I used to be @ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.
- 2 Posts
- 23 Comments
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•Whats the hardest days work you've had?English
5·2 days agoI worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.
The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.
Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.
It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.
There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.
Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.
Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's the best way for me to donate to FOSS projects?English
17·4 days agoThere are a few such foundations!
- NLnet (among other things) donates to a lot of fediverse and similar projects, including multiple donations for lemmy.
- Software in the Public Interest acts as a fiscal host for its 45 member projects. You can make a general donation, or a donation to specific projects.
- The Software Freedom Conservancy, among other things, acts as a fiscal host for its projects. You can donate to individual projects, or make a general donation to conservancy and they will use it in whatever way best advances software freedom.
- Likewise, the FSF has a “Working together for free software fund” which has a few projects listed. I can’t see a way to donate to the fund as a whole, but if you don’t mind some (most?) of the money going to things that aren’t directly developing software, you could make a standard donation to the FSF.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
1·8 days agoThank you. Of those I think JOSM is the most appealing, if it can directly show the results on the map. I’ll give it a go later just out of interest.
I also gave
osmium tags-filtera go and it’s meeting my needs for now.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
1·8 days agoI spent quite a while browsing your brewery map earlier, very cool!
It is probably overkill for me at the moment, but it’s good to know if my needs ever scale up dramatically. Thank you!
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
1·8 days agoThanks for the tip! Your assumptions are correct.
Someone else suggested
osmium tags-filteron the downloaded PBF files (which are ~150 MB), and that’s working well at the moment. I’ll keep this in mind as I’m presuming that importing into a database will be more efficient in case I ever increase the size of the map I’m working with.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
1·8 days agoThank you for the tips! I should have been more precise in my question. The downloaded maps are ~150MB, in PBF format (although I would have been happy to use any other standard format if needed). I went with
osmium tags-filterin the end, and it seems to be working well.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
2·8 days agoThank you, this is perfect! Lightweight and easy to set up.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukOPto
OpenStreetMap community@lemmy.ml•How to query the map offline, on Linux?English
3·9 days agoI can fake it by sending you a message if anything good comes up :)
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@lemmy.world•Meta has discontinued its metaverse for work, tooEnglish
151·9 days agoIt is not OP claiming that. It is the description from the link preview.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@lemmy.world•Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the publicEnglish
29·10 days agoIt’s an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There’s more info on the differences here.
I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.
Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.
As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@lemmy.world•Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical”English
34·11 days agoYou can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.
It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@beehaw.org•When hardware products reach end-of-life, companies should be forced to open-source the softwareEnglish
30·11 days agoNow, I’m not asking companies to open-source their entire codebase. That’s unrealistic when an app is tied to a larger platform. What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.
I agree with this. I think the most important thing is not necessarily the original company releasing their proprietary code (although that would be nice), but it being easy (and legal!) for hackers to reverse engineer and/or build on top of the platform.
The irony is that, since most such products will have some GPL’d code in there somewhere, most products already basically have such a requirement, thanks to the section requiring complete corresponding source including installation instructions. Hopefully, the Vizio case will establish the precedent that users, as well as copyright holders, can take action against such companies.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@lemmy.world•QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This YearEnglish
6·11 days agoThis might be a silly question, but in what ways did it get worse? Is it the size of the keyboard changing, the predictions not being as good anymore or something else?
With my knowledge of tech companies, I’m not exactly surprised, but I’m not an iPhone user and struggling to understand how a keyboard of all things could get worse.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•Those of you who cut off all comms with your parents, what would it take to mend things and reestablish contact?English
7·11 days agoFor me, it would be for her to actually respect my boundaries, and to show an active interest in who I actually am instead of what role I can fulfill for her.
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Linux@lemmy.ml•I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should tooEnglish
10·11 days agoWait is this how you get up to date when your system is past long term support?
Pretty much! You just modify the apt sources, and upgrade incrementing by each stable release until you reach current stable. Each upgrade guide has a section that points you to the guide for the previous version if your version doesn’t match.
Would not recommend doing backups drunk.
:D in my experience, there’s a certain amount of drink-inspired overconfidence that can be helpful, but it’s very easy to go over. I need more testing to find the exact line - it might also wrap around again if you drink more. More investigation needed :)
ambitiousslab@feddit.ukto
Technology@lemmy.world•QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This YearEnglish
6·11 days agoThere were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it’s a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.
I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry’s dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I’ve always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.
There’s something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it’s that they’re happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.
This is me, but with OpenTTD :D
By dumbing down the suite, are you talking about things like flatpak / atomic distros?
If so, I am also not a fan of those things - give me Debian stable and the software in the repos and I’m happy - but I also don’t think I will be harmed by others coming in and trying different approaches. From what I can tell, with each paradigm shift, the old approach doesn’t go away, but stays powered by the volunteers who care about it.



I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.
For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).