Please point me to the nearest meat grinder. I'm jonesing for breakneck speed mayhem!

I'll never forget installing ut2k4 on my linux box and having it Just Work. Magical.

Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.

I had it working without issues from Steam (I bought UT 99 and 2004 before Epic de-listed from Steam)

I just want to say that I love pico.sh <3

much appreciated!

The definition I liked best, which I _think_ came from one of the Google SRE books though I'm not certain, was: "SRE is what happens when you consider operations to be a software problem".

In one of the myriad making of / behind the scenes docs I've watched over the years, they described how after the first set was built it was decided it should be more cramped, so they cut a horizontal swath out of big chunks of it and lowered the ceiling forcing the actors to crouch and duck as they moved around.

Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.

I am extremely Not A Database Person but I understand that the rationale for Kubernetes adopting etcd as its preferred data store was more about its distributed consistency features and less about query throughput. etcd is slower cause it's doing RAFT things and flushing stuff to disk.

Projects like kine allow K8s users to swap sqlite or postgres in place of etcd which (I assume, please correct me otherwise) would deliver better throughput since those backends don't need to perform consenus operations.

https://github.com/k3s-io/kine

You might not be a database person, but you’re spot on.

A well managed HA postgresql (active/passive) is going to run circles around etcd for kube controlplane operations.

The caveat here is increased risk of downtime, and a much higher management overhead, which is why its not the default.

There are also distributed databases that use RAFT but can still scale while delivering distributed consensus don’t is not a challenge that can’t be solved. For example, TiDB handles millions of QPS while delivering ACID transactions, e.g. https://vivekbansal.substack.com/p/system-design-study-how-f...

GKE uses Spanner as an etcd replacement.

But, and I'm honestly asking, you as a GKE user don't have to manage that spanner instance, right? So, you should in theory be able to just throw higher loads at it and spanner should be autoscaling?

Yes, from the article:

> To support the cluster’s massive scale, we relied on a proprietary key-value store based on Google’s Spanner distributed database... We didn’t witness any bottlenecks with respect to the new storage system and it showed no signs of it not being able to support higher scales.

Yeah, I guess my question was a bit more nuanced. What I was curious about was if they were fully relying on normal autoscaling that any customer would get or were they manually scaling the spanner instance in anticipation of the load? I guess it's unlikely we're going to get that level of detailed info from this article though.

For folks like myself, who don't know much about DB internals but know a bit about Kubernetes, this sounds very akin to the K8s API watch cache.

https://danielmangum.com/posts/k8s-asa-watching-and-caching/

It CAN cost nothing to give a take home, but this is not a requirement. At my previous employer any candidate that made it as far as the take home project was paid for the time they worked on it.

That’s a good distinction. A paid take home is very different than an unpaid one.

I've been dreaming for years of some kind of "two ways to unlock your phone" mode.

Mode 1: I'm bored, show me something interesting, all notifications are available

Mode 2: I want to do something specific, don't show me anything but a tool for selecting an app / task (list of apps, search box, whatever).

I think that's basically the concept of Fairphone's "Moments" mode, which it even has a physical switch for: https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6#moments

Have you explored Focus modes on iPhone? You could place a button for a Shortcut on the lock screen to toggle Focus modes that change which apps show on the Home screen, and which notifications to show (while the others go to Notification center). Could use the Action button or Back Tap to change Focus mode before even seeing the lock screen.