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Replying to

reminds me of that time at a previous job where someone had broken the code that compiled a support-tool for tests, but no one noticed for months because: 1. the failing to build the tool didn't kill the test 2. if it failed to build a tool, it used the last-successful-build

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so for months there was a "trying to compile test tool.... FAILED!" in the logs, and no one noticed because it was line #2194 of 40mb of log files, and the test still passed

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we only finally noticed because we tried to set up a new test server and it wasn't able to run any tests, because it had no previously-successful build to fall back on.

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the two most important things I've learned in doing continuous integration 1. if it looks like it is working, it probably isn't, and you just can't see that it's failing 2. if it looks like it's failing, it probably isn't, and you just can't see that it's succeeding

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basically, never underestimate how much stuff is broken but just seems to be working because of inertia.

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you ever unscrew a lightswitch panel and all the screws are out but it stays attached to the wall, because the paint is effectively gluing it to the wall? The expected support is gone, but it stays in place because of the unintended support.

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it turns out that when you're doing continuous integration, you learn that half the shit in your process is like that. The screws have been gone for years. the paint is slipping.

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you go to put up a painting on the wall and the lightswitch panel falls down. Huh. that's weird. You spend a week trying to figure out how your painting broke the lightswitch

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only to eventually realize that no, your painting did nothing. your lightswitch had been broken for a long time, and your painting just jostled the situation enough to make an already broken thing finish falling over.

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if I had a nickel for every time I changed X and Y broke, and I went looking for the link only to find there was none, and Y had already been broken for a long while and we just didn't notice, I could retire from trying to fix these things

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oh hey good news. this it out of date: gitea 1.15.0 released 3 days ago and adds LFS mirroring

Release v1.15.0 · go-gitea/gitea

BREAKING Make app.ini permissions more restrictive (#16266) Refactor Webhook + Add X-Hub-Signature (#16176) Add asymmetric JWT signing (#16010) Clean-up the settings hierarchy for issue_indexer qu...

8:33 PM · Aug 24, 2021

Replying to

anyway, you know that story about magic vs more magic? that story is all of computers. no wonder we become superstitious, because this shit is all magic. catb.org/jargon/html/ma

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I remember saying that back when I was a win95 repair tech in the late 90s. we weren't engineers or scientists, we were magicians.

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we didn't diagnose problems and repair things, we knew rituals we could do. we'd try them and maybe they'd work. sprinkle the right holy water, say the right prayers, reinstall tcp/ip, rearrange the RAM sticks, maybe the gods will be pleased today.

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I remembered thinking that maybe this was just a problem with the current win9x state of things and one day it would be better. ahh, youthful optimism

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computers have gotten more reliable in general, which just means that when they break, they break in far weirder ways.

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it's like that line in Charles Stross's Accelerando, about the guy who has some weird brain cancer. In the future world where they've cured all the common stuff, that's all that's left.

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we mostly fixed the problem that random windows system files get corrupted and can't be repaired, so now when shit breaks it breaks in ways that you can spend two weeks trying to repair and give up.

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it's not "oh this server can't talk to that server because it's using the wrong DNS" anymore.

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It's "this server's got the wrong certificates and we didn't notice because part of the test process refreshes the certificates but the mirror uses HTTP and the original git server uses HTTS and this system should be using the mirror but we had to move it to the original because

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that git server is inside the DMZ which means the now isolated test beds can't talk to the mirror directly, so they have to use the original. which worked for all the existing servers, but then we tried to install new servers, which were missing certificates

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and the test would have happily gotten the new certificates because it downloads them but it was trying to get them off the git server which it can't talk to unless IT HAS THE CERTIFICATES"

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you're half a mile down the chicken-and-egg problem rabbit hole and this took a week to figure out, to mix your metaphors, and you're considering quitting any job that involves touching a computer and moving to montana to raise actual literal chickens and rabbits

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I grew up on a farm. the main problems I had to debug was that chickens had gotten out of their enclosure or that a fox had gotten into it those are both a lot easier to fix and don't make you hate technology

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and plus if you take care of a chickens they will give you eggs and you can scramble them or make a cake that's a much better output. my work with computers just gives me beeps and pages of errors. and you can't eat that

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unless you print it out. paper is technically edible even if it's not nutritious. don't eat thermal paper, though. that's known to the state of cancer to give you california

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also you can get printers that print on cakes. but it would be silly to have all your errors come out in the form of cakes

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maybe I should build a thermal printer that prints onto pita bread

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that sounds hard and silly but more fun than trying to finish debugging this git-lfs-github-gitea-vm-mirroring nightmare

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honestly some days the main thing that keeps me from going mad and running off into the wilderness to devote my life to one silly singular goal (like building a pita printer) is that I have too many silly singular goals to pick one to hyperfocus on

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but as soon as I get to live in a world without capitalism and I can duplicate myself 30 times, it's all over for your punks

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the world's gonna be full of Weird Foones living in a forest like a local urban legend bog witch, each devoted to one weird thing and they won't be stoppable.

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one's releasing a new keyboard every week, each worse than the last. one is putting out modified ROMs of every game that asks you for a gender, giving you third options. one is hacking everything with a screen (and many things without) to run Doom

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one is just finding new and unusual ways to rickroll people. rumors are that they are currently building a space rocket to display it on the moon using laser projectors

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one's just dressed as a ninja and repeatedly trying to break into Microsoft HQs to steal their QIC-80 datatapes of source code from the mid 90s

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and another is building an analog TV station and is being constantly tracked by the FCC.

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because even in a glorious automated luxury space communism post-scarcity world where no one needs to work to live, there's one thing that will remain limited, and need to be managed so it's not misused: The radio spectrum!

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BUT THE FCC CANNOT STOP ME. I AM A REBEL. NTSC ANALOG TV WILL NEVER DIE. AND IF I HAVE TO BUILD A SECRET MOON BASE TO BROADCAST MY ILLEGAL SIGNALS AT THE PITFUL EARTH, SO BE IT!

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also I'm gonna write into my favorite anarcho-communist youtubers to ask them the important question of how they intend to handle the radio spectrum in a stateless world without unjust hierarchies. How do we get rid of the FCC without it being a disaster?

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I don't mean that as a "gotcha, your anarchist utopia would never work!", I'm legitimately interested in how they think that sort of thing should be managed.

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