in a town of this size they probably knew the guy and thought (correctly, as it turns out) he’d be back in jail by Friday and didn’t want to do the paperwork again

deleted by creator

Oh yeah, I make no claim that any of my experiences are anywhere near universal. Basically no part of the American experience is.

Or driving in general. As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can’t comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn’t know how to use a passport as an ID.

The only other people I’ve met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem… the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like “simply drive to your driving test appointment”…

Yeah, a small village. It would have been a half-hour bus ride to the town of ~5000, but they couldn’t compel all students to get a passport, and the nearest pool in the US would have been about an hour and a half away, so it was never part of the curriculum. Some kids had their parents drive them to Canada after school for private (expensive?) swimming lessons, but it wasn’t standard.

American here. The nearest swimming pool to my hometown was in Canada. So no.

Edit: I don’t think this is normal

prison

./*

not sufficiently evil for my tastes

does not involve Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg

RemindMe! 3 weeks

(has anyone buillt a remindmebot for lemmy yet)

Ehhhhhhh. Using a relational database for Lemmy was certainly a choice, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad one.

Within Lemmy, by far the most expensive part of the database is going to be comment trees, and within the industry the consensus on the best database structure to represent these is… well, there isn’t one. The efficiency of this depends way more on how you implement it within a given database model than on the database model itself. Comment trees are actually a pretty difficult problem; you’ll notice a lot of platforms have limits on comment depth, and there’s a reason for that. Getting just one level of replies to work efficiently can be tricky, regardless of the choice of DBMS.

Looking at the schema Lemmy uses, I see a couple opportunities to optimize it down the road. One of the first things I noticed is that comment replies don’t seem to be directly related back to the top-level post, meaning you’re restricted to a breadth-first search of the comment tree at serving time. Most comments will be at pretty shallow depths, so it sometimes makes sense to flatten the first few levels of this structure so you can get most relevant comments in a single query and rebuild the tree post-fetching. But this makes nomination (i.e. getting the “top 100” or whatever comments to show on your page) a lot more difficult, so it makes sense that it’s currently written the way it is.

If it’s true (as another commenter said) that there’s no response caching for comment queries, that’s a much bigger opportunity for optimization than anything else in the database.

Oh shit does lemmy not have response caching? Yeah, that’s gonna be an issue pretty soon.

hh3tf.golden.exe is 1536 bytes, compiled from C, and comes with a comma and exclamation point:

I’m actually surprised it’s that large, but Windows gonna Windows.

I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day

We do not.

One more anecdote for y’all to pluralize into data: my instance is currently using 915Mi of storage for pictrs and 976Mi for postgres, roughly 650Mi of RAM (including postgres), and negligible CPU

My other reason is that it’s the only way to know I picked an instance that isn’t going to just go away without me and take my account with it. It will be an interesting day when the first major lemmy instance goes down…

mrw the style guide requires documentation for every function

Yes, but there’s no point in comparing ourselves to those now that they’re going away…

Yeah, but I think the current iteration of Chat is the first one to be offered as an enterprise product, and the first one universally used internally (even some SRE teams are now using Chat by default instead of IRC). I could be wrong - there are some that are before my time.

That said, specific features within Chat seem to come and go quite frequently. In particular, don’t rely on any particular threading model…

Confirmed that I am able to comment on that thread if I manually set the comment language to English, but leaving it as the default “Select language” makes it spin forever.

Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It’s not so important when it’s the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server’s CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it’s the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you’ll feel it.

Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend to C++ isn’t really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn’t have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.