I have a TODO.txt and it’s the only productivity system that I’ve ever been able to stick with. Just a list of stuff I need to do, what’s done gets moved down or deleted. Maybe there’s value in having an archive (a DONE.txt?) but I’ve found that after a while most notes/items lose the context and often it’s hard to decipher what they were about.
One thing I haven’t figured out yet: I’d love to be able to keep this file open at all time, have it pop up with a hotkey. Currently it’s just a TextMate window that I often close by accident.
You make some good points. What I was trying to say is that even though there is the RFC, it's quite common to modify the alphabet or use other variants like Crockford's (mainly to avoid random profanity, e.g. in the URL identifiers).
When you see a Base64 string, you can be pretty certain that it's the standard version. With Base32, it's not obvious which variant was used.
Many languages don't provide a stdlib Base32 implementation (Ruby doesn't), but Base64 is pretty much always included. Maybe this influenced my perception of the lack of a universal standard.
Anyway, I should work on that section to communicate my point better.
I believe the technical term is “Schelling point”: something that people can decide on without communication.
Base64 is very close to the Schelling point of Base62 i.e. [A-Za-z0-9], requiring only a couple more additional decisions to be made: which two extra characters to add.
Unfortunately the original Base64 inexplicably got this wrong and chose + and / instead of the more sensible choice of - and _
In some cases (luck of the data, but often when encoding ASCII without padding) you won't see the non alphanumeric characters (62nd and 63rd place) in Base64 either. So you can't always tell the difference between Base64, Base64Url, Xxencode, or B64.
"Hello, world!" = `SGVsbG8sIHdvcmxkIQ` (base64, base64url), `BG4JgP4wg65RjQalY6E` (Xxencode), or `G4JgP4wg65RjQalY6E` (b64). A legitimate reason for choosing B64 over Base64 would be: it maintains ASCII sort-order.
Any language that has to deal with HTTP (or MIME) has to encode/decode Base64 in order to support some headers (eg Basic auth) and features (binary data from a form submission). There is no similar HTTP need for Base32, so perhaps it's less surprising it's not in the standard library?
It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.
Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.
Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game).
Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and things like stories of success/failure, biographies (or history in general) etc. will no longer make the same impression.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books. I first read Black Swan a long while back, and two things popped out at me. 1) The author comes across quite snobby and high-handed in his writing (which has translated over time on his Twitter as well for those who follow him on there) and 2) The essence of the book was distillable into a much smaller novella.
Picked up Antifragile and Fooled By Randomness over time just to see if the hype is worth it, but none of the books honestly bowled me over or presented anything enlightening or explored ideas not explored in a better manner elsewhere. I feel like Taleb falls into the same fallacy he preaches about in his books to a large extent. But then again, given his popularity, maybe it's just my opinion.
> Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books.
I have the same feeling. Don't get me wrong, I really respect Taleb and his insights. But I skipped a large part of Black Swan because some parts are more literature than insights.
He got one thing right: the picked a great title for a book. "Black Swan". These 2 words together made him a multi-millionaire. The content of the book is quite lame, but darn, what a killer title.
Based on my non-fiction reading habits, I believe this is true for 90% of the non-fiction books I've read. In fact, most can be broke down into a series of highlighs / quotes.
That said, no pain, no gain. The higher bar creates a sense of dedication for the reader. A 5k and a marathon are both "just running", but it's the latter better sharpens the sword, so to speak.
"Thinking fast and slow" is like this, it's a bit dry and it makes for hard reading (I tried by the poolside) but it's sort of more rewarding to fight through it.
5 minute summaries are also forgotten in the same amount of time.
Not just you. I felt like Black Swan was utterly forgettable and could be summarized as "shit happens". The name dropping and snobbery put me off reading anything else by him.
It is true. But we also have to consider many people not only read books to learn and consume information as efficient as possible but also because they enjoy reading. It's like saying a 2 hr movie could have been reduced to a 10 min video that explains the story. You want to see development, different stories, jokes, etc. Even for non-fiction books (non-academic of course).
I don't know why it is convenient to ignore the "managed" aspect of it.
DO's or AWS's managed databases do more than just stick it on an server VM. It has a firewall built it, replicas, backups, logs, API access to manage it, etc.
The reason why these managed database services even exist is because people are willing to pay for it. It provides them value. If it didn't, they'd stop working on them.
Processing web requests & some reports, pretty much the same as everyone do nowdays. Dev team add some features, but still on scale it the same - web requests and reports.
CPU is pretty much idling, like ~ 10-15% used on average, in spikes may be 20%. But that's minimal CPU hoster gives with RAM 128GB+ platform, so using it.
RAM (~ 110GB) obviously used for DB and the for auxilary tasks.
DB itself is medium sized, with raw data ~ 1.5TB yet
DISK IO on average is pretty high, around 55%, with often spikes to 100%, that part I'd add more IOPS on if response times grow above the limits.
I so badly wanted to use their managed databases, but they priced me out of it. It's so much cheaper just to manage the database myself, and thus far at least not that much more effort.
I think this is probably the right positioning for anyone's decision on managed database vs. running it yourself, or any cloud managed product for that matter.
If you feel you either don't need the managed offerings and/or can manage it to a point where you're spending less of you or your company's time resources on it, then by all means manage it yourself.
If the managed-ness of the cloud offerings are a high enough value for you, then you will pay for it.
Creating, maintaining, constantly upgrading and improving a managed database product takes a hell of a lot of expensive engineer hours. It's probably a better bet for cloud providers to have relatively fewer high-margin customers on that product than they would if they tried to squeeze margins to compete with "I can provision a VM and install Postgres myself" which is also a product they already offer - just buy the VM.
tbf, its about 2x the EC2 instance cost, so I guess is actually kinda reasonable for a kinda managed service.
But the (backup) storage is really how they get you in my experience.
And do not turn on auto growth for diskspace, it will just grow to the limit and then you are paying for 200GB of daily backup storage you are not even using.
I think it's because they included an additional node in the price by default. So it's double because they have a read only node added in there, the price for managed DBs doesn't seem to have changed mostly.
OP here, thanks for clarifying this - I can imagine it's a super complex problem and I truly appreciate all the work that you (and other contributors) have put into this project.
My only point (and a source of confusion) here is that I never anticipated the cascading effect that installing a single package can have on seemingly unrelated parts of the system. I've been using homebrew for many years and as far as I remember, the only time anything broke like this was when I explicitly ran update/upgrade.
I'm going to try HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE/HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE — it does seem like a more intuitive default, but again, I don't know anything about how homebrew works under the hood.
Personally, I have moved to downloading large things (Python, Postgres by your example) as standalone apps, and only use Homebrew for small libraries and CLI tools. I think that makes more sense.
You can download all of the Mac Python versions you want from python.org and you can get Postgres from postgresapp.com which provides a nice toolbar interface to start and shutdown servers of various versions.
C in Polish is pronounced as ts/tz and 'ck' is an interesting case in Polish-American surnames: American pronunciation turns 'ck' into 'kk' and Polish speakers will often have a hard time recognizing the original spelling.
Listening to audio mentioning Susan Wojcicki, I could never figure out the spelling of her name... BTW, Polish pronunciation for Wójcicki (notice the 'ó') is Vooy-chits-ki
One thing I haven’t figured out yet: I’d love to be able to keep this file open at all time, have it pop up with a hotkey. Currently it’s just a TextMate window that I often close by accident.