• 2 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • About 15 years on, I’m still so happy I got good coursework marks for the route-finding equivalent of a bogosort. Picked a bunch of random routes and pick the fastest. Sure, that guy who set up a neural net to figure it out did well, but mine didn’t take days of training, and still did about as well in the same sort of execution time.




  • Had something along these lines - a mail server that ended up used almost exclusively for sending automated internal emails. We’d migrated to a third party for email sending because managing DNS etc for clients got pretty painful. Mail server got removed by the tech lead and repointed to our third party mail provider without telling anyone, and 3 days into the months we’d hit our billing limit, on the lead’s day off. Turns out that one service had been sending an order of magnitude more email than all of our other services put together, as someone had been using email as a logging method.

    That was a… fun day.















  • Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

    Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.



  • Those are reasonable options - though I’m pessimistic enough to believe that trolls will get better than every automated system, so we’d probably want some manual options. I wouldn’t say it’s not possible - just would require quite a bit of work, and would likely be an ongoing battle to improve your auto-moderator.

    It feels like I’m moving the goalposts, so apologies, but your response got me thinking further. The other big advantages I can think of for central censorship is that it can actually prevent hosting of content - which has two benefits:

    • legal concerns - make countries will require the removal of some amount of content - extreme stuff of all the usual sorts. Some jurisdictions will also require minors being prevented from accessing certain content, at least to a reasonable degree - refusing to host that kind of content is an easy solution.
    • community unity and protection - is a lot more abstract, age debatable - but I’d contest that central moderation can give a certain “this content isn’t wanted in our community” that individual censorship won’t. Really difficult to define, though.