> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?
Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/
1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
The book “Backup and Recovery” was published on February 6, 2007, almost twenty years ago. I was a technical reviewer for an earlier version of this book, “Unix Backup and Recovery”, published on January 1, 1999. And these books were not the first to advocate the standard 3-2-1 model of backups. Curtis also has more modern books, if you like — such as “Modern Data Protection: Ensuring Recoverability of All Modern Workloads”, published in 2021.
If you’re not adequately backing up your data, then that is entirely on you. After thirty-plus years of this best practice guidance, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.
Apple makes this pretty easy with iCloud and Time Machine, but they are far from the only company trying to make this as easy as possible for their customers.
While I was expressing an ideal setup, it isn’t all or nothing. A single backup is still better than none at all.
I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:
1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget.
2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.
I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.
If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.
I agree, if it has too much friction it's more likely you will postpone it. Any option, either just a cloud backup tool or a spare HDD or SSD with CCC or TimeMachine is better than nothing. And you have to plan for the most likely case, e.g. spilling beer on the laptop vs the house burning down.
For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.
if you want to talk about 'average people' go hang out on reddit. How many times have 'average people' been brought up here explicitly to shut down a discussion. It is reductive and insulting
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
FWIW, if you aren’t interleaving other allocations (which includes on other threads), the ArenaAllocator in Zig doesn’t have this problem. If you attempt to resize the most recent allocation, it will do so in place if possible.
IIRC: it is to leverage the OS page cache rather than having a separate buffer pool in user land. By default lmdb uses normal pwrite/fsync for the write path, but can optionally use a writable mapping and (presumably) msync.
How is pwrite/fsync any better than mmap/msync? Both go through the page cache and combine asynchronous writeback with forced flush. One theoretical advantage of pwrite might be that you can handle I/O errors, but I’d like to see a case where recovering from an I/O error makes sense (rather than just crashing the database, which SIGBUS would do anyway by default).
write/fsync can be faster in a large dataset because writes let the filesystem know an explicit list of dirty pages, so fsync only needs to deal with them.
mmap/msync gives no hints about which pages are dirty (unless the app tracks them itself and msyncs them individually, which would completely defeat any reduced syscall advantage of using a writable mmap in the first place) so the entire map must be scanned for dirty pages.
In practice, the expected performance advantages of using a writable mmap just aren't there, and coupled with the ease of silent corruption, it's best to never use that approach.
The issue for me is that bookmarks suck. They don't store the state (where I was reading) and they reload the webpage so I might get something else entirely when I come back. They also kinda just disappear from sight.
If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.
Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.
Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.
I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.
Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).
While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.
I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.
I've started using Karakeep as well, however I don't find its built-in viewer as seamless as a plain browser page. It's also runs afoul of pages which combats bots due to its headless chrome.
Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
Websites that are walled off behind obscure captcha don't do well in Karakeep for sure, but so far for me those are usually e-commerce sites or sites I don't return to anyway.
If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.
There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.
How much would it take up if there was less RAM available. A web browser with a bunch of tabs open but not active seems like the type of system that can increase RAM usage by caching, and decrease it by swapping (either logically at the application level, or letting the OS actually swap)
The computer has 18GB of total RAM so I would hope that it’s already trying to conserve memory.
It’s kind of humorous that everyone interpreted the comment as complaining about Chrome. For all I know, it’s justified in using that much memory, or it’s the crappy websites I’m required to use for work with absurdly large heaps.
I really just meant that at least for work I need more than 8GB of RAM.
Anecdotally, I fly round trip out of SEA ~3 times a year and experience very bad turbulence on about half the flights. Earlier this year it was bad enough to suspend drink service.
> Earlier this year it was bad enough to suspend drink service.
If drink service wasn't suspended on others, it wasn't very bad turbulence. A rule of thumb is that if your seat belt isn't hurting you, it's moderate or lower intensity.
About a decade or two ago, turbulence seemed worse. My uncle told of a time when he saw people hit the ceiling. I've rarely had issues, although plenty of smaller pockets where service does get suspended. I fly out of SEA, but in my opinion, DEN is much bumpier because of the sheer winds from the Rockies.
My rule of thumb is if the drinks didn't fly into the air and spill, then turbulence is minor.
This is absolutely true and has been for years. You’re granted access to the minimum number of buildings required for your job function, and can file a ticket for temporary access grants to other buildings based on need.
It’s absolutely not true and hasn’t been for at least the last 5 years, in my experience.
I have access to every building in my city despite only requiring access to one of them, and I didn’t have to request it.
When I visited Seattle, I had to request access (which required clicking a grand total of 5 buttons in an internal portal and was instantly auto approved) to “the Seattle campus” and was granted access to every building, and still have that access years later. It wasn’t temporary.
Ditto for the other offices I’ve visited, both domestic and abroad. One office internationally I literally showed up and walked to reception and said “hi I work here but I’m visiting from out of town” and they immediately gave me access. I don’t see how this is different from the “second passport” described in the article.*
There are a couple of limited-access offices such as for subsidiary companies, but those are not the majority.
* - the one big difference definitely is the amenities and food, though. Amazon offices don’t have great, or even good, food. And the amenities are lame, most offices don’t even have a gym. There isn’t much of a reason to stop by an office unless you’re specifically there to work.
I worked for Amazon for a bit over two years, followed by Google for a bit over the last decade.
It never would have occurred to me to visit an Amazon office, so I didn't know about the ticket thing. I rarely worked with anyone remote.
When I joined, Google encouraged travel (less so lately). In the time I've been here I've visited over a dozen offices around the world. Some of them on vacation, because I knew there would be something unique about the local office, but also because with the exception of one office (Copenhagen), I'd worked closely enough with someone there to drop by their desk, say hello, shake hands, and get the best restaurant and bar recommendations I've ever found (and some great unexpected dinners with colleagues!)
I'd argue all these "publish your DB schema as a GraphQL endpoint" frameworks that seem to proliferate have done a lot of damage to GraphQL's reputation. Strongly coupling data to presentation seems like such an obvious anti pattern, yet tools doing just that seem to be very popular for some reason.
Agreed, the reason I really like GraphQL is you can map different parts of your schema "tree" to different backend systems, APIs, etc. This makes your API plane/BFF nicely decoupled from those details like DB tables, etc.
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
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