Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits
Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!
More you might like
okay americans how’d i do
There are so many parts of this that just genuinely brighten my day
I like how the four corners states are the algebra meme
This is why I dislike looking back on the past as if everything has been constantly improving to get us to where we are now
Our cement isn't as strong as the Romans, our steel isn't as strong as Damascus steel, we cannot replicate the beauty of a Stradivari violin, we've already lost some of the technology that flew Apollo and Gemini to space
And when I live out a suitcase I have to sift through a pile of stuff like a neanderthal
no idea if this is true, but it feels true
I heard an interview, can’t remember the psychologist, but he was explaining this idea and encouraging people to stop and take a deep breath and literally drink in small moments like you’re a dryass plant when something is ever satisfactory, positive, mildly successful, randomly joyful so your brain can code and integrate that experience because our natural lizard brain will quickly tape over it with mostly unnecessary negative survival shit. Sounds dumb and dorky but sometimes I remember this when I’m feeling good about a moment because our cave brains are still catching up with modern life without sabertooths. I like that it’s not just a pollyanna gosh just be more positive thing but more of a legit brain wiring phenomenon can be gradually hacked through small behavioral changes.
Another super important one: Take the time to tell yourself, when something you did or bought or decided works out “That was a good decision and I’m glad I made it! Go me!”
Seriously, it can have a huge impact. suddenly you go from remembering nothing but bad decisions to adding in a series of Excellent Choices You Feel Good About, and it makes things so much better.
I’ve read that Agatha said she loved being married to an archaeologist because the older she got, the more interesting he found her. And I think that is one of the best quotes about love that I have ever heard.
at times when hope is too big of a thing to have, curiosity (even clinical or small) is a very good placeholder
Anonymous asked:
I loved your bit on ao3, but I have a question! Why is ao3 a miracle? I know next to nothing about tech in general and would really like to know! I know that it has a /lot/ of stuff to manage but I’d really like to know more!
bitternest answered:
Ok, I’ll bite.
For starters, zz9pizza did up a better tech breakdown than i ever could here: https://zz9pzza.tumblr.com/post/616408796841000960/insert-normal-disclaimer-about-personal-opinions. If you want more info on the technology, I’d poke around there.
But basically, the Christmas miracle part comes from two things:
- Everyone’s volunteering! Christmas spirit! Yay!
- AO3 is delivering a best-in-class website, on-premise (not in the cloud), using generic hardware (Supermicro is the server equivalent of a soda can that says COLA on it), and using free software. This is the most cost-effective way to deliver a service and while it’s becoming more accepted it is certainly not the norm.
Those two things by themselves aren’t particularly miraculous, but the devil’s in the details. Supermicro’s documentation is ass, which means setting stuff up can take a while. And they’ve set up quite a bit. The work they’ve done on these servers runs from the commonplace (nginx “doing full page caching, html optimisation, priority queuing and sending load to the back-end”), to the more advanced (SYS-5018D-FN4T generic servers configured as pfsense firewalls) to the kind of modern magic that makes tagging and complex searching work (elasticsearch).
Elasticsearch does indexing. What indexing means in this context, very briefly, is tying related documents and bits of data together. For very simple use cases (like logging, Elasticsearch’s primary use case) this is pretty easy to maintain. For tagging in AO3, which is dealing with non-predictable items, categories, relations, loads etc, you need to know what you’re doing or things can go sideways very quickly. Like they did lat year with the page slowness. I’m going to highlight a section of zz9pizza’s post:
We spent quite a lot of time looking into it and made both code changes and other systems changes, and people from elastic reached out to us and gave us advice ( thanks for that :) ).
We ended up working out that the main issue we had was that bookmark searching could eat all of our search capacity so we did some work behind the scenes to ensure that those requests went into a separate queue. That queue was limited to allow only a few of those searched to run at once. Once we did that the cpu load on the elasticsearch which had been hitting 100% started topping out at about 70%.
Two things stand out here to me. One, elastic.co, a notoriously money-grabbing corporation volunteered help. Sure, they were probably individuals and not the corporation but a) in the US at least a corp can absolutely say “don’t fucking do your job for free” (whether its legal is another matter but haha capitalist utopia) and b) the people at elastic get paid very well to figure this shit out. That’s high quality volunteering. And the second thing that stands out is that the AO3 team then managed to re-architect their app to mitigate this in approximately (someone fact check me here) two weeks on volunteer time. Those people have mentally exhausting jobs and came home to bang out fixes in their spare time in a fraction of the time corporate dev teams do.
I just… Look, none of this is particularly magical. The hallmark of any good sysadmin or programmer when faced with new and unfamiliar technology is the ability to say “Gimme some time to figure it out” and then roll up their sleeves and get to work. The magic comes from loving an idea enough to want to do that well-paid work for free, at times of stress and for repeated abuse on this bluehell website.
That, and being able to buy 5 servers for $60k. Like, actually fuck off.
