• 0 Posts
  • 128 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle


  • Mostly the latter. We don’t do any optimizations on our product whatsoever. Most important thing is to say yes to all the customers and add every single feature they want. Every sprint is spent adding and adding and adding to the code as much as we can and as quickly as we can. Not a single second is allotted to any discussion about performance or efficiency. Maybe when something breaks, but otherwise we keep piling on more crap at full speed non-stop. I have repeatedly been told “the fast way is the right way” followed by laughter. I was told to “merge this now” on multiple occasions even when I knew that the code was shit, and told the team as much. I am expected to write code now and think about it later.

    As you can expect, the codebase is a bloated nightmare. Slow as shit, bugs galore, ugly inconsistent UI, ENORMOUS memory use, waaaaaay too frequent DB access with a shit ton of duplicate requests that are each rather inefficient themselves. It is a rather complex piece of lab management software, but not so complex that it should be struggling to run on dedicated servers with 8 gigs of RAM. Yet it does.


  • The why is easy. As others said, the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you, the user, because there’s not a single thing you can possibly do to address it. What are you gonna do about a database connection issue, or bad cache, or broken Javascript? Nothing. So don’t worry about it. Besides people are less panicky when they see an oops rather than a stack trace or a cryptic error message.

    And don’t worry, people who know how to write up useful support tickets and bug reports know how to do it even when all they can see is an “oops”. Builtin browser dev tools will have information they can use to help the devs.








  • Twice, because usually it’s two sticks.

    In any case, RAM failure is rare enough that quadrupling its chances is not gonna make any meaningful difference. Even if it does, RAM is the easiest thing to replace in a PC. Don’t even need to go offline while waiting for a new stick. Someone who’s got the cash to build that thing in the first place won’t be too upset by the cost of another 32gb stick either, I don’t think.


  • herrvogel@lemmy.worldtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldSpotify Premium "Ad Free" plan
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Of course not. You need other software to rip your music from physical media, or potentially multiple other software to search and download them. You’ll need additional software to host everything over the internet. You’ll probably want a computer to act as a server. You’ll very likely need a private VPN to be able to access it over the public internet. You’ll need some networking knowledge to set everything up. Hope you’re familiar with docker. And afterwards you’ll have to manage everything yourself once they are up.

    Even if you don’t search for new music very often it’s a lot of work. If you care about being able to discover new music then it’s pretty bad. There’s a reason music streaming exploded in popularity so quickly. This shit is not easy or convenient to self-host. At all. If you’re already selfhosting a bunch of stuff, then it might be worth it to add this stack on top of your existing stuff. But absolutely not worth building anything from scratch just for this.




  • It’s a translator. Takes commands that are meant for windows to understand, and translates them into something Linux can work with. If the program requires the services of the kernel, for instance, it makes its system call as usual but the call gets converted to a command for the Linux kernel. At the end of the day it’s the Linux kernel doing the work that was aimed at the windows kernel, and there is no windows kernel anywhere at all. That’s unlike an emulator where you’d be running the windows kernel inside your Linux environment.

    Wine also creates a windows-looking file structure so that programs can find the stuff they’re looking for where they expect them to be. Like, it creates a “program files” directory somewhere in your filesystem and tells the windows applications to look there if they need to. There’s more to it, but you get the gist I hope.

    In a way, wine extends your Linux environment to support windows stuff. Whereas an emulator would create a new windows environment entirely. The goal is not to trick software into thinking it’s on a windows machine, it’s to make it work on Linux. The difference there is that by making it work on Linux you can make it work together and share resources with the rest of the system instead of remaining isolated in its own emulated environment.



  • I’ve always found it super interesting that Disney made a kids’ thing out of that particular book. Because that’s a bleak fucking book full of nasty filthy disgusting terrible people doing nasty filthy disgusting terrible things. Someone went “you know the classic where a couple of city officials drool after a gypsy woman and violently rape her in a cathedral and then hang her in the street? And a grotesque monster rampages against them for it? Wouldn’t the kids just love that one but as a musical and instead of hanging her they burn her at the stake?”


  • Compulsory service exists in many parts of the world and it is rarely good.

    Forcing people to do work they don’t want to do leads to very unproductive environments that are also very open to abuse. Being forced by law to do the work has a tendency to create super unhealthy power dynamics.



  • Well you see one client demanded some absolutely stupid very obscure feature that was so absolutely stupid that it could only reasonably be achieved by hacking some bullshit together on their on-premise bare-metal installation that they insisted on not giving you proper access that you needed. Then something went wrong with that hacked-together one-off bullshit, and the digital equivalent of this was the only way to figure out what the hell was happening.