is to start with it - you don't need to deploy agents or even understand a lot about how it works.
Trouble is, it doesn't really scale. It's pretty slow when running against a bunch of machines, and large configurations get unwieldily quickly (be it because of YAML when in large documents its impossible to orient/know what is where/at what level, or because of the structure of playbooks vs roles vs whatever, or because templating a whitespace-as-logic-"language" is just hell). It's also fun to debug "missing X at line A, but the error can be somewhere else". Cool, thanks for the tip.
So it's pretty great to get started with, or at a home lab. Big organisations struggling with it is a bit weird.
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