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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The default actually works pretty well these days.

    Messing with the EFI partition, for instance by attempting to have two of those on separate disks, will probably cause you more pain than Windows will. As far as I understand, only one EFI partition can be configured in BIOS as the boot partition, so you will have to change the configuration in BIOS whenever you want to boot to the other OS.

    Windows does have a history of changing the default EFI bootloader once in a while; however your chosen bootloader is still there, just not marked as the default anymore. A Windows app like EasyUEFI will let you change the default back.




  • All labels are imperfect, I guess. That’s the nature of labels: a shorthand for a complex reality.

    I don’t know if the “trans” label is or isn’t a good shorthand for the complex reality of your identity. But the important thing is: your identity is valid and yours, regardless of what labels you stick on it.

    If you feel that you are a woman, be that partially or completely, then congratulations, girl, there you go. Or maybe what you feel like switches back and forth depending on your mood, or maybe you exist somewhere in the middle. That’s valid too. There are other labels worth exploring in that space, non-binary, genderfluid… I suppose the only really useful thing here is to work out which ones resonate with you as a suitable shorthand for who you are.

    Oh and who you are attracted to is irrelevant. Lots of trans gals are lesbians. Doesn’t make them any less trans.




  • It’s not the company it once was, but there are also a lot of outrage-bait headlines about it that don’t hold up well to scrutiny.

    For instance, there have been a lot of Lemmy posts about Chrome supposedly removing the APIs used by adblockers. I figured I’d validate that on my own by switching to the version of uBlock that is based on the new API. Well… As it turns out, it works fine. It’s also faster.

    Mind you, figuring out the actual facts behind each post gets exhausting, and people just shutting down and avoiding the problem space entirely makes some sort of sense. That, and it is healthy for an ecosystem to have alternatives, so I’d keep encouraging usage of Firefox and such if only on that basis alone.


  • Balinares@pawb.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlCrowdstrike Cockup
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    4 months ago

    This is actually an excellent question.

    And for all the discussions on the topic in the last 24h, the answer is: until a postmortem is published, we don’t actually know.

    There are a lot of possible explanations for the observed events. Of course, one simple and very easy to believe explanation would be that the software quality processes and reliability engineering at CrowdStrike are simply below industry standards – if we’re going to be speculating for entertainment purposes, you can in fact imagine them to be as comically bad as you please, no one can stop you.

    But as a general rule of thumb, I’d be leery of simple and easy to believe explanations. Of all the (non-CrowdStrike!) headline-making Internet infrastructure outages I’ve been personally privy to, and that were speculated about on such places as Reddit or Lemmy, not one of the commenter speculations came close to the actual, and often fantastically complex chain of events involved in the outage. (Which, for mysterious reasons, did not seem to keep the commenters from speaking with unwavering confidence.)

    Regarding testing: testing buys you a certain necessary degree of confidence in the robustness of the software. But this degree of confidence will never be 100%, because in all sufficiently complex systems there will be unknown unknowns. Even if your test coverage is 100% – every single instruction of the code is exercised by at least one test – you can’t be certain that every test accurately models the production environments that the software will be encountering. Furthermore, even exercising every single instruction is not sufficient protection on its own: the code might for instance fail in rare circumstances not covered by the test’s inputs.

    For these reasons, one common best practice is to assume that the software will sooner or later ship with an undetected fault, and to therefore only deploy updates – both of software and of configuration data – in a staggered manner. The process looks something like this: a small subset of endpoints are selected for the update, the update is left to run in these endpoints for a certain amount of time, and the selected endpoints’ metrics are then assessed for unexpected behavior. Then you repeat this process for a larger subset of endpoints, and so on until the update has been deployed globally. The early subsets are sometimes called “canary”, as in the expression “canary in a coal mine”.

    Why such a staggered deployment did not appear to occur in the CrowdStrike outage is the unanswered question I’m most curious about. But, to give you an idea of the sort of stuff that may happen in general, here is a selection of plausible scenarios, some of which have been known to occur in the wild in some shape or form:

    • The update is considered low-risk (for instance, it’s a minor configuration change without any code change) and there’s an imperious reason to expedite the deployment, for instance if it addresses a zero-day vulnerability under active exploitation by adversaries.
    • The update activates a feature that an important customer wants now, the customer phoned a VP to express such, and the VP then asks the engineers, arbitrarily loudly, to expedite the deployment.
    • The staggered deployment did in fact occur, but the issue takes the form of what is colloquially called a time bomb, where it is only triggered later on by a change in the state of production environments, such as, typically, the passage of time. Time bomb issues are the nightmare of reliability engineers, and difficult to defend against. They are also, thankfully, fairly rare.
    • A chain of events resulting in a misconfiguration where all the endpoints, instead of only those selected as canaries, pull the update.
    • Reliabilty engineering not being up to industry standards.

    Of course, not all of the above fit the currently known (or, really, believed-known) details of the CrowdStrike outage. It is, in fact, unlikely that the chain of events that resulted in the CrowdStrike outage will be found in a random comment on Reddit or Lemmy. But hopefully this sheds a small amount of light on your excellent question.





  • Mélenchon is… frustrating.

    He’s the main contender on the limited field of the actual left in France. He’s got a lot of proposals that are actually good and desirable.

    He’s also a narcissist and a populist whose stated approach to achieving his proposals is to denounce treaties he doesn’t like and somehow force other countries to replace clauses with whatever it is he wants.

    He’s also incapable of compromises, and right now busily torpedoeing the left wing alliance that won the election because his own party didn’t win enough seats to take charge of the alliance.

    What I don’t know is, how much of the populist/anti-system talk is just talk for political reasons, and whether he would in fact be capable of the nuance required to govern. He might. He might not. He’s clearly smart and charismatic. But he’s also the type to huff his own farts hard enough to mistake the visions for the truth of the world. So… In that respect, pretty much just like Macron.

    France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.







  • Vast question. Finding out who you are is a lifelong process.

    My thought: “male” and “female” are, in fact, abstract ideas, simple labels that each imperfectly, awkwardly covers entire, partially overlapping universes of complexity. And in practical reality, no one is all the way in either universe to the entire exclusion of the other.

    So perhaps you are fine in a masculine body enjoying feminine-coded traits and activities. Perhaps the body shape that you would like to see in the mirror fluctuates with time or with your mood. Perhaps you are fine with your genitals but would like to have breasts, or perhaps you are fine with your chest but are thrilled by the idea of a vulva between your legs. Perhaps you would love the way you look and feel in a skirt and high socks. Perhaps you just thrive socializing and belonging in groups of women. Perhaps – likely – none of the above, but something else, something lovely I can’t even begin to imagine. Only you can find out.

    Ultimately all labels are, to some extent, bullshit. Each human is a rich multitude that defies naming and containment. I hope you love whatever it is you end up finding out are.