Notices by Merry Jerry 🎄🎅🕎⛄️❄️ (jerry@infosec.exchange), page 9

About a year ago, we were experience peak migrations from Twitter to mastodon. For those that stuck with it, I’m glad you’re still here. It’s been quite a year.

@danzajork ironically, the smart TVs, like the fire TV, tend to be cheaper. I recently replaced all the TVs in my condo with fire TVs, but I have them connected to Apple TVs as well. I just don’t use the smart TV nonsense.

To those people celebrating a year on the fediverse, I’m glad you’re here and I’m honored to be part of this community we’ve built together.

@bbaugh @anildash it’s working really well

One of the things I am really liking about Fastly, other than that it makes the instance incredibly fast from almost everywhere, is the observability. I was poking around and found this graph that shows the origin of traffic to the instance at a given point of time, with the size of the bubble representing how much traffic that pop is getting.

Note the two big circles. One over Germany, and one over Finland. Coincidentally, the location of Hetzner’s two main sites.

Much of that traffic is inter-instance communications. And the reason is that, I strongly suspect, much of the fediverse infrastructure exists in those two Hetzner datacenters.

NB: Hetzner is critical infrastructure for the fediverse.

Some observations from looking at billboards on my drive from Atlanta to Panama City Beach yesterday, which takes me through very rural parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida:

1. “Jesus Saves” would be a fine slogan for a bank

2. The visible support for Trump is waning significantly

3. Apparently medical problems leading to foot amputation is a real problem out there

4. The industry that would suffer the most if there were meaningful tort reform is the road sign advertisers

I expect a brief Infosec.exchange outage on Sunday while we move from the old database server (Postgres on an AMD7950 with 128GB of ram) to the shiny new AMD Epyc (Genoa 2 with 48 cores, 256GB ddr5 ram, 4TB nvme datacenter drive, and 10Gbps network). This system will also have the redis database server, which is currently on an i9-13000 server. I’ll also be switching to use the new local storage server from Backblaze at the same time.

I’ll post a better outlook on when after I get a sense of when the replication will finish. It should only take a few minutes to complete once started.

Tomorrow evening, I will move the the core mastodon application and web front end to the new app server (2x32 core sapphire rapids, 256GB ddr5, 2TB nvme ssd). This should be transparent.

Once this is complete, the server infrastructure will go down to 4 servers from 14 and everything will be connected via 10gbps networks, all behind fastly and bunny.net. I am quite eager to shut off the 10 or so extra servers, since the new servers are adding about $1100/month in costs. But I expect to save in the neighborhood of $1000/month after I decommission the 10 servers. I expect my backblaze and wasabi costs will go down after I delete some buckets, which I expect will save about $100. Netting it all out, I expect that the costs will go up very slightly but performance and manageability will improve significantly.

Question for people in the USA: why would someone want to use a regular bank rather than a credit union for personal banking? Am I missing something?

I’ve been having a challenging go at $dayjob for $reasons, but some good happened today:
Hetzner delivered the first shiny new server.
And Fastly gave me a super discount on their service and I should be allowed to sleep in my own bed again as a result.

This game is rigged by the very unfair New York Times

I would like to take a moment to orient people to a brand new and highly innovative feature that was recently introduced in mastodon and many other fedi-apps. This feature enables you to not have to see posts from or interact with people whose posts you don’t like, don’t agree with, or are otherwise offended by.

I like to call it the “block button”.

Does someone on the fedi support the “other side” in the Israel/Hamas conflict? Instead of asking your moderators to figure out which side is objectively right in a no win situation, BLOCK! It’s amazing!

Did someone just say that they are frustrated that they got Covid after having gotten all the vaccines? That’s not disinformation, it’s an opinion and you can block them!

Does someone seem a little too happy that one of Biden’s staff got in trouble or that a democrat is getting charged? BLOCK! It’s amazing!

Did someone use the word Nazi in a way that offends you? Yep, you guessed it! BLOCK!

I have no idea what the median age of people on the fediverse are, but it’s disappointing that moderators are effectively having to act as camp counselors for 13 year olds who are having a disagreement. Yes, the substance of these disagreements tend to be much more consequential, but the pettiness is about the same or perhaps worse.

If someone is harassing you or otherwise violating your instances rules, please do report them, but try to apply some perspective.

Hello everyone. If you care about fedia.io, please read this: https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/350673

Note: it’s good news-ish

Dear people of the fediverse: someone expressing an opinion about a controversial topic that you happen to disagree with does not constitute spreading disinformation. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

Bingo time! I continue to be amazed at the 5g speeds from rando bar parking lot where bingo is hosted

@catsalad this is the way

Working on a title for my autobiography…. So far, I am thinking “Things to avoid” or “At Least I Tried”

@achyuthcmu I am not going to lie, it’s super stressful, but I have an amazing team. Keeping a cloud provider safe is a lot of work.

@achyuthcmu patience with yourself and others, the ability to communicate very well, the ability to break down a complex issue into pieces that can be divided up, and the ability to instill confidence. I am not good at any of those and have to keep working on them.

@vidmo I have been one for going on 4 years. I do not think this is a long term career for most people. I don’t think my body can handle that much more.

@achyuthcmu welcome! I am curious: what sort of work does a data engineer entail?