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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

    If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.


  • Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

    • Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
    • Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
    • Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

    And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

    Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.


  • Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

    I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

    Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.



  • I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

    Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

    It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.



  • Yeah sorry but that’s completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.

    Compared to grid-scale you have:

    • No economies of scale
    • Massive investments required to force utilities to upgrade transformers (here in Belgium it’s quite common in the summer that whole neighborhoods have their inverters shut off because the voltage is too high because the low-voltage grid simply wasn’t meant to flow in the other direction)
    • Horrendous fiscal incentives that reward the rich and punish the poor (who are forced to shoulder the distribution costs for the rich who are still using the grid but “offsetting” it with net metering).

    Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).

    If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn’t make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.


  • Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

    Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

    Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.


  • I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

    Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.



  • Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

    Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

    That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

    Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

    The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.





  • Ideally you’d use the docker executor with a dind service instead of docker commands in the shell. You’ll have better isolation (e.g. no conflicts from open port forwards) and better forward-compatibility (the pipeline won’t break every time a major upgrade is applied to the runner because the docker - especially compose - CLI is unstable).


  • For gitlab this is only correct with a shell executor which is to be avoided in the general case in favor of a docker or k8s executor for isolation&repeatability.

    Those you can actually run locally with gitlab-runner, but then you won’t have all your gitlab instance’s CI variables so it’s a PITA if you need a CI token which you probably do if you actually make decent use of gitlab’s features.

    In most cases I just end up committing my changes to avoid the headache. :!git commit --amend --no-edit && git push -f goes pretty dang fast and 60 % of the time third time’s the charm.



  • I don’t disagree with the point being made but I think the author is underselling the value of opentelemetry tracing here.

    OTEL tracing is not mere plumbing. The SDKs are opinionated and do provide very useful context out of the box (related spans/requests, thrown exceptions, built-in support for common libraries). The data model is easy to use and contextful by default.

    It’s more useful if the application developer properly sets attributes as demonstrated, but even a half-assed tracing implementation is still an incredibly valuable addition to logging for production use.



  • My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

    I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.