Weeknotes 106

“The Titan Submersible Was ‘an Accident Waiting to Happen’"

Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot.

‘It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting’ she told me.

wtf?!

“I hereby officially announce the Elixir type system effort is transitioning from research into development”

While we have introduced a new syntax capable of expressing the semantics of the new set-theoretic type system, the syntax is not final as there are still no concrete plans for user-facing changes to the language.

It’s reassuring that user-facing changes are still up for discussion at this time.

I’m attempting to lose some weight again. I wasn’t sure whether to talk about it here – does acknowledging the attempt publicly make it more or less likely to be successful?

I know what to do. I just need to do it. I’m focussing on:

• Not being perfect
• Being more organised with
• Relying less on “will power”

If I stop talking about it you know what happened ;) If I’m “successful” there will be self-congratulatory graphs.

LiteFS Cloud: Distributed SQLite with Managed Backups

Fly are adding a managed backup service for SQLite.

Well, that’s why we’re launching, in preview, LiteFS Cloud: backups and restores for LiteFS, managed by Fly.io. It gives you painless and reliable backups, with the equivalent of a snapshot every five minutes (8760 snapshots per month!), whether your database is hosted with us, or anywhere else.

And

We’ll introduce pricing in the coming months, but for now LiteFS Cloud is in preview and is free to use. Please go check it out, and let us know how it goes!

Worth a try for free.

This is very exciting and just in time for a side project I’m working on. I’m interested in trying this very soon.

A GitHub UI discovery this week: If you mention a CVE identifier (common vulnerabilities and exposures), which looks something like this – CVE-2023-26115 – in a Git commit message it will link to the GitHub Advisory Database automatically 👌

The tests for my aforementioned side project run in 0.6 seconds and almost all of them hit the database.

Finished in 0.6 seconds (0.00s async, 0.6s sync)
151 tests, 0 failures

Not Ruby, of course – I’m using Elixir and Phoenix. But the main benefit doesn’t seem to step from those so much as using SQLite instead of Postgres so there is no “setup Postgres” step during CI.

It’s early days, but the difference this makes is hard to put into words. Using other languages really makes you aware of the issues with your everyday tools. Speed dictates how you test. I expect to do less mocking in Elixir because hitting the database and doing “real work” is less costly.

After years of a rock-solid internet connection in the last 6 weeks or so it has become unreliable, so I wanted to setup some sort of monitoring.

I’ve used thinkbroadband’s Broadband Quality Meter (BQM) in the past, so it seemed to be the logical (only service I could find) choice. However, it was tricky to setup and the tool was reporting 100% packet loss indicating that I was not allowing ICMP on my internet router (a UniFi USG).

Thankfully, I found a blog post detailing how to set it up (How to allow ICMP ping on a Unifi Security Gateway WAN Interface) and I’m now happily monitoring how poor my internet connection is.

“VC qanon” and the radicalization of the tech tycoons by Anil Dash.

…so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. ‘I must be smart, look how rich I am.’

Why we all need subtitles now – Dammit downmixing, shakes fist ✊