itnuts
Engineers and Engineering companies
However, there are two ways of interacting with an abstraction layer: as shorthand for an understanding of what it is doing on your behalf, or as a black box. I think engineers are most capable and most effective when abstraction layers serve as shorthand rather than a black box.
For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity
As we’ve made it easier to build games, we have certainly seen more of them. But the number of highly rated games (in this case as recorded by metacritic) does not seem to be increasing over time.
I think we can only truly create when we truly understand what we have to create with.
The qualities that make a good engineer are often the same ones that create a good engineering organization. Both start with deep understanding as the basis for innovation – cultivating the curiosity to look inside the black boxes.
memory consumption when using imap_unordered in Python multiprocessing
A separate thread is spawned to ingest data into the pool, but it doesn’t stop to wait until the tasks are processed. Therefore, if task definitions consume substantial amount of memory it can lead to OOM kill.
If you’re using
multiprocessing.Pool, consider upgrading toconcurrent.futures.process.ProcessPoolExecutor, because it handles killed workers better. It doesn’t affect the problem described in this question.
CST timezone
a quiz question would be to expand the abbreviation.
list of timezone names: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/
Docker pulls entire image even if some layers were delivered with save/load
When saving an image from the graph-driver store, a new archive is created containing the uncompressed layers; saving/loading will produce the same layers as were pulled, but the save/load won’t include information about their compressed digests, because this information cannot be verified without the actual compressed artifacts (as pulled from the registry). Reconstructing the compressed layers is not possible due to compression algorithms not being 100% reproducible (they may be most of the time, but various factors, including CPU load, and CPU optimizations during compression can cause their checksum to differ).
Brief comparison of Google Drive and Dropbox
Price per 2TB
- GDrive $137.75 / year
- Dropbox $120 / year
Privacy
When I shared a file with someone, and then want to: unshare and share with someone else.
Can the sharing link be reset for a particular file / folder?
- GDrive: copy file, then link will change. No way to reset the link. community answer from 2021
- Dropbox: you can reset, set expiration date, etc dropbox docs
NOTE on Dropbox:
You can only delete shared links that you create. If you invite someone to a file or folder with editing access, they can create their own link to share with someone else. You can’t manage those shared links
Software development is not a rocket science, or is it?
VPN considered insecure
general practice for VPN, is to prioritize itself via defining more specific routing rules, which take priority over the default gateway. the attacker, however, can spin up another DHCP server, and use rule 121 to push some new routes to the client. Importantly, if the routes are more specific than the ones defined by the VPN, they will take over, and unencrypted traffic directed to the VPN interface will end up on the attacker’s machine.
the golden standard to avoid this vulnerability is using network namespaces: https://www.wireguard.com/netns/#the-new-namespace-solution
Categories of hype
Engineering is magic
Terry Pratchett, «Equal Rites»