@sailor_sega_saturn And given enough time and enough scale even the most improbably weird things will eventually happen. Update file corrupted by a storage controller that flips a couple of bits at random after every 720 hours of uptime but only if it’s 23.682 seconds after the hour? Weirder shit has happened.

@dgerard @froztbyte I always tell people that the reason so many systems nerds (I don't use BOFH any more as that's.. not really an attitude I like identifying with, it hasn't aged well) use Macs. It's because once you get back from work, frankly, the LAST thing you want to do is system administration on your home machine and OS X is just *nix enough.

@swlabr @skillissuer Not sure what a Bill Burr is but that's a traditionally idiotic statement. Doping in cycling isn't about steroids and hasn't been for decades - it's an endurance sport so these days when it occurs it's all about the blood doping, all EPO and transfusions and stuff to get your red cell count as high as possible. This is a really dangerous thing to do if you want to avoid joining the list of young cyclists who dropped dead of mysterious heart problems in the last 20 years, and if you suddenly start saying *that* is okay there will be a lot more kids having cardiac arrests because their blood resembles Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup.

@gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?

@swlabr As a ten year veteran of the SRE mines I’ve always tried really hard not to do this, but I did once leave a job partly as a result of the CTO justifying a decision with “But it says here in the SRE book that that’s the way they do this at Google!” and completely ignoring my protestations that god no, that certainly wasn’t how we did it at least in my bit of SRE.

@self There’s a definite “Sir, this is an Arby’s” air to his posts.

@blakestacey More fool them. Wytham Abbey’s basically just a big house, not fortified at all, and it’s close enough to the centre of Oxford that they’ll be easily overrun by the first wave of pitchfork-wielding mathematicians who decide they’ve finally had it with their faux-intellectual bullshit.

@self This was the point where I started wanting to punch things:

“At one company where I worked, someone got in trouble for using HipChat, a predecessor to Slack, to ask one of my colleagues a question. “Never HipChat an engineer directly,” he was told. We were too important for that.”

Bless his heart. That, dearie, isn’t “engineers are so special”, it’s managers wanting to preserve old-fashioned lines of communication and hierarchy because they fear becoming irrelevant. Gatekeeping access to other people’s knowledge to make yourself important goes back millennia.

@froztbyte The stage contractor is often a different company to the lighting contractor, and it wouldn’t surprise me too much if they blew enough of the budget on the stage and PA that they decided lighting could be a DIY job. Bet they didn’t bother with public liability insurance either, although as this was gross negligence their cover might be void anyway. With any luck they’ll get taken for every JPEG they have in the bank.

@gerikson RPGs have been putting intelligence on a different axis to wisdom since forever for a very good reason, but the SBFs of the world clearly never wondered why that is.

@carlitoscohones Republika Srpska is now the ethnic Serbian part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, most famous for giving the world the term “ethnic cleansing”. Interesting to hear that it was only enlightened self-interest rather than genocide.

@washingtoncom Put as neutrally as I can, his relatively brief time at Google was marked by extremely loud and somewhat ranty posts which can be summarised as "I am very intelligent, everyone else is mediocre, most of you are also mediocre, if only I were in charge of everything it would all be much better and less mediocre". Definitely a smart guy, probably a great engineer, but pissed literally everyone off so much that a) it even made cynical SREs like me feel a bit of sympathy for middle management and b) he was gone in fairly short order.

Definitely not in *any* way entirely wrong - some of what he said about the arbitrary and random nature of company management and about how becoming rich in tech was as much a matter of pure luck and who you know as it was a matter of intellectual greatness was completely correct - but leavened with so much "My genius vision is too brilliant for mediocre mortals to understand" type stuff that it overshadowed everything else. Something of a conspiracy theorist. Has been seen making assertions such as "Software engineers are the manual workers of the 21st century" which will be a surprise to a lot of actual manual workers. Will say with a straight face that his detractors are envious of his intellectual ability.