Notices by Kevin Riggle (kevinriggle@ioc.exchange)

@mhoye By this standard Google did RSS a favor by shuttering Reader when they did

@aardvark @Mordoukna @mekkaokereke As “invariants which must be true for the system to be safe” go, “the door handles work in the event of a power outage” is a big one

@TeeCeeGee @mekkaokereke I for one look forward to some SEC enforcement actions in the marketplace of ideas to ensure a fair and level playing field for all market participants

@lindsey @mekkaokereke this is half the magic of Pride. The other half is that, hey, it’s a really good party, and only bad people don’t like a really good party

@Unixbigot At 38 and an early starter I’m pretty much the end of the generation that learned to code by typing in BASIC listings from magazines and books, and I say pretty often that it taught certain useful skills like hunting for that one-character mistake

In case you need it tonight, here’s a minute of my girlfriend’s guinea pig hanging out in a pumpkin

@tilde @Tarah although, actually, rereading your question again, dovecot alone can also speak Maildir to your filesystem and IMAP to your mail client, it may even handle filesystem actions gracefully enough, I forget

@tilde @Tarah yes although you can point a regular imap server like dovecot at the Maildir, and let offlineimap sync the Maildir.

Now that I say this I have no idea if using rsync to keep a Maildir folder in sync between computers has any horrid failure modes or not

@Tarah @tilde I think that offlineimap is what you’re looking for here, clients speak Maildir to the filesystem and the offlineimap daemon syncs it using IMAP. It works pretty great tho

@danhon any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence

A full episode transcript is available along with the audio version of the podcast here

https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/she-missed-the-overnight-push-julia-lunetta

"Write something like you would want it to be written if you had to debug it at three in the morning, six months from now." Good advice for #coding and especially good advice for documentation. #CriticalPointWarStories

https://youtu.be/2f9ifyVxg1s

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird …yeah uh you may not have used any government web sites recently but they’re already struggling to keep something only slightly more advanced than static HTML or basically 90’s web CMS tech online, maybe don’t expect them to run a terrible Rails app as part of a distributed system that is trying to make some kind of liveness guarantees

@EverydayMoggie @futurebird @nazokiyoubinbou The wild and welcome success of Login.gov says that such a thing is very much possible. It’s just, you know, work

(Over the years I’ve been involved in work that was tangential to various .gov software efforts like the healthcare.gov recovery so)

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov I’m currently reading a book about how the brain works, and while they do find that simulations of avalanches in piles of sand can help us understand avalanches in networks of neurons, the facts of the brain avalanche models which are not captured in the sand avalanche models are obviously just as important as the facts which are.

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov The idea of emergence is tha certain levels of abstraction have more predictive power in the information theory sense than others, and lower levels are not always better, but it doesn’t follow from this that at some level of abstraction in these systems all models are perfectly substitutable

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov @knowuh homomorphic implies (aiui) that all operations on one half of the homomorphism can be mapped 1:1 to operations on the other half, and my point here is that we already know that at least in the strongest form that argument is not true.

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov @knowuh (this is the book I’m reading and it goes into quite some detail about how the symmetries break down. BUT, causality and modeling is of great interest to me and I now know what I’m reading next thank you :)

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov @knowuh in the much weaker and non-homomorphic sense that we can use the models on one side to make predictions about the models on the other side and then test them against the real world, sure absolutely. That’s just science! But we really, really can’t assume that the real world will validate our extrapolations.

@nonlinear @futurebird @dahukanna @PavelASamsonov @knowuh oh thank you for flagging, I got distracted

https://www.amazon.com/Cortex-Critical-Point-Understanding-Emergence-ebook/dp/B09RF2SJRQ/